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

by Maggie Sunseri

“I want you to taste a kind of freedom you’ve never thought possible. Freedom from all of your fears, your wounds, your unmet needs and desires. I’ve always told you that you deserve nothing less than it all.” I stroked her cheek. “There’s no way for me to guarantee my honesty other than by showing you with my every action. Treating you like my pet is one of my favorite pastimes. But if one day you should decide you want all of your power back, including the power you relinquish in our games and play, I will hand you the keys to your own mental freedom.”

“I want to be yours.” He grasped my face, inhaling in slowly. “You already are. You always have been.”

I eyed the tiny potion. “As if you haven’t had me helpless, vulnerable, and asleep at your disposal before.” “Baby, stop the dirty talk,” Rune groaned. “I couldn’t possibly want you any more than I already do.”

Growing up, I found acceptance in the interconnected tree roots on the forest floor, running and jumping and climbing over top of them as if they were a maternal source of stability. I was held by the earth beneath my feet, the dirt between my toes. I found love in the stars, in the way my voice soared in reach of them. I felt seen by the gods, by grand myths and stories, by my imaginary future friends and family of my own creation.

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.

“Scarlett, you are the only thing that feels different in a world that never changes.”

Rune loved the parts of me I’d hated for so long. If he was only vulnerably human with me, then I was only unapologetically wicked for him.

She burned with a fire that would never die, and I was honored beyond words that she trusted me to tend to her radiance. To drink from it, pull her scorching, bright soul inside of my icy, shadowed one. That may have been the dirtiest, filthiest act of all.

I traced over the various bruises I’d left on her fair skin, and she sighed against my touch. I’d been much gentler with her than I ever would be again. She’d needed me to be, for her first time. And I would always put her needs above my own twisted desires.

You still deserve to be here with us, alive and happy and loved. So much has changed, but your worth has not. You mean something to people, and you add something remarkable to this world.”

Snow is the mvp in this book. I want her as my best friend

“There is no deserve when it comes to love. There are no conditions or stipulations. You just love.”

This didn’t make sense to me. All my life, love was something I reached for. It was a scarcity, an unknown. Sometimes it was there, and other times it wasn’t. Sometimes it felt in my control—like if I behaved a certain way, it would be given. Other times it was unpredictable, doled out in a system of intermittent reinforcement. The love that Snow showed me wasn’t choppy, with tumultuous ebbs and flows. It was steady and reliable, a gentle river that went on and on. It made no sense and yet it was there—I could feel it like a charge of magick. But it was not a desire I could wield or influence, as if it existed on a mental layer I had no access to.

I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe in me and Scarlett and love written in the stars. I couldn’t live inside the same world that Mason did. For a frightening moment, I had the thought that I’d rather live in delusion than in reality if my reality was one without Scarlett.