The Alberta river was a living thing, a beast foaming with the fury of a winter that had no mercy.
It surged forward, heavy with ice floes that crashed against one another with a sound like breaking bones, echoing through the hollow silence of the woods. As I reached the frozen edge, the black, bottomless gaze of the water stared back at me. In its depths, I saw the only reflection that made sense in this gods-forsaken place: my own end.
If I threw myself into that frozen embrace, Varg's suffocating shadow would finally dissolve. The silver ache of shame leaking down my thighs—the physical proof of his cold conquest—would be numbed by the frost.
The phantom weight of his massive hands, which had pinned me down as if I were a mere insect to be studied, would lift. To him, I was a biological anomaly, a curiosity. To the water, I would just be another soul to carry to the sea.
