Chapter 18 Roxana
ROXANA
“Iwish I could see you in your true form,” I told Sangrel yesterday, off-handedly, like it had just occurred to me and wasn’t all that important or thought-through.
We had just gotten home from the chapel, and the antechamber light burned brightly above our heads, deepening the lines in his face. I was depleted almost to the point of collapse. With the painkillers gradually wearing out, the fresh mark on my chest was starting to throb with pain.
I expected him to see right through me and refuse, but he smiled instead.
“What if I told you that you could not only see, but also feel the real me?”
I only grinned at him expectantly in response, inclining my head and biting my lip to show him rather than tell him just how much I was into that idea.
“My dark darling.” He cupped my face in the palm of his hand and ran his thumb over my bottom lip. “I’m going to ruin you for all mortal men.”
Now we’re in the bedroom, and I’m watching my husband’s familiar face change as Silas shrinks away and Sangrel takes control of its features. Desire is already tugging rhythmically at my clit, anticipation pulsating through my core.
“I can see you brought the mirror already,” he says when his transformation is complete.
“It’s a good day for it,” I point out. “February 24.”
It’s Dragobete, a pagan holiday celebrating love and the beginning of spring—the Romanian folkloric equivalent of Valentine’s Day.
“You’re right. The perfect night to stretch that pretty pussy of yours and make it weep for every drop of my cum.”
He’s towering over me with his arms crossed over his chest, muscles bulging.
But intimidating as he is, I no longer feel a shred of fear in his presence.
Maybe it’s because of the way he stands, his shoulders hunched a little, like he’s leaning closer to me in a pull of attraction; there’s nothing threatening in his posture.
Or maybe it’s because I’ve learnt to associate his lopsided, predatory smirk with pleasure.
In any case, even knowing what I’m about to do, I’m not scared.
He inhales heavily, glancing at the mirror propped next to the bed on a kitchen chair I’d lugged here from downstairs. A worried crease appears between his eyebrows. Then his eyes are back on me, radiating with a rare intensity.
“If we’re doing this, you’re going to be Daddy’s good girl and do exactly as he tells you, aren’t you?”
I take a step back and closer to the bed, its black satin sheets neatly made up and reflecting the bedside table lamp’s light.
“Yes, Daddy.”
I feel giddy and drunk, fighting against giggles threatening to erupt from deep within my chest. But when I think about it, I realise I haven’t had a drop of wine today. Well, that’s a fucking first in a long time.
“You’re going to keep your eyes on the mirror.” His voice is velvet and gravel, and his eyes are boring into my soul.
“Yes, Daddy.”
He grabs my chin to force me to keep looking at him in a gesture that is as familiar as it is irresistible to me. It still feels strange—and strangely flattering—knowing that he has leeched it out of whatever remains of Silas’s soul precisely because I’ve always liked it.
“I’ll try to hold back. But you must tell me if I’m hurting you. Too much.” He rubs his thumb over my lips. Electricity zaps through me, and I close my eyes with a soft moan.
“You know that nothing is ever too much for me,” I protest in a sweet voice.
He shakes his head resolutely. “You haven’t been with me like this, Roxana,” he says, the line of his mouth stern in the carefully curated expanse of his beard. “I need you to keep me in check. I could obliterate you with pleasure if I’m not careful.”
“And wouldn’t that be a great way to die?” I bite gently into his thumb, and he sighs with the air of suffering.
“Get on the bed,” he instructs me and slaps my ass when I turn around.
The sharp impact ripples through me and still burns when I plop down on my back on the cool, soothing satin sheets.
“Eyes on the mirror.”
I turn my head to the side, unsurprised to be met with my shadowy reflection in the ornate black frame, younger-looking and more beautiful than I’ve ever been. The bedroom around her is darker and bare of any furniture except for the bed. Sconces with black candles line the walls.
I hear the rustle of his feet on the carpet as he approaches, slowly and with hesitation evident in his step.
“You’ll be able to see me in the mirror now. Don’t be scared, dark darling.”
“I won’t be,” I promise him, and I mean it.
I’m tingling all over with nervous anticipation, my breath short, my heart beating fast and liquid excitement pooling in my core.
But terror is nowhere to be found in the plethora of my current emotions because the truth of it is that I’ve felt safer with Sangrel and more at ease with him than with anyone, ever since he offered me the second cigarette in that bathroom months ago.
Maybe it’s always been in my blood to prefer the company of demons over people.
He takes one more step.
And I finally see him.
He is massive. Much taller than Silas’s six-foot-four and broader in the shoulders.
His whole body seems designed in a way that’s meant to incite fear.
Human-shaped, lean and sculpted, his smoke-shrouded form radiates with unnatural strength.
There’s a stone-grey quality to his skin, but with burning undertones that are making me think of lava rushing underneath the Earth’s crust.
His face looks ... like the face of a handsome man who’s never felt a single benevolent emotion in his life. No smile lines, no wrinkles of compassion. Just dark, cruel eyes like bottomless pits, a chiselled jaw and a merciless line of a mouth.
He takes off his robe, letting it fall to the ground, but he keeps his trousers on.
“Eyes on the mirror, baby,” he reminds me, his voice soft and harsh at the same time. “That’s a good girl.”
As he leans over me, the scorching heat of his body envelopes me. It’s like being close to a fireplace on a cold night.
“You can feel me now, can’t you, my dark darling?” He hooks one of his fingers underneath the lace of my thong, and the talon-like nail slices through the fabric like butter. The garment falls apart into shreds.
“Y-yes,” I confirm.
“The mirror is a portal,” he reminds me. “A gateway between this world and the Underworld. Realities fuse in its proximity. If you keep your eyes on the reflection, if you focus not on what is here, but on what’s on the other side, you’ll be able to feel everything. Let me show you.”
Wedging his bestial hands between my knees, he parts my legs wide and hunches forward.
He opens his mouth, and I gasp when his tongue slithers forward, long and serpent-like.
It’s forked down half its length, which he demonstrates by separating its sharp tips wilfully and pressing one half, coiled into a graceful ‘S’, against my clit while sliding the other half, rough and hot, into my pussy until it’s aligned with my G-spot.
I gasp.
And then a scream tears from deep within my throat when I discover that not only does his tongue resemble a snake’s, but it flickers like one, and currently it’s teasing the most sensitive spots of my body with rapid bursts of vibrations.
Bliss invades every one of my cells. It tingles in my fingertips. It curls my toes. It yanks my eyelids right up and causes my eyes to roll back, and it flushes my body with heat, rushing through me in seismic waves.
“Fuck, this is so much better than my rabbit!” I force out breathlessly as I tip over the edge and crash into the sizzling pits of my climax, jerking and seizing and erupting in sweat.
“I told you, you wouldn’t be needing it anymore,” he tells me, withdrawing his tongue once I recover from a few moments of complete unawareness of anything, the date, the year, my surroundings, my own name, anything but the euphoria rushing through my blood like danger.
And even though I have my own reasons to disagree with his statement, I keep my mouth shut on the subject, and instead only mewl: “I want more of you, Daddy. I want everything. Breed me.”
With a smirk, he straightens up and gets off the bed to discard his trousers, seemingly made of smoke. But when he does and I comprehend what my eyes are telling me, I gasp in protest, “There’s no fucking way.”
Because the rock-hard length in his grasp is so huge that I couldn’t wrap my hands around it. Its surface is smoke-covered, same as the rest of his body, but the popping veins are blazing like volcanic lava lines, and some of the familiar hazy red substance is leaking from its tip like precum.
“It’ll never fit!”
I close my legs defensively before he can get between them. He grasps my knees as if meaning to yank them apart, his long, taloned fingers reaching nearly to the middle of my thighs. My heart speeds up, and my breath shortens.
“It will fit,” he counters harshly, but then a softer note diffuses his tone, “Look away from the mirror now, dark darling.” And then, when I don’t move, frozen in shock, he repeats, “Roxana, turn your head and look at me.”
I peel my eyes away from the reflection, and they land on the familiar human visage of my husband, his chest heaving monumentally and a breathless grin on his face.
I chance a sideways glance at the mirror while still keeping him in my vision, and now I can see both his forms, a human and a demon, Silas and Sangrel, both kneeling at my feet on the bed.
“Eyes forward.”
I do as I’m told, snapping my gaze away from the reflection to Silas’s familiar, bearded face.
“See, you can take me like this, can’t you?” he croons. “Spread those legs for me.”
I do, if somewhat reluctantly.
“That’s it, just a little more.”