Stalked by Seduction and Shadows (Eternal Obsession, #1)

by Maggie Sunseri

Tears ran down the girl’s cheeks as she held the panicked, wounded animal in her small arms, heaving with the bittersweetness of mortality. What beauty and what torment. What love and what utter devastation. This child felt it all.

She was a flame, the pure fire of mortality that kept humans striving, yearning, living in all of its messy, perilous splendor, seeking beauty even as they faced death.

Sometimes I felt dead inside, but really, I was alive—so fucking alive—and my life was out there.

But this girl—she was the red and orange of autumn leaves in the looming, dark woods. She was the flame of life that burned on and on, the warmth I would never feel again, the embers that had dimmed when I’d forsaken my humanity for an eternity of ice and death.

Because in the last couple years I’d been dimming like a dying star, and I’d decided that the world was too grand and unknown to succumb quietly into the void.

She was a perplexingly complex creature, full of such deep sadness almost as great as her bursting, uncontainable delight.

A jolt of anger turned my blood molten, and I was surprised by its intensity. I didn’t like the way they’d pulled her out of the happiness she’d wrapped around herself. The way they’d stolen her from her own, carefully crafted reality and made her an object in theirs.

Your honour. I love him.

The pain a living parent could inflict was much more excruciating than that of a dead one.

Im fcked :'(

I would’ve trained her. I would’ve made sure she knew how to defend herself against anything and anyone who stood to threaten her.

Slay

And that was what I wanted most. I wanted to gaze inside the powerful, haunted, beautiful mind of which I had only ever caught glimpses. I wanted to pry her open and drag her hidden pieces out into the chilly autumn air. I wanted to hold her trauma in my palms and study it, find where the tears began so I could help her mend them. I wanted to know her void and how compatible it was with mine. My pain wanted to flirt with hers.

Live, Little Flame. If you can survive what you have and still burn this blindingly, I have no doubt you will lead a life worthy of immortalization. Not the kind that has killed and buried my soul—but the kind that lives on with your children and ancestors in spoken word, or ink on pages that make it to strangers across the realm. Live. Burn. And never, ever, let them dim your fucking light.

“I don’t want men to want my body. I want them to love what’s underneath.”

I knew I shouldn’t have apologized, but I couldn’t help it. I was grieving her too, and a part of me would always stay reaching for her, no matter how many times she shoved me away.

But my own friend, singular, sounded pretty pathetic.

Relatable lol

I was merely prey caught in her web, a willing votary at her temple, no matter how much I fantasized about my Scarlett on her knees calling me God.

Im ready.

I wasn’t delusional, or, at least, I was self-aware of my own delusions.

Same girl

Oh, Goddess. There I went, speaking to people out of my weight class like I had the fight to back myself up.

The way this is me

“That’s a good girl,”

Oh im so gone

And while nothing had ever been more terrifying, neither had anything ripped through me so intensely, burrowed so sneakily inside the deepest crevices of my mind.

She was the brightest thing in this club, this city, this island, and beyond. When I was near her, I remembered what it felt like to face my own death. She’d roused me from the longest, deepest slumber, painting my world in color again after centuries in the shadows.

In the fizzy electrolyte water, I’d planted a drop of my blood. As soon as Little Flame had taken a sip, she’d been marked. My essence was planted inside her, forever. No longer would I need to track her by scent.

Oh shit

She didn’t know it yet, but she was mine.

Yes master

She was the same little girl who held the trapped, wounded rabbit in her arms, the one who sang mournful songs to the stars. Yet she was also now this woman of many faces—this eternal mystery, a bundle of contradictions and big, deep feelings—an object of everyone’s desire who belonged to no one but herself.

All of Aristelle could gaze upon my Little Flame for all I cared, but just one touch, and I’d make sure they fucking burned.

Her nightmare, her monster, the only thing in this world I wanted my Scarlett to fear.

Shhh. Calm down, baby. The only reason you’d have to worry is if you were to invite a different man to enjoy what belongs to me.

im disgusted that im highlighting this

She was going to think I was bragging. That I deserved the things that had happened to me, especially after I told her how I intentionally drew attention and used it for my own benefit.

Shame enveloped me, and I worried if Snow could see my darkness. The parts of myself that I didn’t understand—the ones that made me different from my family, my peers, and my entire village. The unbelonging that threatened to swallow me whole.

This was the strange thing about touch and comfort, closeness and vulnerability. When confronted with everything I’d ever wanted, everything I’d lacked from my parents, from Isabella, from my small community—I ran from it.

The answer was no. No other mortal or vampire had ever made me feel this way. Not any of the turned or born vampires that had flirted with me last night or had stopped me on the street. Their beauty was captivating, but none had stoked this level of desire. None had this kind of irrational, indescribable hold over me. I was in danger.

“Because you have a big heart,” he said with a cold, sinister smile. “And seeing your lovers lose appendages or disappear off the face of the earth might make it crack a little. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

“I’m merely trying to protect you from the regret of lost hours on dull mediocrity, disappointment, and selfish, lackluster performances. I’d rather you suffer at my hands, personally. In far more thrilling ways.”

“I will ruin all others for you, Scarlett,” he said. “Anything else but us will only feel empty, meaningless, soulless. I will be the only thing you can see, the only being worthy of touching you, of seeing all of you.” His power stilled, a resolute calmness eclipsing his features. “That is what I will demand of you, and what you will eventually give freely. All of you. The parts that you hide, the parts that you hate, the parts that others have made you ashamed of, the parts that you flaunt and wield as weapons.”

As much as I wanted to break her, I also wanted to preserve the fire in her blood that made her so stupidly, recklessly brave and defiant. I loved the way she burned.

“Something tells me you will become your most powerful self when you learn to love what makes you stand out.”

Take your witch friend. You deserve to see, hear, taste, and touch all the beautiful pleasures this world has to offer. You burn too brightly to have anything less than it all.

I thought I was the insane one in this relationship, but this girl was absolutely giving me a run for my fucking money.

Heheheh

“And yet you burn. Despite everything you’ve endured, all the pain and the loneliness and the grief and the betrayal, you burn fucking blindingly, like you can’t help but be anything less than radiantly alive. In you I see hope that never dies, and some might call it weak or naive, but I think it’s the most beautiful thing about you, this radical choice to be open and warm in a world that is overwhelmingly cold and brutal.”

Who did Scarlett think she truly was? Something told me the people she’d grown up with, especially her sister, had poisoned her against herself, all in desperate, envious attempts to dull her vibrancy. It would now be my job to help her undo that damage, to see past their lies and free herself from her own limiting beliefs. Scarlett’s darkness was just as captivating and endlessly intriguing as her light.

“I will earn your trust,” I said. “And then I will demand everything from you. Your secrets, your desires, your needs, and your every last dream. I will make sure you live the life you have always deserved.”

“No. The first time you’re fed from will be after you’ve sufficiently begged me to claim you, and I don’t think you’re ready to do that yet,” he said. “Because after I have my first taste of you, no other blood will ever again be satisfying. And I will be addicted to you even more than I already am, body and soul.”

Hehehehehe

“Scarlett, my beautiful, helpless toy, I will bring you more depraved ecstasy than you could ever conceive. I will bring you to the edge of your limits, flood you with so much pleasure and sensation that your body will give out, and then I’ll do it all over again. I will find and exploit your every weakness and use them to both satisfy and torment you endlessly. I will fuck your perfect mind even harder and deeper than I will fuck your divine body. I will make you the best, strongest, most powerful version of yourself. I will destroy you and remake you in my image as your Master and God.”

I think i just died

“And part of making you the best version of yourself will be teaching you that your thoughts and beliefs are not always reality. Especially not when it comes to who you are and what you’re capable of.”

Rune was going to destroy me, set my body and mind on fire as I handed him the matches.

“You don’t believe in your own perfection yet, but one day you will. I’ll make sure you see yourself the way I do even if I have to destroy the entire realm to do it.”

“Artists, witches, and mystics often speak of the phenomenon of two souls meeting here on earth who knew each other in past lifetimes, or on some other plane of existence that we traversed before our lives began. And that’s why it sometimes feels like we know people before they tell us who they are. That’s why certain beings draw us in and others repel us. Because we’re all stuck in this karmic web together, predestined to love and hurt the same souls over and over until we finally learn the gods’ will.”

I believed in love written in the stars because I couldn’t fathom living in a world without it.

“Sometimes, when you’re really excited about something, or you’re deep in that zone you enter in Odessa when you’re working the room—there are these lapses, as if you realize you’ve flown too high. You clip your own wings. You push yourself back down. You reach to cover yourself, to hold back your true thoughts and feelings. No one is ever born with that instinct; that’s something we’re taught. Abusers don’t just drain us of our light. They also condition us to dim it for them, even when they’re not in our lives anymore.”

“But it’s not enough to take care of a child’s basic needs. The emotional self is just as important. Did she make you feel safe? Did you feel like you could lean on her when you were upset? Did she provide you with comfort? Praise? Physical affection?”

“You don’t have to hate her. You don’t have to feel anything that you don’t feel. Resentment is a hollowing emotion. I think holding on to it can be a way to perpetuate our pain.”