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

by Maggie Sunseri

place of ghosts and specters, ever since my canines first tore open flesh. This was the first time it had been a place for the spark of life. Not a spark—that didn’t do justice to her feelings as deep as the sea and her voice as otherworldly as the gods themselves. 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.

Now she belonged to me. 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.

“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.”

“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.”

“Scarlett, I would drink your darkness, bathe in it, pull it into me while I held you inside my own.”

The whole world is doomed, Little Flame. We live and love anyway.

“Maybe you acted out of vengeance too, but your thirst for retribution was born out of love,” I said gently. “And grief, which is love’s natural consequence.”

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.

Desire is the key to our survival. Without desire for food and water, we perish. Without desire for companionship, we grow isolated and our souls and minds decay. Desire is amoral. It’s the trajectory of our intentions and actions that determine our goodness.”