She hums, pretending to think, eyes glittering. “Then that must mean you’re mine, too.”
Fuck. Who the fuck is this girl? This isn’t the timid creature who bumped into me only a week ago. The demon has made itself a home inside her, and now—now it’s like she was always meant to be this.
And I fucking love it. And I fucking hate myself for loving it so much. If I say it again, I might believe it. Or worse—I might need it. Need her. And that’s the most dangerous fucking thing of all.
I snarl. She laughs. And I devour her.
We feed off each other for hours. The bond hums like a living thing between us, crackling with every thrust, every scream, every bite. Her hunger sharpens my own until I don’t know where mine ends and hers begins. The room shudders with our power, the air so thick it tastes like metal and lightning.
I know the other two leave, unable to stand listening to the lewd, violent sounds pouring from my bedroom. But I don’t fucking care.
We fuck until we collapse on the floor, slick with sweat and blood and power.
And now, thanks to her, I’ll have to replace my bed.
It takes me a moment to place myself. The world is the sticky, wrong kind of warm—heat pooled in the corners, shadows crawling like spilled ink along the edges of my vision.
For a breath I think I’m awake. Then I remember: this is not waking. This is a dream, her dream. Somewhere inside the bond a door cracked, and a part of me stepped through because a part of me could not help it.
I step forward into the scene, the way a predator pads into a room that already smells of prey. Cassiel is there on his knees, muscles strung tight, golden hair tangled around his face. He looks up at her with the awkward collision of defiance and surrender that I have seen in him before, that stubborn, hollow angelic thing.
Lillien stands above him like a goddess, fingers knotted in his hair, forcing his gaze to meet hers. She moves slow, deliberate, a predator making scripture out of sin. A sharp nail traces down his chest and the sound of his breath changes—short, ragged, as if the world has shrunk to that tiny channel of air.
She is corrupting him. Watching it should ignite something in me that hates it, something territorial and ugly and possessive, and it does. My cock tightens at the sight.
Cassiel, the one whose halo still remembers light, is bending under her hands and the bruise in me that answers to ownership burns. I want to wrench him away. Not from some noble love. Not from righteous jealousy. From the pure, animal need to kneel him where he belongs and to prove he does not, will not, take up space that belongs to me.
Then the dream shifts. The air thickens until it feels viscous. Shadows breathe like living things and the edges of the vision blur into a darker velvet. I sense another presence before I see him, the way a scent announces a guest long before the door opens. He is not me, but he islikeme. Older, blunted at the edges, hunger baked into the way his shoulders slope. Wrong. Poisoned beauty. He watches from the dark with a slow, knowing laugh threaded through the dream like a cord.
My bones go cold. My instincts flare, a wild animal’s map flaring crimson. He is here for her. He has been watching. The energy skittering over my skin tastes like treason. It is disturbingly familiar, as if some mirror of my own nature has been bred cruel and sharper. My jaw tightens. Everything in me is a coiled thing that wants one thing: to hunt, to erase, to tear.
I move toward him, ready to hunt and punish, to make the dream a battleground he will remember in every waking hour. The surge of hatred is an ocean and I intend to drown him in it. Then the dream rips away.
I wake with a start. Muscle and fiber reject the slide back into the small, violent clarity of my bedroom. My heart hammers a savage rhythm, my pulse a drum in my throat. Lillien is beside me but not still. Her body jerks beneath the sheets, a soft strangled whimper slipping from her lips. I know that sound as well as I know my own blood. It is a sound that belongs to someone who is still being trespassed.
Someone is stalking her in the dark places she cannot see. Someone is pressing his hands into the architecture of her sleep and mapping secret routes into her mind. The thought tastes like iron and bile and the promise of violence. I sit up. My fists curl until the skin creaks. Sweat chills on my skin but the chill is not fear. It is murder warming to the ready.
Let him come. Let him think he can touch her with nonsense he calls hunger. I will find him—dream or waking—and I will make him regret that his eyes ever measured her. I will tear him apart until the memory of her sleep is whole again.
I close my hand until the knuckles whiten and the world narrows to one clean, terrible thing: protect her, at any cost.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Darkness and firelight dance across the walls. Shadows fold and unfold like pages turned by an impatient god. Cassiel kneels before me, beautiful and obedient and already tasting of surrender. His silver-blue eyes burn up at me, breath stuttering.
He should not be here. He should not be like this. Yet he is, and the realization sets something inside me alight. It is a delicious cruelty, a possession that curls in my chest and roots its claws in my gut. I want it to stay there forever.
Power does not merely hum through me. It drums, then swells, pouring low, hot, between my legs. Watching him fall beneath my hands scratches a deeper pleasure than any alone in a stranger’s bed. It is not only the sight of him; it is the way he tastes. Salt and sweat tremble in the air, the warm exhale of his breath brushing my skin.
When I push my fingers past his lips into the heat of his mouth his muscles tighten, his jaw clenches, and there is that delicious, animal sound he makes when he is caught between resisting and surrendering.
I pull his hair until he hisses. He could fight me if he wanted, but he won’t. He wants this. He wants me. He wants to fall. AndI will be the one to drag him down, made reverent by his collapse at my feet.
My nails trace a slow line down his chest and his muscles twitch beneath my touch; so strong and yet so breakable. A shudder runs through him and I see the shadow nested under his skin, the darkness that waits for permission. All I need to do is press, and it blooms.
My thumb presses past his lips again. He groans, tongue flicking against my skin in a small, devoted sound.
“Good boy.”
