his eyebrow? It was hard to see with just a glint of moonlight coming through a crack in the curtains.
"Don't make this more difficult than it has to be," he demanded, using his free hand to reach down.
I couldn't see what he was reaching to do. But it didn't seem to take a lot of thought. Men didn't break into the room of women while they were sleeping to offer them pamphlets about our Lord and Savior.
They were there to lay claim to the canvas of your body, to splash it in shades of red, to make what was once something safe and beautiful, foreign and scary and ugly.
I knew.
God, did I know.
And I would be damned if I ever knew that again.
I was small. I knew this. I got confused for a child more than once a week. I had to provide several forms of ID to get into clubs. I was short and slight and I wasn't exactly a big fan of lifting weights, so I wasn't all that strong either.
But women could lift cars off babies.
I could fight off this man to save myself from rape.
Decision made, my feet lifted as my brain scanned through memories of the self-defense videos I had watched online when I was younger, both legs widening like a butterfly's wings before ramming outward, slamming into the man's hips, catching him off-guard enough to stumble back a foot.
Only a foot.
But a foot was all I needed.
I scrambled down off the bed, hand closing around the neck of the bottle, turning it, then rising up, swinging back, and slamming it forward, cracking it more off the side of the man's neck and jaw than head seeing as I wasn't tall enough to get higher.
"Fuck," he hissed regardless, head jerking back as I shoved past him, feeling his hand grab my wrist. Hard. Hard enough to bruise, making me whirl around, hand shooting out, nails bared, to scratch across the exposed skin of his neck.
"Jesus Christ, hellcat," he snapped as I yanked my wrist free, turning, mind set on running, getting out the front door, onto the street, finding some help. This town went to sleep late in the summer. Someone would be lingering around somewhere.
It would be okay.
I would be okay.
It was only a couple yards to the front door.
Heart hammering, brain swimming, muscles feeling foreign and shaky, I barreled through the bedroom doorway and into the hall.
Smelling freedom, I made a beeline for the front door.
Only I forgot one thing.
The goddamn braided rug that was set in front of the door. The same braided rug that had been there my entire life. The same braided rug that had always been a safety hazard, since no one ever bothered to put a pad beneath it to prevent movement.
I realized my mistake the second my front foot landed on the oval rug, and my forward-moving momentum made it slip backward even as my body kept moving forward, sending me flying.
I knew the second it happened that I wasn't going to go down, hit the floor, maybe be quick enough to brace myself on my forearms—not my hands, never the hands. No. There wasn't enough floor space left.
Nope.
I was flying forward.
And I was going to collide with the doorjamb.
Then, just a second later, that was exactly what happened.
There was the surge of fear, the crack of pain, and then... nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Chapter Three
Lorenzo
I hadn't taken a vacation since I was some asshole teenager on spring break, taking one of my father's cars, packing it full of friends, and driving it down to Mexico.
Without the protection of my father, I was just some schmuck in a car worth a hundred grand with a suitcase full of cash.
Within a week, the car was stripped for parts, and my cash had been taken after I got my ass fucking handed to me, leaving me bleeding on some side street.
You'd think as I crawled out of that alley drinking my own damn blood that I would have called my old man, had him come down there, throw his power and money around, get revenge for me.
But it had been the most freeing night of my life, and a hell of a learning experience.
The family was a nice security blanket. I had layers of protection. But when push came to shove, and it was just two men in an alley, I'd been a skinny, useless kid with no way to win a fight.
I got back to the city, took my ass-kicking from