Chapter 2 #2
I gesture to Adriel—one of my enforcers.
He knows what to do.
He forces the woman to her knees and makes her confess her betrayal loudly enough for everyone to hear.
The woman sobs hard, as if it will make a difference.
I feel nothing. Haven't felt anything in years.
Then I look up, and she's there.
Standing twenty feet away, watching me with those dark eyes.
She's more beautiful than the photographs suggested.
The fifteen-year-old girl has become a stunning woman, but it's not her beauty that stops me cold.
It's her eyes.
Dark, haunted, hungry eyes that look at Hell like she's finally come home.
Judge Deveraux's eyes, but with none of his righteousness.
These eyes have seen death and been transformed by it.
Transformed by me .
She walks toward me with no hesitation, drawn by something she doesn't understand.
She has no idea who I am.
The monster she's seeking is the one who created her need for monsters.
The irony is so perfect it's almost poetic.
When she stops in front of me, close enough that I can smell her perfume—something expensive with dark notes of amber and something else, something that reminds me of gunpowder—I have to control my expression carefully.
"You don't belong here," I tell her, testing.
"Everyone keeps saying that."
Her voice.
Fuck.
Smoky and dark, nothing like the screaming teenager from the news footage eight years ago.
This voice was made for begging, for crying my name, for breaking apart under my hands.
"Because it's true. Heaven is upstairs. Pretty girls play pretty games up there. Down here, little lamb, we play for keeps."
She doesn't flinch at the threat.
Instead, she says the words that seal her fate: "I belong in the dark. I've been living in it for eight years. The only difference is that down here, everyone admits it."
Eight years.
Since the night I killed her parents.
I created this creature standing before me.
Something shifts in my chest—a feeling I don't recognize and don't like.
Interest? Possession? Something darker?
I stand, towering over her, and she has to tilt her head back to maintain eye contact.
This close, I can see the pulse racing in her throat, see her pupils dilated with arousal rather than fear.
I can see the small scar on her neck—from that night?
From trying to save her parents?
"What's your name?"
"Selene."
Of course, I already know, but hearing her say it, here in my domain, makes it real.
Makes this moment real.
The judge's daughter is in Hell, looking at me like she wants me to destroy her.
I can work with that.
The next minutes are a test.
I make her watch the woman's punishment—real punishment, real pain, real humiliation.
Adriel is brutal, efficient.
The woman who betrayed me takes him in every hole while she sobs apologies that don't matter.
Selene watches, transfixed.
Her thighs press together.
Her breathing quickens.
A flush spreads down her chest.
Perfect.
She's absolutely perfect.
When I pull her onto my lap, when I wrap my hand around her throat, she melts into me like she was made for this.
Like she's been waiting eight years for my hand around her throat.
The truth spills from her lips—she wants to feel something, wants someone to see her darkness.
Little lamb, I created your darkness.
Shaped it with bullets and blood when you were too young to understand what was happening to you.
And now you're here, begging me to deepen it.
"I don't fix broken things, Selene. I break them further."
"Good."
That single word destroys what little control I have left.
I'm going to ruin her over three nights, going to mark her so deeply she'll never be free of me.
And she's going to beg for every second of it.
The woman's punishment ends.
Adriel drags her away, still crying, probably to be disposed of—she's seen too much, knows too much.
But I barely notice.
My attention is entirely on the girl in my lap, the way she fits against me, the way her pulse races under my hand.
"Stand up."
She obeys immediately, and that obedience goes straight to my cock.
"If you come with me now, you're mine for three nights. No more, no less. You'll do everything I say, when I say it. You'll take everything I give you. And when it's over, you leave and never come back."
"Why three nights?"
"Because that's how long it'll take."
"For what?"
I smile, sharp and dangerous. "To ruin you for anyone else."
And that is something I intend on doing.
I thoroughly debauch her, forcing my cock into her mouth, spanking that perfect ass of hers until she can’t take it anymore.
But I have her for three nights, and that means she belongs to me.
Her face is flushed, and her heart is racing, but her eyes are exhilarated and exhausted at the exact same time.
I carry her to the bed I keep in the adjoining room—for occasions when someone needs recovery time.
She's unconscious before I lay her down, her body finally overwhelmed by what I've put it through.
She sleeps, curled into herself like she's trying to hold onto the sensations I've given her.
Bruises are already forming on her pale skin—my marks, my claim.
Her inner thighs are wet with her arousal, making me want to wake her and start again.
But she needs rest.
Tomorrow I'll push her harder.
I should leave her and get back to business, but I find myself studying her in the dim light.
The curve of her spine. The way her lips are swollen from my use.
The tear tracks still visible on her cheeks.
The small scar on her neck that I now know came from that night—she must have cut herself on broken glass trying to help them.
My phone vibrates.
Vincent:
You sent everyone home from Hell. That's not like you.
I didn't realize I'd done that, but it's true.
After I finished with her, I cleared the entire floor.
Some possessive instinct of not wanting anyone else to see her like this.
Not wanting to share even the sound of her screams.
Dangerous. This is dangerous.
I leave her sleeping and sit in my armchair located in the corner.
The monitors show Hell empty except for my little lamb in my bed.
I pull up everything my men have gathered on her this week.
Medical records from after the murder—severe PTSD, survivor's guilt, dissociative episodes.
Therapy notes acquired through bribes: "Patient continues to experience intrusive thoughts linking violence with arousal. Likely a trauma response to witnessing parents' murders."
If only her therapist knew the truth—that the man who murdered her parents just fucked her into unconsciousness, and she thanked him for it.
Vincent appears in my doorway without knocking—the only person who'd dare.
"The judge's daughter? Really?"
"You already asked that."
"That was before you cleared Hell for her. Before you marked her like you're keeping her."
"Three nights," I tell him. "That's all."
"And then?"
"Then she goes back to her life and forgets this happened."
Vincent's laugh is humorless. "You don't believe that any more than I do. That girl is ruined for normal now. You've made sure of it."
He's right.
After what I've done to her tonight, what I plan to do tomorrow, she'll never be satisfied with safety again.
She'll crave this—crave me—every day for the rest of her life.
Just like I planned.
Except somewhere between her walking into Hell and passing out in my bed, the plan changed. Now I don't just want to ruin her.
I want to keep her.
"You're thinking about it," Vincent observes. "Keeping her."
"It would be cruel."
"Since when has that stopped you?"
"This is different. She doesn't know who I am. What I did."
"And if she finds out?"
I think about it.
About the moment she realizes the man she's submitted to, begged for, called Sir, is the one who destroyed her life. "She'd try to kill me."
"Or thank you."
I look at him sharply.
Vincent shrugs. "Look at what that trauma created. A woman perfectly suited for you. Maybe she'd see it as fate."
"Or maybe she'd see it as the ultimate violation."
"Only one way to find out."
But I won't.
I can't.
The plan is three nights of destruction, then I send her back to her life.
She'll never know the truth, and I'll have had my taste of corrupting the judge's legacy.
That's the plan.
I return to check on her one more time before dawn.
She's whimpering in her sleep, not from nightmares but from need, her thighs pressed together, my name on her lips.
"Cassius..."
She doesn't even know she's saying it.
Doesn't know she's calling for her parents' killer in her sleep.
I trace the marks I've left on her skin, and she arches into my touch even unconscious.
So responsive. So perfectly broken.
Three nights.
I have three nights to destroy her so completely she'll never recover, then send her away before she learns the truth.
Before I do something unforgivable.
More unforgivable than what I've already done.
I touch the scars on my knuckles from that night eight years ago.
I'd punched the wall after, angry at the messy kill, at the witness, at the complication.
Now that complication is in my bed, wearing my marks, calling me Sir.
Judge Deveraux, your daughter is exactly where you never wanted her to be: in my hands.
And she's begging for it.