An unholy sound rent the air, sending chills along my exposed skin. It sounded like death. Was it me? But no, I was still on the ground. It was the man between my legs who had moved. Pain shot through my limbs as I curled in on myself, rolling to my side though one person still held my arm.

There was a shout, and the hand holding down my right arm was lifted. I flailed, hitting and scratching, though it didn’t move them. Dimly, I registered the sounds of flesh on flesh—not mine though.

The sound of flesh hitting flesh was punctuated by grunts. My vision cleared. Hunter was poised over one of the guys at his feet, raining down blows onto a man. As I watched in horror, the man twitched and then laid still, his face already too bloody to be recognizable.

Hunter looked like some kind of avenging angel, but an angel would never pull a knife from his shoe with a glint in his eye. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what happened next. I heard it instead, just the whisper of sound as sharp metal sliced through the air, its abrupt quieting as it met some solid object, and the thud of a body as it was dropped.

The final man was pulled off me, practically lifted into the air above me before being thrown a few feet in a spray of gravel. The man fought back, but he was no match for Hunter, who pummeled him until his head fell with a thud.

I sat there, open-mouthed with shock, my body still lewdly exposed. Hunter came to stand over me, breathing hard, his face a grotesque mask of violence. His hands were covered in blood and bruises. Not an angel—a demon, and somehow sweeter that a beast so savage had saved me.

“I told you not to start trouble,” he ground out, his broad chest heaving.

Tears slid down his throat. Would he hurt me now? If he hit me like he’d just beaten them, I’d die. In fact, I thought for a minute that they were dead, but low groans in the air proved otherwise.

He pulled me up, keeping my dress raised and running his hands along my body. “Are you hurt?”

It hurt everywhere, but I was too numb to feel it—a strange and contradictory feeling.

I shuddered beneath his hands.

He released me. “Get back to the truck. I need to clean up here.”

Clean up? What did that mean? I ran around the diner. His truck gleamed in the sunlight, blinding me. If I got in the back of that truck, would he touch me again? Did I want him to?

Yes, something inside me whispered. Wash them away, make me clean.

Instead I ran toward the road. I couldn’t see any other buildings nearby, but the hill crested just up ahead, blocking my sight to anything beyond. I was running on fumes after the interrupted meal and my fight with the men.

I glanced back. The truck sat exactly where I’d left. He must still have been cleaning up, whatever that meant. My muscles felt nebulous and insubstantial, but somehow they managed to drag me up the road.

At the top of the hill, the scene spread out before me with depressing majesty, a blank canvas of farmland and sky—not a building in sight. My feet slowed to a trod but didn’t stop altogether. There was nowhere to run to.

Gravel crunched beneath my feet. Then louder as the truck rolled up beside me. A hiss as the brakes halted its motion, then the door opened.

“Get in the truck.”

I glanced up at him. He didn’t sound mad, even though I’d clearly disobeyed. He even looked handsome if intimidating up high in the cab, those intense eyes. Maybe the creepiest part was how unaffected he seemed after beating up grown men, almost killing them.

Maybe he had killed them. Maybe that was what cleaning up meant.

I kept walking. With a shudder, the truck rolled forward to catch up with me.

“Get in the fucking truck, Evie.”

I stood still, thinking. It felt important, that moment. Even though I didn’t have a choice, there was a pull toward him or away. At some point those men should have walked away from me—from him. But they didn’t and they’d lost. Was that me? Fighting a fight I couldn’t win, only to get bloodied from my efforts?

Though if I imagined myself the loser, the one wielding the punches was just life, just fear. If I looked at it from just the right angle, it seemed like Hunter could be my defense. He’d certainly figured out how to combat the inevitable.

Swallowing hard, I walked to the back, waiting for him to open the heavy back door. I just knew he’d put me back there as punishment, and I wanted it. I wanted to crawl onto the thin mattress and sob.

Instead he opened the passenger side door to the cab and gestured me inside.

With my arms wrapped tightly around my middle, I walked to the front. Climbing inside exposed all sorts of new hurts in places that had been too blank with shock. I shivered in the seat, feeling cold and dirty and alone. Worst of all and completely irrational, the hurt of betrayal panged in my gut. As if he should have protected me from them. From myself.

He got in the driver’s side and started the truck without looking at me. We’d gone fifteen minutes before the tears began falling in earnest. Another five before broken cries tore from my chest, unstoppable. I hated him for not putting me in the back, where he wouldn’t bear witness to my pain.

He pulled over and shut off the engine, magnifying the gasping sobs I couldn’t hold in.

“Are you hurt?” he asked hoarsely. “Do you need to go to a hospital?”

“As if you would take me,” I spat.

“Do you need a doctor?”

A doctor? Sure, I needed a psychiatrist. I’d probably need daily sessions for the next ten years just to make sense of everything that had happened to me with Hunter, then another ten years for everything that had happened before.

I shook my head tightly. A hospital wouldn’t help anything. I didn’t even care about getting away anymore. It was all a big joke, freedom. Trapped at home or trapped out in the world. Would it help to get strapped to a hospital bed? Not at all.

The sobs threatened to tear me apart. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go on this way. I wasn’t sure I’d ever stop. I wrapped my arms around my waist as if holding myself in.

A muscle ticked in his jaw. “I’m sorry I…I’m sorry I let them touch you. I should have been there. Should have known you’d try to run.”

A cry hitched in my throat. He’d caught onto the same perverse responsibility that I had, the implication that he should protect me even while we both knew he could hurt me.

Incredulity had a calming effect. “Don’t you see how messed up this is?”

No, I didn’t need to be afraid anymore. The worst had already happened—almost happened. And the truth had become clear when those men were on top of me.

I trusted him.

So I rephrased the question. “Don’t you see how fucked up this is? That you beat up those guys for…for…” Here my courage deserted me. “For what you did,” I finish lamely.

I saw the ripple in his throat as he swallowed. He looked less menacing in a side profile. Or maybe that was just the grief in his eyes. It didn’t look new. It looked ancient, as if it had always been there. In fact, I thought it had been, and I’d been too wrapped up in my own sadness to notice his.

“So what do you want?” he asked. “You want me to let you go?”

I said nothing.

He gestured angrily out my window. “So leave. Get the fuck out.”

Tears sprang in my eyes. Wasn’t this what I wanted? Okay, in my fantasies I was dropped off closer to civilization. But even barring that, I wasn’t sure I could get by without him. I hated the helplessness, but in this moment, with my flesh still warm from cruel hands, I hated even more the thought of wandering.

What was the point? Niagara Falls wasn’t a person. It was just another place to be alone.

He sighed. “Let me keep you a little bit longer. You can take some time to recover. Then we can talk about what to do next.”