Triple Xmas

Chapter 1

Caleb

Those who play in shadows always underestimate the light.

They think darkness is their ally, their shield against consequence.

They're wrong.

Darkness is just a temporary veil.

Nothing stays hidden forever.

Justice finds a way.

It always does.

You can run from it, hide from it, pay lawyers to build walls around it, but eventually it seeps through the cracks like light under a door.

Relentless. Patient. Inevitable.

And when you skirt around it for too long, when you think you've outsmarted the system, outmaneuvered the consequences, the only way it ends is… messy.

Violently messy, if I'm involved.

The kind of messy that comes with unmarked graves, desperate phone calls in the dead of night, and bloody clothes that need burning.

Every choice leaves a mark.

Every mark has a weight.

Every weight must be balanced.

I am the scales.

Justice isn't blind. That's a lie they tell children.

Justice has cold, calculating, patient eyes that watch, and wait, and remember everything.

If you earn it, you pay.

Blood for blood hammers through my speakers as I navigate the icy switchback mountain road. Fuck you, and fuck society too. It's a roaring anthem that calms me after balancing the debts.

A ritual now.

A signal that the score has been evened.

An indicator of finality.

Justice done, I put the night's work behind me and concentrate on my next target—Scarletta Mae Desmond.

Erotica writer. DarkDesires Forum pen name, ScarletSins.

Lonely twenty-something with dirty blonde hair and hazel eyes that hide behind a computer screen.

No job worth mentioning—just freelance copywriting she's too distracted to finish.

No purpose beyond the stories she writes in the dark hours between midnight and dawn.

No ambition beyond the next chapter, the next comment, the next anonymous validation from strangers who don't know her name.

Unless you count her predictable cycle—words on the page, fingers between her legs—as ambition.

Which, knowing what I know about her, might be the most honest thing she does.

She thinks she's invisible. Thinks her online anonymity keeps her safe.

She's wrong.

I've been watching for months.

Learning her patterns. Her routines. The precise rhythm of her isolation.

And soon, very soon, she'll understand exactly what it means to be seen.

Completely.

Unavoidably.

Mine.

My driveway entrance sits under a ranch archway marked with a skull and crossbones instead of a cattle brand. I navigate the ice, pulling slowly as I travel through an encroaching tunnel of hundred-year-old blue spruce.

For a moment, there is no sky above—just tree limbs. It’s disorienting, something out of a dark fairy tale. But it never lasts, never long enough. Because a moment later the amber glow appears behind the floor-to-ceiling windows of my log estate.

The temperature on the dash reads twelve degrees.

As I pull the Jeep around the side of the house toward the barn, I catch a glimpse of the hot tub on the back patio, its surface rolling with steam that rises like ghosts in the frigid air.

The water glows an otherworldly red from the submerged lights, a beacon of heat in the frozen darkness.

The contrast is stark—civilized warmth against the brutal cold that wants to kill everything it touches.

I guide the vehicle into the barn's wide, dark mouth, the headlights sweeping across the interior before I drive fully inside. The structure swallows the Jeep whole, wood beams overhead and the lingering scent of hay and horse leather from the previous owners.

When I kill the engine, the hardcore Blood for Blood song becomes instant silence. The engine ticks as I look down at myself, studying the scarlet stains on my shirt, my pants, my arms, my hands.

I get out of the Jeep, walk over to the wood-burning furnace, and open the door. The embers glow bright orange under gray ash. The furnace in the horse barn is a nice touch. Part of the reason I bought this place six months ago.

After stoking the fire and loading it with logs, the flames rise up, fervent and yellow.

I strip out of my bloody clothes and feed them into the fire. The flames eat the fabric, racing along the threads until they are nothing but fire itself.

There is nothing about the past to dwell on.

Properly tuned minds only concentrate on the future.

Creating it. Manifesting it into being with planning, and recon, and proper execution.

So once the fabric is ash, I turn back to the open barn door and walk naked into the snow.

It crunches under my bare feet. Cold bites my calves, my thighs, my balls. I don't speed up. Don't hunch my shoulders or protect myself from the wind cutting across the property.

My skin prickles, then burns. But not enough to distract me from what comes next.

The invitation will arrive tonight. Tomorrow, on Christmas Eve, she will walk through my door believing she chose this.

Believing the auction was chance, not orchestration.

Believing I'm a stranger who won her fairly instead of the man who's been inside her apartment, her laptop, her head for six months.

My cock thickens as I cross the patio. Half-hard already and I haven't even touched myself, haven't thought about anything except logistics and cleanup for the past fourteen hours.

But now it's all about the future.

All about her.

The hot tub waits for me on the back deck, steam rising off the surface like mist on a hot, wet road. I step to the edge and look down at the churning water, lit up red from below.

Scarlet.

Scarletta.

I step into the water. It's scalding. The heat coats the cold chill as I sink down. When the water reaches my collarbone, I close my eyes.

Silence. Steam. Tonight's work surfaces unbidden.

My cock is fully hard now.

I wrap my hand around it. The groan comes unbidden as I start stroking, slow and deliberate. Then I reach for the remote. I press the button, and the feed appears on the hundred-and-fifty-inch screen on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

And there she is.

My current obsession.

ScarletSins.

In this edit, she’s typing. Furiously. Hair unwashed for two days, clothes rumpled, hasn’t eaten since the day before. I've got a split screen going. One side from her webcam—looking directly at her face. the other side, her document, watching every single keystroke.

My pulse throbs in my cock, demanding and insistent.

The story she's writing in this cut is called "Prey."

It's a hybrid piece. Part The Shining—hedge maze in a blizzard, heroine running from something she can't name. Part Meet Me in the Dark—damaged man trying to un-fuck a mind-fucked woman who doesn't trust salvation. Part Apollo and Daphne mythology—get back here, you beautiful fucking victim.

She has no idea that I read every word before she posts it. That her laptop connects to my server the moment she opens it up. That I see her corrections, her deletions, her moments of doubt when she highlights entire paragraphs and hovers over the delete key before changing her mind.

Prey was released last month. I watched her type every fucking sentence. This is my favorite part here…

His hand closes around my throat from behind.

I don't scream. Can't. The maze walls press in on both sides, snow falling so thick I can't see three feet ahead.

"Did you think you could run from me?" His voice is calm.

Reasonable. Like I'm the irrational one for trying. "Did you really think I'd let you go?"

I claw at his wrist. He doesn't flinch.

"You're mine," he says against my ear. "You were mine the moment you walked into that room. The moment you signed your name. The moment you decided your body was worth selling."

My pulse throbs against his palm. He can feel it. I know he can.

"Please," I whisper.

"Please what?" His thumb presses into my jugular. Not enough to cut off air. Just enough to remind me he could. "Please stop? Please let you go? Or please fuck you right here in the snow until you forget you ever wanted to leave?"

She writes this shit because she needs it. Not wants—needs. The same way I need to cancel the darkness with the light of blood, she needs to be owned by something bigger than her small, suffocating life.

The stories aren't fiction. They're blueprints. Architectural renderings of her psyche laid bare in first-person present tense because that's how she experiences her own desperation—immediate, inescapable, happening now.

Every dominant in her stories sees through the protagonist's walls. Every one of them stalks, claims, corners, traps. Every single fucking one refuses to let her run.

And she comes back to this trope again and again.

Hedge mazes.

Basements.

Isolated cabins.

Locked rooms.

Scenarios where escape is impossible and surrender is inevitable.

My cock throbs in my fist. It's intoxicating, this spying I do. Watching her type words I've already memorized.

She craves the experience. Writes it because she can't have it. Can't trust herself to seek it out after every disappointment taught her that real men are nothing like the monsters in her head.

But I am.

I'm exactly like them.

Better, actually. Because I have resources.

Planning.

Six months of surveillance footage and behavioral pattern analysis.

I know her triggers, her limits, her tells when she's lying to herself.

She has no idea that every fantasy she's ever written is about to come true.

No idea that "Prey" isn't fiction—it's prophecy.

Christmas Eve is less than an hour away.

Then she's mine.

I stand. Water sluices off my shoulders, my chest, runs down my thighs. My hard cock juts out, unapologetic. I don't reach for the towel hanging on the deck rail, I just walk inside dripping.

The hardwood is cold under my bare feet. Water pools with each step, trailing behind me through the mudroom, the kitchen, down the hallway. My cock bobs with the movement, still hard and wanting.

The shower is hot enough to hurt. Water hammers my shoulders, my neck, runs down my chest and legs in rivers that pool at my feet before disappearing down the drain.

I scrub under my fingernails with the brush to get rid of the blood.

When I'm done, I shut off the water and dry efficiently. Gray sweatpants. Nothing else.

The whiskey bottle sits on the kitchen counter where I left it this morning. I pour two fingers neat, take it to the leather couch, set my laptop on the coffee table, and sit.

Even though the cut on the screen above the massive stone fireplace is still repeating, showing Scarletta as she furiously types out her deepest, darkest fantasies, that's not what I'm thinking about.

I've got new chapters to read.

The anticipation I feel before opening my laptop is pure arousal. twenty-seconds later, the DarkDesires forum is loading.

Her profile appears first in my bookmarks. ScarletSins. Last active: 4 minutes ago.

This realization sparks abject lust. My cock throbs, interested now in a way I can't refuse it. My hand slides down into my sweats, griping my shaft with intent.

Almost every night little Scarletta posts between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Always a full scene. Always filled with her most private, filthy desires.

The throbbing between my legs intensifies when I see the little green dot. When I realize she's online right now. This very fucking moment. Probably curled in that pathetic blanket fort, laptop heating her thighs, coffee going cold beside her as her fingers work between her legs.

She masturbates two, sometimes three times a day.

I click her latest chapter.

The chapter is called Confession, the book is called See Me, Spank Me, Cure Me.

I read the opening line.

He has me on my knees with my wrists cuffed behind my back, and I've never felt more seen in my life.

My cock jerks in my palm.

She writes the scene like she's living it. First person, present tense, immediate. The protagonist—always some version of herself, always pretending she's not—kneels naked in front of a man who knows exactly what she needs before she does.

The dom in her story circles her slowly. Studying. I can see it perfectly because I've done this exact choreography in my head a thousand times with her body as the reference point.

"You're going to tell me what you want," he says. Not a question. A command.

"I can't," I whisper.

"You can. You will."

I stroke myself slowly, matching the rhythm of her words. She describes the way his hand tangles in her hair, forces her head back, makes her look at him. The vulnerability in that angle—throat exposed, eyes unable to hide.

"Tell me what you need," he says.

The words stick in my throat. Shame chokes them. But his grip tightens and I hear myself say it:

"I need you to use me."

"Be specific."

My grip tightens. I'm reading faster now, breathing harder.

"I need—" My voice breaks. "I need your cock in my mouth. I need you to fuck my throat until I can't breathe. I need you to make me take it even when I gag."

Jesus Christ.

He smiles. It's the most beautiful and terrifying thing I've ever seen.

"What else?"

"I need you to hurt me."

I nearly come as I work my cock in steady, deliberate strokes while my eyes devour each word she's written, every confession pouring directly from her psyche onto the screen in front of me.

This is her fantasy.

TPE. Throat fucking. Pain.

And tomorrow, I will make that fantasy come true.

I will have her down on her knees, gagging.

And she will come for me like the good little slut she is.