Chapter 24
SKELKER/SONNY
She is soft and pliable. Like warm tissue.
So tight and slick. Her blood stains my tongue still.
I savor the sweet, metallic taste of it as I glide inside her wet hole.
She’s more fun to play with than the dead things were.
Their dark seduction can only keep me aroused for so long.
When, what my body really craves is sweat-soaked skin and a fiery pulse.
Her pulse, beating against my cock and between my teeth.
My veins run black as I fill her, my dark essence blooming as she clenches her sweet little cunt around me.
“You’re so raw for me. So open.” I close my eyes for a moment and breathe in her heady scent of jasmine.
It’s offensive in all its fragile prettiness, like a feather to the face when all I want is a punch to the gut.
I want her to brutalize me. To mar and scar my flesh as I do to hers. But I will not untie her until I believe that she will. Her hands are of no use to me otherwise. But her mouth… Mmm. I roll my hips forward and burrow in deeper.
“Please,” she begs again. Always begging and whining. “It hurts.”
“Then scream,” I roar in her face. Her eyes widen, and tears spill down her cheeks.
Ahh, yes. Mmm. I roll my tongue over each one, licking them off her face. “More. I want so much more from you.”
I pin her pussy lips back and slow my pace so I can watch my cock slide in and out of her sopping wet hole. “I’ve made a mess of you, haven’t I?” Everywhere I touch, I mark with inky fingerprints. Her skin is hot, flushed, and charred by my dark essence.
She begs me to stop, and yet her body tells me a different story.
The way her hips angle up to meet my thrusts, and how her eyes roll back every time I press my cock against that tender spot.
The one that’s like an instant switch for ecstasy.
The way she chews on her lips until they’re swollen and bleeding…
No, she doesn’t want me to stop. I think she wants me to go harder.
“Look at you. Oh yes. So fucking needy for my cock.” I slam into her hard and almost rip her apart.
Fucking hell. Tingling vibrations shoot down my shaft and push out a trickle of pre cum.
I feel it leave my body and enter hers just as she soaks me in return.
I kiss her belly before raking my teeth across it.
I nip at her skin until I taste more of her fiery blood on my lips.
“You’re a monster,” she cries.
Oh, yes. I am. I chuckle. She has no idea. But she will learn. “You love these marks I give you. I can tell by the way your cunt throbs, how it strangles my cock. You’re clenched so fucking tight, I can barely move.”
She looks away, knowingly and full of shame. “You don’t know what I love.”
“Eyes on me, Mia. Look at me right fucking now.” I slap the inside of her thigh, just inches above the bite wound I gave her. I’m dangerously close to giving her another one.
“I hate you,” she whispers as our eyes meet. And in that instance, we are locked in both mutual disdain and overwhelming desire. She licks her lips as her eyelids flutter in response to another deep thrust.
I pull out and rest between her legs. “I want you to feel what it’s like to be taken away from everyone you love.”
She blinks back tears. “If you think I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth, you’re sorely mistaken. I’m an orphan just like you.”
The audacity. I finger a piece of my skull, where bone meets cheek. “You grew up in an orphanage because your parents died. I was stolen from mine. Then I was tortured and mutilated and forced to serve. You inherited a fortune and a big house. We are not the same.”
Fresh tears spill down her cheeks. Sickening. I can’t tell if she’s crying for my sad childhood or her own. Or perhaps it’s because of the blooming welts on her wrists. And yet I can’t resist. I lean over and lick the tears off her cheeks while I fuck her slowly.
She snarls in disgust, yet arches for me again. “Why do you blame me? I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even in Ever Graves when you went missing.”
This entitled slut. I am going to kill her.
I wrap my hands around her throat and squeeze before stuffing her full of my cock.
“Missing? I knew exactly where I was, my love. In hell. I was in fucking hell. And it all goes back to the before, before. The night your ancestor rejected the devil, stole his child as he grew in her belly, and then seduced an unsuspecting Crane. And he has been punishing both our families ever since.”
She sighs. “Fine. Do your worst, then, Sonny. Take all your rage out on me.”
“Do not call me that!” I scream in her face with my cock still inside her.
I know it’s not directly her fault. I know this.
But who else can I punish? The devil knows I’ve been punishing myself for long enough.
I need someone other than me to blame. Someone I can drown in my misery with.
I wish I’d known that these punishments would stoke other desires in me.
This makes me hate her even more. She’s not supposed to be beautiful, or fiery, or exquisite.
She’s not supposed to taste like the only sin I’ve ever craved.
“That’s your name. No one can take that away from you. Not even the devil himself.” She wiggles her hips, reminding me that I’m fucking her. A soft whimper leaves her lips. And I realize she might be more deranged than me.
She needs to know how much I hate her. To feel real pain the way I’ve felt. I reach up and touch my skull, fingering the edges again, the way I’ve done so many nights when there was no one there to touch me.
“No. That’s not who I am anymore. I’m a Skelker. I have no name. No family. Nothing. Except my little Harker whore.” I smile even while I break off a piece of bone from the edge of my skull.
She gasps, her eyes wide. “What the fuck? Your face…”
“It always grows back,” I murmur.
The first time it happened, I had spent six agonizing hours breaking it off, piece by piece, only to have it regrow over the next week.
It came back slowly and was a thousand times more painful than pulling it off.
My skin was raw and bloodied and charred when the new bone formed over it, leaving me with more scar tissue than I had the first time.
And then I did it again years later when I was angry with myself. The truth is, deep down, I’ve always blamed myself for that day. I disobeyed. I should never have left Bones or Felix’s sight… How different my life would’ve been.
But I still want to blame her too.
I press the bloodied, jagged piece of bone to her cheek. “Should we give you a mask to match mine?”
Her throat bobs as she swallows hard. “Fuck it. If it will make you feel better, then do it. If I’m really your whore, then mark me like one.”
This one is full of delightful surprises. “Just one tiny piece. It will look so pretty on you.” My cock swells inside her. We aren’t even fucking anymore, just thriving on the friction, our raw tender flesh pulsating in anticipation.
“What are you going to do, attach it with hot glue?” she snaps, her fiery sass returning for one last burst before she surrenders herself completely to me. Her resolve is hanging on by the tiniest of threads. I can feel it in the way she opens her legs wider, urging me on.
I find myself grinning from ear to ear. I can’t help it. I get so hard when her face twists in horror. “No, dark one. I was thinking of something more permanent.”
“What do you mean?” The panic in her voice is intoxicating. I would bottle and drink it if I could.
I pull out of her sweet pussy reluctantly and climb up her body until I’m hovering over her chest. The feel of her nipples against the dangling tip of my cock is dangerous, and I almost abandon my plan so I can fuck her mouth instead. Fuck it. Maybe I’ll do both.
“Let me show you.”
Next to the bed is a small dresser with two drawers.
It belonged to Imogen Bishop, the last virgin to be sacrificed in this cabin.
The woman who ended the Wild Hunt and ruined everything for my dear old devil.
I yank open the top drawer, pleased to find her supplies still inside after all of these centuries.
I lay out the items on Mia’s naked chest—a small dagger, a vial of poison that’s been aging since the late 1600s, and a medieval sewing kit comprised of silk stitches and a copper needle.
I dangle the fractured bone in front of her face.
“Wouldn’t you like to always have a piece of me with you?
” I caress her skin with the back of my hand, delighted by how she shrinks back in fear.
“I can split open this pretty skin, then stitch it back up once I’ve attached my bone to yours.
It will be like a tattoo that never fully heals. ”
Her eyes fill with horror before hardening into apathy. “Do I have a choice?”
“For this? Yes. I will take much more from you without permission, but this can be your choice.” The fact that I know what she will decide makes my adrenaline course in ways that nothing in any realm can match.
It’s sadistic foreplay. I feel it in the heady space between us that exists only for this false politeness.
When really we are both chomping at the bit, ready and eager and desperate to tear each other to shreds.
“Fine. I’ll let you do it. But only if you give me something I want in return.”
“Another blasphemous bargain to tempt fate with? All right. I’ll play along. What does my little Harker whore want?”
“Okay, now I want two things. One, for you to stop calling me that. And two, I want to see the scar on your thigh. The one you got from falling into the river when you were a kid.” Her eyelids flutter, and I know that she is close to blacking out.
I’ve drained her of so much blood and energy.
This bone infusion will surely be the thing that sends her over the edge.
But her relentless stamina excites me. “You don’t believe I am who I say I am. Interesting.”
“I do actually, but Bones needs to know for sure. It’s what I came here for tonight. To trick you into showing me your scar. Clearly, that didn’t work, so now let’s make a deal. You show me yours, and I’ll let you give me mine.”
She intrigues me more and more by the second.
“Oh, sweet, Mia. I don’t believe for one second that you came here tonight just for that.
But if you want me to take my pants off so badly, all you have to do is ask.
” I lift off her and strip down to nothing before retaking my position over her chest. “Let’s have a look, shall we? ”
I lift up my cock and pull it to the side. The four-inch scar on my left thigh healed about as well as the one I’m about to give her. Bones was always better at breaking skin than stitching it up.
She nods. “I knew it. You’re him. Why do you have to be such an asshole about it?”
Feisty at every fucking turn. Even with my cock in her face. Which I’m about to fucking choke her with. “Getting swallowed into the fiery pits of hell as a child has a way of making one less pleasant to deal with.”
“Fiery pits?”
“No. Not even close to that silly expression your new gods claim it to be. It’s far from fiery, but it is hot.
It’s dark and desolate and riddled with despair.
And yet, when you expect it to be cool, it’s sweltering.
And sometimes it’s below freezing, which also burns.
” I finger my scar, tracing over it and wishing it were her lips instead of my own hand.
“Don’t go back then.”
A fire burns in my belly. “Who said I was? I have every intention of torturing you for the next century.”
“Good. I’ll make you up a room in the guest house. Can’t have you in the main building until you’re house-trained.”
Oh, she’s trying to be clever. Trying to soften me. Just as he said she would. I pinch her chin hard between my fingers. “Stop. I can still kill you. I still want to, despite how tight your pussy is. Do not for one second think that I care about you. I never will… my little Harker whore.”
“I changed my mind. You can go straight back to hell.” She turns her head as more tears spill down her cheeks
I snarl down at her without empathy. For someone who claims she’ll never cry for me, I’ve managed to make her do just that three times this evening.
And now I’m going to make her scream too.
“Maybe I’ll take you with me so I can play with your cunt while the devil gives you a proper skull like mine,” I growl. This push and pull between us has me unhinged. I need to spill more of her blood. I love the way those pretty red droplets glisten for me.
“Never. I’d rather die.”
“That is exactly how I intend to get you there, mi amor. But first, a deal’s a deal. I showed you mine, now I get to mark you.”
Her lip quivers. “Fine. Get on with it then.”
I grab the last item out of the drawer, a thick wooden stick, and shove it into her mouth so that it’s sideways. “Bite down, dark one. What I’m about to do is going to hurt like hell, and I’m not quite ready for you to lose that sharp tongue of yours.”