Page 58 of Hunting Gianna

She hesitates. Then she shakes her head. “No,” she whispers. “I’ve never—” Her breath hitches. “I don’t know if I want to understand.”

I smile, slow and sure, and let her sit in the silence until it hurts.

“I’ll tell you,” I say, hand sliding up to grip her chin, forcing her to meet my eyes. “It’s obsession, Gianna. It’s need. It’s fucking violence, dressed up as love. You don’t run from that. You run to it.”

Her tongue flicks over her lips. She’s shaking, but she’s not afraid.

I bend her head, exposing the long white stretch of throat. “You never will, you know,” I murmur, lips just below her ear. “Not unless you’re running from me.”

Before she can answer, I bite her. Not hard enough to draw blood—this time—but enough to mark her, to bruise the flesh and make her feel it every time she swallows.

She gasps, whole body arching into mine, hands clawing at my back for something to hold on to.

I let her squirm, let her fight, let her writhe on my lap while I taste her salt and sweat. I don’t stop until I feel the heat pulse through her, a wet, beautiful surrender.

When I let go, she’s panting, dazed, eyes wide and glassy.

She laughs, shaking her head like she can’t believe how much she loves it. “You’re going to eat me alive,” she says, half fear, half prayer.

I wipe the tear track from her cheek, licking the last drop from my fingertip.

“Yeah,” I say, mouth full of her. “And you’ll beg for more.”

That’s what love is, when you strip it down: hunger and hurt, locked in each other’s jaws. I want her like a wound wants closure, like a starved lion wants meat. I want her to never, ever forget that she’s mine.

And she finally gets it. She finally understands what it means to be loved by a monster. She finally understands what it means to become one, too.

That’s what makes us perfect. That’s what makes us work.

The darkness that creeps into the light without extinguishing it whole.

Chapter Seventeen

Gianna

Afterawhile,thefire burns down to fat, red coals. The bottle of whiskey is empty and I am more than buzzing. I’m draped over Knox, the stretch of his chest under my cheek, breathing in the faint stink of sweat, smoke, and blood that always seems to hover around him. His fingers are tracing lazy circles over my skin, dipping between my thighs before trailing back up and over in a big, looping pattern.

He’s been quiet for a long time. I think he likes it that way, the slow scrape of the clock and the hiss-pop of the last log splitting in half. I think he could sit like this for years, holding me, going nowhere, being nothing.

I fidget, picking at the bandage he stuck on my knee. “This is a problem, you know.”

He grunts. “What is?”

I gesture at the room, at the mess of two lives smashed together in the crucible of trauma and bad whiskey. “This. We can’t stay in your little mountain love-shack forever.”

He lets that hang for a second. “Why not?” He says it soft, but his jaw flexes. He knows why. He just wants to hear me say it.

“Because someone is going to come looking for me eventually,” I say. “Because I still have a job, you do too, probably. Because I have to, I don’t know, give notice before I can run away and become a cave woman.” My laugh is ugly. “You ever hear of two people less equipped to be a real couple?”

Fear is clawing it’s way up my spine. But I always do this. Anytime something gets real, I want to run. Except with Brad. Because I knew exactly what he was and what to expect.

It’s the ones I can’t predict that scare the fuck out of me.

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he peels me off his chest and sits up, tossing the blanket off us. I yelp as the chill air prickles over my skin, and cross my arms over my chest. I’m pretty sure I look like hell. He looks like a fucking MMA hero—lean, bruised, shirtless, but every scar making him more of what he’s always been.

“Here are your options,” he says, and now his voice is sharp, cutting through the buzz. “Option one: I build us a cabin farther out, somewhere no one will ever find. We go full hermit, live off the land, raise little monsters. Option two: we go back. To the city. You do your job, I do mine, we see if we can make it work in the real world.” He pauses. “You get to choose.”

I stare at him. It’s the most he’s ever said about the future, and it stings that both options are binary—either I become his wild woman in the woods, or I chain myself to the grindstone and hope to God I succeed.

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