Page 57 of Prey

The orgasm hits sharp and quick, leaving me gasping against the pillow. Instead of satisfaction, all I feel is empty. Hollow. Like no amount of my own touch will ever be enough to fill the space he carved out inside me.

Pathetic.

I roll out of bed and into the shower, letting cold water wash away the sweat and shame. The woman who killed three traffickers in a month shouldn’t be getting off to memories of her captor. She should be stronger than that.

But when I close my eyes under the spray, all I see are those eyes and perfect bone structure. All I feel are phantom hands on my throat, phantom lips against my ear whispering promises about breeding and ownership and forever.

If I saw him tomorrow—if he walked into that fight gym or appeared in my doorway—would I run? Or would I spread my legs like the desperate thing he made me into, begging him to finish what we started?

I press my forehead against the shower tiles, water streaming down my back. The honest answer terrifies me more than any knife fight or trafficking ring ever could.

I’d hesitate. Standing there with steel in my hand and his throat exposed, I’d hesitate long enough for him to take control again.

That hesitation would get me killed. Or worse—get me dragged back to that underground facility, back to his bed, back to being nothing more than a pretty object for him to fuck whenever the mood struck.

But there’s a small and sick part of me, buried deep, that whispers,Would that really be so terrible?

I turn off the water and step out, wrapping myself in a thin towel. The mirror shows someone who looks capable, dangerous. Someone who’s left bodies in her wake and felt righteous about it.

But mirrors lie. They only show the surface.

Underneath, I’m still the woman who melted at the sound of her own name in his mouth. Still the broken thing that found safety in submission, who got wet from his hand around her throat.

Maya Chen wants to fight me tomorrow night, hungry for revenge over her brother’s death. She’ll come at me with everything she has, fueled by grief and rage and the need to balance the scales.

I’ll be ready for her. My body’s a weapon now, honed through weeks of training and violence. I’ll put her down if I have to, add another name to my growing body count.

But if Nikolai walks through those doors, if those eyes find mine, all that training might crumble like paper in a fire. All that strength might dissolve into the desperate need to feel his hands on my skin again.

The thought should scare me.

It does scare me.

Because the woman who’s been dismantling trafficking networks isn’t a lie. Neither is the woman who wakes up aching for him. Both are me. The damage didn’t choose which one was real. I get to. The real me still wakes up aching for a man who saw her as property, who kept her like a pet and made her love every second of it.

Tomorrow I’ll fight Maya Chen. I’ll probably win—I’m hungrier than she is, angrier, more willing to cross lines. But thevictory will taste like ash, because every triumph just reminds me how empty I am without him.

How much I miss being owned by someone who looked at me like I was the answer to every one of his prayers.

20

NIKOLAI

Five collectors are dead. All of them were knifed to death, all of them found in circumstances that suggest someone who knows exactly how to kill efficiently and disappear without a trace. Too many to be a coincidence.

The rage that’s been simmering in my chest for almost three months has crystallized into something colder. More focused. I will find her. Not because of some desperate need to reclaim lost property, but because she’s the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced in my life.

At least, that’s what I tell myself as I walk into the underground fight gym at eleven forty-seven PM, scanning faces in the crowd.

The place reeks of sweat, blood, and desperation. Concrete floors stained with years of violence, a chain-link cage in the center where two men are currently trying to beat each other unconscious while the crowd screams for more. This is where society’s discards come to trade pain for money, where people disappear into new identities built on scar tissue and broken bones.

Perfect place for someone to vanish in Chicago.

Ezra’s intelligence had been clear—a female fighter matching Jenna’s physical description has been working the circuit for ten weeks. Goes by Kathy, pays in cash, no background. But everyone has a price, and the right one loosened tongues about the fighter who came out of nowhere. The timing aligns with her escape.

But what sealed it was the other pattern Ezra identified. The one that made my blood sing with recognition.

The collectors started dying around the same timeKathyappeared. Not random violence—targeted elimination of specific individuals involved in human trafficking.