Primal

She needed to see what fixed him.

Karla knows every micro-clench of Ian’s jaw, every quiet tell in the body she’s catalogued for eighteen months. When he finally confesses he won’t give up his twice-yearly weekends with Angela, she doesn’t walk away. She demands to witness it. At the isolated Vermont cabin, she stands on the porch while Angela bolts into the trees and Ian becomes something raw and unrecognizable—chasing, pinning, claiming her in the dirt with the kind of violence that leaves bites and scratches and the heavy scent of earth and need on their skin.

Karla watches every moment, her own body burning as he takes Angela with a hunger she’s never seen. Then she tends their wounds with warm cloths and steady hands, her thighs slick and aching. Until the moment they turn that same feral intensity on her—Angela’s mouth claiming her while Ian holds her open, both of them fighting to possess her until she comes apart shaking and undone.

Now Karla understands the shape of what she truly wants. Not to be the one claimed. To be the one who chooses who he hunts next.