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

by Maggie Sunseri

But that wasn’t the sickness. The sickness was the way my mouth opened, and my body stilled, my mind succumbing to the headspace I hadn’t stopped thinking about since I’d come undone on Rune’s fingers. The headspace of complete release.

Because everything twisted and sick inside of me thirsted for everything sick and twisted inside of him.

“Lillian’s daughter, born of a human lover. Heraphane, the first succubus.”

“Oh, they’re real. They’re just extremely rare, thank the gods. They make for excellent born spies. I’ve enjoyed killing quite a few of them during my reign. Slippery, soulless demons spawned occasionally from a born-human pairing.”

I pitied the poor little seductress. She had no idea how much I would take, how much I would demand from her. Her every breath she would breathe only for me. It would be through my will alone that she could ever find relief, solace, and touch.

He manages to convey the imprisonment of immortality so heartbreakingly even as he uses only the brightest, most vivid colors. It’s a juxtaposition, you see. Because you cannot actually live forever. You can only exist.

anhedonia

inability to feel pleasure

I’d learned that in order to retain pleasure for things like art, aesthetic beauty, music, food, or philosophy, those muscles required constant upkeep.

The born, as children of Lillian, may have been predestined to be soulless demons. But I had once been human, and that was something I refused to let die. I would never be like them.

“Scarlett, I would drink your darkness, bathe in it, pull it into me while I held you inside my own.” I let my cloud of shadows seep from my skin

“I think the best things in this world defy logic. They just are. Nameless, formless. All feeling, devoid of the bondage of logic and limited mortal understanding.”

“To varying degrees. Family is the stage upon which generational pain is reenacted over and over again, the same story with different characters.”

“They can be, yes. Most try, but few succeed. It’s difficult for mortals to recognize patterns from their own limited perspective. They can’t see the way their great grandparents passed wounds to their grandparents, their grandparents to their parents. They can’t hear the echoes of the eons, fathom the trauma they absorbed from something that happened centuries ago, spread through words and actions here in the present.”

“I cannot fathom not wanting to see you, all of you. Your voice is my new favorite sound.”

They all tried their best. Maybe it hadn’t been enough. I’m starting to see that now. But it was still their best.”

Because this was not my gathering, not my goddess, not my devotion to feed off. Selfish parasite. Attention-whore.

Because I knew she likely had an empty place of her own now, the gray void of numb escape that relieved the body of absorbing shock. And it didn’t matter to me that she’d blamed me for my own, accused me of inviting men to hurt me. I wouldn’t wish what had been done to me on anyone else. She hadn’t understood that pain when it had been carved into my skin. She did now. And that brought me nothing but unrelenting torment.

“Because if you didn’t know she was human, and I’d heard that description without having met her, I’d have bet everything I own that she was a succubus.”

Sadie threw her head back, her magnetic laughter spilling out into the autumn air. “Goddess, no, Rune. What if they unionize? Elect alpha subs to lead the pack and represent their interests? What a headache.”

“You deserve so much more than what life has handed you, Scarlett. Don’t accept the half-love that you’ve grown accustomed to. Only accept the full, staggering devotion that you deserve. It’s what we all deserve. To feel wholeheartedly chosen, desired, secure, and nurtured. Anything less is theft.”

No, what Rune and I had couldn’t be love. It was too dark, too big, too violent of a push and pull.

He wanted to tell me more. He desired to open up to me. I repeated these mantras, willing him to bend to my will.

His human life had been appalling. Having to kill his abusive father to protect his mother and sisters, only to have his mother shun him, was bad enough. Now to know that his sisters had been slain by vampires? Rune was nothing if not a protector. He must’ve felt so anguished, completely helpless. No wonder he’d chosen to become the strongest version of himself, to avoid ever feeling that way again.

And Helia save me, I wanted to be his.

Because being in Rune’s presence was the only place I’d ever truly felt like I belonged. Watched by all, Rune was the only one who truly saw me.

“This position is called humble.” He retracted his foot.

He brushed a thumb over my lip, and his tenderness didn’t steady me. It only broke me further. This collar around my neck attached to the chain he held in his tight grip—we were this act of depravity, yet so much more. We were the meaning behind the props and the theater. We were the exchange of trust and the flow of surrender and devotion. We were the obsession and the addiction, the love and the art and the poetry. Life, in all of its complexity and duality, its grit and its unending fire.

“All of you. But especially the parts you save only for me.”

vampire lord terrified of his own soul. His wicked smirk had my stomach flipping. Then, the mask fell again, and I lost myself in the rare hint of softness in his features. “Scarlett, you are the only thing that feels different in a world that never changes.”

“I’m going to feed from you now,” he said, nearly a hiss through his teeth as his jaw tremored. “And I need you to trust that while I may seem out of control once I finally taste you, I will never put you in danger. You will always be safe with me.”

“But it will be intense,” he said. “All of it. The feeding. The fucking. Your every last orgasm, your every sting of pain.”

I was not a moth to a flame. The light had never held much interest to me. It was the darkness I’d always flown toward. The twisted pleasure, the dangerous games, the wicked seductions. No number of warnings from villagers had scared this deep, cavernous drive out of my bones. No amount of shaming from Isabella.

Damn him, Rune had been right all along. I did enjoy pain. Just like my fear, panic, and terror, I only wanted to bleed for him.

I swore I saw the cosmos behind my eyelids, but soon Rune had yanked me back down to hell with him by my collar.

I’d thought that Rune and I had already rooted ourselves in each other as deeply as we could dig, but I’d been wrong. With my essence flowing into him, and his now spilling inside of me, we became corporeally bound just as inseparably as we already were in our souls.

We were inevitable, our lives forever intertwined. She was my Little Flame, and I was her darkness, the beast that would always stalk her from the shadows.

The emptiness finally caught up to me. It swallowed me in one decisive bite, snuffing out the hope I thought would always sustain me. My tired limbs that had always reached for the cosmos fell back down to my sides, the stars blinking out one by one. My voice that had once soared went deathly quiet. My vision of the horizon, that ever brighter tomorrow, turned inward to gaze into the maddening darkness instead. I was alone.

“No, you can’t,” Snow said. “Succubi cannot induce love, Scarlett. Succubi influence and feed off desire. Love is not a desire. Not like lust or hunger or want. They’re all related and connected, but you cannot force anyone to love you.”

“I want to turn it off. I want to cut it out of me,” I pleaded. “Please cut it all out of me.”

“This wasn’t the outcome I’d hoped for. You give all of yourself to the clan. To Aristelle and Valentin, too. We wanted to protect you, but I personally wanted you to have this. To have her. I saw a fire in you I haven’t seen in decades, and it brought me no pleasure to watch those flames die out.”

“I’m extremely powerful right now. But there’s a wall up inside of him that I can’t break through. It’s as if he desires nothing at all.”

“You can’t be influenced by sex demons, Rune. We made sure of that long ago, when you asked me to rid you of desire and I was more than happy to oblige. You are as immune to succubi as you are to bloodlust. All desire you harbor is yours and yours alone.”

Just because my twisted, all-consuming love for her had been real, didn’t mean she felt the same.

In my search for the truth—the poison, the roots of our shared delusion—all I ended up doing was falling deeper in love with him. And falling this endlessly for someone who would never love me in return was a pain I could never have prepared myself for. It shattered everything I thought I knew about fate and souls, romance and destiny. It shattered me.

You’re mine. You always have been. I will never let you down, never let you go, no matter how much you beg and plead.

All I had was this love bleeding out of me uncontrollably. This pure, naive, silly feeling that he’d said a demon like me wouldn’t be able to feel. But I felt it. Damn him, I fucking felt it.

There are no absolutes, Rune. Sometimes we’re wrong. Even infallible gods like you.

You are the only thing that feels different in a world that never changes.