I cranked my neck as he ran a hand along the doorframe. He withdrew a key, steadied me with one hand, and used the other to shove it into the knob before kicking the door open. He stomped through the main room, dim in the dawning light barely peeking through the curtains.

“Put me down!” I kicked my feet and dug my nails into his strong back as he entered a bedroom.

“Stop it, Lex.” He yanked my sweats down, baring my bottom, and smacked my ass hard. “Don’t try to run,” he said, letting me slide to the floor in the adjacent bathroom. “You won’t get far. No one’s around for miles.”

As I jerked my pants up, my gaze lowered to his muddy sneakers, but he gripped my chin and forced my attention on his face. “You understand me? No one will hear your screams up here. Nobody knows we’re here, and the owner’s in Europe for the summer, so it’s just you and me.”

Five in, hold, five out. Repeat.

I’d lived by the ritual since the day he’d stolen my innocence. Only now I was stuck on hold. If I didn’t breathe, then I wasn’t alive. If I wasn’t alive, then I couldn’t feel.

His gaze lowered to my filthy tee. “Take that damn thing off.”

Air whooshed from my lungs in a rebellious rush, and my chest resumed its natural rise and fall. But I wasn’t breathing, and I didn’t know how my arms moved without a heart that pumped life through it, how my fingers grasped the bottom of the shirt that belonged to Rafe.

His shirt. On my body.

If I closed my eyes and pretended, I could almost feel Rafe’s arms around me, his mouth moistening my neck, his warm palms on my breasts, brushing across hardened nipples. Could almost hear the husky way he spoke to me, his tone full of command yet quiet with vulnerability. I chewed my lip to stop it from trembling, but my chest shook with the rising tide of grief.

“Now, Lex.”

I jerked my gaze to my brother’s hardened expression. Even after all he’d done, I couldn’t think of him differently. I still remembered him as the boy I’d latched onto when I was six, when our parents made the colossal mistake of merging our families. Reality demanded I think of him as a murderer, but that only brought me back to the fact that I wasn’t breathing. Still. Not. Breathing.

Rafe’s not dead. Not dead. Dead, dead, dead…

The thought fired through my synapses, on constant repeat.

“You fucking reek of him!” Zach’s hazel eyes spit poison, as potent as the arsenic boiling in his soul. “Take it off.”