The red light flashes of the rotating beacon greatly reduce their visibility, and the shrill siren screams so hard that their eardrums pulsate painfully. It looks like hell.
Pierce turns on himself, his eyes wide open and his weapon unsheathed. He scrutinizes all around him with anxiety but at each rotation of the beam he thinks he sees a movement in the opposite corner. It is only when the bed is pushed in his direction that he finally finds the beast, amazed by his skill in hiding in such a small room with so little furniture.
The beast jumps on the bed and propels itself against Pierce's torso, who drops his weapon when his back hits the ground. His face tightens and a raucous complaint escapes from his throat when he reflexively brings his hands to his chest and realizes that the acute pain he suddenly feels is due to the claws of the mutant that are planted there.
He grabs her wrists but she is literally crouched on his chest and pushes with all her weight on her hands, slashing a little more the flesh at every attempt of Pierce to repel it, soon snatching more intense cries of pain. The chaotic atmosphere and Pierce's panicked gaze stir up her predatory instincts, obliterating all rational thought. Leaning over his face, the beast growls, showing her fangs and threatening to bite his neck just when the light comes back as suddenly as it had extinguished.
The siren still screams but the clear view of Pierce's contrite face and his stunned eyes slows down her momentum. Out of her trance, she freezes, realizing that she has just wounded him to the point of blood. Pierce finally manages to push her claws out of his skin in a sigh of relief. She expects him to reply immediately, that he tries to get up by throwing her to the ground, but he does not move, his hands still holding her wrists.
For a few seconds of fluctuation, she no longer knows if she is supposed to kill him or to apologize. He's still holding her hands against the blood-soaked fabric on his chest when he raises his head with an undecipherable look.
"You can't leave." Pierce says calmly, he seems to establish a fact more than an order or a threat; making her even more confused.
"What?" she asks with a disconcerted air.
Amused by her reaction, his mouth forms a soft smile as he releases her wrist and brings his hand to her face, gently brushing her cheek with his fleshy fingers.
At this moment, she no longer hears the siren. A wave of chills spreads over her skin to his touch, a deep breath exhales from her mouth allowing her muscles to slowly release the tension she had strongly maintained until then.
To surrender to him is all that her body desires and all that she has fought since meeting this man and his intense blue eyes. He should be angry, he should counterattack and punish her for what she did, but instead he gently touches her with a serious look on his face. Now the beast feels about to let go, her face slowly attracted by Pierce's hand towards his own.
The door violently opens and all of a sudden her senses return to reality, to the medical room, to the sound of the alarm, and to Pierce, the man who has captured her and who has been playing with her ever since, on the ground beneath her feet, his breast bleeding from the claws she has planted. She must seize the moment.
The man in the white coat who has just entered has scarcely time to push himself when the captive runs through the door, the sound of her bare feet on the ground almost undetectable.
"No, grab her!" Pierce screams at the dazed man, then he screams something again, but she's already too far away in the corridors to hear his words.
After getting up, Pierce starts in pursuit of the fugitive, crossing the building and frantically throwing glances in the rooms and the cells that he crosses, all empty.
"Where is she, where did she go?" He asks the two nurses running towards him.
"Who ?"
"How that, who ?" He yells furiously at the woman's face.
"But they're all on the run, sir, all the patients..." she moans, panicked.
Pierce froze, the time to process the information. "Shit, shit, SHIT!" he yells as he resumes his race. When he crosses three of his men on the way to the elevator, which revealed that they had not seen her pass, he learns that several of Dr. Rice's patients managed to escape, presumably helped by nurses from the Center. Guessing that the confusion created by all these people running in all directions in the building could only be to the advantage of the fugitive, Pierce summons one of his men to accompany him to the parking lot.
When he uncovers it, he distinguishes a form on the ground, near parked cars, and runs nervously toward it. Lying on his stomach, a man bathes in a pool of blood seeming to come from his abdomen and his neck is no more than a scarlet pulp. On his forearm, shreds of bandages reveal a trace of recent bite, the scarring has hardly begun. This is the only trace that the beast left behind.
The breeze carries with it the warm and damp odors of earth and wood that she knows so well. This passage among civilization strengthens her in her choice not to belong to it. The forest has not changed much since her departure, only the wind is warmer and the clouds of insects more numerous and denser, confirming that the summer has indeed arrived.
She had to travel at night to the north, hiding on the rooftops of buses or in the back of passing pick-ups. Going unnoticed almost naked in this hospital outfit was not easy but she could not see how to ask people for help with her appearance. Two nights had been necessary to reach Durango and get closer to home.
Now, perched on a branch high enough not to be seen from the ground, hidden by the dense foliage, she observes below the entrance of her den, a cave half buried in the ground whose entrance easily passes unnoticed if we do not dwell on it. She waits patiently for something to move, as she has often done since returning two days earlier.
Like the first time, she feels him before she even sees him. His smell now engraved in her memory, she could feel it for miles, but he is not so far and slowly approaches the place which, despite its discretion, revealed her presence at the origin. He is alone and, although she expected, his insolent assurance makes her smile.
Pierce sinks and enters and then comes out almost immediately, realizing that the place is empty. He sits on the trunk lying on the ground near the entrance, places his jacket there and lights a cigarette. A bandage protrudes from the collar of his black tank top. During the hours that the animal passes by observing him, he sometimes prowls around the lair, freezing at the slightest noise, the hand on the butt of the weapon at his girdle. However, the beast does not detect an ounce of fear in his attitude, only the impatience that echoes her own, that of confronting him again. And she is as anxious, as irrational as it seems to her, to find herself near him.
Pierce rises, his muscles begin to become numb by dint of sitting while the light is declining. After a few trips back to the entrance of the cavity, his hands in his back, he decides to return inside the cave. He lights a torch to illuminate the interior, now totally dark. The cave is surprisingly more spacious than it looks from the outside, allowing even a man to stand upright.
As he inspects the ground with his torch light and distinguishes between the leaves and the dry soil a doe skin probably supposed to serve as a bed, Pierce is suddenly pushed in the back and strikes the wall. He then pivots with his fist raised but the beast blocks his movement with his forearm, strong enough to make him let go the lamp that rolls on the ground behind her, casting their shadows on the wall. She grabs him by the throat with her free hand, blocking him against the wall and trying to maintain sufficient pressure to deter him from moving. Only, seeing his smile widen in the semi-darkness that subsists above the lamp's beam, she understands that something is wrong; she then feels the cannon of a weapon sticking to her belly.
"Nice try, baby, but you should stick to your strategy of killing in the second." He says, leaning his head to one side.
"Fuck you!" She says.
"Ha, it reminds me of our encounter ..." Pierce goes on, disengaging himself from the grip of the beast to catch the nape of her neck with his free hand, pushing a little more the canon under her ribs.
"You made me wait baby! Why do you do this to me, I've been tender with you the last time ..." he says with an exaggerated condescending look on his face.
"Only to humiliate me, you thought I could do nothing against you ..."
"Oh baby, you're breaking my heart, I'm here for you ..." he replies with a falsely warm smile.
"To bring me back to this shitty place, you're a heartless son of a bitch ..."
"Jeez, for sure you talk dirty when you talk! Let's be nice, okay, or you could be hurt ..."
"I won't come back," she firmly interrupts, her yellow eyes piercing through Pierce's gaze.
"So why are you here? If you wanted to kill me, I'd already be torn to pieces, right?" he adds with a heavy tone of innuendo.
She feels the nervousness rise in her again as Pierce starts to mock her attraction to him. The beast tries to retreat but he does not let her do it and draws her closer to him, tightening his hand on the back of her neck.
"I know you're smarter than that so you knew I was coming here, you were waiting for me ..." he whispers, his breath on her face, "You're so mine, you can't help it."
Recalling what Pierce told her about the dominant male, she cursed this doctor for telling him about these things he since never stopped using against her.
"You don't know what you're talking about," she says bitterly.
"Fuck no, it's all crap for me!" he mocks before taking a more serious expression. "But you do act funny with me and, strangely, it turns me on baby ..."
She puts her head down, trying to avoid his approaching face and to chase his last words out of her head, but Pierce mimics her movement and makes his way to her lips. For a moment, she loses her breath and the will to push him away, until she feels his tongue invade her mouth unceremoniously. His hand presses her face firmly against his and she can feel the cold metal of his gun through her blouse as he clasps her back with his arm.
She can hardly breathe, moaning, desperately trying to close her mouth, to regain control of her body. She tries to push him back with her arms, slipping them between their bodies but he tightens his hug more, until she bites his lip. Surprised by the pinch, he finally let go, tasting the salt of the blood in his mouth.
"Damn, you're really something, darling," he says, wiping the blood on his chin with a black look, "You like it rough, huh? You're gonna love this."
At that moment, she knows she should get out of reach, run away immediately, but she is tetanized by the attitude of Pierce. Despite all she had done to him, he had never seemed to be furious, not at that point.
The beast can feel the anger and an unhealthy excitement rise in him as he grabs her again by the neck with an evil smile on his face, and pushes her brutally against the ground, her face almost hitting the dirt.
Pierce throws his pistol and kneels over the beast that tries to crawl out of his reach but he grabs her head and presses it against the ground, his metal fingers tangling painfully in her hair.
Her mind is overwhelmed by panic, unable to think clearly about what she needs to do to escape, or whether she should do it, or whether she really wants to. It is only when she feels the fingers of Pierce raising her blouse on her back that her body stiffens and agitates to unbalance him, but he blocks her against the ground and stretches with all his weight.
His breath is raucous and as heavy on her neck as his body is. The breathless screams of the beast suddenly clamp in her throat when a burning pain pierces her between her legs, while Pierce brutally presses his pelvis against her ass.
He rumbles deeply, breathes loudly in jerks, the muscles of his belly stretched against the back of his prisoner, pulling a little harder on her hair. The beast struggles to catch her breath, even after feeling him enter into her again, and again, each strike seeming deeper and more brutal than the previous one.
He finally releases her hair and grabs her hips to pull her harder and faster against him. She frantically searches the ground in front of her but her claws find nothing to cling to, catching only dirt and branches. Her mind is cloudy, uncertain if the stinging contractions that ravage her belly cause her suffering or intense pleasure, unable to say whether it is hatred or adoration that she now feels for this man who possesses her so fiercely.
"That's what you wanted, right?" he whispers in her ear, passing his hands under her chest, clinging to her breasts. The face buried in the neck of the beast, Pierce accentuates his cadence and kisses with avidity her burning skin. She lets out an acute and breathless scream when he bites her flesh, he can feel the muscles at the base of her neck stiffen under his tongue.
"Oh damn, I'm going to ..." A deep rattle forms in his throat as he reaches ecstasy in one last charge.
Lying on her, his hands resting on her loins and his sweaty forehead caressing her cheek, their gasping breaths create a cloud of dust swirling in the torch's beam.
Minutes pass and they remain motionless. The beast feels exhausted, tired of this internal struggle between opposing feelings. He had just been all that she hates in a man, their insolent thoughts that everything belongs to them, that they direct everything without an ounce of doubt or empathy. But at the same time, it felt so damn right, just as things were supposed to be for her, in the arms of the one who deserves her, the one she deserves.
In her head emerges the idea that he probably delivers the same inner fight without the ability or the urge to put the finger on it, let alone to accept it, hiding behind any excuse his job may provide him to do what he has to, instead of what he longs to. She already apprehends his next insensitive reaction, only to find her fears confirmed when he finally retires and sees the blood that stains his sex and his thighs.
"What the fuck is that?" he asks with an air of astonishment.
His gaze oscillates between his crotch and the face of the beast that looks up at him, until he understands what it is. Then, in a mocking tone, he exclaims: "Shit, you were a virgin?"