59. Briella #2
“You smiled in your sleep, too.” My spine nearly bows when he touches his lips to my brow in a surprising and tender kiss.
“I knew he’d come. I was only there to watch you.
Nothing more. Nothing less. I felt nothing but an innate truth.
The truth that I could not allow something so…
” He breaks off, like even he can’t believe the words.
“…so fucking alive to be gutted by that kind of filth.”
I go still. I can feel the tension thickening in the room, pouring from the others like vapors, but they don’t matter right now.
Only Raphael. We are in our own universe. He doesn’t orbit me. We’re fused. I’m dancing in his Abyss.
“You were whole.” He presses a thumb to my chin, locking me in his gaze. “Untouched by rot. Wild, reckless, defiant—but whole. Like a match that hadn’t been struck yet. And I wasn’t going to let that depraved, sick fuck snap you in half just to watch you burn.”
He moves inside me like he’s claiming it all over again. Like my survival is his. I’m drunk on it. On him. On everything.
“You woke up during the hour I stood there.”
He pauses inside me, his hand sliding to cup my cheek, his eyes stroking mine. Some sense crawls along my spine like cold spiders. Something in the darkness. Something not safe. But safe for me.
“You saw me. Stared at me like the prey you were. You knew I was a fucking predator. And then you—”
“—crawled across the floor with my teddy bear and blanket.” I blink rapidly as the deja vu creeps into my thoughts, becoming a…“I thought it was a dream.”
He shakes his head and kisses my eyes. “You curled up at my feet. You knew I was dangerous. A monster, even. But…that night, I was your monster.”
This time, I kiss him. I take my monster back. Now, I’m curling up in his abyss, making my bed in it, and feeling its weight on me every night. He has his eternal hooks in me. Blood and bones and scars.
But everything began that night.
“You weren’t a dove or a lamb or any of that soft, breakable shit,” he tells me, quickening his thrusts, driving his erection in more. “You were lightning in a bottle. And I would’ve razed the whole damn building before I let someone uncork you for their own twisted fun.
“So, when he came into your room, I dragged him out, offered myself instead. That’s what he wanted.
Not just someone to break—but someone who wouldn’t fight.
He liked the quiet ones. But he hated them, too.
They faded too fast. He wanted it raw. Real.
Wanted to know I felt it. Never saw the monster hiding in me.
I gave him everything he asked for. And you? —were gone by morning.”
The gravity of his words hangs in the balance between us. Raphael’s gaze never leaves mine. There is no question about it. No uncertainty. Whatever lives inside him has already found its mirror in me.
It isn’t emptiness within him. It’s a black hole. A force of inevitability. A monster like he said.
My monster.
I didn’t need a hero. I didn’t need a savior. I needed the villain.
Raphael didn’t just burn the world for me. He fed his soul to hell itself.
He laid himself down on a cross made of another man’s sin and let it carve him open. A sin I understand intimately—because of him. Because, in that mine, he took from me what no one else ever had the right to touch. A violation, yes, but not a desecration. Not like his past demon. Not like mine.
Raphael didn’t leave me on that cross. He didn’t seal me in a tomb. He waited for me. He watched. Just like that night. He prepared for my ascension, my resurrection: one I claimed when I rose out of that bone pit.
Yes, it’s twisted and fucked up. There is no denying the abuse. But there is no shame in reclaiming it, re-framing it.
I can stay a victim trapped in the black hole of that desolate mine. Or I can take it back. It’s not surrender anymore. It’s seizing, claiming, crowning. It’s embracing what rightfully belongs to me.
And every last one of these damned men—gods and monsters—belongs to me.
They didn’t destroy me. Together, we built a kingdom around my ruins. Around my healing. Around me.
This is our home. This is where I stopped running.
This is where they did not fix my broken pieces. They crowned them.
They are not my captors anymore.
I am not their victim. I am their Queen.
Raphael bows his head just slightly, like he’s always known this truth. Like the monster in him has been waiting for mine to wake up.
Not all monsters deserve redemption.
Not all monsters can be saved.
But some?
They can be chosen.
“I’m here now,” I finally say, softly, while I gaze at my soul-slayer and resurrector. I won’t ask him about his past before the group home. Or about how he saved their lives from that group home. Or…the cap. Not yet. He’s already given me what I need tonight. Later, he can give me what I want.
“I’m not just someone to break,” I tell him.
“But I’m not fighting anymore. I’m just me.
Raw. Real. I’ll feel it. Everything. If I’m your Queen, then I can take him.
I’m strong enough for your scar. I’m strong enough for your soul.
” I straighten and speak my truth so they may all hear, “I choose you. I choose all of you.”
I lift my hands and take his face between them. A muscle bounces in his jaw. I level him with my gaze—my soul standing on the battlefield where we went bare-bones, twin storms, and came out still standing amid scorched earth and dead stars.
Weighing every word, holding my crown, and forging my chain, I touch my lips to his ear and whisper, “So, let the monster out, Raphael. I’ll give him everything. And I swear I’ll still be here in the morning. Your Queen.”
Raphael doesn’t wait.
He lets himself off the chain. He fucks me in every single hole while the others watch. He takes me outside and fucks me in the snow, his teeth scraping over the raw, angry arrow-scar bearing his name. He covers me in his semen, his piss, his blood.
The monster fucks me down to my soul.
And then?
He gives me to the healer to treat me,
The warrior to shield me,
The butcher to feed me,
And the fixer to lighten my load with laughter.
I wake up in the morning wrapped in all their warmth, their weight, and their chains—still holding me, keeping me in a five-linked vow that I will never escape.