A forest couldn’t become hell, bleeding normalcy into fiction. Spiders the size of cats weren’t supposed to crawl by, nor wolves the size of polar bears to slink in the shadows.

I swallowed a scream as more and more predators arrived from nowhere.

Sabre tooth cats with canines still holding carrion from prior meals. Bears as tall as houses, their shaggy fur dreadlocked with gore. Vultures fell from the sky, ringing us in our fire circle. A stampede of furious wildebeest snorted in the gloom. A howl and snarl of more wolves sent elixir second-best beneath my desire to flee.

This...wasn’t possible.

This threatened to break my mind, to prove my imagination had limits and I’d reached the threshold of what I could accept.

It’s not possible!

Wait...

It’s not possible unless the man who made all of this possible is here.

Hope sprang.

Wishes spilled faster than my tears.

Sully!

I fought harder, knocking Drake sideways in his stupor of what’d happened to his fantasy. “Did I load it wrong?” He scowled, crawling back over me and pinning my wrists deeper into the dirt the more I struggled. “Quit it.”

A wolf snapped at his head.

Drake didn’t react, almost as if he believed it was just a mirage. A program glitching that couldn’t hurt him.

But I smelled the wolf’s rancid breath. I felt the breeze of its jaws. I heard the thunder of its paws.

“Let me go!” I fought again. I fought to wake up before something far more dangerous than Drake decided to have me. This might not be real. This might be entirely in our minds.

But our minds made it real.

Our brains told our skin what to feel and how to react. Our nervous system was the only reason we felt the world we lived in.

This was now the world we lived in—regardless if it was true or not. This world could kill us as surely as our old one.

“Get off me!”

God, I need.

Need!

My hips rocked as instinct suffocated beneath elixir.

Stop it!

It wasn’t the animals I had to be afraid of, it was me.

I was my own worst enemy.

Please!

“Shut the fuck up.” His red beard shuddered as he spoke. “Let me think.” He rocked his hips into mine, his cock still unnervingly close to taking me.

I hated that I shuddered in horror but also hunger. I contemplated riding him just so I could be free of the constricting, clutching mayhem of my heart.

I needed to come again.

The palpitations and skipping, tripping beats made me sick and lightheaded.

“You’ve been in these illusions plenty of times, how do you reset it?” Drake stared at me, his gaze orange from the flickering fire.

Elixir bowled through me, no longer willing to play nice, dragging me deeper into sex-crazed.

My back arched. My core begged. I let out a pitiful scream.

I need.

I can’t.

Stop it!

Drake pressed his hips into mine, scattering me in all directions, leaving only hate and shame behind. “Finally want me, huh?” He rubbed his cock against my clit, driving me headfirst into the beginnings of the most diabolical release. “I’ll fuck you, girl, but not until I figure out what the fuck is going on around here.”

“Allow me to show you.”

That voice.

My head whipped to the side.

The release taunting me erupted from the sinful snarl.

I convulsed with carnal clenches.

It wasn’t Drake who granted me pleasure. It was the owner of that magnificent growl. A grumble full of hellfire and brimstone fury. Darker than night, blacker than sin, as deadly and as lethal as venom.

Sully?

Disgusted tears drenched my cheeks as echoes of my climax made me feeble, unable to fight Drake off me. I had a small window to get away before I lost myself entirely. A few precious seconds to stay loyal to Sully and myself.

“Let her go.”

Drake twisted to look behind him as the night shimmered and parted like a veil, delivering not a man but a monster.

We both froze.

My heart tangled and tore, quadruple beating with rapidly encroaching death.

The new arrival wasn’t just a monster. He was a beast so much scarier than all the predators currently stalking. A beast standing on two legs with fangs like a vampire, eyes like a snake, and scales like a dragon.

Shaped like a man but taller than any I’d ever seen, he had no hair, no softness, no vulnerabilities. He had goat horns and bat wings and talons stolen straight from a devil.

Drake gulped as the nightmare stepped toward us. No, not stepped. Flew. An effortless swoop of membrane wings and snap of power.

Drake was lifted in one hand.

Thrown with one toss.

Eradicated with a single thought.

He cried out as he landed on the other side of the fire.

And the demon fell to one knee beside me. He held out his scaly hand, his glowing reptile eyes raking over me, and I knew.

My heart knew.

My soul knew.

My body instantly wanted him.

It wanted this monster because it knew who puppeteered such a thing.

It wasn’t biologically possible. He wasn’t my species anymore.

But he was male.

He was mine.

He’s...Sully.

With tears pouring, I placed my tiny breakable hand into his claw-frosted paw.

Electricity crackled. Chemistry ignited. That all-knowing, all-consuming, all-binding bond between a god and a goddess who no longer played in the human world but had strayed directly into myth ignited.

It gushed between us.

It branded us, burned us, broke us into pieces that belonged entirely to the other.

This was what Sully was.

He wasn’t just a man.

He wasn’t just a monster.

He was everything.

He was every creature and element.

He was fury and faith and utterly blinding loyalty.

Elixir refused to be thwarted any longer.

I’d found the man I loved and lusted.

He was here.

I could be given redemption and releases.

I could feel him beneath the fantasy. Not wearing fingerprint sensors meant I touched his skin beneath the scales.

I burned.

Scooting to my knees, I crawled into him. “You’re alive. You came for me.”

I twined myself over his scaly skin, my body with its oil sensed the otherworldly armour he wore but my fingers stroked the contours of human muscles. I kissed the ice-cold angles of his cheekbones.

I wanted him.

I needed him.

Now!

A savage growl echoed in his throat. The wolves surrounding us answered back, a symphony of snarls and yips.

Goosebumps prickled me, activating my lust a thousandfold. My thirst for him was maddening, terrifying. “Sully.”

Holding me in his massive paws, cords of power etching his reptilian skin, his features remained vicious but a soft glow appeared in the snake-slit eyes. “I found you.”

My stomach clenched as he brought my hand to his icy lips.

“I love you, Eleanor. I’m sorry I’m late. I’m sorry for what you’ve endured. But this is the last time you’ll ever be hurt this way. I give you my word.”

His voice wasn’t just a voice. It wasn’t a bear’s growl or wolf’s howl, it was a blend of all of them. A thick thunder of gravel and hurricanes.

Another orgasm threatened to split me in two.