Helplessly His

I should hate him. I have told myself that since the moment I woke and realized the truth of what had happened between us. I should be sharpening a blade, planning an escape, imagining all the ways I might make Scar regret ever putting his hands upon me. That is what the woman I have always been would do. A Panther does not yield. A Panther does not belong to a man. A Panther does not lie awake in the darkness remembering the sound of his voice and feel something low and treacherous stir inside her at the memory. Yet here I am, furious with him, furious with myself, and perhaps most furious because I cannot decide which of us I am angriest with.

He showed me a part of myself I did not know existed. He took a woman who had spent years believing herself untouchable and made her realize just how easily her certainty could be shaken. I had thought strength meant never yielding an inch, never allowing another hand to guide me, never permitting a man to see the places where the fierce creature beneath my skin could tremble. Scar did not seem impressed by my weapons or my snarls. He looked at me as though he already knew there was something beneath all that ferocity, something I had buried so deeply that even I had forgotten it was there. That infuriates me. Gods, how it infuriates me.

And still, when I think of him, I do not think only of the man who captured me. I think of the hunter. The man who knows the forest as I do. The man who understands hunger, silence, blood, weather, and the language of things that live beyond the walls of cities. He does not waste life. He does not kill merely to prove he can. He watches. He waits. He knows when to strike and when to let the forest speak. Perhaps that is why I cannot simply dismiss him as some brute who overpowered a woman. I recognize something of myself in him, and that recognition is more dangerous than anything else.

I have spent my life refusing to be claimed. Yet he never needed a collar to make me wonder what it would mean to be his. That thought alone should make me furious enough to put an arrow through his heart. Instead, it leaves me sitting here with my knees drawn against my chest, wondering why the word Mate sounds different when it comes from his mouth. I should reject it. I should spit it back at him. I should remind him that I belong to no one. And perhaps I still do. But there is a part of me—small, stubborn, utterly traitorous—that does not hate hearing it.

That is the part I fear.

Not Scar.

Me.

Because I am beginning to suspect that what has me so enthralled is not that he defeated me. It is that he found a place inside me where surrender does not feel like weakness. Where yielding does not mean becoming helpless. Where perhaps a woman can remain fierce, remain a hunter, remain herself, and still choose to place her trust in a man strong enough to hold it without destroying her. I do not know what to call that. I do not know whether it is desire, curiosity, respect, madness, or some dangerous mixture of all four. I only know that when I close my eyes, I see him.

And when I should be dreaming of escape, I find myself wondering what it would feel like to choose surrender rather than simply refuse it.

And gods help me…

I wanted to find out.