Chapter 5
Chapter five
Damien
She enters the house, the door closing behind her and that wolf of hers.
My entire body tenses, every sense heightened as she disappears from view.
She felt me watching. Even before she called out, the subtle stiffening of her shoulders, the careful tilt of her head, and the deliberate slowness of her movements told me everything.
She felt my eyes on her.
The wolf sensed me first, and despite my efforts to stay hidden and the considerable distance between us, the animal knew my exact location.
Wolves are such remarkable creatures.
He didn’t come rushing out to investigate. He stayed by her side, sensing the potential danger I posed to his owner. And make no mistake, I am a threat to her.
Be careful, Dr. Foster. Your guardian has good instincts.
I move closer while staying concealed within the trees that border her sanctuary. I pull up satellite imagery of her property on my phone, my eyes tracking each detail, committing buildings, enclosures, and camera placements to memory.
Amateur security.
The basic cameras, there only to track wildlife, cover the main buildings but leave blind spots I can bypass in my sleep. The tall fences might keep animals in, but they won’t keep someone like me out. She needs a lesson in proper security.
Perhaps I’ll give her one.
My mind once again drifts back to our encounter at the post office. The way she captured my attention felt like gravity reversing—sudden and inescapable. I went from being a man with a purpose to being a man with only one purpose.
Her.
Something primal within me recognizes her as mine, but the intensity of this possession is startling. I want to claim her like the wolf I’ve become through years of hunting. I’ve crossed too many lines and shed too much humanity to pretend I’m anything other than the predator she’s awakened.
I’ve felt nothing resembling genuine emotion in so long that I forget what it feels like. I’m incapable of feeling anything more than the satisfaction of ownership. And I want to own her. Claim her. Brand her.
I check my watch, and my pulse kicks up with each passing minute as I wait for her vet tech to leave. The lights inside the house glow through curtained windows, each one hiding her private world from my view. A world I’m going to step into whether she invites me or not.
I don’t have to wait long. Less than half an hour later, the door opens and both women step out onto the porch.
Luna’s hair is down now, spilling over her shoulders in waves.
My hand curls into a fist. I can feel it already—those strands wrapped around my knuckles, silky and tight.
Her on all fours, spine curved, and ass in the air.
Pulling her head back as I thrust into her.
That blonde hair giving me something to hold onto while I fuck her hard enough to make her voice break.
They embrace at the doorway. Luna’s laughter drifts through the night air like a melody, and a hunger to be the one who coaxes that sound from her lips stirs in my chest.
She releases her friend, unaware of the wolf watching from the shadows. I’m not close enough to hear what they’re saying, but her lips mouth the words, “thank you.”
Her friend walks to her car, and Luna kneels next to her wolf, speaking to it with an intimacy I rarely witness between humans, let alone across species.
Her hand scratches behind its ears, and it accepts her touch with a trust that seems absolute.
It’s distraction enough that the wolf doesn’t sense me still here.
Invisible bands wrap around my ribs. I’ve spent my life studying predators, understanding their nature because I recognize it in myself.
Yet Luna Foster handles this apex predator with a gentleness that would typically register as weakness to me.
Instead, I see strength in it, a power of a different kind than I’m accustomed to wielding.
It’s this contradiction that calls to me.
How can someone so soft survive in this world of teeth and claws?
How has her light not been extinguished?
Luna and the wolf enter the house again as her friend drives away.
The pain of losing sight of her is swift.
Even in the dark of night, her light is like a beacon that calls to me.
Perhaps it’s how she embodies everything I’m not.
Light to my darkness, mercy to my judgment, and healing to my destruction.
The thought of corrupting that purity, of watching her light flicker and dance as I introduce her to my shadows, sends electricity racing up my spine, tightening every muscle.
The lights on the first floor turn off behind the curtains as I wait for Luna to head upstairs.
My patience pays off when only her bedroom light remains, illuminating the oversized window on the second floor.
A balcony runs the entire length of the front of the house, creating a roof for the porch below.
It’s strange to have a balcony with no door access.
The curtains are open, offering me a perfect view as Luna enters the room.
The hunter in me awakens, recognizing its prey. But it’s different this time. I don’t want to destroy her. I want to possess her.
This unfamiliar yearning is dangerous. Distracting. I should eliminate it and focus on my reason for buying the Morrison property. To hunt and kill without prying eyes. But as I watch her, I know I won’t.
Can’t.
Won’t even try.
She approaches the window, her gaze sweeping the tree line, but I’m positioned far enough back that she can’t see me.
A cat sits in the window, and Luna’s lips move, speaking to it before reaching for the curtains.
She pauses mid-motion, pulling the fabric across the window but leaving a deliberate gap that feels like an invitation.
My breath snags as she undresses, peeling away layers with unhurried movements, unaware of her audience. Her skin glows in the soft lamplight, and I move closer, abandoning the trees to cross her yard as she turns and disappears through the door to a bathroom.
I wait for her to return with bated breath, the image of hot water sluicing over her pale skin nearly unbearable.
Blood pounds in my ears, in my cock, turning everything into a dull roar.
It takes all my self-restraint not to burst into her house, join her under that spray, and pin her to those tiles.
Feel her wet and slick under my hands, and give her what’s been building since the moment I laid eyes on her.
When she emerges, she’s wrapped in a towel.
She releases it, and the fabric drops to the floor.
My throat goes dry. The glimpse of her nude body is brief—smooth skin, the dip of her waist, and the swell of her ass—before she pulls on a tank top.
Then shorts that barely qualify as clothing.
But it’s enough to have my cock surging in my pants, hardening until the pressure becomes almost unbearable.
Fuck!
For the first time in my life, I’m hunting prey I have no desire to kill.
In mere hours, she’s become my obsession.
Though every instinct honed through years of training screams at me to retreat, recalibrate, and regain control, I remain rooted to my spot, captivated by the woman who has somehow, without even trying, thawed something I thought permanently frozen within me.
As the light in her room turns off, plunging it into darkness, I force myself to turn away. I slip back into the trees, covering the short distance to my Range Rover, parked in a secluded turnout off the main road just to the right of her driveway.
I want nothing more than to scale that balcony and watch her all night, but I have a target to kill.
The first bead of blood wells and trickles in jagged red rivulets past Brixton’s belly button.
My hands are steady after all the years of doing this. Still, every drop sparks something feral inside me, and a hot rush of sensation floods my veins. I lean closer, breathing in the metallic, coppery scent, and a shiver of excitement skitters down my spine.
I relish every involuntary flinch, every desperate whimper, every roll of his panic-stricken eyes, and the muffled screams vibrating through the duct tape that covers his mouth.
Social niceties were never my forte, but bodies—flesh, tissue, and bone—I understand.
I excel at inflicting pain, torture, and punishment.
After twenty-five years of delivering justice to monsters, I’ve mastered the art of retribution.
The anticipation of each cut, each scream, feeds a hunger within me.
This basement is musty and damp, heavy with the scent of wet earth, blood, and death. I take a deep breath, savoring the stench that defines my sanctum of reckoning.
My target for tonight lies strapped to the metal table.
He strains against the straps and duct tape that bite into his flesh, his muscles bulging like gnarled tree roots beneath skin slick with sweat.
Panic burns bright in his eyes, the same wild fear that consumed him when he first opened them in this dank chamber to find my mask looming above him like death incarnate.
Tommy Brixton is a heinous monster, torturing cats and dogs on video and posting them to social media and dark websites.
People think men like him are just evil and broken, some fuckup of DNA or a bad childhood.
Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes, though, it’s not a mistake so much as the world’s natural decline, the slow rot inherent in the very nature of the species itself.
No therapist or priest will cure that. Only pain and vengeance can.
He’s been pleading for mercy through the tape for the better part of an hour, eyes rolling, and snot bubbling out his nose. I ignore his pleas, drawing out his suffering, savoring every moment.