His eyes.
They glowed golden.
I pulled back but his grip was strong.
“Pop?” I said. “No… You’re not Pop…”
His expression hardened and his hands tightened around my arms in a vicelike grip.
“Let go!” I cried. “You’re hurting me!”
I yanked hard but the more I fought, the harder he squeezed.
“Your suffering is of no consequence,” Pop said, and as he spoke, his eyes hardened to polished topaz and his voice shivered like electricity running over a metal grate.
Then his face melted, morphing into that of Liam, and just for a split second, right before he became Liam, there was a flicker of another face…
Clint.
But this creature wasn’t Clint.
It was the creature he’d been fighting.
Whatever this thing was, whatever it was trying to be, it wasn’t anyone I knew.
“Liam?” I said. “Let go of me! What’s happened to you?”
“Liam is a part of me now. He longs to be a part of you. We both do. You are my fated mate and we will be joined. You are mine and I claim you.”
He spun me around and pinned me to the bed.
He pulled my skirt up and my panties down.
I screamed but it was muffled by my blankets.
I kicked and punched and flailed, but he was too strong.
I felt his hand press on my lower back, pinning me in place.
His belt buckle clattered and his fly zipped open.
He placed himself at my opening, which was cold, tight, and dry, not ready to be entered.
“No!” I screamed. “Please! Don’t do this!”
Liam leaned over me and whispered in my ear.
“You are mine. And I claim you as a vessel of the empire.”
I wept for what was about to happen, for this stark and horrifying incident that would divide my life and forever scar me.
I would never be the same after this.
I wondered how my life had reached this point, how fast I had sunk.
Just moments ago, I was prepared to open myself up to Clint, for him to claim me.
I thought about Clint and how much I wished it was us having sex.
I wriggled desperately to avoid Liam—this stranger—from fucking me.
And then a strange calm came over me.
I realized this was going to happen, no matter what I did.
And I wondered what I’d done to deserve it.
“Hey, asshole.”
Smack!
The press of Liam’s body on top of me disappeared immediately.
I wasted no time and rolled to one side.
Liam crumpled to the floor at my feet.
I pulled my panties up and my skirt down and bolted for the door.
Another pair of powerful arms reached out and grabbed me.
For once, I just wanted to escape!
“Isabella! It’s me! It’s me!”
Clint.
I froze, momentarily incapacitated.
Could it really be him?
Or was it another trick?
This Clint sported a black eye and a grazed chin from where the gravel had torn his skin.
His eyes gleamed golden just as Liam’s had but there was an unmistakable kindness in them that fake-Liam hadn’t possessed.
“Clint!” I gasped. “I thought you were dead! I thought… I thought…”
I fell into him and he held me close.
Our lips merged and it was just the pick-me-up I needed.
Something moved on the floor and Clint spun around and swung his weapon—the emergency fire extinguisher we kept at the top of the stairs—and struck Liam across the face again.
Liam shouldn’t have been able to move after such a blow as that—never mind two of them!
He struggled to get his arms underneath himself.
“We have to get out of here,” Clint said.
He dropped the extinguisher and led me out the door.
We bolted down the stairs and out the front entrance.
I skidded to a halt.
“Wait!” I said. “My parents!”
“This thing doesn’t want your parents. It’s after you.”
A million questions buzzed through my mind like fireflies but I couldn’t get the answers to them, not right now.
I snatched the car keys up from the bowl on the entrance cabinet as we bolted down the front steps to my pop’s second pick-up, this one even more beaten-up than the last.
I paused at the bottom of the steps to peer back at my childhood home and wondered if I would ever see it again.
“We have to go,” Clint said. “We can’t wait for him to recover.”
He was right, but still, I wished he wasn’t.
I climbed into the front seat and breathed a sigh of relief when the engine grumbled into life.
I couldn’t help but glance in the side mirror at the farmhouse.
There was no mistaking the shadowy figure standing at my bedroom window, watching as we made our escape.
And just as when I had looked down on the sinister figure emerging from Liam’s cruiser, I got the terrible sense that we weren’t the ones in control.
He was.
Ras
Isabella took the first highway we came to.
It didn’t matter where we were heading, only what we were racing from.
Liam’s blow had hit me like a sledgehammer, driving the wind from my lungs.
The only thing that affected me worse was the shock to my system.
He moved fast—faster than anyone I had ever seen.
With the angle of the sun, I hadn’t seen the golden glint in his eyes until after the gut punch, and that, mingled with my surprise at seeing my own eyes reflected back at me, made me lose my focus.
And I was done.
The gravel tore up my face as I rolled end over end in a mad screaming rush that made attempting to stop impossible.
The guy I was fighting was not the same weakling I had defeated just a few short hours ago.
He was powerful, a force of nature…
He was like me.
I lost consciousness for a few moments, completely at Liam’s whim.
He could have pummeled me into the dirt and I couldn’t have done a single thing to stop him.
Luckily, he turned and ran in the opposite direction.
Then I noticed what had grabbed his attention.
Isabella.
My Isabella.
Not so lucky, then…
Her scream was what resurrected me.
And the knowledge that I was failing her.
I shoved myself up onto my feet with a single push and ran toward the house.
I was about to scale the side of the building the way Liam had
