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

by Maggie Sunseri

For soulmate love—however dark, powerful, & all-consuming.

Tips were the objective. It didn’t matter how the patrons stared, how they spoke to me, or how their wives or girlfriends felt about it. All that mattered was my survival. My future. And the future I owed Isabella too, for taking care of me all these years, even when she hated me.

It was getting harder to avoid reaching hands, especially from the wealthier men. They always thought handing me exorbitant amounts of money meant they owned me, no longer a person but merely a collection of body parts.

I didn’t belong in Crescent Haven. That much I knew. But there was this nagging voice, the one that sounded like my sister, who whispered the cruelest words of all. You don’t belong anywhere. And you know it. Run from the truth, but it will always catch up to you. The emptiness will always be there, and it’s growing.

I was being watched. Not just by the human men from Aristelle. By something stronger, darker, and more ruthless, something that awakened all of my buried pieces and threatened to lay them bare and spread for all to see.

She looked away, and the moment passed. And not only did I feel insane, but I also felt like the world’s biggest creep. I was watching an unsuspecting human child have a silent existential crisis, stalking her by her scent. What the fuck was wrong with me?

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.

Maybe I’d be punished in the underworld for all of eternity for my selfishness, for the darkness inside of me that pulsed with greed and desire. But until then, I would live. I would burn.

The screaming hadn’t saved me, so I began to shut down, to remove my mind from my body. I had to split, to detach. I had to float up into the night sky so I wouldn’t feel a thing, no pain and no struggle and no sensation.

But most of the time, the truth was far sadder. Most men and boys did not have even the slightest capacity to ascertain the complex emotional landscape of another person’s mind, least of all one belonging to someone they wanted to fuck.

My city needed me ruthless and of sound, calculated mind. Not inexplicably captivated by a random human child—the only little creature capable of bringing back what I could never admit I missed dearly.

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. She was so used to manipulating desire, and I wanted her to set her sights on me. I wanted her to become frustrated when I refused to bend and downright terrified when she realized that her heart was the only thing ever truly in danger.

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.

But we found a way. Or maybe she had found a way through me. Because people wanted to give me things. They just equally wanted to take.

The first time a man made me go to that empty place in the stars, I didn’t come back to my body for three days.

“Scarlett, I’ve seen you flirt with Trevin at least a dozen times,” she said slowly, her brows rising as her voice burned with frustration. “And now you’re trying to tell me that the reason you refuse to contribute to household chores or go to work—to keep a roof over our heads—is because he finally gave in to your shameless, vile seduction attempts?”

“You’re a parasite, Scarlett. Mom and Dad knew it, and now I do too.”

“I hope you change your mind,” I said. “I love you, Jaxon. I hope the coast is just as beautiful as it looks in the paintings. Thank you for being my friend for as long as you have.” Before you decided it wasn’t worth it anymore. Just like Isabella. Like my parents. Like everyone I’d ever been close to.

The sun fell early, beholden to autumn’s call for darkness and introspection.

I was Aristelle’s stunned and captivated prey, a willing sacrifice on her altar of sublimity.

took Millie, my shadowbird.

It was about identifying a lack and then subtly emphasizing it, propositioning myself as the only thing in the universe that would fill that void.

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.

I’d made the morally correct decision in Crescent Haven. I’d let her go. But now that she’d defiantly fought her way back to me, planting herself before the most powerful beast in a city full of them, I wouldn’t be making the same mistake again.

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.

all men had ever done was disappoint me. Emotionally, sure, but sexually too. There were a few decent experiences, but good sex rarely accompanied good connection and mental stimulation. It was all bits and pieces of pleasure from different people, never aligning into something deeply satisfying in all ways. The

“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.”

This time, when Isabella’s voice demanded to be heard, I listened. You’re a selfish whore. While I’m currently being tortured, abused, and drained of my blood and will to live, you’re rubbing up on a fascist vampire. A monster just like the ones who stole me from my bed. Look at you. There’s a reason your slutty witch friend couldn’t see your tar black soul.

Because you cannot actually live forever. You can only exist.”

But the more time I spent with them, the more I saw this loneliness inside of them that I fundamentally understood but didn’t know why.

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

Various gags? The hell did that mean? I was beginning to understand that Rune was some kind of pervert. An ancient, ruthless, clinically insane sexual deviant whose undivided attention was, for some unfortunate reason, directed at me.

Not because when I looked into Rune’s eyes, I saw the cosmos. Not because when he touched me, I tasted the full brunt of desire for the first time in my life, molten and all-consuming. Not because when his attention was on me, I burned with my own aliveness. And not because, most terrifying of all, when I was with him, I didn’t feel so alone anymore.

“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.”

“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

“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.”

But I’d believe anyway, in a quiet, secret sort of way. That all the horrible things that had happened to me and the people I loved weren’t in vain.

That maybe I’d been hurt and violated and sent to the empty place because that was what needed to happen in order to weave my path into something beautiful and destined. Because it was only through knowing the darkness that I could one day find myself drowned in light. I believed in love written in the stars because I couldn’t fathom living in a world without it.

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

And I was fucking angry, because I couldn’t open my eyes wide enough to look up at the stars. I couldn’t leave my body behind and go to the empty place where nothing hurt, and nothing was real.

It looked like all of that trauma was for nothing, after all. Maybe in the next life.

“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.”

“But the human girl won’t take the universal blood type. As soon as we tried, she had a reaction that would’ve left her dead if we proceeded. We cannot figure out why. All we could do was soothe the immune response, but we can’t replenish her blood supply.”

Actually, the emotions I was truly embodying were something more like helplessness and fear, but those weren’t safe emotions to show or admit, even in my own castle. They weren’t emotions I’d thought I was even capable of anymore.

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.

“You are here, in this room, with me. And there’s no safer place in this world for you.”

“There is no competition in trauma. None of it is ever better or worse than any other. Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside of you as a result of what happens to you.”

First: Rune had buried himself so deep inside of my mind in such a short time that I was sure I’d become hopelessly dependent. Second: Whether or not I resisted, or if this was just a twisted game or a thrilling conquest to him, didn’t change how I felt. I’d been trapped and captured, even if I couldn’t admit it. On some level, he likely already knew.

His lips found my neck, and again my voice was lost. When Rune kissed me, touched me, whispered praise in my ear, it was like everything I’d ever been searching for in this world had finally found me.