Chapter 13 #2
Men who posted too eagerly about ignoring boundaries, about pushing past resistance, about the thrill of taking what wasn't offered.
The Scales needed fresh prey.
And I needed something else entirely.
There was a darkness brewing inside me during those months that had nothing to do with justice or retribution. A yearning for something I couldn't quite name.
An evil, maybe. Brewing inside me. I wanted to punish more than just the obvious billionaire. I wanted my justice to reach the 'common man' too. For the truly sick and twisted exist on every economic level.
Scarletta was the first writer on DarkDesires who made me stop scrolling.
Her prose was sharp, psychologically sophisticated, and unflinching in its examination of power dynamics. Where other writers dressed up their fantasies in flowery language and romantic justifications, Scarletta wrote with surgical precision about the mechanics of surrender.
About the shame that fueled desire.
About protagonists who craved darkness not despite their intelligence, but because of it.
I read everything she'd posted within a week of discovering her account. Then I read it again… and again… and again.
The cameras went up in her apartment almost immediately.
Looking back now, the timing was something of a lucky break. Scarletta almost never leaves her studio—days can pass without her stepping outside, her entire existence compressed into four hundred square feet of unwashed dishes, blanket forts, and the blue glow of her laptop screen.
But that particular week, she was earnestly trying to find a job. A desperate attempt to address the financial situation that was already spiraling toward the eviction notice I would eventually exploit.
She left every day for at least four hours, trudging through Idaho Falls in her best clothes, going on interviews to coffee shops and bookstores that would never call her back.
My team installed sixteen cameras and a keystroke logger while she was gone.
That night, I found the folder labeled 'DO NOT OPEN.'
The Call of the Labyrinth.
I knew from the first paragraph that this was different from everything else she'd written. Darker. More dangerous.
His clawed hand wraps around my throat. I know I should fight. Should scream. Should do anything except what my body is doing right now, which is melting into his grip like I've been waiting my entire life for exactly this pressure against my pulse.
"You ran so beautifully," he growls, his voice resonating through my chest. "But you were never going to escape. You were always going to end up here. Underneath me. Begging for the monster you pretended to fear."
I want to deny it. Want to spit in his face to prove I still have a shred of dignity left after everything the maze took from me.
But it's a lie. So instead, I whisper… "Please."
He smiles at me with too many long, sharp teeth. "Please what, little runner?"
"Please ruin me."
So he does.
His cock is inhuman—thick, and ridged, and far too large for my body to accommodate. But my body doesn't care about accommodation. My body opens for him like it's been designed for this exact violation, stretching around his impossible girth while I scream, and sob, and beg him never to stop.
"You're mine now," he snarls this into my ear as he bottoms out inside me, his claws drawing blood from my hips. "Every part of you. Every thought. Every breath. Every orgasm. Mine."
I come so hard, the darkness obliterates my sight. Sends me into a state of unconscious oblivion.
When I wake, he's still inside me, still moving, and I realize with devastating clarity that I don't want to escape anymore.
I want to stay in his animalistic darkness forever.
The story breaks every consent law, both real and implied.
In the legal world, what Helix does to Lyra constitutes kidnapping, assault, and rape.
In the book world—even in the darkest corners of erotic fiction where consent can be negotiated and fantasized—the story crosses lines that most platforms explicitly forbid.
Obviously, Scarletta figured this out early because she never put it online. She hid it away in that folder, a shameful secret she couldn't delete but couldn't share, a fantasy too dark even for her anonymous ScarletSins persona.
I jerked off to that story twice a day for two months straight.
I could not get it out of my mind.
The beastly nature of Helix, his absolute certainty that Lyra belonged to him.
How much bigger he was than her, how he filled her so completely that there was no room left for anything except him.
How Lyra ran from it, fought it, and then took it and loved it with a desperation that made my hand move faster on my cock every single time.
God, I was obsessed.
Looking back, I recognize that I was out of control during that period.
The surveillance escalated beyond anything I'd done with previous targets.
The fantasies grew more elaborate, more consuming, bleeding into my waking hours until I could barely focus on MacLeay Capital, or The Scales, or anything that wasn't Scarletta's face on my monitors, Scarletta's words on my screen, Scarletta's soft moans when she touched herself to her own stories without knowing I was watching.
That's what really spurred the whole Derek situation.
I was just… out of control.
When I discovered what he'd done to her—reading her frantic, tearful journal entries through her hacked hard drive, watching her curl into a ball on her bed and sob for hours—something in me snapped with an almost audible crack.
The methodical patience I usually brought to Scales operations evaporated entirely. I tracked Derek down within seventy-two hours, and what I did to him had nothing to do with justice, or balance, or making the world safer for innocents.
It was personal.
It was emotional.
It was the most satisfying kill I've ever made.
I've dialed it back since then—forced myself to regain the control that defines everything I am, everything I've built.
But only because I found a healthier outlet for the obsession.
I recreated the Helix maze here, on Story Island.
The construction took three months and cost more than most people's houses.
Custom bamboo walls grown to specification.
Portal archways with concealed and nearly silent hydraulics that create the illusion of teleportation.
A wireless sound system and custom earbuds to replicate the way Scarletta described Helix's telepathy in Lyra's head.
And the costumes.
Fuck, the costumes for my attendants are out of this world good.
Horns. Claws. Voice modulators that transform human speech into something inhuman and predatory. Every detail pulled directly from her manuscript, recreated with obsessive precision because I need her to believe she's stepped inside her own death-spiral imagination.
The maze has been ready for five weeks now.
And I've been planning to put my good little slut inside it since the day the final camera was installed.
I lean in, almost pressing my nose to the screen as Scarletta comes into view on the monitor. She's approaching the entrance…