Obsession

by Harleigh Beck

“I don’t know how to give you what you need, Savannah.” His shoulders droop as he lets me glimpse the man behind all that darkness. “I’ve never touched a woman without hurting her.” With a small shrug, he looks at me, a muscle ticking madly in his cheek. “I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt you.”

“I can’t promise I won’t do the same to you, but I can promise to slay every fucking dragon from your past and bring their heads to you on a silver platter. I’m a monster, Savannah. So, let me do what I was born to do. Let me love you the only way I know how.”

I love this so much. Do I need therapy?!

My heart is aching, my clit is throbbing, and my sanity is slowly slipping through my fingers.

Outside, the rain patters softly on the window, but I’m too transfixed by the woman who has somehow dug her sharp nails into my heart.

No one messes with what’s mine and lives to see another day.

He’s an elusive and enigmatic man who is too intrigued to stay away but too scared to get close.

I want to drown her in pleasure, not lose myself in her suffering.

Every time I get a taste of this woman, I fall harder.

“Don’t forget who owns you, beautiful. If you provoke me, you won’t like the consequences.”

“If tonight is all we have, then so be it. Ruin me, Robbie. Destroy me. Show me all of you. The evil, the beautiful, the raw, the damaged. There’s no part of you I don’t want a chance to love.”

“Let’s see how deep that darkness runs, my sweet Savannah.”

“This is me, baby. Your very own monster.”

“I’ve never been in control around you. I’ve tried, but you make it impossible. From the very first moment I saw you, I knew I had to have you.”

This. Woman. Is. Mine.

His gaze bores into mine as he tenderly kisses my knuckles. “You bring me peace.”

The sunrise is still far away, and the night belongs to us and our secrets.

“When did you fall in love with the devil?”

Our story is, in fact, a doomed love story.

What I have with Robbie is anything but easy. It’s a fucking nightmare I don’t want to wake up from. I’m in love with a monster, a cruel man who also loves deeply despite the evil acts committed at his fingertips—fingertips that have brought me orgasmic bliss.

He rips my coat and cardigan open with rough hands to reveal the wires strapped to my skin.

Armed police run forward to cuff his wrists, and I’m forced to look away, or my heart will crumple to dust.

Of course, love isn’t enough to tame a monster.

“Despite the evil in him, he’s still capable of loving you, Savannah. Maybe his demons won this time, and maybe the grain of goodness inside him, the grain you helped water, isn’t strong enough in the light of all that darkness.”

My naive heart believed I was enough to quiet the whispers. It turns out, I wasn’t.

“There are no lengths I won’t go for Savannah. I’ll murder time and time again to keep her at my side.”

“You should know nothing stops us when we set our mind on something. Savannah is mine, and you’re currently in my fucking way.”

My heart frosts over. I’ve lost him. He’s not mine anymore. I’m his, but the gates to his heart are welded shut.

“I’m yours, and you’re mine. Years can pass by, lifetimes even, but our paths will always cross. Mark my words, Robbie Hammond. You can’t run from me.”

“I want to know what you believe. The truth doesn’t matter. All I care about is how you see me.”

Morally gray is not a word in our dictionary. Black is our color. Black is our song. Black is his love note to me.

I don’t deserve her, nor do I deserve something as good and pure as the love I see reflected in her tear-filled eyes—a look I would kill for.

“He loves deeply, and that scares him.”

“You must understand, Miss Campbell, that he couldn’t live with himself if he hurt you.”

“Don’t get me wrong. He’s a lethal man—a dangerous man,” he empathizes. “But beneath it all, there’s goodness too. And you, ma’am, you bring it out in him. If anyone will ever save Robbie from himself, it’s you.”

“Robbie fears himself when he’s around you.” “And I fear myself when he’s not around,” I reply honestly.

Queen of Hearts—my calling card in the world of serial killers.

“If you ever so much as look in another man’s direction again, I will peel your skin off your body. You hear me, baby? I will take my fucking time, torturing you slowly.”

“I love you too. I love you so much it consumes me, but I would never forgive myself if I hurt you.”

Here is a monster of a man with such beautiful, masculine hands—hands that have committed atrocious acts, yet he holds my much smaller one with such careful devotion.

I’m happy. For the first time in my life, bathed in the sun’s glow through the windshield, I stare at my future and feel at peace.

“You’re my everything, Savannah. There’s nothing I won’t do for you. No lengths I won’t go to, no matter how wrong they may seem in the eyes of the world, to keep you here with me. We don’t follow rules.”

“The future is ours, baby.”

“The day you let the priest marry us on this beach, you made me the happiest man alive.”

“My wife,”

“My future.”

My queen of hearts. My future.

“I lost twenty years of my life because of the sickness inside me. You saved me, Savannah. If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead now.”