Cardinal House (The Blackwell Brothers Book 4)

22. Wolf

“And she was fine?” I ask Haisley for the fifth time since Thorne and I walked in the door less than twenty minutes ago.

Luna is still outside, sitting between tombstones and crumbling rock headstones. She saw the car pull in, but she’s still out there. She likes the fresh air, the open space, she doesn’t much enjoy staying inside this dark and dingy old house. Not that I blame her, it could do with a good clean and the windows need some serious help, they’re awash with a layer of grime from the heavy snow and rain of winter. Still, I think she just prefers to feel the air on her skin.

Haisley has her back to me, reaching up to grab a stack of plates for the dinner we brought home from a cabinet above the microwave. I watch her clasp four of them in freckled fingers, a big glistening rock on her left ring finger, a thin, gold band securing it. She places the china down on the counter and then turns to me, resting back against the work surface, her eyes flicking hesitantly to Thorne as he leaves the kitchen before coming to mine.

“She was fine,” she licks her lips, dragging my attention to the scar in her upper lip, it snags her sharp cupid’s bow up a little higher on one side.

“But?” I cross my arms over my chest, leaning back against the opposite worktop, circular wooden dining table between us, six chairs tucked beneath it.

Haisley chews her bottom lip, slipping on a cropped black cardigan as Thorne re-enters the kitchen, passing the knitted item over to her with an outstretched arm. She flicks the end of her ponytail out from beneath the fabric and then looks back at me. Sighing, her shoulders drop and she rubs the side of her fist across her forehead.

“I think I might have upset her,” she hedges, swallowing and tangling her fingers together in front of her.

“Upset her how?”

I feel it then, that dark, whispering, poison filling my arteries.

Obsession.

“I’m not really sure, I think- just because- I don’t know… Maybe, she just wanted you, and I’m a stranger, just like everything else in her life right now. She probably just felt uncomfortable with me,” she shrugs, frowning down at her feet.

Thorne curls his hand beneath her chin, fingers spanning over her slim throat, his body towering over her short frame. The way they look at each other, hold each other’s gaze, it’s this filthy, possessive, ownership. He owns her. She owns him. And they both love it.

“I’m going to get Lu-” I start, but I don’t finish.

Luna pads softly into the kitchen, footsteps light across the stone tiles, blood smeared over her upper thigh, a limp white rabbit in her hand, the length of it swinging beside her shin, its back legs clasped in the delicate hold of her long fingers.

She swings the dead animal with casual movements, and drops it onto the laid table. Then she reaches up, long black hair in twin braids that hug the shape of her skull like thick ropes, and wipes the back of her hand across her mouth, blood staining her pale skin, she licks it from her lips without even blinking.

Haisley makes a strangled sort of sound in her throat, but Thorne and I make no sound at all, watching her pause at the edge of the table, place her fingertips to the pale wood, the tips bending back sharply as she leans her weight forward on them.

“I’m not hungry,” she announces quietly, her breaths slow and even, her attention on the rabbit.

Then, she turns, unhurried, and exits the wide archway opening of the kitchen. Her steps are slow as she turns down the hall, and I watch her leave for a moment, listening to the creaks and groans of the wood echoing back to us. And then I move.

She knows I’m there, following behind her, my footsteps not shy, my boots heavy as she floats through the shadows. She doesn’t turn towards our makeshift bedroom. And she still doesn’t look at me. I follow her silently through the darkened halls, stone walls, and ancient wood flooring until we reach the morgue.

Luna isn’t shy as she depresses the door handle, opening it wide and taking the three steps down. She doesn’t flick on the bright overhead light as she passes the switch, the room is empty now, the shattered coffin burnt to ashes in the furnace room, all that remains in here now is a trolley of clean instruments, and the fixed slab.

Not fully entering the room, I stand on the top step, watching her shadowed form sweep fingers across the side of the tiled slab in the centre of the room. She circles it, her fingers bumping over the little dips of grout between the tiles.

This is an original fixture, most tables like this are crafted of metal now. It’s more hygienic, easier to clean, but I haven’t the desire to change it. This one’s been here as long as the house. Buildings live and breathe too. It felt wrong to rip it out.

Luna pauses at the drain end of the table staring up at me, my hands in my pockets, the black slacks too tight across my hips with both curled fists in my pockets, but I don’t withdraw them. Her blue eyes set my skin on fire as she leisurely roves her gaze up from my black, laced boots to my crisp, white, collared shirt, the sleeves rolled up to my elbows, the top few buttons open revealing the tanned, olive skin of my chest.

“Did you put me here?” she asks me quietly, in the same way she always speaks, that soft, cracked, whisper.

“Put you here?” I ask, pushing thoughts of the dead rabbit out of my mind for now.

“On this table,” she blinks hard, her face blank, “when I was dead.”

The way she throws the word out, dead, I bristle at the casualness of it.

“Yes, I laid you there,” I tell her, wondering where the fuck this is going, but I’m trying to let her walk through things, talk out thoughts, memories, coax her into finishing half sentences.

I want her memory back.

I’m going to bring you heads, severed, bloody, heads, Little Moon.

She glances down at the pristine table, her taped fingers gliding back and forth across the square tiles.

“Lift me up,” she tells me, an instruction, one that has the hair on the back of my neck shifting to stand on end, but I don’t hesitate.

Cold and sterile, I move fully into the room, stopping in front of her, I grasp her hips in my hands, lifting her up to sit her on the long edge of the slab. She shivers as her bare thighs touch the cold tiles, and then I release her, take a step back.

She kicks her dangling feet gently, her fingers curling loosely over the edge. Her pale eyes look white in the darkness of the room, like she’s not in there anymore, drifting around the space in a non-corporeal form, as though her soul uses those blue glass orbs as doors to drift in and out of.

Her gaze comes to mine, a shiver rocking through my body like I’ve just been electrocuted. She looks at me like she’s looking through me. Then she swings her legs up, slides her body down the length of the slab and lies there. All delicate and quiet, calm. Staring up at the ceiling, unblinking, she has her hands over either edge of the table, fingers curled gently over the lip of the slab. Then with a soft flutter of her inky lashes, she closes her eyes and she looks like a fucking corpse.

Something wrong rushes through me, a fire in my veins like lava rushing down the side of a volcano, racing towards the little sleeping village below. She looks like a fucking corpse and my cock kicks to life like it’s the only place on my entire body that requires blood. Heart thrashing around inside my chest, I go to stalk forward, to tear her off of the fucking slab.

“Did you take off my clothes here or was I not wearing any?” she suddenly asks, her voice a ghostly whisper.

It stops me from completing my step towards her so suddenly that I have to grab onto the metal counter at my back to stop myself from stumbling forwards.

“What?” I reply sharply, my head snapping up so it’s straight on my shoulders.

“My clothes,” she says, staring up at the ceiling. “Did you take them off of me or was I already without them when you found me?”

I swallow down bile as I start to taste that acrid flavour on the back of my tongue, at the same time my cock weeps in the tight confines of my slacks.

“I cut them off of you.” The inside of my mouth is like sand as I say it.

“How?”

“What?” I repeat, staring at her blankly, seemingly so comfortable and relaxed on a table I regularly dismember bodies on.

“My clothes,” she says whimsically, like she’s smiling on the inside. “How did you cut them off of me?”

“Scissors.”

I can’t give her much more than blank answers, I’m equally terrified and morbidly excited to see where the fuck this is going. And I shouldn’t be, should I. Like, this is beyond fucked up, and yet…

“Get them,” Luna instructs, and my dick pounds against the inside of the zipper it’s imprisoned by.

Without hesitating, I turn towards the shiny metal table of tools, and retrieve the black handled scissors.

“Now what?” I find myself asking, a shiver tearing up my spine as I hover at her side, my shadow, even in the dark, darker than the rest of the room, looms over her like a cold blanket of death.

“Cut my clothes off, Wolf.”

Detachment.

That’s what she sounds like, that’s what it feels like, as I step closer until I’m flush with the edge of the table.

Still, I reach over her, the scissors sliding down the valley between her breasts, cutting easily through the elastic material of her spaghetti-strap, vest top until it’s falling open in two pieces.

My eyes move to hers, but her own are shut, heavy fans of black lashes like butterflies settled upon her cheekbones. She hums, not focussing on anything but the feel of the blades as I slide them down the dip of her belly, and start cutting through the shorts sitting low on her hips.

When I reach the hem of the last leg, I place the scissors back down on the table and then I gently roll her onto her side. She lets me move her like she really is a corpse, it’s both thrilling and disturbing as I tug the clothing out from beneath her. Getting another good look at the fading bruises, yellows and sickly pale greens.

Once she’s bare, she shivers, her skin pebbling with goosebumps, her dark nipples pricking into sharp points. My mouth waters with the desire to suck them into my mouth, to bite down so hard around each of them that my teeth marks scar into her perfect skin.

“Then what did you do?” she asks, her voice trembling.

“Luna-”

“Then what did you do, Wolf?” She cuts me off with a sharpness I’ve not heard in her before.

“I cried.”

My lungs deflate as I admit it, my hands trembling with a mixture of rage and hatred and so much fucking lust, it feels like it’s going to explode out of me at any second.

I think of my mother, the way she would mock me for being soft. When she lopped my ponytail off and then taunted me with the rubber band of chopped hair, I cried, and she would scold me for it, mock me.

“Oh,” Luna says breathily.

“I fucking cried, Luna, that’s what I did,” my voice is like the crack of a whip, dark, violent. “Then I cleaned you up, and I washed your battered body and I fucking cried every moment while doing it, before I laid you in that coffin. Then I sobbed all fucking over again.”

Luna’s eyes pop open, her lips parted as she watches me grasp my hair in my hands, losing the elastic tie and yanking at it so hard it makes my eyes sting.

This is like reliving my own fucking trauma, and I feel selfish for even thinking about my own feelings in this moment, but I just… today has been a long fucking day.

“Did you find me attractive?”

“What?” I feel like I’m coming unstuck, I’m a good man to her, but I feel unhinged, here, in this moment, I feel like a monster.

“When I was dead, did you look at me? Did you think I was pretty?” all of her words were cold, but these ones, these questions, fuck.

My breathing is ragged, loud, rasping heaves of breath, my heart battering against my sternum, the only thing containing the wild, erratic organ, because I can’t lie, “Yes.”

“Did you want to fuck me?”

An eruption of stars explode in my vision filling the dark room like a clear night sky. Ears muffled, the pounding of my blood shooting through my veins the only thing I can hear, can focus on as I think of her, only days ago, lying here, upon this slab, in this same position, naked and wet and bleeding.

Did you want to fuck me?

There are no morals with obsession, nothing can quell the desire, murder the lust, decapitate the hungry, pounding need to consume.

I am a monster, but I know I am, and I’m not ashamed, so I speak the only truth I know.

“Yes.”

“Wolf,” she says, a hitch in her voice.

At the same time I say, “Luna.”

“Kiss me,” she quietly demands, and I’m gone.

There’s no real way to explain what it feels like to kiss a girl I once thought dead. Laid upon this morgue slab and readied to cremate. But the way her lips feel moving against mine with wild, hungry desperation, fills the hole in my soul like a black, poison laced, cure.

Quite literally, every ounce of hesitation, of worry, about what the fuck is happening here, dissolves like smoke whipped away in the wind. I throw myself up onto the slab, knees and hands bracketing her in against the tiles. My mouth descends on hers with the wild ferocity of an animal. She groans into the kiss, the sound rocking through her entire body.

Tongues tangling, violent, quick, collisions, I growl into her mouth, tasting her sweetness, consuming it.

My teeth clash with hers as we fumble together to get my slacks down. Her hands lift first, those long taped fingers struggling to pop open my button, but she tears down the zipper as I aid her, and then she’s shoving her hand beneath the waistband of my boxers and dragging my cock out in a grip that’s so tight it actually hurts.

I nip her lips as she tugs on my cock, but not like she’s trying to make me feel good, more like she’s trying to fucking direct it. I’m not thinking straight as I let her. The soles of her feet come up, pushing down my slacks and pants, kicking at the fabric, and then she’s lifting her hips high, tearing at the final few buttons of my shirt and shoving it off of my shoulders.

My hands planted either side of her head, her teeth in my tongue, my cock finds the heat of her cunt, her folds all slippery and wet, and I’m inside of her in one quick slam of my hips. The tip of my cock punches against her cervix, and I can’t stop.

The noises that fall out of her throat only spur me on. The urge to devour her nice and slow for our first time comes in last place. The primal, frantic need to fuck her so hard we crack bones is the only thing in the forefront of my mind.

Her nails cut into my back, her fingers running down the planes of tight muscle like carving knives scoring my skin. Her scent fills my nose as I tear my mouth from hers and bury my face in her tits. Her usual smell of sweet peas and clean cotton is there, but she smells like sunshine and earth and there’s the unmistakable copper taste of blood as I lick over her breasts. Sucking on both nipples, one and then the other as I piston my hips into her like I’m trying to drill my presence inside of her.

“Wolf,” she pants, cutting her nails into my shoulders, the long lengths of her scratches burning with the sting of split skin in the cold air of the room.

My shirt flaps against my lower back as I fuck her, drawing my cock all the way out of her before slamming it back inside of her, and I know I can’t last. The silken walls of her tight cunt squeeze so fucking deadly around my cock, it’s hard for me to breathe.

Luna pants as I bury my face back in her tits, biting and sucking and marking her ice-white skin with savage little nips and ferocious, scarring bites.

Tearing myself out of her, knocking her legs from around my back, I dip my face down to her cunt, breathing her in like some sort of wild fucking animal. I breathe her in so hard, she’s all I can sense. The room falls away and all I can hear is the moans and cries drifting like lyrical notes from her dry throat.

There’s blood on my tongue as I lap up the length of her cunt, which almost gives me pause, but then my mouth is suctioning over her clit, teeth burying themselves into the flesh surrounding it. My tongue lashes around and around inside the circle of my teeth, sucking on her flavour like she’s cake batter on my fingers. Forbidden and so fucking rewarding.

Her knees draw up, her thighs clamping down on either side of my head, she lifts her hips high, my hand grabbing her hip and slamming her back down into the table as she starts to come.

“Don’t stop,” she breathes, delirious and blissful.

And I already know I’ll do anything this woman fucking demands of me. I rear up onto my knees as she finishes coming, slamming my cock back inside of her to feel her muscles clamp down around me, push me out and suck me inside. My thumb rubs torturously over her swollen clit as she thrashes beneath me.

“Don’t stop,” she breathes again, a chant, a dark summoning of my soul that licks at the base of my spine and triggers my own release.

I dip down, my mouth finding hers as she detonates around my cock, soaking me with a groan that rattles its way up her vocal cords like a demonic prayer.

“Wolf,” she shudders as I fill her and fill her with ropes of hot cum, my hips clacking against hers as I push in deep one final time.

“Luna,” I say softly, panting for breath, her nails still cutting into my shoulders.

She looks up at me in the dark, her face in shadow, but her glacier-blue eyes glisten like her soul’s sighing with pleasure, and I feel it in my chest, that glittering black tether.

“I’m a monster, Luna. Your monster. Use me, muzzle me, unleash me like a hound of hell and I’ll tear out the throats of all of your demons.”

Her eyes flicker between mine, her fingers digging deeper into my skin, “Wolf.”

“Luna,” I whisper, dipping down to take her mouth once more with mine. “I’ll do anything for you,” I confess, drawing back just enough that I can see her face, even in the dark.

“I know,” she breathes, and then she smiles.

This pure curl to her mouth that hits me in the heart like an arrow of love, and it feels like I have so many things to say now, but I don’t, I don’t say any of them. Instead, I bite my tongue and kiss her again, clawing her closer with a sigh of pure happiness.