Promises and Pomegranates (Monsters & Muses, #1)

by Sav R. Miller

I learned I quite enjoy the taste of brutality on my tongue. Love the way it blossoms like a flower springing from the earth, igniting a compulsion like no other. A desperation only relieved by the feel of another’s heart pulsing beneath my fingerprints—the flutter delicate and innately human, petrified and struck stupid in my wake.

It was supposed to be enough. Moral licensing I didn’t think twice about, until the lines bled too fully for me to distinguish between them. Until Elena. The most forbidden of fruits. Persephone to my Hades, as some used to call me. Springtime in a world rife with death and destruction. A woman I scorned until I found myself blinded by a new obsession. Until I tasted her—the dewy essence of her supple skin, the tang of her arousal glistening on her own fingertips, the salt of her tears as I shattered the last vestiges of her innocence. Whether she knows it or not, she gave herself to me that night. Surrendered her soul under the guise of choice.

There’s something magical in the act of holding another’s life in your hands. A kind of symmetry found in nature, where you’re given the opportunity to bring beasts to grisly fates or heal them instead.

“It’s rude to refuse hospitality from your boss.” “Not when my boss knows I didn’t come here for happy hour.”

Touch has a memory. O say, love, say, What can I do to kill it and be free?

Even being in the same room as her makes my lungs feel like they’ve caught fire and I’m trying to breathe through the singed rubble.

Her leggings cover the K carved into the inside of her thigh, and my cock twitches at the memory of putting it there. How she preened as the blade drew against her sensitive flesh, back bowing, pussy cresting around another orgasm. The way her blood tasted as it dripped down her pale skin and how I lapped at its coppery essence like a man dying of thirst. And I was. Dying to drink her, to consume the young virgin the way she had me since the night she asked me to be her first.

All the ways I’d worship her tight, perfect body if given the chance. How I’d drag her to the depths of hell but convince her she’d gone to heaven, using my tongue to write wordless poetry on her sensitive, swollen flesh. All the ways I’d treat her right, if I could. If there wasn’t too much for me to lose. If I thought I could actually love her and not just use her as a pawn in my twisted games.

“Would that prove to you that this marriage is real?” he asks, his thumb smoothing back and forth over my mangled flesh. “If I took you again? Was the first taste of ruin not enough for you? Do you still crave my darkness, little one?”

“You’re not my prisoner,” he murmurs, something heavy settling in the air between us, making my bones seem dense and rendering me immobile. Electricity pulses in my blood, carrying it to the rest of my body as my heart falters, skipping a beat when he moves forward. “Oh,” I breathe, my brain unable to form another word. “But if you don’t turn around and leave right now, I’ll make you feel like one.”

If Elena is even half as divine as the fruit in the Garden of Eden, I absolutely understand Eve’s surrender.

“Can you not say another woman’s name while your finger is inside me?” I look down at her, cocking an eyebrow. “Jealous?” Her eyes narrow. “Not at all. Oh, Mateo, that feels so fucking good. Don’t⁠—” Slipping my index finger from her pussy with lightning speed, I tug her head back and stuff it inside her mouth, interrupting her. “I can’t kill him twice, Elena. Sure that’s a road you wanna go down?”

“You’re going nowhere, my little Persephone. I didn’t bring you back to my island just so you could leave, and I’m certainly not relieving you of your sentence. You’ll serve it at my goddamn side as the queen of my little Underworld, and all your family will ever be able to do is watch.”

Maybe Hades was lonely too, and he brought Persephone to his realm because he knew she’d bring the light with her.

“People who wear black all the time are not normal,” my sister would say. “Either they worship Satan or hate themselves. There are too many colors available on this green earth to sit and choose one that lacks any at all.”

In the pit of my stomach, in the fabric of my soul, I know. I’m in love with my husband.

“But then I realized monsters aren’t capable of returning love. And the longer you spend chasing it from someone who cannot ever give it back, the more of a monster you become in turn.”