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A collective laugh travels around the hall. I’m not intentionally funny. Snide and mocking, yes. Smug and egotistical? Oh, fucking absolutely. I’ve earned my notorious reputation. Unlike my peers, all striving, quite pathetically, to immortalize themselves by reinventing the philosophy wheel, I’ve already established myself in academia.
God I missed him
When I’m hungry, I eat. Pick Me girl would run away in terror if I showed her what I need in order to get off. My tastes have always been particular. But it’s like with any drug, the more you use, the harder it is to achieve the same high.
We don’t get the choice of where we originate from; but everything after is all choice.
“Light cannot exist without the dark. Good cannot exist without evil. The totality. Ergo, peace cannot exist without violence.”
Her calm surrender to logic quiets the raging storm of fury and madness which plagues my mind. By the same design, my chaotic frenzy awakens her heartsick soul with maddening vigor. One cannot exist without the other. I cannot exist without her.
As the early morning air crackles with a volatile, kinetic force, I sense the moment he enters my energy field. Like the darkest flint striking an abrasive surface, the friction of his presence scratches over my skin, heating my flesh. His fiery chaos pulses against my logical defenses, and my breathing becomes erratic.
Sheathed in a designer black suit tailored to his beautiful form, he’s the devil of deception and debauchery descending on Hollow’s Row once again.
“I can think of at least three different ways we can master our desires right now and save our damned souls, sweetness.” My heart pounds in my chest. “Go to hell, Kallum.” His smile is wicked. “Obligingly. But only with you by my side, angel.”
“If Alister touches you again, I’ll flay his skin from his tendons and carve my initials in his bones.”
“I’m crazy for you.” His gaze drifts over my body, deliberately taking in my soaked shirt. “Fucking certifiable. Capable of the most vile, monstrous acts.”
“It’s heated glances and charged near touches. It’s cruel words and fiery tempers. It’s instant chemical attraction across a quad when you make that first real connection, when you feel the center of gravity shift…and you know nothing will ever be the same again.”
“I want you,” he says, as relentless as the storm. “All of you. Your sexy as fuck body that drives me right out of my goddamn senses. Your intellectual mind, rational and logical to a frightening degree, but so fucking brilliant everyone else around you pales miserably by comparison. Your beautifully broken soul, so immersed in anguish it chokes me—” he swallows hard “—but I relish the pain. I’m begging for it, because the sweetest taste of you soothes the burn, and it’s fucking euphoric.”
“The villain only becomes such after he’s lost that which he cannot live without,” he says. “I’m in no need of a metamorphosis. I refuse to lose you.”
“There is no greater destruction than one of self. And therefore, no catalyst more powerful to wield in alchemic creation. Destruction isn’t an end—” “It’s a beginning,” she supplies, and my heart vaults to match the staccato beat of hers.
Little Halen, defending her devil. I think hell just froze over.
“Te adoro deam.”
All our lovely bad and beautiful things are derived from violence.
I reach up and touch Kallum’s face, trace the outlined hollows of the skull. Feeling the dried blood. The monster that feeds off my pain, my personified daemon, presented as the killer I’ve obsessively hunted. “The villain becomes a hero,” I say, my voice weak.
“And I’ll always be that man, Halen. The one who will spill blood for you. I should have torn out his entrails and let Devyn feed them to her minions. If that makes me a monster, I have no quandary in that regard. I might have stormed the castle and swept the princess into my arms, but I’m not the knight in shining armor.” Forcefully, I push my hands past the blanket and palm her waist. “In fact, I would destroy that fucker to steal the girl.”
