45
‘Say something,’ Elias whispers.
He stays in the doorway. One hand rests against the frame, but he makes no move to come further in.
I curl my fingers tighter around the remote.
‘Tell me about this,’ I say quietly.
He shifts his weight. His attention moves over the camera and the bed, then up the amber-lit walls, then returns to my face.
One hand flexes briefly at his side.
‘This room once contained one demon. Now it’s remade for two to roam free,’ he says darkly.
I observe the beautiful creature framed by the doorway. Pale skin. Shadowed lashes. Strength wrapped around the wound I’ve spent months circling without understanding what my hands were making.
I had imagined healing him as a kind of unfastening: chains falling away, violence softened into a gentler thing. But he has not asked me to remove the darkness. He has built boundaries, switches and doors for it – and placed the power button within my reach.
I press it.
The projector comes to life with a soft whirr, casting a shifting light across the wall above the headrest. A second later, colour spills onto the screen.
It’s us.
Captured from one of the lower angles – the more unforgiving ones.
His mouth is pressed to my neck, teeth buried in skin, my body arched beneath him, lips parted in a cry I remember down to the echo in my bones as we move in a decadent rhythm.
His hand is barely visible in the frame, his fingers splayed over my breast.
I don’t need the whole frame. One image is enough to pull the moment back intact – every sensation from that time, every surrender, every wicked promise remade.
‘Penny for your thoughts?’ he asks softly. That tone – once laced with danger – now melts into something far more potent, sending heat through me instead of locking my body with fear.
He waits for me to decide what this room means instead of deciding for me. Because he finally knows that I’d never weaponise his hunger, the twists and curves of his desire – only match them.
Moving from one camera to the next, calibrating angles and adjusting tripods, I reach the final one and the tremor in my fingers becomes anticipation.
‘Dim the lights,’ I murmur without looking at him.
He hesitates for a second before his hand lifts slowly to the switches.
The lights morph into a rich sepia, just enough to highlight movement, just enough to paint skin in shades of gold.
‘Take off your clothes,’ I whisper.
His shoulders relax. I haven’t even realised how rigidly he’s been standing while letting me process everything.
He crosses a few steps towards the small drawers at the desk, pulling out a bottle. It flies in an arc until it lands in my hand.
I flip it over to show the label.
Lavender Massage Oil.
Before I look up again, his fingers are already working the hem of his black jumper upwards, exposing the first hard ridges of his stomach.
I chase the lines over the ripple of muscle, the flex of tattoos. I match him, undoing buttons, peeling away layers.
‘On the bed,’ he rumbles, the words moving across my spine like silk and flame and desolation I can’t wait to drown in.
Backing away slowly, crawling up the mattress, I watch the glint in his eyes darken with every movement I make.
I’m not entirely sure what decadence he’s planning – but the hunger on his face is enough to tell me it won’t matter once it begins.
‘I want to watch you use that oil on yourself,’ he says.
My eyes trace its outline in my palm as something wicked comes over me – because he’s voiced his want aloud this time.
I toss the bottle back to him. He catches it one-handed, eyes narrowing, lips parting with a soundless question as his body locks up.
‘You do it,’ I whisper.
A slow inhale. A twitch of his jaw. That delicious flicker of a smirk.
‘Demon,’ he breathes.
I reach both hands towards him.
Starving.
He comes towards me slowly, every honed angle of his naked body polished further by the low light.
If this is what damnation feels like, I never want to be saved.
Twisting my hair up into a loose knot, I close my eyes and offer my throat without hesitation.
The first contact is cool, almost shocking, as the oil spills over my skin and runs downwards in slow, indulgent lines. His hands follow, spreading warmth through it with a pressure that makes me dizzy with need. Thumbs sweep along the line of my collarbones before gliding down over my breasts.
Pinching both my nipples, he rolls them gently until the nerves flare all the way to my core. The contrast between the slick glide towards my ribs and the intensity of his touch makes my skin pebble. I feel him everywhere at once as he takes his time to memorise me by touch alone.
I press my oiled hands to his hard chest, spreading the slickness over the muscle, up across his shoulders and down his arms, trailing the lines of ink that make him all the more damning.
He feeds on my hunger with dark reverence and watches as I explore him slowly, worshipping him with each pass.
But unlike his touch, mine drifts lower, slipping through the sparse trail of hair. His breath skips when I coil my hands around the base of him. I hold him there, pulsing in my palm. It’s the way I give him time to work through the arousal and the ghosts beneath it, until all he feels is my touch.
His jaw clenches as soon as I begin slow, measured strokes, each breath leaving him less evenly than the last. The blue of his gaze turns a darker shade until only a narrow ring of ice remains, and I feel the precise moment need begins pressing against the edges of his control.
He doesn’t close his eyes any more. He doesn’t turn his face away or swallow the sound that threatens to rise.
His hand slides over my hip, down the trembling line of my thigh, then drifts inwards until his fingers dip into the soft flesh between my legs.
My breath breaks against his.
I arch into his palm and let him feel how much I want him there.
We sink sideways onto the bed, the sheets catching at our oiled skin as if the linen itself can’t let go. Every slow drag of his fingers between my thighs pulls another sound from my throat, while every stroke of my hand around him chips away at the last brittle sense of civility.
He parts me for the cameras with firm hands, holds me open beneath the warm, low lights.
I should feel exposed. But with the moans coming from the speakers, with the sounds of our bodies meeting, I feel chosen instead.
I guide his length, watching the sheen cling to the black waves of his hair spilling over his forehead. My eyes lower to his arms, muscles shifting with every movement as he pushes in.
The stretch steals all thought from me.
He fills me slowly, heavily, and my body struggles to make room not just for the size of him, but for everything he has been holding back that he is now ready to give me. My spine arches from the sheets, mouth open around a sound that barely survives, and Elias bows over me with a broken groan.
From the speakers, our replayed breaths spill into the room: his roughened growls, my fractured cries, the rhythmic creak of the furniture beneath. The echoes fold over the sounds we make now.
Time becomes the small red pulse of the recording lights, the rasp of linen beneath my shoulder blades, the low murmur of our voices as he turns me, lifts me, bends me into another shape for the cameras to remember, and the mirrors to emphasise.
The pace splinters when his hand snakes into my hair and closes hard, hauling my head back until my throat lies bare beneath him.
My need bursts as heat follows the pain from my roots down my spine and crashes in my core, where his hips start driving forward harder.
His tongue drags slowly over my neck, tasting me with a sound so dark it nearly pushes me over the edge.
The recording eventually reaches its end. Our last encounter flickers once across the wall, then disappears into a blank square of light.
By the time the oil has soaked into our skin, and the air has grown too scarce to breathe without tasting him in it, I no longer know which version of us the cameras have captured this time and which new version emerged from it.
His hands keep finding me in the dimness.
My name keeps breaking apart in his mouth.
His fingers shift between us, slide between my lips, push back into my hair, then coil around my throat. His grip turns rougher as the movements begin to lose their pace.
My heel slips against the sheets, my nails drag over his strong shoulders while the bed complains beneath it all. Breath comes in torn gasps, skin striking slick skin, neither of us holding anything back.
Somewhere amidst the heat, the shadows, and the silent witnesses pointed towards the bed, I realise the most dangerous thing about this room is not that Elias built it for our demons.
It’s that mine know exactly how to behave here.
A bead forms at his temple and slides down as his eyes hold mine, zeroing in on my mouth each time a cry tears through, feeding that ravenous demon in him.
His thrusts drive me towards the edge until my vision starts disintegrating.
‘I need to fill you, Leah,’ he rasps.
The meaning doesn’t click right away.
‘I’m going to make you take it all…’
‘No… Too dangerous…’
‘Yes,’ he growls. ‘Please… tell me you want to. You took it once before.’ He moans with the next thrust. ‘You wanted it back in that visitor room too, didn’t you? You wanted me to mark you.’
I open my mouth to deny it, but he shifts the angle of his hips, and light fractures across my vision, scattering every remaining coherent thought.
He has never been able to speak of things like this before. Never allowed himself to want aloud. I need to hear it again.
I hold what little breath I have left as a ragged sound tears from him.
His hands abandon my hips to clasp mine, fingers threading tightly around each other as he lowers himself fully over me.
With every inch of space gone between us, I feel… everything.