Chapter 24 Theo
THEO
“How?” I ask. One word, but my hands still shake. I don’t know if it’s trepidation or excitement.
Chloe settles back into the mattress and spreads her legs a little wider, like she’s excited by the thought. I wedge up against her, pressing my erection to the seam of her shorts. Too much cloth between us, but I need to know this one thing before we can start.
More heat in Chloe’s face. “How do you want to do it?”
“No. You tell me.”
Her chest rises, full breasts straining against her shirt, her nipples indenting the fabric.
“Something simple,” she signs, her hands shaking. “Just—cut off my air.”
My cock shudders again, but I like the answer. I don’t work in strangulation. Never have, just like I never work in drowning. Cutting off breath like that—well, it’s too close to my first death. I like blood. Viscera. Heat.
This is safer. I don’t think it’ll trip any wires inside me.
I slide my hand around Chloe’s long, graceful throat, gently pressing my palm against her trachea. The effect is immediate: her eyes go wide, her lips part, and her body riots. I raise an eyebrow, asking, Like that?
She understands. She nods.
I kiss her, then, a full and hungry kiss that makes her moan into my mouth.
Then I undress her the way I did the last two times, quick and perfunctory, wanting the clothes out of the way so I can get to the beauty beneath.
The lamplight makes her skin glow like starlight, and I can’t stop myself from licking between her breasts and over her belly.
Tasting her. Even over her skin, I taste the blood that will stay inside her.
Then I wrench myself away from her and tug off my own clothes: shirt first, then boots, then my jeans. I want to really feel her skin against mine, heat on heat. I don’t want clothes getting in the way.
Chloe gives a little gasp as she looks up at me, her fingers curling up the bedsheets. Her eyes trace over my chest, thick and muscular from the work I do on my peninsula. Then she drops down over my soft belly to my cock, which juts between us, swollen and rock-hard.
“Do it,” she whispers.
I fall onto her, catching her mouth in a kiss and her breasts with one of my hands.
She moans and bucks against me, hooking her legs around my thighs and working her hips like she’s trying to get my cock inside her.
I don’t let her, though. I kiss her and tease her, nipping at her throat and then down to her hardened nipples, where she arches her spine and grabs at my hair.
“Do it,” she pants, brimming with force.
I pull back to look at her sprawled out on her bed, her eyes glassy and her body flushed. She lifts her chin to bare her throat. An invitation.
I accept it.
Well, not how she wants. I bite her neck, right at the place where her pulse flutters up against her skin, and my teeth come dangerously close to cutting her open.
But fuck, it feels good, the promise of that blood.
I can only imagine it flooding up into my mouth. But that, she wouldn’t come back from.
“Do it!” she screams, pulling on my hair, bucking her hips. I shove her down at the shoulders and meet her gaze, all that wild, lustful fury
“Please,” she whimpers.
Enough teasing. I line my cock up with her slit and am not remotely surprised to find that she’s soaked, that it takes nothing for me to slide into her warm, sweet cunt. Chloe moans and shudders and brings her legs up around me, locking me in place.
I slide my hand up over her belly, stopping at her breasts—just for a few seconds, mostly because I can’t help myself—and then end with my fingers around her neck, my palm pressing into the place where I bit her.
I don’t move. Don’t thrust. Just sit inside her while she stares up at me, desperation brimming in her eyes. I think I’m giving her a chance to stop me. To say no.
Instead, she rolls her hips, grinding herself along my cock.
It’s all the answer I need
I tighten my grip, squeezing hard on the sides of her throat until her pulse is flapping around wildly like a frightened bird.
A soft choking noise spills out of her lips, and she thrusts harder against me.
I respond by settling more of my weight onto her shoulders, pinning her down into the mattress. Stilling her.
She sputters, lips already turning red. I slide in and out of her, slow and steady. I’m afraid that if I go any faster, any harder, I’ll lose control. Her cunt is already fluttering around my cock, her muscles pulsing furiously as her body fights for air.
“Faster,” she manages to rasp out, her hands wrapping around my wrists, almost like she’s going to push me away. But maybe I’m only expecting that because of what I am. She actually clings to me, eyes rolling back, body jerking. “Fuck— me—fas—”
The last word dies on her lips as I squeeze just a little harder, the sound turning to a gurgle in her throat.
Her face is turning red now, too, and her eyes are glassy and wet.
Inside, her systems are in a panic: blood pounding, breath tight and strained.
I wish I could keep her like this forever, right on the verge of death.
It’s the most beautiful fucking thing I’ve ever experienced.
I can’t, though. Unlike me, her death will be permanent.
I give her another sip of air at the same time I deliver a hard, firm stroke, burying myself to the hilt inside her. Chloe cries out, still clinging to my forearm. “More!” she gasps.
I know she doesn’t mean air. I squeeze again, making her convulse.
Her cunt convulses, too, slicking my cock with her arousal as I pump slowly in and out of her.
Chloe drops one hand to her side, her knuckles thumping against the mattress.
She’s still very much alive—I can hear it, her body screaming for release—but her eyes are starting to dim, and so I let her breathe again, just a little.
She gulps down the air greedily and grinds against me.
There’s a heat building in her core. I can taste it on the air.
With my free hand, I manage a single clumsy phrase: “Come for me.”
She sees it; I watch her glossy eyes follow the movements.
Whether she parses it, I don’t know. I tighten my grip on her throat, and her lips move, so red and swollen that I can’t stop myself from bowing over her and catching her bottom lip in my teeth and biting down until I taste the hot, salty tang of blood.
It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid, making her bleed like that. As soon as I taste it, my cock surges, and I lose what little control I had, and I give her what she’s been asking for:
I fuck her harder. I fuck her as hard as I can, hard enough that her body jostles and slams beneath me, hard enough that I have to brace my other hand around her throat, pinning her down at the neck.
And she smiles.
Through the glossy tears and red-veined eyes and panicked lungs, she smiles for me. Her blood looks like lipstick, garish and bright. The brightest thing in the room.
“Thank,” she rasps, the rest of it strangling in her throat again. Then her eyes roll back, and she flops against the mattress in time with my angry, violent thrusts, and the strangling noises become steady and rhythmic.
She’s about to die.
She’s also about to come. So am I.
My muscles cord up in my arms as I bear down on her, the bed frame slamming loudly against the wall in a creaking, staggering rhythm that almost matches the panic of Chloe’s heartbeat.
I press my fingers into her throat, relishing the give of her skin, the staccato rhythm of her pulse, and the taste of her impending orgasm, building like a storm cloud.
Her lips move, like she’s trying to say something. I’m squeezing too tightly, though, and just for a moment, fear flashes through her, bright and sharp as a knife. It’s a fear I’ve felt dozens of times, that spark when a victim realizes I really am going to kill them.
Usually, it delights me. Not tonight, though. Tonight, I feel my own panic at the thought of losing her, and so I loosen my grip—
Just as Chloe’s orgasm spills over.
She screams her first full breath, her body a riot beneath mine.
I slam my fists into the pillow and fuck her as hard as I can, hard enough that I can hear the drywall splitting as the doorframe slams into it, burying myself deeper and deeper into her spasming cunt until heat tears through me, too.
My cock pulses, my cum erupting inside her.
She’s still coming, though. Her body pulses, and she squirms beneath me, making soft, desperate little noises.
I slump down to kiss her, licking the dried blood off her lips and tangling my fingers up in her hair while she ruts against my softening cock, riding out the last waves of her pleasure.
That place where we’re connected is drenched with a hot, warm liquid that reminds me of blood, even though it’s not.
Eventually, Chloe’s movement slows, and then she stills completely, sinking into the mattress. And I feel the shift in her emotions, like I did before.
Shame.
I roll off her and settle on my side so I can smooth her sweat-damp hair away from her face. She turns her pretty brown eyes toward me, her lashes still limned with tears, her lips still swollen.
“You feel ashamed,” I say, twisting my body to make room for my hands.
Chloe tenses a little. “You can sense that, too?” she murmurs.
I nod. Then, even though it makes my heart feel tight: “Is it because of me?”
Just for a moment, her shame is replaced with confusion. Then she shakes her head and reaches her hand up to her throat, already striped red and white from my fingers. It’ll be mottled with bruises tomorrow, a thought that gives me a warm feeling, a little like pride.
“It’s not you,” she says softly. “It’s—this. Wanting this when we’re…” Her voice trails off, and she looks away from me, up at the ceiling. “The things I would have to think about,” she says flatly, “with other guys, just to have any hope of coming—”
The shame flares hotter, and I cup her face to force her to look at me.
“Tell me,” I say.
Chloe trembles a little. The tears dance on her eyelashes, and I reach up and swipe them away with my thumb, then press them to my tongue.
“You know what I am.” I have to sit up to talk to her. “The things I’ve thought about doing to you would probably make you scream.”
She smiles shyly at that.
“Tell me what you think about,” I say. ‘And I’ll tell you what I think about.”
My heart’s pounding furiously against my ribs as I form the words, knowing I could be making a terrible mistake.
But I’ve never wanted to share a piece of myself with a human before.
Or with anyone. My father kept me at arm’s distance, the way a leopard mother does her cub.
I did the same with others of my kind, the few that I’ve met over the years.
We’re all solitary predators, hunting in our respective territories. The blood was what mattered.
Until Chloe showed up across the lake.
She takes a deep breath, fingers trailing along my arm, a reminder that she’s real. “I would just—think about dying,” she says, and there’s a faint rasp in her voice that I know I put there. “Imagine being strangled, like you just did.” She blushes. “Or being cut. Bleeding.”
My cock pulses.
“What do you think about?” The shyness in the question makes it seem to curl in on itself.
“Blood,” I say. “I think about blood, too.”
“My blood?” She signs it, and she says it, making the words echo.
I nod. “Splitting you open.” I wonder if she sees how my hands shake. “So I can worship the inside of you.”
Chloe stares up at me, her eyes wide with fear. With something else, too.
“Are you ever going to do that to me?” she whispers. “For real?”
“No.” I shake both my head and my fist forcefully. “I told you that.”
We stare at each other, and she looks so luminous in the lamplight. It doesn’t matter how much I would like to see her split open like that, to feel her blood on my skin. I can’t destroy her.
“I just don’t want you to be ashamed,” I finally say. “Because I think those desires are what brought us together.”
Chloe breathes out, eyes shining. And then, like I think it might prove it to her, I drag her into my chest and lie down with her on the mussed blankets.
She doesn’t pull away. Actually, she does the opposite, tucking herself into my chest, her warm fingers spreading against my waist. I nuzzle into her hair and trace along the outline of her skin.
Along her arms, and the curve of her hips, and the side of her neck, where I know bruises are already starting to bloom.
The evidence of the violence I did to her, that violence that marks her as mine.
We stay like that, wrapped up together on her bed.
Chloe doesn’t speak. She doesn’t have to, because I can feel her contentment and her hesitation and the last lingering threads of her fear, all warring together.
Eventually, though, contentment wins out, and her breaths slow until she’s asleep in my arms. Vulnerable. Safe.
I’m aware of how fragile she is, holding her like this.
Humans are unbelievably fragile to a monster like me.
It’s so easy to rip them into pieces, to creep into the places where they think they’re safest and paint them red with blood.
Whether I use a knife, or an ax, or my bare hands, it doesn’t matter. It’s always easy.
I squeeze Chloe a little tighter. She mumbles in her sleep and tilts her face into my chest, warming my skin with her breath. And I know I won’t hurt her.
But there’s a silvery line of moonlight spilling in through the gap in the curtains, and I feel it again. That sense of something snapping inside me.
The killing moon, calling me home.
I close my eyes against as dread coils in my belly, and I press my nose into Chloe’s hair. I really thought I had chased it away. But there’s no denying the way it’s pulsing through the air. I only have a few more days until it rises.
I wish there were a god for me to pray to, but I know there’s not. What god would listen but the devil?
So instead, I pray to Chloe. I pray to her blood and her fear and desire.
I pray that the killing moon will pass me by.