In the end, it didn’t matter how much she resisted. Marathin was much too strong, and despite fighting and screaming as best she could, nothing she did made him stop.

When his hand brushed between her legs, separating her nether lips, there was nothing she could do to resist it.

Marathin grunted at her low sob, squeezing her wrists painfully tight. She tried to clamp her thighs together, but he simply lifted her to rest against the hood of her car and stepped in between her legs, separating them with his hips.

But where despair and violation had sprouted, something new rose from the very core of her being: a white-hot fire burning through her veins in a flash faster than she could fully comprehend, eradicating her fear until only deep, seething anger remained.

He dared! He’d ruined her life, had hunted for her across the entire country, and now he’d taken her mate from her just so he could violate her once more.

She’d cowered before him for the last time.

“I said no!” This time her voice was not a pleading whimper. She screamed in fury as the fire in her blood rushed up her arms and into her hands.

Marathin released her wrists with a startled shriek, stumbling back, and she didn’t pause to think. The second she was free, she grasped his face in her hands and squeezed.

His skin lit up with bright white light drawing fissures from where her fingers bore into him. He screamed then, his eyes wide with fear as he stared at her, but his body seemed limp, only held aloft by her grip.

There was nothing but grim satisfaction as she stared at his panicked eyes lit up from within with the raw, pulsing power rushing from her core.

With a crack like thunder, his head exploded between her palms in a burst of light. Selma tumbled to the ground, thrown by the shockwave. Belatedly she shrieked and cussed as her exposed skin grated against the rough road. But once she finally lay still, nothing but silence met her.

Slowly she sat up, panting from pain and a kind of soul-deep exhaustion that was wholly new.

On the ground a few yards over, Marathin’s headless body lay sprawled on the tarmac. Bits of bloody skull and brain matter were scattered around them both.

The nausea came before she could fully process the horrific scene, and she only just managed to lean over to avoid vomiting all over herself.

Once her stomach settled enough that she could fight against the dry heaves, she somehow found the strength to hoist herself up by grabbing onto the car.

She’d killed him. She’d killed her rapist. Her kidnapper. And she felt no remorse.

She didn’t know what that white light was or where it came from, but she knew without a doubt that it belonged to her.