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

by Maggie Sunseri

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.

“That’s a good girl,” he whispered, his voice now completely different from the sharp whip of his command. It was softer now as it carried my praise, and I refused to show him the way it affected me.

“Do you always treat your staff with this level of hands-on attention?” His eyes flashed, his lips twisting as he glanced again at mine. “No.” He paused, and my stomach again flipped when he craned his head closer. “I didn’t think I was being hands-on at all yet.” Yet.

He gently twisted a strand of my hair around his index finger, and I gasped. “I wanted to kill them, for making you scared.”

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.

She didn’t know it yet, but she was mine. I’d given her a chance to escape me, but instead she’d seemed just as unconsciously drawn to me as I was to her. It was as though her soul had chosen me before her brain had.

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

I stared up at Rune’s wicked, ethereal features, a beautiful nightmare in a field of violence and shadow.

“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 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.”

How else did he know about the emptiness? The way I felt surrounded by hundreds of people, yet still just as alone as I was when I escaped to the woods to stare up at the stars? The meaninglessness of every fling, every seduction, every game—the way a man could be inside of me and still not fill even an inch of the void in my soul?

She hated how much she wanted me, and it was deeply, intoxicatingly, satisfying. I wanted to break her. I wanted to see her lose every ounce of her self-control, melt into a puddle of need and desperation at my feet. I wanted her to look up at me with those piercing blue eyes and recognize me as the jailer of her heart and the owner of her body and soul.

I would not play his games. I would make him play mine.

I lay the dress over the couch and opened the note with shaking hands. 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. He didn’t sign it. He didn’t have to.

“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.”

“You’re sick,” I said. “And you love it.” He took a step back from me, his eyes roaming every inch of my body. “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.” My jaw hung open, but before I could call him a raging narcissist, he’d stuck two of his long fingers in my mouth.

“There are many people in this world who would love nothing more than to clip your wings. Stop doing it for them. Soar instead.”

The human side of me knew that Scarlett was mine, and he wanted to claim her in this life and every one of her lives after, for all of eternity.

I broke the surface, I heard Rune’s voice. “Don’t you dare give up, Little Flame. Or I swear I will fight Helia herself to drag you right back down here to live in hell with me.”

Because when I thought she’d died in my arms, I felt my soul reach for hers, and I swore to the gods that hers had reached right back.