Page 56 of Stream & Scream
I’ll drag her through dirt and wire if I have to. Break throats, open arteries, blow holes in anyone dumb enough to stand between us and that wheelbase. Ugly I can handle. Ugly’s the only thing I’ve ever handled. Blood is my first fucking language.
All that matters is she makes it out alive. Because she’s mine. And no one, not the producers, not their drones, not even the pathetic replacements they’ll drop into my woods, gets to touch what’s mine.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Olivia
Sunday evening.
The sound of leaves crunching around me pulls me from sleep.
My eyes snap open to a graying landscape that comes just after sunset and makes everything look like it's been drained of color and life. The hollow between the oak's roots feels smaller than it did when I crawled into it a few hours ago, more confining, like the walls closed in on me while I was unconscious and vulnerable.
But it's not the walls that have moved.
It's him.
I can feel his presence before I see him, an eerie awareness that makes my skin prickle and my breath catch in my throat despite every rational thought screaming that I should be terrified and fighting. Really, I should be doing anything except lying perfectly still while a serial killer circles my hiding place.
The footsteps are unhurried. There’s no urgency in them. Leaves crunch as they shatter beneath his heavy boots.
He wants me to know he's here. Hewantsme to wake up to the sound of him lurking.
The footsteps stop directly outside the entrance I crawled through to get here, so close I can hear his even breaths. For a moment, there's nothing but silence and the growing certainty that this is it—the moment when the game ends and reality begins.
He’s going to kill me.
"I know you're awake," he says, his voice no longer masked by a filter. "I heard your breathing change."
I cup my hand over my mouth to calm my breathing, but it’s no use.
"Come out, Olivia," he continues, and there's amusement in his tone now. "Don't make me drag you out. We both know how this ends."
With my death.
I crawl out from the roots slowly, trying to stall long enough to come up with an escape plan. Or any plan at all.
When I stand fully upright, exposed and in the open, he's right there. Close enough to touch, close enough that I can see details of his tactical gear that I hadn’t noticed before. He smells like a man who’s spent the last two days in the forest. Wild and sweaty, but there’s still a light note of the soap he uses. Or maybe it was his cologne? Either way he could smell worse, I decide.
He's removed the mask.
The Hunterwantsme to see him.
His eyes are dark, but they’re watching me intently behind long lashes. There’s brown stubble along his sharp jawline, completing his two days in the forest look.
He's the perfect predator. Beautiful in a way that draws me in and makes me want to know more about him, yet devastatingly animalistic beneath the surface. He’s corded in lean muscle from head to toe. He’d rip me apart before I knew what hit me.
His smile is predatory and approving as he watches me assess him. Suddenly his hand is clamped over my mouth and his body is pressing against my back with enough force to make it impossible to fight. I can’t even move.
He spins me around in one swift movement, positioning me exactly where he wants me, immediately lighting my entire body on fire with need. My hands hit the rough bark of the oak tree, palms spread against moss-covered wood, back arched in a position that leaves me completely exposed and vulnerable to him.
He’s going to fuck me, and then he’s going to kill me.
"It felt like a good time to pay you another visit," he says, his mouth close enough to my ear that I can feel his hot breath against my skin. "You look like you could use another fucking, and I’ve got some anger I need to work out."
"P-please," I whisper, though I'm not sure what I'm asking for. Mercy? Release? For him to stop talking and start fucking me?
"Please what?" His hands grip my hips, holding me in place against the tree with enough pressure to leave new fingerprint bruises on my skin. "Use your words, clickbait. Tell me what you want."
