Page 13 of The Fire Went Wild

“Be quiet tonight,” he says. “And I’ll bring you breakfast in the morning.”

I don’t want to think about what a guy like this eats for breakfast. Still, I don’t say anything. Just push myself up to standing, bracing myself against the bed. He watches me warily, like he expects me to attack him again. Not that I’d reach him. He’s still in the doorway, just outside of the range of the chain.

For a moment, we stay like that, sizing each other up. Then Jaxon steps backward to leave me alone. And I don’t want tobe alone. I’m scared and panicky, but I’m also angry. I want answers. I want to know why he’s doing this.

And so before he can slam the door shut, I blurt out, “This is because I have a picture of that symbol, isn’t it?”

He freezes with his hand on the doorknob. When he looks up at me, his eyes are storming.

“I knew you recognized it,” I say, keeping my voice low. “I saw it on your face in the diner.”

The darkness in his features deepens. He squeezes the doorknob, tightens the line of his jaw. “That’s not something a human like you should have ever seen.”

Human?

And then he slams the door shut so forcefully that the walls shake, and I don’t know if my heart will ever stop racing.

CHAPTER FIVE

JAXON

Ican’t believe I got to touch her again—and while she was awake, no less, her blood coursing through her body, her eyes wild with fear and anger in equal measure. I’ve never had a woman’s breath on my skin like that, our bodies all tangled together, and me with no intention of killing her.

It made my cock hard.

That surprises me, but everything about Charlotte has been a surprise, from the moment she pulled out the picture of my sigil to the way she tried to fight me even with a chain around her ankle and no hope of escape. I keep thinking about it as I go down the hall to my bedroom, one hand listlessly rubbing my dick over my sweatpants.

When she starts up her racket again, slamming her chain around and stomping against the floor, I’m not even irritated by it. It just reminds me of how she tried to grab me. How she tried totouchme.

What woman wants to touch me?

Charlotte’s tantrum plays out in the background as I lay out on my bed, still distractedly touching myself. There are little reminders of her scattered around the room because I wentthrough her purse earlier—not that she had much in there. Just her wallet, which I left alone, and her phone, which I took out and smashed with a hammer in my studio. The only other thing was a slim, vintage cigarette case filled with five neatly-rolled joints. Brave girl, driving that shit through Texas, which was where her rental car was from.

They’re currently sitting on the bedside table.

I fiddle with the cigarette case, but it’s too detached from her. The cold, smooth metal distracts from my memory of her hot, soft skin. So I swing myself off the bed and look over at her suitcase.

I set it in the corner of my room for safekeeping, and I study it now, my heart pounding up in my throat. Charlotte’s still clanking around down the hallway, reminding me that I’ve got a living human in the house for the first time in… months. Over a year, I think.

Before I can stop myself, I roll the suitcase over to my bed and unzip it and let it fall open like a clamshell. It’s full of hastily-packed clothes, with a Ziplock bag of toiletries and makeup lying on top. I set that aside. The clothes make my heart beat faster because they all smell like her, that sweet, sandlewoody scent that I breathed in when I had her pinned down a few minutes ago. My cock jumps at it, and I plunge my hand into the mess of fabrics, plowing through until I find the silky slip of one of her panties.

They’re black, with little lace trimmings. I press them against my nose, breathing in her scent—faint, here. They’re clean. I sit back on my heels, letting out a soft, shuddery sigh. I don’t know why I’m doing this. Why I’m letting myself get obsessed with a girl I can’t kill and therefore can’t reallybewith.

I lay on the bed again, clutching her black panties in my fist as I pull my cock out. Then I wrap her panties around my shaft, shuddering at the soft, silky fabric. My eyes flutter closed asI stroke, listening to Charlotte clanking her chain around. The more noise she makes, the harder I abuse myself, squeezing my dick until it’s painful. I like pain, though. Maybe I should have let her kick me in the balls the way she wanted. I stopped her because I didn’t want her to know that catching her before she fell, feeling her soft flesh and her warm living breath, had given me such a huge erection.

Down the hall, Charlotte shrieks, her voice muffled. I imagine she’s shrieking because I’m fucking her, or maybe cutting her. Putting something in her. I groan and jerk myself a little faster, strangling my cock with her satiny underwear. I realize I’m matching my strokes to the rhythm she’s using to pound the chains. That makes it even easier to imagine that I’ve got her tied up, helpless, and I’m thrusting into her over and over while she spasms around my cock.

That does it. Pleasure tears through me, and my cum floods through her panties, soaking into the fabric. I slump back against the mattress and let the mess fall on the floor beside my bed and listen to Charlotte trying to—do something. I’m actually not sure what she hopes to accomplish with all that noise. Annoy me into killing her, maybe. Although she probably thinks she can annoy me into letting her go.

Neither option’s possible, though. Fortunately, a Hunter like me doesn’t really needthat much sleep even though I had been enjoying a good rest before she woke up and started her futile little campaign.

Her tantrum plays out in the background while I lay on the bed and imagine fucking her again, although this time, I imagine her the way she looked after I knocked her out, slack and unmoving, her lips parted. Shame heats my cheeks. It’s not that Ipreferthem when they’re dead, it’s just that it’seasier. The closest I ever came to fucking a living woman, she gazed into my face before I could slide inside her, and she saw it. The voidbehind my eyes. The emptiness granted to me by the Unnamed. That blackness that makes me what I am.

And then she told me to stop and shoved me off her and fled the motel half-dressed. I didn’t follow her; she didn’t know my name and she hadn’t been marked by my gods for killing. And I hadn’t done anything she could take to the police.

But she saw it. She knew. She recoiled from me like the prey she was.

The dead ones don’t do any of that.

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