Legend (A Gothic Shade of Romance #2)

Prologue

Brom

One year ago

The creature stalks toward me.

Darkness coming out from darkness.

He’s inside my head, inside my nightmare.

He’s stepping out of my mind and into the hall.

The hall outside the room.

Malevolence pours under the doorway, flowing toward me like oil.

The creature forms here.

Tall, broad-shouldered, cloaked in night.

Missing a head.

He’s holding something in his hand behind his back.

Something that drips onto the floor.

I see a hint of long blond hair hanging.

The color of cornsilk.

I know what it is.

I open my mouth to scream.

The headless man brings the object forward.

It’s Kat’s severed head, her blue eyes frozen in terror.

“Let me inside,” the man says in a deeply inhuman voice that sinks into the marrow of my bones. “Let me inside and I’ll put her head back on.”

I sit straight up and scream. It echoes in the room and for a moment I don’t remember where I am.

Then someone sits up next to me. A man.

He puts his arm around me, his skin cool against my burning body, and gives me a squeeze.

“It’s a nightmare, Abe,” he says in his low, rich voice. “You’re all right.”

I try to breathe, my lungs aching, and he runs his palm up and down my arm, soothing me.

“It’s all right,” he says again, resting his chin on my shoulder. “There’s nothing to fear.”

But there’s so much to fear.

All I feel is fear.

I can’t stop running from it and it can’t stop coming for me.

I turn my head to glance at him from the corner of my eye.

Crane. His name is Ichabod Crane.

The mystery man at the opium den.

He had been watching me and I had been watching him.

Wondering what he wanted with me. His mannerisms were so refined despite the smoke going into his lungs. He seemed worldly.

And it seemed he wanted me.

I hated that I wanted him.

Then tonight he got up and approached me and offered me a bath and a place to stay. Anywhere was better than the slums I had been sleeping in, even though the idea of being with him both terrified and thrilled me.

So I came with him here.

I took a much-needed bath.

And then I sucked him off and reveled in his praise.

Feeling like I was good. Worthy.

I was wanted.

I was safe.

It had been such a long time since I felt any of those things.

I’ve been running for so long.

“What haunts you, Abe?” he asks, brushing the hair off my head. I close my eyes to his touch but then stop myself, pulling away and putting distance between us.

“Everything,” I tell him though I know this man won’t leave it at that.

“That much I know,” he muses.

I lean forward and he puts his hand on my back, fingers gently brushing my spine. I hate how good it feels, hate how badly I want this man to use me again like he did earlier. That feeling of being wanted and desired so much, that urge I have inside to please.

I want to please him and keep pleasing him.

“This isn’t the first time for you,” he says. “Or is it?”

I shake my head no. “I don’t do this often,” I say, my voice raw.

There was only Pastor Ross. That man had started off as a father figure to me, someone who I turned to because my own father acted like I didn’t exist. I trusted Pastor Ross. And I wanted him too. We only succumbed to our desires twice, knowing how dangerous and forbidden it was.

The first time we were together was the first time I had a man’s cock in my mouth.

The second time he took my virginity.

And shortly after that, I took Kat’s.

My heart squeezes at the thought of her.

I left Sleepy Hollow for her. I was so afraid that the magistrate would make an example of me to the entire town, not just telling my parents that I was a product of the devil but that Kat would find out too.

I truly didn’t care what my parents thought of me; they already treated me like I was something they had to tolerate, as if I was thrown in their laps like a stray kitten they felt obliged to take care of.

But Kat…Kat was my everything. She still is. I didn’t know if she’d accept me if she learned I’d been with another man. It didn’t matter that Pastor Ross was twenty years older than me and I was only eighteen. There was no sparing me for being younger. I would be shamed.

Leaving her was the hardest thing I had ever done.

I wanted to tell her the truth. I wanted to ask her to come with me.

I should have. Sometimes I think about her alone in that house with her mother and it fills me with fear.

The minute I know that the magistrate is dead, I’ll head back to Sleepy Hollow and I’ll rescue her, take her with me to some place far across the country where her mother can’t get her.

But for now, I’m here. I’m here and I’m hiding.

Because there’s something out there that wants to bring me back too.

Something dark and dangerous and evil. It wants to possess me, drag me back to Sleepy Hollow and hold me there so that I can never leave. It’s hunting me down in my dreams, I see the shadows on the street, I see the eyes in every painting I pass following me, tracking my every move.

But how do I explain that to this man?

“You carry too much guilt with you,” Crane says, running his fingers up and over my shoulder blades. Soft as a breeze but carried with precision.

I swallow thickly, feeling anger flare inside me. “What do you know about guilt?” I grumble.

“More than one man should, perhaps,” he says gently. “I grew up with six sisters in a tiny house in Kansas, my father was the town pastor.”

So maybe he does know.

“I grew up hearing that sodomy was a sin,” he muses, his fingers tracing shapes on my skin.

“The problem is, I’m so good at sinning.

” I can hear him smile. “It took time to dissect what it all meant. My attraction to men being on the same level as my attraction to women. It can be terrifying living in a world that is primed to not accept who you truly are. Isn’t it? ”

I find myself nodding. I want to tell him what happened with the pastor, but I want to leave Sleepy Hollow behind me for now. I want to be Abe, not Brom. I want to hide. Disappear. Become someone else entirely.

His hand trails up to my neck and wraps around it, holding me gently.

“I want you to sin with me,” he whispers, his voice raw with desire.

My cock immediately hardens.

Yes. Yes, I will sin with you, sir.

His grip on my neck tightens and he pulls me back down into the bed.