TWENTY-FOUR
As I stared at Scarlett in the free-standing mirror, her black Venetian mask catching a trespassing blade of moonlight, she somehow looked cruel and amused by my hesitation in equal measure.
It shimmered with secrets waiting to be confessed.
Her knowing, half-shadowed eyes dared me to recoil, to withdraw from this thrill that still lived in me.
If I stared too long, I feared she’d sneer.
What was I becoming?
Was I her now, or had she always been buried beneath my skin, waiting for the right man to bleed her loose?
I looked down. My bare feet pressed into the plush hotel carpet, silken and silent.
The sensation brought me back to reality, if only for a moment.
Then, slowly, I raised my gaze again, touched up the red gloss on my lips – deep crimson, like ripe fruit – and smacked them in defiance, staining her mouth in return.
She mirrored me.
I let out a soft, dark chuckle.
I was making her into a living creature. But Scarlett wasn’t that. She wasn’t a fantasy I’d summoned in times of weakness.
She was me.
The version Travis tried to break. The one fear had tried to drown.
The plastic lip-gloss tube crinkled in my hand, warped under the pressure of my grip. I didn’t loosen it. I didn’t look away.
‘I’m not afraid,’ I whispered. She bared her teeth. ‘I am not fragile.’
My voice was steadier this time, more flesh than breath.
Inhaling deeply, I felt my lungs expand until the words settled like armour plating around my heart.
I’ve survived worse. Pain. Loss. The emptiness that filled me for years. I moved across the world and built a life from ash and syllables, turning my dream into survival.
And tonight, I’d invited the demon forged in the belly of hell to tear me apart – and I was thankful for every goddamned second.
My gaze fell to the bitemark at my shoulder, still tender, the skin slightly raised, the bruise deepening. I traced it. Pressed down gently. The sting pulsed with a delectable memory.
Then I saw the bruise high on my collarbone – like ink spilt just beneath the surface of my fevered skin.
Another press. Another sting.
He’d left that one when he came, pressing down, just that little bit harder, as his heat spilt across my chest.
Fuck, he was amazing. His muscles had tensed above me, every vein straining like rope pulled taut.
I felt his release ripple through him. So raw and unguarded.
Scarlett’s face shifted, turning solemn. Somehow, she looked… smaller. Trapped behind the frame.
And I realised – I wasn’t her.
I was the dark.
A slow breath escaped my lips. The barriers. The burdens—
They were gone.
I’d shed them all.
All that remained was the mask.
The pink on my skin.
And the truth beneath.
Turning towards the shadows, I glanced over my shoulder with a smile that tasted of blood and victory.
I could still feel the cold kiss of the blade tracing my spine when he’d mounted me from behind. Could still feel the demon in the mask pushing into me; one hand gripping my throat, the other clutching my hip, both dragging me back into myself. Pinching, biting, marking… worshipping my destruction.
His ragged snarl had broken against my neck.
The bindings had bit into my wrists.
Leather scored my skin in sweet punishment. I’d strained against them, needing the burn – the reminder. Every nerve in my body lit up, every breath became a prayer and a curse. Pleasure and pain braided so tightly that I’d forgotten which was which.
He’d wielded torment like art: slaps and bites that bruised into salvation, a careful orchestration of control and surrender. Each sound he made was a thread stitching me back together in a pattern only we could read.
This hadn’t been sex.
It was resurrection. Mine. I chose it. I let him pull me apart because I needed to be rebuilt, but… I forgot to protect myself against his pull.
He’d lured me to the edge of myself.
And when his solid weight pressed into me, I felt… untouchable. Powerful, even in surrender. Because this shift in power wasn’t weakness – it was freedom.
Here, behind the velvet curtains and between the shadows, I could finally let go. No masks except the one shown to others.
And as I stood there, naked and smiling into the dark, I knew exactly who I was.
I was my own – unbroken, unbound, unleashed.
Or so I told myself.
Until he appeared in my vision with shadows reclaiming his large form. He stepped out from behind the mirror, emerging from the bathroom.
Slowing his steps, he raised his chin – still beneath the mask – and drank me in from head to toe, as if trying to memorise every inch.
His gaze lingered on the red streaks left by the flogger, then climbed up to the crescent bite marks blooming on my shoulder where the bruises painted a confession into my skin. His fists balled at his sides, as if he were battling something I couldn’t see.
The breeze from the open window whipped at my bare skin like a slap of reality.
I didn’t know what possessed me when I whispered, ‘I love them.’
It startled even me. But I didn’t take the words back.
His breath ceased. For several heartbeats, I couldn’t see his chest moving.
‘I don’t know why,’ I said, ‘but you set me free with everything you do.’
He let out a long, slow exhale. And I couldn’t tell if it had been a sigh of relief or the weight of something too heavy to carry.
‘That freedom had always been yours, little angel.’ His voice was low and measured. He inhaled and held there for a beat. ‘I didn’t give you freedom – I just cracked the walls until you could see it for yourself.’
My lips parted, a thousand words tangled on the tip of my tongue. His black scleral lenses caught the neon scatter of the city outside, and it made them seem like endless, inhuman voids.
Then I realised—
‘You’re clothed.’ The words stumbled out as I stared at the jeans hugging his hips, the black long-sleeve tee stretched tight over the sculpted planes of his chest down to his wrists.
He said nothing. Just stood there, unmoving, and I stared, and stared – until awareness crawled in unwelcome. All the way into my throat.
Tears pressed against my lids, and I pushed them back with a shaky breath that followed a that hollow kind of shame for tethering myself to a stranger.
‘You’re not coming back.’ I swayed where I stood, the words breaking apart even as they formed.
And we both knew they were true.
‘No,’ he breathed.
The breeze suddenly felt colder, stripping away the last of the warmth.
‘Why?’ I whispered, hating the tremor in my voice, hating how small and selfish it sounded.
And how much the answer mattered.
He turned slowly, without a word, scooping up the duffel with that signature calm of his. Then headed for the door – not looking back.
Not even once.
My feet refused to move. My hands began to shake, and every inch of me burned with the ghost of his touch. Every mark, every sting, every place he’d claimed now ached with his absence. An impossible urge to chase after him flared between my ribs.
And then the door clicked shut.
He was gone.
It felt like a tether snapped – not just absence, but loss. But in the quiet that followed, something else settled in its place… what he had left behind.
Freedom. Self-worth. The echo of a voice that had forced me to see myself stripped to the bone and still unbroken. Washed in pain, cleansed in sin.
He hadn’t set me free.
He’d just brought the freedom out of me bleeding and screaming.
Like he’d said: he’d simply shown me I already was free – I just needed to see it myself, save my own sanity.
I jolted when my phone rang, the sudden sound slicing through the heavy silence, making my heart stutter. By reflex, I pivoted frantically towards my bag in the wardrobe, dropping my lip gloss.
Reclaiming the tube, I picked up my dress on the way and shoved myself into it in a clumsy rush. The fabric wiped my wet cheeks and snagged on my still-sensitive skin, as if it too refused to let go of what had happened.
By the time I reached the wardrobe door, I was breathless. I fished out my phone and glared at the screen: Gianna.
Every muscle tensed with the urge to hurl it at the wall.
Coaching myself into calming down, I answered, ‘Hey, cuz.’ My voice barely sounded like my own, thin and distant, as if travelling from somewhere far away.
‘Fuck me. Who kicked your puppy?’
I dragged a breath down to the pit of my lungs and held it until it burned – as if I could cauterise the ache there.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked stiffly, the clatter of whatever she was doing falling away into silence.
‘Ghost broke it off,’ I said shakily. The words scraped my throat raw. They weren’t quite right – too small for the weight of what they meant – but they still landed with a truth that felt heavier than anything else.
‘Oh. Shit. What happened? You okay?’
No. Not even close. ‘Yeah.’
‘Sure you are. Crazy ex on your tail, masked sex god off it… You need a good time, baby.’
I frowned. ‘Aren’t you on holiday?’
‘Boring. I came back a few hours ago. Holidays with family at twenty-eight are blah.’
I started fastening the straps of my shoes with restless fingers that wouldn’t obey, then yanked the wig off my head.
It usually felt like losing a piece of myself whenever I removed it.
Now, it felt like shedding something false.
Like peeling off something that had never really been mine to begin with.
‘You there, baby doll?’
‘I’m here.’ The words left my mouth on autopilot.
She groaned loudly. ‘All right. Plan for tonight: we’re going after some blood.’
I stood slowly, still feeling his hands on my skin, as I moved the phone slightly away and narrowed my gaze at the screen. ‘Uh… It’s two in the morning. Wait—’ I glared at the screen again. ‘Why are you calling me at two in the morning?’
‘I slept all day, so now I’m up.’ Right. Because that automatically meant I needed to be, too. ‘Come on, amore! Half-naked boys beating each other sounds exactly like what a scorned woman needs. That – and about seven Pina Coladas.’