Chapter 9 Dagger & Sigil
DAGGER & SIGIL
ELARA
He moves his hand from my bottom to my hip.
His cock finally notches against my entrance, thick and relentless.
In his other hand, the dagger presses against the sigil, the cold metal a stark contrast to the heat he’s churned inside me. I can feel the being inside me thrashing, screaming in protest, but I don’t care. I want it gone.
Want Lucien to take it, to take me, to fuck it out of existence.
His cock slams into me in one brutal thrust, stretching me, filling me so completely I see constellations.
The dagger bites into my flesh, into the sigil, the pain a white-hot brand, but it only makes me tighter, wetter, my body clenching around him as he fucks me like he owns me.
Like he’s reclaiming me.
“Lucien—yes—” I sob, my nails digging into the bedding, my body trembling on the edge of something huge, something final.
“Show yourself, coward,” he snarls.
The sigil pulses and shrieks a savage warning. But Lucien’s cock is relentless, his hips snapping against mine, his fangs drips something onto my skin—another first, another phenomenon it seems I’ve missed.
The stings like venom…it sinks into my skin, and then, gods, the pain morphs into aphrodisiac pleasure, making me wetter.
With lighting fast movements, he makes cuts with the dagger all over my back and thighs, then he braces it in the arch of my back so he can grip my hips with both hands.
Then with superhuman speed, my love fucks me blind and deaf and dumb. All while bleed for him.
And it’s the most sublime, pagan and savage deed that draws shrieks from me until my voice is hoarse.
Until I lose count of how many times I come on his cock, only that I’m wrecked inside and out, my throat raw as I scream for more. “Harder, Lucien! Please fuck me harder!”
His answer is a growl, low and feral, as he slams into me with enough force to make the bed groan beneath us.
The cords still binding me bite into my skin, holding me open, offering me up to him like a sacrifice.
And God, I’m willing, desperate, my pussy drenched around his cock, my body singing with every brutal thrust. The candles flicker wildly, their shadows stretching across the walls like grasping fingers, as if the very room is alive with the energy crackling between us.
Lucien’s breath is hot against my neck, his lips parted, fangs glinting in the dim light. I can feel him teetering on the edge, his control fraying, and it sends a thrill through me so sharp it borders on pain.
“Do it!” I can barely recognize my own manic voice.
His fangs sink into my throat.
I try to scream, but it comes out a broken moan as his fangs pierce my skin, his mouth sealing over the wound. The first pull of my blood into his throat sends a shock through me so fierce it blurs the edges of the world.
My back bows, nails raking down his arms as they band my waist, holding me tight against him. He doesn’t flinch, only drinks deep and hungry, his tongue swirling over the punctures to coax more from me as he groans with pleasure and triumph and satisfaction.
His cock throbs inside me, swelling with every pull of his mouth, the rhythm of his drinking syncing with the rhythm of our bodies. And then I feel it—the thing inside me stirring, furious and awake.
Heat erupts across my shoulder blades and down my back, searing through the sigil. The sound it makes deep inside me is terrifying—a sound that feels like metal dragged through bone, a vibration that steals my breath and whites out my vision.
Lucien groans against my neck, his fingers tightening on my hips, his thrusts turning wild, desperate, as if he can drive the darkness out of me with every movement.
“Fuck, Elara—” His voice is rough, strained, like he’s fighting something even as he buries himself to the hilt inside me. I feel it then, the moment his control snaps.
His cock twitches, thick and relentless, and then he’s coming, his release flooding me in hot, punishing spurts.
I sob, my body clenching around him, milking him for every drop as the sigil’s light pulses in time with his orgasm, as if feeding on it.
On us.
His blood-stained lips press harder to my throat, his fangs still buried deep, and I taste copper in the back of my own mouth, feel the way his seed mixes with my wetness, dripping down my thighs.
The room hums with power, the air so charged it makes my skin prickle, my breath come in shallow, desperate gasps but it dissolves into something else as he drinks deeper, his throat working.
Then the sigil flares.
A blinding light explodes behind my eyes, white-hot and suffocating. My back arches so violently I think my spine might snap, my muscles locking as the entity inside me thrashes, its presence suddenly a deranged living thing, a storm of needles beneath my skin.
Lucien rips his fangs free with a snarl, his lips slick with my blood, his cock still jerking inside me as he grips my head, turns me to stare down at me with wide, dark eyes.
“Elara—!” His voice is distant, muffled, as if I’m hearing it from the bottom of a well.
I can’t answer.
Lucien
The first taste of her continues to detonate my very bones as she goes limp in my arms.
Fire and sweetness, a thousand years condensed into one breath. Her magic floods my mouth, hot and electric.
But beneath it, I feel something else stirring, the thing inside her, writhing against me through her blood.
It’s not human. It’s not witchcraft. It’s hunger and evil, pure and ancient.
I pull back and savor it, lips smeared red. “I taste you now,” I growl and it’s not aimed at my Elara but at the entity. “I see you now.”
Her eyelids part slowly. A sinister acknowledgment burns black for a fleeing moment through her eyes and I know I’m staring at my adversary.
“It knows,” she confirms in a terrified hush.
And then she collapses against me, trembling, her head buried against my neck. I hold her there, breathing her in, feeling her pulse slow. The glow beneath her skin fades. For now, it sleeps.
“You don’t fucking give up, Elara. You are no longer alone in this,” I repeat the fierce reassurance I’m not sure she believes.
She looks up, eyes wide and I see she wants to believe but uncertainty still wavers in her eyes. “This delicious madness will doom us, Lucien. You shouldn’t have drank my blood.”
“It’s the single sweetest obsession in this universe. I will never learn how not to be deliriously damned by it.”
Her lips part to protest, but I silence her with another kiss, this one slower, softer. A promise and a warning both.
When I pull back, my voice is rough. “Whatever they put in you, I’ll find it. I’ll kill it.”
Her gaze darkens. “What if by killing it, you kill me?” she whispers.
The words hit like a blade. I search her face for a lie, find none. “Then we’ll find another way,” I say finally. “But if it attempts to reclaim you, if it ever tries to take you from me, I’ll drag it into hell myself.”
Her smile is small, sad, knowing. “You always were too proud for heaven.”
I press my forehead to hers, our breaths tangling. “Heaven wouldn’t have us.”
Outside, thunder rolls across the Arno, the first warning of another storm. Inside, her heartbeat slows against mine.
When she blacks out, I collect her against me, grappling her close.
For now, the monster inside her sleeps.
For now, she’s still mine.
Elara
The sigil’s light consumes me, burning through my veins, my nerves, my mind. Pleasure and pain twist together, indistinguishable, until I can’t tell where my body ends and the entity begins.
My vision blurs as the edges darken.
The last thing I see is Lucien’s face—his chest heaving, his fangs still glistening, his expression something between awe and terror—before the world tilts and goes black.
When I come to, it’s in stages.
First, the cold.
Wetness of tears beneath my cheek, the damp chill of the chamber seeping into my bones.
Then the scent of blood, sex, something metallic and dark, like ozone after a storm. My body aches, a deep, throbbing pulse between my legs, my throat tender where Lucien’s fangs have been.
I blink but my lashes are heavy, and find myself cradled in his arms, my limbs limp, my skin slick with sweat and other fluids. His chest rises and falls in sharp, uneven breaths, his heart hammering against my ear.
The candles have burned low, their flickering light casting long, wavering shadows across the walls. The dagger lies on the bedside and I watch its blade gleaming ominously, as if waiting.
Lucien’s fingers trace deceptively idle patterns along my arm, his touch feather-light.
I turn my head just enough to see his face.
His lips are still stained red, his eyes dark and unreadable. There’s tension in the set of his jaw, in the way his fingers flex against my skin, as if he’s fighting the urge to grip me again. To use me. For sex. For war. For us.
“You’re awake,” he murmurs, his voice rough.
Not a question. A statement. A warning directed at not just me.
I swallow, my throat dry. “Did it work?” I ask, even though I’m almost sure of the answer.
A beat of silence. Then, a low, humorless laugh.
“No.” His fingers curl, just slightly, as if he’s resisting the urge to squeeze.
To keep squeezing until wills and foes bend to him.
“I still feel it inside you. On your skin. In your blood. But it reacted…enough.” His eyes turn deadly black for a moment before they morph back to crimson gold, intent on my face.
“How do you feel? Does it…hurt you?” There’s a shiver of agony beneath the terse question.
I curb the need to rush to reassurance and examine myself warily, hold my breath in relief when I take account. Then shake my head. “No…at present it’s just the ghost of its heat, like an ember slowly dying. It’s never done that before.”
If I expected that response to please him, it does the opposite.“It bides its time, seeks a specific purpose. Does this cursed spelled thing have a name?”
A voice stirs behind my ribs, too ancient to belong to anything mortal, too cold to belong to me.
“They called it the Shackle-Soul. They…they forced it into my body as part of the binding ritual. A parasite forged from a witch’s dying breath and sealed to my soul with blood I never consented to give. ”
And now it wants power. Untold, insane power. The kind forged by the eternal love born of a vampire and witch.
“Then I’ll rip it out of you with my teeth if I have to—no coven, no god, no hell-born parasite takes what’s mine.”
My shiver is steeped in pure, raw belief that he means what he says.
His fingers spike into my hair, angles my face to his. “I never got around to asking. How long ago did you escape?”
“I’m not sure. Days…maybe a week?” I look around me now, the nerves I felt when I stepped into this new and strange world, creeping back. “Everything is so…different.”
He snorts. “Understatement of the millennia.”
“Yes.”
His eyes narrow. “Should I ask how you got by? How you travelled from Florence to Venice?”
A flush of self-consciousness builds but I refuse to be shamed by it. “I didn’t have the correct documentation or indeed the courage for the metal birds that fly through the sky so I took the thing that resembles the…mechanical serpent, the…train?”
For a moment, I can only stare.
The idea of her—my Elara—standing in the clatter and smoke of some mortal station, wrapped in borrowed clothes, braving a world she doesn’t understand, hits me square in the chest.
My eyes darken with a hunger that has nothing to do with blood.
“You’ve missed so much, my love,” I murmur.
“So many wonders. Steel birds that carry men above the clouds. Towers of glass that scrape the heavens. A thousand ingenious marvels that would have terrified then delighted you. When this is done, when they’re all ash, I’ll show you everything,” I vow.
Her smile falters into something radiant. “I want to see it all. With you.”
“You will,” I promise, voice roughening. “But first, we survive the night.”
I exhale shakily, my body still humming with the aftershocks of whatever happened. Of him. “And what does that mean? What did you taste in my blood?”
His eyes meet mine, and for the first time, I see something hesitant in them. Something almost like fear. He touches his lips to mine. A tiny bolstering that moves me.
“It means,” he says slowly, “that you were right.” His thumb brushes over my lower lip, smearing the traces of blood he left there. “It’s part of you.” His voice drops, a dark terrifying caress. “And it wants me as much as you do.”
A shiver runs through me, despite the heat still pooling in my belly. The implication hangs between us, heavy and suffocating. The sigil isn’t just a curse. It’s a hunger. And Lucien—my predator, my ruin—is its prey as much as I am.
His fingers slide down my throat, tracing the punctures his fangs had left. “It means, we don’t rest. Again,” he reiterates, his voice a velvet command. Not a request. A promise. “We try again.”
I should be terrified.
Should perhaps fight, suggest we rethink the strategy.
But the savage resolve in his eyes and the way his cock twitches against my thigh, already hardening again, the way his breath hitches as his gaze rakes, then lingers over my bruised nipples, my smooth belly, my swollen pussy, renders all argument obsolete.
All I can do is whimper, my hips shifting instinctively against him. “Yes.”
The dagger on the bedside glints, as if in approval. And the shadows on the walls seem to lean in closer, watching.
Waiting.