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When she was young, she had daydreamed about men who were bigger and stronger. Men who would take control. In all those romance novels she had read, she had been beguiled by the idea of a passion that was boundless, so utterly fueled by its own destructive fires that it would consume everything in its path, flaming hotter and brighter.
After Johnathan had raped her in his trailer, holding her down with one hand over her mouth as he took her beneath his other trophies—the trophies from his career, which he had eventually used to crush hers—she could no longer bring herself to read the books she had loved as a hopeful young woman. Reading them now made her feel sick, and she often found herself wondering if it was her dark and twisted fantasies that had marked her as the perfect victim.
I asked for this, she had often thought.I thought I wanted it and made it happen.
She had fallen in love with horror because it validated her belief that monsters wore human faces, and it provided an outlet for her constant fear without breaking her completely. Every time a movie made her heart pound and she felt the familiar flood of adrenaline and panic, she could stop the movie and leave the room, and it would all subside, and she would still be safe.
Every time she was safe, that raw wound inside her scabbed over just a little bit more.
As Rafe pulled her back from the cliff in an iron grip she couldn’t break from, Donni realized that she had, at some point, stopped feeling afraid of him. He was manipulative and controlling and more than a little cruel, but knowing there were lines he wouldn’t cross with her, and that he would always leave her with the means to run—even if it was just to chase her—made her feel good. It made her realize, with a sense of bewilderment, that maybe she wanted him to chase her.
Because she wanted to be caught.
And it had taken almost losing him to make her realize how quickly she could almost envision a future between them that was free from the shackles of the past.
She was not surprised that the two reporting officers were Lambert and Corcoran. It seemed like they would never be free of them at this point.
Lambert went pale at the sight of blood on her face and hands, but Corcoran was harder to read as she stared at the two of them. “Where’s Staal?” she demanded, looking hard at Rafe.
“He jumped,” Rafe said tonelessly, tilting his head. “Down the quarry.”
“Is that blood?” Lambert asked Donni, who nodded bleakly.
Officer Corcoran pulled out her radio. “I need a team to go down to the quarry and recover a body—presumed injured, possibly armed. Have the coroner on standby.”
“You two,” Officer Lambert said wearily. “I’m taking you to the hospital and then I have some questions I need you both to answer.”
“I’d like to call my lawyer,” said Rafe.
Lambert threw up his hands in defeat.
“Fine.”
???????
Rafe was silent on the ride to the hospital, his face grim in profile. But his hand covered her bloodied one, his fingers stroking hers absently as he looked out the window through the rain. Remembering how many times his mother had pulled from him over the years, she found herself wondering if that was part of the reason he had ended up so cold.
Her mind began to wander again as the taste of blood rose in the back of her throat.
(You killed a man who hurt you. Good for you.)
If only it were that simple.
One day, after a bitter fight with Marco and too much wine, she had drunkenly Googled herself and come across a blog from a man—well, she had assumed it was a man, but she supposed it could have been a woman—who had been talking about her character inSilent to the Grave.
The whole post had sexualized her character, saying that she wanted it, asking why the men in the film hadn’t just tied her down so she couldn’t fight back. And she had read it, no longer eighteen now, but nearly forty, and had felt a bolt of pure, maddening rage.
These people knew exactly what they were doing, she realized. Johnathan, Marco, the mystery blogger. They knew what they were contributing to, and they didn’t care, because the same systems that put the onus of avoiding rape on the victims created a social infrastructure that enabled rapists to get away with their crimes again and again. A woman risked her career working with men but men risked nothing when working with women, because the public only considered accomplishments when meting out consequences, not mercy.
Ultimately, the public had considered Johnathan’s career to be of more consequence than his twenty-five “alleged” victims when he received a five-year sentence for her rape, and the rapes of others, that would likely be slashed in half for good behavior.
If he had any shame at all over his behavior, Johnathan would still be alive today. But being what he was,whohe was, he had wanted to cow her that one final time. Just to see the fear in her eyes and know that he had been the one who put it there.It always hurts the first time.
Only, Donni had decided that—for him—it would be the last time.
When he had looked into her eyes that afternoon, what he had found there wasn’t fear.
Her eyes flicked back to Rafe, drawn to his chiseled jawline, and the sharp cut of his jaw. He was like his father’s dark mirror: instead of glancing off a shallow, glittering surface, one touch would send you falling right through the frame into a darkness that never stopped.
