Chapter 3
Chapter Three
VIVIENNE HAWTHORNE
T he night air is sharp against my skin as I run. My breath comes in frantic bursts, each one clouding in the cold as I push forward, deeper into the woods, away from the one thing I can never truly escape.
Orion.
I don’t hear him, but I feel him. That unbearable weight of knowing he’s there, that he’s always there, watching, waiting. The way his presence coils around me, dark and inevitable, like fate itself.
My heart slams against my ribs as I spot the narrow opening of a cave up ahead. Shelter. A place to think. To breathe. I scramble over jagged rocks, slipping inside just as a gust of wind whips past, carrying with it the phantom touch of a memory I swore I buried long ago.
I close my eyes, pressing my back against the cold, damp stone. But the past is already unfurling inside me, creeping into the cracks of my resolve.
I was eighteen. Young, untouched, and utterly his .
He had come for me then, just as he comes for me now. A different kind of hunt, but a hunt all the same.
I had been warned about warlocks, about what they did to witches like me. How they used us, drained us, made us theirs in ways that could never be undone. I knew better. But when Orion Voss set his sights on me, it didn’t matter.
He found me in the woods, just like tonight. Only then, I wasn’t running from him. I was waiting.
He didn’t touch me at first. He just looked at me, his silver-blue eyes burning with a hunger that made my breath hitch in my throat.
“Do you know what you’re asking for, Vivienne?” His voice was rough, edged with something dark and unspeakable.
I had nodded, pulse hammering. I had known exactly what I was asking for.
His fingers traced along my jaw, down my throat, pressing just lightly enough that I felt the power thrumming beneath his skin. A warning. A promise.
And then he kissed me.
I had never been kissed like that before—like I was something sacred and something sinful all at once. Like I was meant to be devoured.
When he laid me down, the earth was cool beneath my bare skin, the night alive with the rustling leaves and the distant howls of the wind. But all I could hear was the ragged pull of his breath, the low, guttural sound he made when he pushed inside me for the first time.
It had hurt. But not in a way that made me want to stop. It was a claiming, a surrender. A fire that burned through me, leaving me aching, gasping, ruined.
I had clung to him, nails digging into the hard muscle of his back as he moved, relentless and unyielding, until I shattered beneath him, crying out his name like it was the only thing keeping me tethered to this world.
And when it was over—when I lay there, spent and trembling—he could have taken everything. My power. My soul.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he looked at me like he had just made a terrible mistake. Like I had just become his undoing.
Since that night, no other man has ever touched me. I tried. I tried to let them. But it never worked.
Because none of them were him.
I press a trembling hand to my chest, my heart still racing—not from the run, not from fear, but from the memory of him inside me, filling me, ruining me.
I wonder if he knows. If he ever thinks about it. If he remembers the way I broke for him, the way I have never truly put myself back together.
A sound outside the cave makes my breath hitch.
He’s here.
The hunt is over.
Orion has found me.