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

by Maggie Sunseri

Or, they would’ve, if Little Flame didn’t have a deathly powerful and monumentally pissed off vampire stalker.

I wanted to hold her trauma in my palms and study it, find where the tears began so I could help her mend them.

My pain wanted to flirt with hers.

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.

“Stick to the real love. The kind that fills you up. The other kind is merely manipulation of the highest degree, and it will leave you emptier and lonelier than you ever thought possible.”

She was a hex, a force of destruction. I was merely prey caught in her web, a willing votary at her temple, no matter how much I fantasized about my Scarlett on her knees calling me God.

No one needed to know my current state of insanity but me.

They couldn’t know I’d pulled Scarlett away from them because I was horribly, irreversibly, fucking insatiably obsessed with her.

All of this sound logic, paired with the hunger in the born vampires’ eyes, was the perfect justification for my next questionable, morally reprehensible action. 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 would know where she was at all times, an invisible leash that tethered her to me. Gods, did I love that mental image.

Before I lost my last thin thread of control, I disappeared, leaving her adorably angry and confused.

Or at least, she used to belong to no one. 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.

A fucked-up fantasy to have in this moment, yes, but that was her fault for making me unable to go a full five minutes without thinking about her.

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.

I didn’t know how to receive the love I needed. Maybe that was why it always existed out on the horizon—in other lands, in people I hadn’t met, in a future that was always one step out of reach. Because great love was this thing that existed only conceptually, only in the abstract. It wasn’t something I ever truly thought I’d have, deep down. Though I wanted it terribly—to fill all the cracks in my aura, burst through the blocks, and prove that I was worthy.

“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.”

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.

As much as I wanted to break her, I also wanted to preserve the fire in her blood that made her so stupidly, recklessly brave and defiant. I loved the way she burned.

I’d just the same fall to my own knees before her, offer my worship with my tongue between her legs as she writhed and stared up at the stars.

As I sunk back into the shadows and watched her, I became resigned to my new reality. I was already addicted, and this inexplicable madness would only get worse from here, for both of us. I wanted to believe that any time at all with her would be enough, but I already knew it wouldn’t. I would want her forever. I already feared the hole inside of me she would leave behind.

She didn’t know it yet, but Scarlett had me wrapped so tightly around her finger that just one crook would put the whole city in peril.