I wanted him in a way that I’d never dreamed was possible. As he stepped away from my body and put the knife down at his side, I had this overwhelming urge to leap on him and crash our lips together.

“You’re not ready for me, Kirby, but soon you will be. You continue to hang onto the ledge with your fingertips, but you’re tired of hanging on to something you never wanted. You will fall, and I’ll be here waiting.”

We stood still, each staring at one another with carnal lust. I didn’t need a mirror to know what my eyes were saying to him. As he turned to walk away, the connection between us broke, and I gasped in a deep lungful of air as my hand grasped my throat. The adrenaline coursed through my veins. I wondered if I was an adrenaline junky, which drove me to want more. As I looked up at him, my heart told me I could keep making excuses. I could try to deny the emotions but I’d already slipped from the cliff. That singular thought horrified me to my core.

I shook my head and cringed away from the loud screaming as my eyes focused on the table with the woman on it. A pang of guilt hit me as I realized I’d completely forgotten about her. I began to wonder if she’d been screaming the whole time. Nothing else existed when Cain was near me, he was the singular focus of every nerve ending in my body. I watched him as he methodically moved around the table and pulled on a pair of surgical gloves.

Ripping a piece of tape off the wide silver roll, he unceremoniously slapped it over Barbara’s mouth. “I told you, Barbara, your screaming hurts my Sunshine’s ears, and we can’t have that.”

His eyes flicked up to mine, and I knew I was in deep trouble. It had nothing to do with the blade Cain wielded and solely with the power he had over me. Every second I spent in this place, the more pieces of who I thought I was disappeared, and the reality of that knowledge was more terrifying than a thousand deaths.

As he started to work, I moved around the corner so I didn’t have to watch and gripped my head in my hands. It didn’t block out the sound, but I didn’t want to watch him turn her into one of the bodies I’d seen on my classroom screen.

Rocking back and forth, I pushed the last of the sounds from my mind by humming the song that had become my anthem. Either Cain heard me, or he sensed that I needed to hear the song because Cain turned up the volume of “You Are My Sunshine” once more.