I wait until she focuses on me. My cock is already stiff when I reach for her hand and place it on my hip, positioning her fingers so that she can feel every jagged variation in the skin. Then I watch her, my eyes narrowed, and issue one single command.
Daniela
“Count,” the devil tells me, pressing my fingertips into the ridge of scars that turn the top of his thigh into one of those “Touch and Feel” books they would give me in school to help me connect common sensations with the English words.Soft. Fur. Feathers.
Lucifer feels...raw. A million stories lurk within his skin. A million new words and sensations to learn. I drag my thumb along his thigh, straining to see the irregular, silvery edges of the cuts. It’s too dark, however. Touch is the only sensation I can employ to study him, and I’m greedy to learn.
“Count,” he told me. His scars, I assume. But I already have, though the number is somewhere...deep...down...away. I have to start over.
My head swims around the room while I crawl to the edge of the bed and use him like an anchor to hold myself upright. Naughty, naughty Daniela. I pretend that I don’t notice his cock as I cling to him. My head comes too close, the tip of him grazing my hair. Lucifer growls, but like a good teacher, he won’t let himself forget the task at hand. His grip is a vise clamped down over my throbbing fingers as he steers them to the top of his row of scars.
Count.I do, carefully stringing the numbers together like popcorn on the Christmas garlands my mother and I used to make.Um, dois, três, quarto.I take my time, learning him with every degree of dedication it took to learn English. Dante is a tougher, more archaic code to crack. I’m on the fourteenth dash when he finally decides to speak.
“I made the first one the night I swore...that I wouldn’t let it happen again. He wouldn’t come into my room again. I’d stop him.”
A darkness taints his words. I can see it dripping out of his beautiful mouth and speckling the air like spray paint. I keep counting, however, using my grip on his leg to keep myself tethered.Fifteen. Sixteen.
“The fucker liked to wait until he thought I was asleep,” he says, his gaze on the far wall, his jaw clenched. “Sometimes he knew that I’d raid his liquor cabinet and drink whatever I could find just to make it easier to pass out...” He breaks off, inhaling and exhaling hate like a dragon. His body ripples with emotions that spill into my waiting hands. Morehate. Hate. Hate. Fear. Regret...
“I cut myself that night,” he tells me, brushing his hands alongside mine to prod the remnants of that very first shallow wound. “As a reminder. This was the last time... There was a knife under my bed. I was ready for the fucker. Then he came in and I just...lay there while he fucked me like an animal.” His voice breaks, but I have never heard such a dangerous sound pass the devil’s lips. He’s a creature formed entirely of rage.
My fingers tremble against his white-hot skin, and I’ve lost count. I start over, but this time, I let my hands fall and bring my face in close, brushing my lips against his uneven flesh. His story is too complex to be felt. It needs to be inhaled. Swallowed. Consumed.Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen.
“I did the same thing the next night,” he continues by the time I finally reach the twenty-eighth mark. “And the next. And the next—” He inhales sharply when my tongue grazes his skin.
My lips go dry at his taste. Sweat and musk, way more potent than whatever’s in my veins. He travels deep down inside me to where no one else has ever been. A place that Vinny doesn’t even know exists. It swells with the presence of him, and I’m infested with the devil himself.
“Thirty-four days,” he says, his voice catching over the words. It’s more than a number. It’s the price of his soul. Thirty-four days before he finally managed to fight his way out of hell. “I didn’t use the knife, either. I hit him...with my fists. I kicked him. I couldn’t stop. The bastard wasn’t even hurt. He didn’t try to stop me when I ran out of the house, half fucking naked, screaming that I’d tell the police. Maybe he wanted me to...” Helaughs; it’s a twisted hollow sound that drips down over his chest like falling blood. “I was twelve.”
My head throbs beneath the weight of his confession. It wants to sink back down into the warmth...the nothingness. My brain doesn’t want to feel, for once. It wants to sleep. The drug makes it so very easy to sleep.
But the devil’s taste is on my tongue. I wince as I sink forward and fall to my knees. My mouth is on him, still pressed against the shrine of his body, and I breathe in each word of his morbid sermon. I memorize every cut, and he lets me clumsily attempt to trace every one. His bitter truth is enough to counter the opposing rush of the heroin.
But it’s a bittersweet cure—he’s ruined one high and given me another. The substance he wields takes me impossibly higher than anything else, but he’s stingy. He won’t ever give me another taste, and my teeth sink into his flesh in punishment, though my jaw feels too heavy to truly bite down.
He flinches back with a hiss, raking his fingers through my hair to latch onto the back of my skull. He forces me to look up, holding my gaze. Then he hauls me upright and shoves me back onto the bed, leaving me there while he stands against the wall.
He watches as my tongue shoots out and seeks all traces of his taste from my lips. He watches me swallow every last bit. He watches...and he knows exactly which budding addiction will win out when I finally come down from the high.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Daniela
Morning descendswith all the intensity of a freight train slamming into my chest at full speed. My lips part beneath a groan first, cracked and painfully dry. Next, my eyes blink themselves open to a stained, grimy ceiling illuminated by a swath of gray daylight.
My brain is mush, my skull composed of a million bricks that clatter together when I try to sit up. I barely lift my head clear of whatever lies beneath it only for it to fall right back down. It takes three attempts before I can roll over onto my hands and knees. I’m shaking, forced to rock back and forth to stay upright. The world is spinning when I finally manage to lift my head and focus on the shadowy figure watching me from across the room.
“Get up,” Lucifer commands. His tone is clipped with impatience.
How long has he been waiting? How long has he been wondering whether or not I’d survive my little brush with a powerful opiate? His eyes reveal nothing as I scramble to remember how to control my limbs. It hurts when the muscles in my legs contract in order forme to stand. They shake too badly, and I flop back onto the mattress, clinging to handfuls of the comforter for balance.
Panting, I glance at him through the wild, tangled mess of my hair. “Help... Help me.” I hold my hand out, gauging his reaction to the request.
His eyes narrow, but before I can even guess whether or not he’ll move, he approaches me and snatches my wrist.
I cry out when he pulls me to my feet. The bastard isn’t gentle. I stagger forward and have to clutch at the wall for balance. Clinging to it, I tremble, every nerve loose and unstable.
“Look at me.” He’s at my shoulder and grabs for my chin himself when I don’t obey quickly enough.
