Chapter 19 #2
Without warning, I pinched my nipples hard, trapping them between my fingers. Pleasure spiked through me—both mine and not-mine, doubled and reflected back. Inside me, the demon made a sound I’d never heard before. Not a hiss. Not a growl.
Almost a moan.
“There you are,” I breathed.
No response to that, and I tipped my head back, drawing in a deep breath as I slid my hands along my waist again, following the slight flare of my hips then sweeping them back over my belly.
Slowly, methodically, I unsnapped my jeans and dragged the denim down, exposing plain black cotton panties.
“So boring,” I murmured, but my voice had gone husky. The air felt thicker. Charged. “You could have dressed me in lace. Silk. You could have had so much more fun. But you wanted to keep me like this. Didn’t you? Untouched. Unknowing. A gift not yet unwrapped.”
His presence behind my gaze had never felt so close. So intense.
“So I’ll unwrap it for you.”
I kicked the jeans aside. My breathing went shallow. And inside me—inside me—the demon breathed in too. Harsh. Ragged, almost. Like he was drowning.
Stop.
The word swept through my mind like trash in the wind, desperate and raw. Not a command. A plea.
I smiled at my reflection and slid my hand into my panties.
Drawing in a slow, deliberate breath, I forced myself to focus solely on the touch of my fingers along the soft, hidden folds between my legs, the whorls of sensation that sparked off shivering heat when I dipped inside.
Stroking and sliding, I feathered my fingers along my clit like the brush of a hummingbird’s wing.
I gusted out a heavier sigh, shimmying my body again, undulating against the force of my hand.
I couldn’t look at my eyes in the mirror anymore, couldn’t risk breaking my focus.
Instead, I stared at my hand and imagined it was someone else’s hand, someone subtle and sure in the darkness, strong and sly.
I could feel the pressure building, spiraling up, and I dipped in again, spreading myself.
It felt good—wild. A little profane, but that was the whole point, wasn’t it?
Yes, it was.
The pleasure was mine, of course, but threaded through it was something else—a thrumming curiosity that couldn’t be squashed down anymore. It wasn’t separate from me, but full and hot, woven through every sensation.
My sighs turned into longer, deeper moans, and at some point, I lifted my hand to plant it on the mirror, leaning in, my body closer to my own reflection, but my eyes fixed on my hand, my fingers, the deep and rolling pleasure as I touched and explored, skimmed and fondled.
Time seemed to slip away, lost on the escalating heartbeat, as I got closer—closer.
Every stroke of my fingers sent shockwaves through me—through both of us—and at some point he stopped trying to pull away.
Instead, his presence shifted, a reversing tide.
It flooded through me, no longer fighting or resisting, but riding each cresting wave as I went up…
up, up…before plunging down the other side.
For the first time in fifteen years, we weren’t at war.
My breath shuddered out at the thought of that, which somehow pushed me higher, closer, my heart pounding raggedly at the idea of this creature who yearned as I yearned, slid as I slid.
My neck arched as I swept my fingers high again to the nub of my clit, stroking and pulsing before dipping deep again.
Slick heat coated my fingers and the scent of my own arousal swirled around me.
I felt the dark energy twist up in a sharp wet coil, then pulse, pulse, the want becoming need, the need becoming its own living thing. The line between us dissolved completely and I felt the demon within me reach down, embrace me, then shove me up again.
I shattered, built, shattered again…and built higher. I wanted this, needed this—needed him to feel it with me.
The pleasure crested—and it was ours, not just mine, not just his. Ours. For one blinding second, we were the same thing. We were—the—same—
I jerked my head up, directly meeting my own untethered gaze in the mirror, and in that one-brief-moment-yes!
Yes!
“You,” I breathed out as my gaze filled with the creature inside me.
A suggestion of wings, massive and dark.
Eyes that weren’t eyes but points of light in a shape that had once been beautiful and was now...broken. Hungry. Ancient.
And looking at me like I was the only thing in all of creation that mattered, as its quivering, shivering desperation vibrated with something that wasn’t just lust or violence—not entirely. It was panic. Shame.
Need.
The broken, starving thing beneath the monster. An image of utter desolation and vulnerability that seared itself into my—
A force that seemed to blast out from the mirror itself jerked me three full inches off the floor and flung me backward across the room as an enraged roar exploded in my brain, loud enough to make my ears bleed.
The bed caught me in the back of the thighs, and I flipped straight over it, smashing into the wall and crumbling into a heap on the floor, a discarded doll.
But I wasn’t a fucking doll.
Not anymore.
“I saw you!” I seethed as I lurched to my feet, scrambling back up on the bed again as I glared at the mirror across the room.
I didn’t know what I expected to see staring back at me.
The unholy nightmare trapped behind my eyeballs had been more shadow than form, and if it leaped out of the mirror at me right then I’d probably die on the spot.
I didn’t care, though. In this particular moment, I didn’t care about anything other than that I had won—won! I’d lured the creature out because it wanted me, needed me, and at the very last second, I’d looked up and I had seen it.
And seeing these fuckers was the first step to booting them straight back to hell.
I stared at the mirror for another long moment, the pain of my impromptu body slam against the bedroom wall beginning to break through my euphoria. But nothing flickered in the mirror, nothing murmured in the back of my brain.
My demon, for the moment, had nothing to say.
But I could still feel him. Coiled tight in the deepest part of me. Not angry anymore.
Hiding.
And for the first time ever…I wondered if he was afraid of me.
The thought should have felt like victory.
It didn’t.
Moving slowly, never taking my eyes off the mirror, I gathered up my clothes and backed toward the hallway.
Thirty seconds later, I closed the door to my mother’s room behind me and sagged against it. Then, fatigue and pain finally catching up to me, I stumbled back to my own bed.