Panic overcame me when I felt myself floating. My eyelids snapped open, and I furiously took in my surroundings. My chest rose and fell in painful, panicked breaths. It took everything within me not to scream as a flashback overcame me.

Sensing my distress, Rev began murmuring softly to me. “It’s okay. It’s just you and me. No ghosts of the past allowed.”

Tears stung my eyes at the kindness of his words and the fact that he was carrying me into the motel room so that I didn’t have to exert myself. I curled my fist tighter into his shirt. Somehow his strength was enough to ward off the flashbacks. I wasn’t back at the motel with the Diablos. Instead, it was Rev, and only Rev, with me.

After he kicked the door closed, Rev asked, “Do you want to change?”

Since I could barely keep my eyes open, I replied, “Just sleep.”

“Okay.” He eased me down onto one of the beds and pulled the cover from the other side over to wrap me up. “Sweet dreams, Annabel.”

“Same to you,” I murmured before sleep once again overtook me.

Naked after his last attack, I lay on my side with him pressed against me. As his fingers skimmed over my back, I prayed that even though it was early in the evening, he would fall asleep.

He had been gone most of the day. Business meetings of some sort. He had returned, finely dressed in one of his thousand-dollar suits and reeking of alcohol.

“Go put on my dress shirt,” he commanded.

Since I always did just as he asked, I slipped out of bed and padded silently across the cool marble floor as I went over to the chair where he had tossed his shirt. Quickly, I slid it on and buttoned it up. Because of his height, it reached my knees.

With a flick of his wrist, he beckoned me to him. “Come here.”

I drew in a breath of trepidation, but immediately went back over to the bed.

Mendoza stared up at me, drinking in my appearance from head to toe. “Mmm, you look sexy in my clothes.” He shoved his hands into my hair and jerked my head closer to his. Within seconds, his lips were moving frantically against mine.

In another time and place, far from here, I might have considered his dark, chiseled features handsome. But because of the monster I knew him to be, I never looked at him without thinly veiled repulsion. His ego was so enlarged that he expected me to enjoy his rapes. At first, I had wept inconsolably during each attack, and in return I got beaten. I had learned very quickly to use my imagination. Instead of Mendoza, I pretended it was Brad Pitt or Henry Cavill in the bed with me—anything to endure it.

He pulled me down onto the bed beside him. After rolling on top of me, he shoved up the dress shirt. “Roja,” he murmured against my lips.

I disconnected the moment he slammed into me. Instead of Mendoza’s black, soulless eyes looming over me, it was the gentle, caring eyes of Dr. Josh Jenkins. What I imagined with him wasn’t even sexual. It was more about the kindness he had shown me, the dimples that appeared when he smiled, his tender bedside manner with his four-legged patients.

Because I missed him, the animals at the clinic, and most of all my former life, I found myself murmuring, “Oh, Josh.”

Mendoza’s pounding in and out of me immediately ceased. When I finally dared to open my eyes, his menacing gaze made me shudder, even though I knew better than to show any reaction to him. “What did you say, bitch?”

“Nothing,” I whispered as I shrank away from him.

His fingers came to curl around my neck. “I’ll kill you for letting another man’s name come off your lips.”

When his other fist blasted into my cheek, I began to scream.

My eyelids fluttered as I tiptoed along the line between consciousness and unconsciousness. Someone was shouting my name. “Roja!” “Annabel!”

I focused all my strength on the one who called my real name. When I dared to open my eyes, I found myself staring into the kind, concerned face of Rev. I exhaled a breath of relief. It had been a dream. Just a dream. I wasn’t back at Mendoza’s.

“Are you okay?”

Since I couldn’t speak, I merely nodded. My body shivered and shook like a newborn colt taking its first steps. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to stop the tremors.

Without saying a word, Rev’s strong arms reached out to draw me against him. “Shh, it’s all right. You’re safe,” he murmured against my ear.

My trembling arms came up to wrap around him. I burrowed deeper into his chest, into his warmth. Closing my eyes, I pressed my face against his skin, searching out the sound of his beating heart. I marveled at the thought that a relative stranger could provide the comfort I so desperately needed. “You want to talk about it?” Rev asked.

Only with him would I allow myself to go there. I swallowed hard. “It was about that last night with Mendoza . . . how he wanted to kill me.” The tremors ricocheted through me again like I was being shaken by someone.

Placing his hands on each side of my face, Rev pushed my head back so I could look into his eyes. “Believe me when I say that you never have to worry about Mendoza hurting you ever again.”

“How can you be so sure?” I whispered.

“Because I will put a bullet between his eyes before he ever has the chance.”

My heartbeat skipped erratically, as if it were playing a manic game of hopscotch. For a moment, my instinct was to recoil from him with disgust by what he had just suggested. I couldn’t fathom how the compassionate and caring Rev could also be a coldhearted killer.

Rev stared down at his hands. “I’m sorry if I disappoint you, but that’s who I am. I will protect what’s important to me. You need to understand that.” From the look of determination that was etched across his handsome features, I knew he spoke the absolute truth.

I shook my head. “Regardless of what you say you are, I could never let you do that. If you got caught, you would go to jail because of me.”

“It would be worth it to end the life of such an odious creature. Mendoza doesn’t deserve to live.”

Although I wanted Mendoza dead even more than Rev did, it was still hard hearing him say the words. Anxiety ricocheted through me, and before I could stop myself, I blurted, “But if you went to jail, then I wouldn’t get to be with you anymore!”

Rev’s smile once again sent my heart skipping, and it amazed me how quickly he could shift from intimidating to sweet and tender. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“But if you—”

“I won’t get caught.”

“How can you possibly believe that?”

“Just trust me.”

“Rev—”

“Because I’ve done it before.”

My brows furrowed in confusion.

He shook his head slowly back and forth as if he were trying to get me to see the light. “I’ve killed before, and I’ll kill again.”

A shudder ran through me at his words. My savior couldn’t be so soulless. He saved lives; he didn’t take them. He dried my tears and comforted me, which wasn’t part of a killer’s profile. With my stomach roiling in revulsion, I argued, “No . . . no, you’re not like that.”

“But I am.” He exhaled a breath that sounded tormented. “Right now, in your current frame of mind, it’s easy for you to think of me as only a knight in shining armor. But that’s just make-believe. When my club, my brothers, have been threatened or are in danger, I have fought with them. And I have killed with them.”

I sat in a dumbfounded stupor as the veil of my ignorance concerning Rev and his brothers was stripped away. Besides my time with Mendoza, I had never been in the presence of a murderer before. When I was a little girl, I had seen the faces of death row inmates on signs when groups of protestors were petitioning my grandfather for clemency. They had scared me then, and they scared the old Annabel of a few months ago.