The red of Greer’s silk almost looks black now, dark water flowing and rippling over her body. I’m so hard it hurts, and I take a step toward her, ready, ready, ready, God help me, and then I remember. I’m Ash, right now, not Embry.

And it’s so much responsibility, having this kind of power and control. The weight of someone’s safety and catharsis. How does he do it? How does he hold that corner of his mind open for compassion and evaluation while he gives himself over to the monster inside? My monster has no corners, my monster has no compassion. He has only need.

I pull a pocketknife out of my pocket. “Before we start,” I say, fighting to keep my voice normal as I walk over. “Just one thing.”

She understands almost immediately as I reach for her wrists and holds her hands up to me. I cut one layer of the tape open, unwind it, and make her flex her hands several times until the circulation is back, and then I reapply the tape, looser this time. It’s sticky enough to hold, weak enough she could break free, if she needed.

“Can you snap your fingers when your wrists are taped?” I ask, trying to remember all the things Ash does before he claims one of us. Limits, safe words. Though with me it was never that straightforward. Never that safe. There were times I’d walk into the Oval Office and be yanked into a dark room, a silk tie shoved in my mouth, no words uttered at all…those summer nights in the Carpathian mountains with a belt between my teeth so the other soldiers thirty yards away wouldn’t hear my grunts as Ash drove my body into the dirt…

“I can snap them,” Greer answers, bringing me out of my memories.

“Show me.”

She shows me.

“I’m putting your gag back in,” I inform her. “Snap if you need me to stop.”

She shivers as I move the gag back and tighten it. I can feel the lingering teardrops on her cheeks and in the satin net of her hair, but she’s not crying anymore. Her eyes instead are large and fascinated, imploring and a little bit curious. Goose bumps cover her skin, and I run my fingers along the exposed curve of her breast to feel them under my fingertips.

And just like that, the nice playboy I thought I was disappears. The monster who’d once had Greer’s blood on his thighs is back.

I move my hand to her neck, feel the delicate inner workings of her throat as she swallows underneath my palm. I press down, relishing the give of all that soft skin, the sensation of exquisite muscles and veins relenting under my grip. A moving mosaic of panic and desire shifts on her face, rippling and interlacing the way shadows do at the bottom of a sunny pool.

I lean down, still squeezing her throat, and kiss her shadowed face. I kiss her forehead and the edges of her mouth around her gag, and then I give into the sickness and bite her. I bite her cheeks and her neck, I bite her earlobes and the edges of her jaw. I bite her like I want to eat her, like she’s a thing to be consumed or used, not loved.

But I do love her. I can feel that love, just as present as the sickness, as the monster, all one and the same.

Fuck, I’m hard.

I let go of her throat and I hear her struggle to take in air through her nose. I press my ear to her chest and hear her heart thudding, a bird’s wing beating against the inside of her ribs. And then I bite her breasts, biting the bottoms through the silk of her dress, biting the bare skin of the tops, and then I take the dress in both hands and tear it down to her waist. Her nipples are furled and tight, their usual pink hue looking crimson-dark in the moonlight. I see the blooming crescents of my bite marks on her tender skin, and the sight of it is like blood to a wolf. Some primal part of me growls in hunger.

After I pull off my shirt, I palm my cock as I give one of her tits a rough squeeze. Then I start to unfasten my pants, and that’s when she does it. She bucks underneath me, catching me in the lower stomach with her feet, and it knocks the wind right out of me. I stumble back with a muttered fuck, genuinely pissed, and she tries to wriggle to the far edge of the bed.

There’s no thought, no consideration about what happens next. It’s pure, unfettered male instinct. Which is why I’m going to hell.

I leap over the near side of the bed and I get my hand on her upper arm, yanking her hard onto her back. Within an instant, I’m straddling her, my knees sinking into the mattress on either side of her squirming body, and I’m gripping her face with one hand as I lean down and speak low into her ear.

“Is that how you want to do it?” I ask, and in that moment, I don’t know who I am, if I’m Embry or Melwas or Ash, or Ash pretending to be Melwas, or me pretending to be Ash. All I know is that I’m angry and aroused, and the woman I want is trying to get away from me.

Greer pauses her struggling, blinking up at me.

I ask her again. “Is this how you want it, little princess? Because I’m not afraid to take it from you like this.”

Which is a lie. I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid of the monster inside.

She gives me a slow, deliberate nod.

I bite her neck, hard enough to make her cry out, and the way her cries sound through the gag is arresting. Hypnotizing. I bite again and again, still straddling her, and she starts to thrash underneath me, trying to get away, and God, it just stirs me up even more, wrestling her arms down, clamping my thighs around her hips, biting and biting and biting. My cock is so hard that it’s worked its way out of the unbuttoned waistband of my pants, and as I grapple with her, the silk of her dress brushes against it over and over again. It’s soft and warm from her skin and I can’t wait any longer. I know Melwas or Ash or the monster inside me wouldn’t either.