“. . . fucking gave you an order, bitch,” Thor’s saying. “Clear as fucking day, I gave you an order to pull over, and what did you fucking do? What did you fucking do, huh, bitch?”

The Daniel and Abigail Bannings of the world are few and far between, thank God. But men like this one, men who will run you off the road because they have cast you in their paranoid fantasies, are far more common. And the tyranny of their appetites is so woven through every woman’s world that imagining life without it is the same as imagining life without ground underfoot.

“Don’t you fucking move—got it, bitch?” Thor snarls. There’s about a foot of space between them now. He’s going to step behind her to cuff her wrists. His friend raises his shotgun. “We can either have a nice long conversation about what the hell you’re doing all the way out here, or Axel can put a load of buckshot in you and save us all the trouble.”

Axel is a silhouette backlit by the headlight from his bike. But his aim looks steady. Thor is behind her now.

“I live out here.” Her voice sounds vacant, numb.

“Oh yeah? Are you a snake?” He grabs the back of her hair and pulls it like a leash. It should hurt. He wants it to hurt. But it doesn’t. “I said, are you a fucking snake, bitch?”

“Get off me,” she says.

“What?”

“I said get off me.”

“You don’t give me orders, you stupid fucking cu—”

A few seconds later, he’s careening toward his friend like a drunken idiot trying to dance at a wedding reception. It wasn’t the most complex of moves on her part. Just a pull of his arm and a thrust really. But the strength she put behind it is otherworldly; it’s like a blast of air has sent him hurtling through the dark toward Axel’s shotgun. There was no preparing for it.

Axel, it turns out, is too prepared.

There’s an explosion of light and a deafening boom. Drifts of torn denim snowflake through the air in front of her. Over the ringing in her ears, she hears Axel bellowing as he realizes he’s just blown a hole in his friend.

Thor’s drop is decisive and sudden.

Before Axel can raise the shotgun again, she runs for him, hands out, gives him what would have been a light shove just hours before. He hurtles backward into the bars of his Harley-Davidson. The impact of his spine cracks the headlight. The shotgun hits the dirt. He and the bike fall over to one side together, their dark silhouette like a time-lapse of melting snow.

The ringing in her ears drowns out the sounds he’s making now, but if his spread arms, trembling hands, and shaking head are any indication, they’re probably stomach churning, and she’s willing to bet he’ll never walk again.

There’s a cold caress around her ankles. Her stopping power punched shallow holes in the ground. When she steps out of them, the holes widen, chunks of caked desert earth tumbling off her sneakers.

There should be regret, she knows. Somewhere within her there should be some primal remorse.

But the music in her bones is at a fever pitch now, and so vivid are the nightmare images of what these two men might have done to her out here, they white out all her other thoughts. And there was a glimpse of something, just a glimpse in Axel’s eyes before he cracked the bike’s headlight with his spine, a glimpse of something that satisfied a thirst in her she didn’t know she possessed—fear.

There’s no sign of the biker she hit with her car. Did they leave him for dead, or is he crawling back to their hideout to get help? How many of them are there?

The darkness seems to close in around her now.

The thought of digging in their pockets for their phones sends a rush of revulsion through her that makes her feel suddenly ordinary again. Do they have satellite phones? They’re well outside the boosters at her house that could provide decent service.

The police station’s too far away to head for on foot, especially if the guy who destroyed her windshield has called for help. She had good luck against two of these guys. Against four or five? She’d need more than this impossible strength.

There’s only one place she can go right now. Home. If more bikers are on the way, better to face them from behind her security system, with her guns and with some chance of repairing her phone line. Besides, maybe they’ll never find her house.

In the emergency kit in her Escape she finds a flashlight.

On the other side of the wrecked car she finds the Beretta.

Home is the only place she can go, she realizes.

A few minutes after she reaches the road, her flashlight beam finds the other biker’s legs. Once she runs it up his body, she sees his waist is twisted at a grotesque angle from the rest of him, his head a mound of gore. No way did he manage to call for help. The desert’s ghostly quiet.

She starts in the direction of her house. After a few seconds, she begins to run. She’s afraid too much exertion might flush from her system whatever insane combination of hormones is giving her this strength. But she’d rather take that risk than meet more bikers out here in the dark.

9

As the door descends behind her, Charlotte uses the keypad inside the garage to search her security system’s recent history.

Somehow Jason managed to crack her code. The proof’s right in front of her.

SYSTEM ENTRY 5:36 p.m.

Automatic reengagement happened three minutes after.

Next comes her arrival, two hours later, followed by her departure twenty minutes after that.

Twenty minutes. Jason’s attack, overpowering him, binding him—was that really all it took?

She draws her Beretta. The metal depresses under her grip before she softens her hand.

Bedrooms, closets, bathrooms—all empty.

Not the kitchen.

Jason’s still trussed up like a pig, but he’s managed to squirm away from the debris left by their struggle in the living room. Exhaustion or pain from his injuries has overtaken him. He’s rag-doll limp. But he’s definitely alive. When he sees her coming down the hallway, his eyes widen, then narrow when he realizes she’s alone.

Something uncurls in her at the sight of him. Something hungry and feral and ready to strike.

When she’s a few steps away from him, he whines into the duct tape across his mouth, starts wiggling backward in a desperate attempt to escape. He seems to be remembering what she’s capable of. It’s good to be reminded, because there were a few moments during the strange, silent trek back to her house when she thought her night so far might have been one giant hallucination.

And what causes hallucinations?

Drugs.

Drugs like the one she’s on now, the one Dylan gave her.

But Jason’s fear is too real to be a hallucination. If this truly is all some giant drug reaction, it sure as hell isn’t the kind they warn you about on TV commercials.

She reminds herself what she came here to do. A phone. I need a phone.

She checks to make sure the base station for her phone system is in its usual spot, on a table in the hallway, just by the entrance to the kitchen. It is. There’s even a handset in the cradle. But when she traces the cord down to the outlet, she sees that it’s dangling inches from a new hole in the wall.

Jason removed the entire socket. Even if she could find it, she’d need a technician to plug it back in and rewire it. He didn’t just cut the cord. He didn’t just unplug the phone. He made sure there was no way she could easily reconnect if a struggle went in her favor. And if the landline’s out, that means no using the alarm’s panic button to summon Scarlet PD, who are forty minutes away at best. She checks the outlet in her bedroom. It’s in the exact same condition.

Her pulse roars in her ears.

She’s afraid again, but for entirely different reasons. What scares her now is that the pathetic sounds Jason’s making when she returns to the kitchen don’t inspire revulsion, much less pity. Instead they seem like information. The way a caribou’s limp is information to a hungry wolf.

Is this the drug, too? she thinks. Is it giving me more than just strength? Is it silencing my soul, removing my remorse? Or does remorse always leave once you have the power to indulge your worst instincts with impunity?

As gently as she can, she grips him by one shoulder and pulls him away from the cabinet until he’s lying flat on the floor.

She gazes into his eyes. Studies the fear there.

She’s savoring it. There’s no other word for it. And he can see this, and it terrifies him more.

For the first time in months, she tries to summon memories of her grandmother. Her grief made the effort too painful before. But in this moment, it’s Luanne’s voice she needs more than any other. She needs some of the wisdom the woman acquired during the years she spent not knowing what had become of her daughter and granddaughter. Without Luanne’s moral clarity, Charlotte might do something terrible. Something that can’t be reversed. Something that will haunt her long after she finds a way to understand just what the fuck is happening to her body right now.