Chapter Fourteen
Lenora
Idon’t share Marcus’s bed.
He offers and I refuse.
He tries to reason, offers to stay in mine.
I leave him in the corridor with his words echoing after me. But his comfort is not my concern. I have a mission, a task he was supposed to help me with and he failed.
His own sons.
And he can’t be bothered to do his job.
Hatred and disgust fill the empty void my boys left behind. A bitter, visceral loathing I can taste.
I don’t need him.
I don’t need that demon.
I shove open my bedroom door and stalk inside for the first time in days. My toes kick aside the pillow where it fell when I flung it. It hits the shattered lamp.
Marcus said the room had been cleaned, but it’s exactly how I left it.
Doesn’t matter.
It’s not important.
I head into my closet and rifle for clothes. I could wear a dress, but I need ease of movement. I settle on Ames’s sweats. The drawstrings would need to be pulled tight and the cuffs rolled. And one of Eliah’s paint splattered hoodies.
I think it’s fitting that a bit of them comes with me when I avenge their deaths.
Both are folded and placed on the tossed bed. I climb up next to them in Ames’s T-shirt. Marcus should sleep soon. So will Etienne Duval. Everyone will be. The city will be quiet. Easy to navigate.
I could maybe kill all of them tonight. It would be best. Leaving any behind might alert the others and they could flee, go into hiding.
I don’t have the connections to find them if they do.
It won’t be as satisfying. I wanted to take my time, hear them scream and bleed, but it will have to be enough.
There is an absolute darkness pressing against my eyes when I open them. The kind found in the deepest parts of the ocean, vast and endless. The kind that makes a person wonder if they’re dead.
But I know I’m not, nor am I alone.
In the muggy space already choked with the ashes of age and decay. It breathes with me. So careful not to take too much, but the shortage it leaves behind suffocates. Every shaky pull shatters through my lungs with splinters of ice.
“Stop it,” I hiss, warning the endless expanse of black filling every corner of my bedroom.
It doesn’t listen.
It has no reason to when I’m merely a human and my strength is no match to his.
He wants me aware of that fact. Wants me alert for when it slips into my room, creeps closer to my bed. It’s angry with me. Offended by my accusation.
But like Marcus, I have no fucks to give about his feelings.
“Leave me alone,” I tell it with sharp firmness.
The mirror ripples in the corner. A faint shimmer of moonlight on a still lake in the distance. The sharp, gray gleam of a dagger’s edge catching the light. But there is no light.
I shut my eyes. It’s hard to be certain when the darkness never changes in the airless, windowless square of space.
Don’t scream.
Screaming will only bring Marcus and questions I’m unwilling to answer.
Cold brushes the naked skin of my arms. A deliberate breeze that tugs at the worn threads of my T-shirt.
Teases my nipples.
I bite my lip. Fight to ignore the familiar rush of warmth filling my belly.
Not again.
The air thickens. It crawls up the sleeves of my top, drips down my shoulders. Circles my nipples. Unleashes a bucket of tingles down my spine.
“Stop it,” I rasp, dragging the thin sheets tighter around myself.
My thighs press together across the cool mattress like that might stop it from touching me where I am already aching for him.
But the room hums. A familiar vibration only I seem to be able to hear. A frequency meant only for me as it worms in through my skull and crawls through every nerve in my body. It fills me. It strokes the threads connected to my willpower and I feel myself softening.
“Let go,” he coaxes through the wires of my mind, a deliberate stroke that has my toes curling.
“No…”
Invisible hands twist into sheets and tug.
They snap from my fingers and slither down my chest. I gasp and scramble to recapture it, but it’s gone. It’s torn from the bed and sent somewhere into the dark.
I am exposed. Vulnerable on the sliver of foam, draped in darkness where I can see nothing and it can see everything. Even in the T-shirt, the only piece of clothing on me, I am bare.
“Why do you fight, little pet?”
His voice is satin and gravel. Age and dust. It is infinitely old, something primal and ancient beneath the earth itself. And it whispers to me like I am glass. Like I am a fine, priceless figurine in his hands.
“I don’t want this,” I snap. “You’re a liar.”
Cool breath brushes my ankles. It ghosts up my calves. Stops at my knees. There are no fingers, but a weight of air curling into bone.
“I’m a demon.”
My knees are forced apart. They’re dragged wide to expose the damp heat already sweltering in preparation for his arrival. A lewd show of my naked mound.
There is no substance, no pressure of a body climbing over me, but I know he has. I know he’s there before my top is bunched and pulled, torn from my body.
“But I have never lied to you.”
Every breath a jagged pant — I tell myself of fear, but it’s not. God, help me, but it’s not fear that has my breasts plumping, silently begging.
“You said you would help me,” I throw back, staring hard into the place I think his face might be.
His growl guts me. It rolls through me with the liquid heat of warm honey. It fills and possesses me with a … joy, I can’t shake. It’s the gruff rumble of a predator and I am his prey.
“And I will.”
Icy cold wisps kiss my nipple. Cut my skin. They slice thin lines I’ll find in the morning as a reminder of who I belong to.
“When?” I force out even as my body bows to him. As my spine bends to give him the other breast as offering.
A slick pressure slides between my legs. A whisper. A taunt. Never touching, but so close it burns.
“Open for me first. Let me feed.”
Pulsing tendrils slither over my hips, shackle my wrists. They are bound to the mattress just over my head. Something thick brushes my core. Nudges my opening.
I thrash. Barely. There’s no effort when my channel is throbbing with greedy pangs.
“Please…” I whisper, unsure if I want him to stop or finish.
Maybe both.
Maybe neither.
In the corner, the mirror swells. The surface pulses like it’s absorbing my pleas.
“You are mine, Lenora,” he says as if it has always been true, as if it’s been written on my soul. “Your body. Your soul. I will have you first.”
I open my mouth to tell him that he has already been paid, but that razor blade of ice has left my breasts to find my center. It dances ever so lightly over my clit. The momentary pain is swallowed by the fear of being cut as I lie frozen, heart thumping. Too afraid to even speak.
He nicks.
Cuts my swollen bud.
I barely catch my wail as the warning is followed by the sweet sweep of a warm wisp. Maybe his tongue. It runs over and around the injury. It fills me as I gasp. As my hips drive down to meet him.
Long tendrils expand and curl around my thighs.
They pull me open, spread me wider. They grip me as their owner laps at my heat with a hunger that sends my head back against the pillow.
I barely notice the razor drifting across my heaving belly, leaving love notes in my skin on their journey back to my breasts.
“My precious pet,” he breathes with an all-consuming madness that fuels mine. “Made for me.”
I want to tell him he’s wrong, but he’s circling my nipples. He’s flicking them to match the endless unspooling of his tongue diving deeper, deeper inside me and the second tiny mouth suctioned on my clit.
I try to imagine what he looks like outside of Marcus’s body, try to draw him based on the many hands and mouths and tentacles, and knives he seems to wield, but it always changes.
He’s still licking and sucking. His tongue is still deep in the place no one else has ever touched me. I am already so full when his wisps join the others. When they seep in like ink and spread. Reshaping. Deforming to fit. To stretch.
“Oh God!”
He pulses as if my cry of pleasure feeds him. “Yes, pet. I am your God now. Beg for me.”
He’s so big, bigger than he had been last time. Maybe it’s the tongue … the wisp coiling around his throbbing cock like an added sleeve, but I lose all threads of sanity. I am doing nothing to calm or quiet my voice as I scream the sob lodged in my throat.
“You’re mine,” he’s growling with every slow, deliberate thrust.
Another wave crashes over me, a blunt punch of euphoria that capsizes the world and everything in it. I’m babbling something incoherent as I arch off the bed and meet every thrust of torture.
The shadow fucks slow to shame me, to leave no doubt in my mind that it’s me impaling myself on him. That he barely has to hold me open as I dig my heels into the mattress for him. He wants there to be no mistake that I want this.
Want him.
“I’m not…” His tongue and cock curve into my upper wall. Scatter my thoughts. My stability. “Not yours. I’m not yours,” I growl.
“No?” he mocks with a chuckle that burns my cheek. “Then why are you so fucking wet?”
I want to scream at the injustice. At my body’s stupid weakness.
I want to cry at the helplessness.
I want to stay open and beg him to never stop.
“Such a little liar.”
My hands clench against the shadows pinning them. My back bows. My thighs twitch. He curls inside me with a pressure that undoes everything as he hits that spot … that thing that steals my very soul.
“Don’t…” I beg, one final attempt.
“Say you’re mine, Lenora,” he growls into my ear, thick and greedy.
“No,” I choke out. “I won’t.”
Tendrils curl around my throat, tightening with just enough warning to have me squeezing around him as my air is stolen.
“I will have your submission.” Another thrust. Deeper. Harder. My eyes roll back. “I will have you crawl to me, dripping and begging to get fucked.”
I am crying, sharp, ragged sobs that twine ecstasy and misery. I wail as he takes me.
Marks me with his razors.
Fills my opening so full I’m seeing stars.
I’m begging even as I meet every grind. I don’t stop him even as thin, sickly light spills into the room with the parting of my bedroom door.
The shadows whisper. They hiss. The air thickens with ice.
I squeeze my eyes shut at the sound of Marcus’s horrified gasp, unable to face him as I cum on the demon’s cock. As I expel and gush, as I convulse and scream for him not to stop while begging Marcus not to look. Not to watch my shame.
And he roars with triumph and pleasure. He huffs like a wild beast as he slams my bed against the wall.
“Mine!” he snarls out loud, though I don’t think he’s talking to me. “She. Is. Mine!”
Somewhere in the distance, Marcus bellows my name. The sound pierces the silence but barely registers. It’s silenced by the crack of the door shutting in his horrified face, sealing me in with the darkness that owns my soul.