Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
AIDEN
I can taste him on my tongue.
It’s like toxic mold mixed with vanilla icing, confusing my senses, and making my already fractured mind crack just a bit more.
Levi— Leviathan —is still lying on my lap, gently sucking my soft cock, and I have no idea what to do now. I’m a prisoner to this lunatic, more animal than man, and if I want even a chance of getting free, I need to play this very carefully.
I saw a transformation overcome him just now. I saw the way he turned into a beast with a heaving chest, curtains of dark hair hiding his face, and snarling lips. It was like watching a man turn into a wolf, seeing the way its bones snapped one at a time until its large maw drooled venom.
But it’s what I saw in his eyes that terrified me.
He was going to kill me.
The wound on my neck still stings and I’m afraid to know how close I came to death. Then something changed. My blood seemed to mesmerize him, calm the untamable beast. He hurt himself, plunged the knife into his own skin, and dripped his pain onto me. But it didn’t look like he was in pain, not at all. It looked like he was close to reaching a settling calm that echoed in the way his eyes softened.
And when he rubbed his blood against mine, mixing us together, I’ve never felt so dirty.
You liked it .
He fed me too. The insane cosmic joke is that those vanilla cupcakes were the best I’d ever had.
Because they tasted like him too.
“Aiden…”
I shut my eyes as a tremble wracks through me. I’m so confused. He sings my name like it’s poetry, running his hands along the fat in my stomach while he nuzzles my balls. I know he says I’m his, but I don’t know what that entails. He’ll keep me until he kills me? He’ll assault me while he waits?
“What are you thinking about?”
I suck in a sharp breath. I don’t know what I’m thinking. I should be thinking of ways to escape, but it seems so hopeless. I don’t know where I am—if I’m even still in Juniper Ridge—or how I could possibly…
He left his knife when he was out of the room. Does he think I’m too weak to not use it? Is it some sort of game where the second I fight back, it becomes a game for him? It’s a trap, isn’t it?
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I admit, flinching when he nips at my thigh, tears welling in my eyes.
He hums, lifting his face, and I fight the urge to push back the hair obscuring his eyes. Eyes that I know would tell me the truth, that are so vibrant with death and destruction, that would clarify things for me. “You confuse me.”
I gulp. “H-How?”
“I…” He sits up, cocking his head to the side as he slowly fingers my glasses. “I broke your glasses.”
That’s not really my top worry right now, although it does make the image of him even more distorted and sinister. I try to placate him because he seems at ease right now, and I know what happens when he’s close to losing it. “It’s okay.” I wet my lips and he follows the path with his tongue. “What’s… um. What’s confusing you?”
I yelp when he takes my hips and manhandles me until I’m lying flat on my back. He hovers over me, his nose trailing down my cheek to the cut on my neck. “I want to be the one that kills you. I’m obsessed with the way life would fade from your eyes.” He shudders, dick hardening against my hip as he thinks about it. “But I also want to keep you in a bubble. I want to know things about you.”
I think I can work with that. They say that you have to humanize yourself to your kidnappers because it’ll make it harder for them to hurt you. “I’m twenty-five. I’ve lived in Juniper Ridge my entire life. I teach preschool and?—”
He growls, seizing my chin and tipping my head down, his eyes cold and furious. “Don’t give me that ridiculous shit. I don’t give a fuck how old you are or how you spend your time. I want to know the things you hide from others. I want to know everything.”
“It’ll be our little secret.”
“I…” But I don’t know what to say. The truths I’ve hidden and ran from for so long refuse to come to the surface. I can feel it scratching at the back of my brain, but I hold them back. “Please.”
“Please,” he mimics, imitating my pathetic cadence. “I thought I’d only want to hear you beg for your life, but I want to know what else you’d beg for.”
MORE.
YES.
FUCK.
I try to shake away that voice. That roar. That dark part of me simmering below the surface. This isn’t the time. My life hangs in the balance and all the darkness wants is to distract me from what’s really going on.
“Are you scared of me?” he asks, placing his nose right behind my ear and taking a deep whiff. “I can smell it.”
“You said you were going to kill me,” I try to reason. “Why shouldn’t I be afraid?”
He grunts under his breath. Without warning, I’m flipped onto my stomach, and covered by the weight of him. I feel him fumbling with the ties of his sweatpants, pushing them around his thighs until his cock smacks against my ass.
“Levi, please. Not again?—”
“I…” He groans, something broken and choked. “I want you, Aiden. Always. You’re turning me… I don’t know…”
He trails off as his fingers rub against my hole. I freeze up, waiting for the thick digits to pierce me with pain, but they don’t. When I look over my shoulder, Leviathan’s head is hanging down. His chest is heaving as he tries to rein himself in, his free hand pulling at the collar on his neck.
“I want you to beg for me,” he finally says, slipping in the tip of his finger and making me hiss. “I need to hear it.”
I shake my head. “I-I can’t.”
Because I don’t want this. I don’t want to be fucked by some psychopath that’s chosen me, out of all people, to fixate on. I don’t want to be here, trapped and naked, so vulnerable for the taking. I don’t want any of it.
“Please.”
The plea is robotic, inhuman, a mimic of something he’s heard in the past. It’s not genuine with its inflection or ask.
When I don’t answer, he moves me again, slamming my back against the bed. He’s enraged, his nostrils flaring with each breath he takes, his silver eyes ready to tear through my heart.
I lick my lips, wondering what I should do. Maybe if I just give him what he wants, he’ll let me go. That’s what they say to do, right? Just appease them? Calm them? Make them think everything is okay and then…
“Okay,” I whisper, hating the taste of my defeat. “Please.”
He stops, cocking his head to the side. “Please, what?”
The words taste like bile on my tongue as I bite back more tears. “Please, fuck me.”
He lets out a full body shudder, rolling his shoulders back like he’s releasing the tension he carried. He hooks one of my legs around his waist, drawing me closer to him. “Do you want it to hurt?”
YES.
Sniffling I shake my head. “N-No.”
He thinks my words over, testing them in his head. After a second, he reaches for something on his nightstand. I don’t know if it’s healthy or clean to be using lotion as lube and fucking covered in dried blood, but I don’t think Leviathan cares. He drips some onto his fingers, bringing them back to my hole, and slicks me up. He’s thrumming with anticipation as he opens me, not lingering to make it pleasant, almost as if he’s just trying to get the job done. It doesn’t hurt. It?—
PLEASE.
“Tell me again,” he commands, slotting himself against my entrance, pushing in ever so slowly. “ Fuccck .”
I’m sure it feels incredible for him, fucking me for the first time, instead of rutting against me. Still, my body rebels against the intrusion, but my lips move without my consent. “Please, fuck me.”
He drops his forehead against mine, giving easy and lingering thrusts. He runs his hands up my body until they reach my throat, but he doesn’t press down. He fingers the cut, whining when a sliver of blood drips down.
He places both hands on either side of my face, staring deep into my eyes, his nose bumping against my glasses. The overwhelming intensity of him, the uncomfortable dread that accompanies him singes my bones. He’s looking at me with too much desire, too much frustration, too much humiliation.
I wonder what it’s like being in his head.
“Do you like it?” he asks in a shaky voice, dipping his finger into my mouth.
I don’t know what to say to that. My tense body relaxes under his tender touch. He’s manipulating every inch of me. I don’t start to cry because he hurts me but because I can feel my cock growing against his stomach.
He chuckles darkly, licking away my tears. “Little lamb, tell me you like it.”
GIVE ME MORE.
FUCK ME LIKE YOU MEAN IT.
MAKE IT HURT.
I start to panic. I try to push him off me, but he’s a stone wall. I flail, kicking out my legs, but he holds them steady in place. “Stop!”
“No,” he snaps, his thrusts growing more brutal the more I try to fight him. “Give in, Aiden.”
FUCKING ME SO GOOD.
WANT IT SO BAD.
“You’re so special, Aiden.”
“I don’t want it!” I yell, punching at his shoulders. My mind is a chaotic mess, growing needier and darker and hungrier, wanting to take and take and take and?—
“Why are you fighting this?” he growls, pounding into me so roughly he takes my breath away, my throbbing cock aching as he starts to swivel his hips. “Want me, Aiden.”
“I can’t!” I cry out, feeling my heart twist in displeasure as a burning tightness starts to crawl up my cock to my gut. “N-No?—”
He slams his lips against mine. I try to wrestle my mouth away, but he’s brutal in his quest to claim me. His mouth is clumsy over my own, sucking and nipping at my uncollaborative lips.
LET US OUT!
NOW!
The toxicity curls within me, the string so taut it vibrates with even the slightest of air. I can’t control myself as I open up to him, fucking his surprised tongue against my own, letting my body melt when he moans into my mouth.
I throw my hands around his neck, dragging him down so he’s suffocating me, taking my breath away. He roars in victory, the sloppy wet sounds of his cock heightening as he fucks me harder, deeper, needier. I’m squirming against him because he can’t get close enough. I give into the sickness within me and let him take. The pleasure zaps through my body the more words he says, taunting me with their deviousness.
“You do recognize me,” he grunts against my lips, a feral and manic glint in his eyes that speaks to his victory. “Beg me. Mean it.”
“Levi!” I shout, arching my back off the bed when he hits a magic spot inside me that makes me see stars. “Fuck me!”
The desperation in his thrusts increases. The ferality of it all making my head spin. So many intrusive thoughts pop into my brain. So many things I’ve tried to deny.
JUST LIKE THAT.
GIVE ME MORE.
He impales me on his cock, holding himself deep inside me, and his entire body shakes as he comes. He’s practically chomping at the air, losing himself in the pleasure, and the crazed air around him?—
TAKE MY SOUL.
A broken sob leaves me as I come alongside him, the sticky proof of my weakness coating my stomach. He takes me in his arms, keeping himself inside me, and starts to rock us side-to-side.
“I want to live inside you,” he confesses, kissing my sweaty shoulder. “Do you get it now, Aiden? Do you see what I see?”
Yes.
And as he pulls out of me with a whine, lying down beside me and wrapping himself around my broken body, I’m disgusted that I gave in.
Knowing that if I don’t find a way to get out of this, I’ll lose myself in hell.