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They say when two opposite polarities collide, you get steam…

It wasn’t entirely right, when he took the grasshopper and pressed it against her lips. There was the threat of bile rising, unsure whether it was the dead bug or her twin that her stomach was having difficulty tolerating. She accepted regardless, eyes defiant as she chewed slowly and deliberately.

She’d sensed him behind her even as her eyes skittered over the newspapers, her head snapping around a fraction too late to avoid the cloth wrapping around her throat and the force of the body crushing her against the wall.


*


“You’re one sick son of a bitch,” she hissed.

She flinched - barely noticeably, as his hand trailed along her jaw, down the soft curve of her throat and along her collar bone - blanching inside. The sudden sound of the television screen springing to life caused her heart to skip a beat, and the makeshift noose at her neck tightened as his fingertips caressed her side, her thigh, her…

He slid his leg between hers and pressed harder against her back.

“Jarod must really want you out of the way,” he murmured over the pretender’s prerecorded prattle. “After all, survival is extremely important to him, and while you’re always one step behind...”

It was at this moment she decided there was no way in hell he was having his nausea-inspiring way with her, and braced herself as she aimed a well timed stiletto spike where she hoped it would hurt.


*


The battle goes like this:

Her scrambling away and him clawing after her in flaring irritation; his fist closing around her hair and yanking her mouth to his, harsh and bruising against her lips. Wrists gripped above her head as she kisses him back long enough to surprise, then her hand finding the gun and shoving the barrel painfully into his chest.

She can shoot him - crawl to a far corner, look away, calm her breathing, and tell herself she survived. Once bitten, twice shy. Instead…

“Tick… tock…” she whispers in his ear; bringing the butt of the weapon down sharply against the side of his head, knocking him unconscious.

When Jarod’s face reappears on the screen, she shatters it with a single bullet.









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