Chapter 2
Sera
I did not have My house is trying to kill itself on my Bingo card today.
When the porch light explodes, glass rains down onto the dead flowers on either side.
The ground trembles. Yes, Kansas has earthquakes, but this is localized, violent, and it’s centered on the house.
The old Victorian shudders. Windowpanes rattle like chattering teeth.
The old porch swing jerks sideways, its chains shrieking.
The front door slams open with a force that shakes the frame.
It bangs against the interior wall, hangs open for a second, revealing the dark maw of the hallway, then wham.
Open. Shut. Again and again, like a monstrous, gasping mouth.
Each impact vibrates through the soles of my boots and cracks my molars together. Bang. Bang. Bang.
“Daddy!” My voice sounds too thin, ripped away by the next ferocious slam. “Stop fucking around!”
No answer. Just the relentless, rhythmic violence of the door. Dust puffs from the doorframe with each impact. Inside the dark rectangle of the open doorway, shadows swirl thicker than usual, coalescing and straining.
Something is wrong. This isn’t my shadow daddy’s usual spectral sulking. This is manifested agony.
I take a step back towards the porch steps, instinct warring with a sickening pull. The door hangs open again. In that slice of hallway darkness, the shadows thicken and pulse. The vague silhouette of a hand forms. Daddy’s hand, reaching out. Reaching for me. It crosses the threshold.
Blue-white lightning spiders over his shadowy flesh.
He jerks, a silent scream contorting the half-formed planes of his face.
The reaching hand spasms. Dark fluid, like congealed ink, wells from his fingertips, sizzling where it hits the porch wood.
His whole shadowy form flickers violently, threatening to unravel.
I’m running toward him before my mind can catch up. “Daddy, what are you doing? Stop!”
His face takes shape then, peering from his shadow form, lit from within like glowing embers, but also charred black. He collapses forward, one knee hitting the threshold. More of that dark blood weeps from where his eyes should be, steaming on the hot wood.
His form trembles, barely holding cohesion. His head lifts. The bleeding shadow pits where his eyes are fix on me. Utter desolation, a plea, a warning ignites in their depths.
The house groans, a deep, structural sound of protest. The door bucks against his shadow arm, trying to slam shut on him.
“Idiot,” I breathe, rushing toward him.
He’s killing himself trying to reach me. Trying to stop me? Or just fuck me one more time before work? But no, this is more than that. This is pain made real, and me being late for work is unimportant noise against the sight of him bleeding shadows onto my porch and disintegrating at my doorstep.
Two quick strides back up the steps, over the shattered porch light glass, and I cross the threshold.
The door slams shut behind me with the finality of a tomb sealing. The two locks on it click in quick succession.
Darkness, thick and velvety, wraps around me and holds me tightly like armor.
Other than his face and the vague outline of huge shoulders, he’s mostly shadows again.
The bleeding has stopped, but the stains remain on the wooden floor, slick, dark puddles that seem to absorb the weak light filtering through the dusty window on the door.
“Hey…” I reach up to graze his cheek, his shadowy face shockingly cool and terrifyingly handsome.
Even in his fiery, charred form, he has unfairly plump lips and ridiculous cheekbones that cut my willpower by half.
“What was that? Are you all right?” I ask.
He lifts his head. His eyes aren’t pits of shadow now. They burn with actual embers, glowing with banked, infernal heat in the gloom. They lock onto me, filled with fury, possession, and rage. The air crackles with the sheer, suffocating weight of his presence.
“Mine,” he rasps.
The single word drips with fear and with a pain that twists my soul.
His shadows lash out. Cold, impossible bands snap around my wrists, wrenching my arms high over my head. My back hits the slammed door hard enough to rattle the hinges and send a shower of dust down from the frame. The impact punches the air from my lungs.
He heaves a low growl that starts deep in his chest and vibrates through mine. Then his mouth crashes down on mine, as real and hard and corporeal as the house around me.
His teeth scrape my bottom lip. The sharp, bright tang of my own blood blooms on my tongue. He licks it away, a rough, possessive sweep that feels less like affection and more like a predator tasting its next kill.
I moan as my knees nearly give out. His shadows hold me up by my wrists, and one twines in my hair, wrenching my head back and exposing my throat.
More shadows slide under my shirt, shove under my bra, and give my nipples a cold, punishing twist, reminding me who owns the flesh beneath my cheap cotton clothes.
I cry out, the sound swallowed by his devouring mouth.
He tears at my clothes, leaving only my bra and panties, and cool air instantly hits my skin.
His gaze rakes down, an appraisal etched in literal fire.
A guttural snarl rips from him, vibrating against my chest. Possessive fury sharpens to a razor’s edge.
“Mine.“ The word is a graveled rasp against my throat.
His teeth find the frantic pulse there, and the promise of violence thrums at the contact.
Something primal and dark in me answers, that terrifying, seductive pull towards the oblivion only his darkness offers.
But I don’t have fucking time for this.
“Let me go. I’ll be late for work.” I writhe against him to break free, but it’s like pushing a mountain.
He doesn’t budge. The embers in his eyes flare brighter, and my challenge only seems to ignite him further. He dips cold shadow tentacles beneath the waistband of my panties.
“No,” I hiss, the words ragged. “I don’t have time. I have to go—“
Shadow tendrils yank up my bra and coil around my breasts, pinching my nipples to aching points. I gasp into his claiming mouth.
Two thick, icy tendrils spear into my cunt, a brutal stretch that steals sound, thought, and balance. I arch off the door, a strangled gasp tearing free. They twist inside me, coiling, finding that spot—oh fuck, right there—and grinding.
I buck against him, a frantic, useless motion. “Stop! I’m late for—“
His shadows thicken, stretching me wider. A third tendril presses insistently against my asshole. His eyes, so much like burning coals, drink in every spasm, every tremor.
I bite down on a moan, turning it into a snarl. “Fucking let me go, Daddy.”
The third tendril pushes in, filling my ass with icy, impossible thickness.
Now his shadows claim both holes, and the dual invasion overwhelms me.
Shadows writhe inside me, front and back, cold and knowing, finding every hidden trigger.
Pleasure-pain spikes, sharp and blinding. My vision whites out, and my hips jerk.
“Sera, mine.” His voice is a dark caress inside and outside my head.
His shadows curl deeper, crooking just right.
The fire coils tighter and hotter. His shadows work me mercilessly, knowing exactly where to press, how to twist. This is punishment for leaving him. For stepping towards the autumn sunlight that hurts him and makes him bleed. For James’s and Eddie’s marks he must see all over my body.
He’s overwriting all of it, scouring me clean of anyone else’s touch. Marking me from the inside.
My hips jerk against him. A low, feral sound escapes me.
Sparks ignite along my nerves. The coiling heat snaps. My body locks, then shatters. An orgasm rips through me, violent and convulsive, wringing a raw cry from my throat.
He withdraws his shadows slowly, and I wonder if he’s going to let me go now.
He brings the shadows to his beautiful mouth, and his long, pointed tongue flicks out, tasting my wetness.
His eyes never leave mine, the intensity soul-scorching, and he makes a satisfied noise, deep and primal, in the back of his throat.
He presses against me, and I swear I feel his cock against my belly.
I look down, and sure enough, that’s a cock.
God damn. It juts thick and heavy, its base shadow-dark, the shaft a column of burnt, veined flesh streaked with fiery cracks, the head flushed an almost painful red.
Unlike the rest of him, heat radiates from it, like a brand waiting to be used on me.
He lifts me effortlessly, my back scraping against the rough wood of the door. My legs lock around his waist, an instinctive anchor, because sure, I guess I have time for a fuck after all.
I won’t fight him, not when he seems so eager to please.
He guides that burning crown to my slick, stretched entrance. The heat is shocking against my sensitive flesh, still cold from his shadows. He pushes in, fills me, possesses me, in one deep, relentless thrust. He stretches my tender cunt beyond thought.
I scream, the sound swallowed by his mouth. He’s everywhere, inside me, around me, the cold shadows binding my wrists, his burning thickness splitting me open. I’m pinned against the wall, utterly owned.
He holds himself there, buried to the hilt, his forehead pressed to mine. His breath, smelling of earth and iron, ghosts over my lips. The embers blaze in his eyes, hungry and ready to devour.
He pulls back, almost out, then drives into me again, dragging that fiery friction along my over-sensitized walls. Shoving in with his burnt cock, the crisped parts feeling like scales that stimulate my clit again and again. Harder and deeper and oh my fucking god.
The rhythm he sets really is a punishment.
Each thrust slams me against the unyielding door, reforging me, hammering his claim into flesh and bone and soul.
His shadows grip my hips and dig in hard enough to leave new bruises over James’s and Eddie’s fading ones.
His mouth finds my throat again, teeth scraping, sucking fresh marks into my skin and branding me anew.
Another shadow tendril snakes around, groping my ass cheek, squeezing hard and greedily.
Then it slides down, finding my clit, and icy pressure circles the swollen bud, teasing and tormenting, while his burnt, scaled cock scratches against my clit as well.
The fire and ice of him is a shock of conflicting sensations.
It drives me wild. I grind my hips against him, meeting every thrust, seeking the friction, the fullness. The shadow on my clit presses harder, faster, syncing with his brutal pace. More shadows peel my lower lips apart so that he can watch his cock fill every inch of me with his fire-filled eyes.
“Mine,” he growls against my skin, his hips pistoning. “Mine!”
The shadows near my clit vanish and clamp around my ass cheeks, spreading me wider, forcing me to take him impossibly deep as he pounds into my cunt. He buries himself to the root.
My shadow daddy bites down on the curve of my shoulder. Pain sparks, sharp and bright, mingling with the pleasure spiraling to a breaking point.
“Yours!” I scream, desperate for release. “Yours, damn you!”
A ragged sound tears from him, and his pace becomes frantic, like he’s trying to fuck me with a force that threatens to break the door or break me.
White light explodes behind my eyes. The coil snaps. A second orgasm detonates, and I convulse around him, milking his fiery length. A ragged scream tears loose.
I throw my head back, lost in the dark storm he rages inside me. The world narrows to the slam of our bodies, the wet, rhythmic sound of him annihilating me.
His body locks as he buries himself to the root. A guttural roar tears from him as he pulses inside me, filling me even more with his darkness.
He pulls out, and the fire in his eyes is banked to embers again. His shadows brush a strand of sweat-damp hair from my forehead and trace the fresh bite mark on my shoulder.
“Sera,” he murmurs.
Slowly, sensation returns. A deep, profound ache pulses between my legs, my skin raw and marked. My clothes lay in tatters on the floor.
Outside, muffled by the thick door and the haze of sex, a car horn blares. The real world crashes back, cold and jarring.
My shadow daddy flinches at the sound, his eyes hardening instantly back into shards of obsidian. The fragile moment shatters. He sets me down carefully, and my legs tremble, barely holding me.
He steps back and blends with the house’s shadows. Even his face is obscured. Distance slams down between us, thick with unspoken questions about what got into him and the cloying scent of blood and sex.
“Mind telling me what that was all about?” I demand.
The fury that drove him has bled out, leaving a strange, heavy stillness.
At his silence, I bend to retrieve my ruined clothes. The bite throbs. Inside, I feel scraped hollow and claimed, irrevocably marked. His darkness lingers under my skin, a heavy, possessive stain.
I am his. I’m also pissed at him. Two things can be true at once.
The horn blares again, closer and louder this time. A screech of tires and brakes, a door slams, and seconds later, a single, heavy knock echoes through the silent house.
James. And I can practically feel his urgency coming from the other side.