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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.
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.”
but. I didn’t see or speak to her except in passing over the years, but I kept watch over her after she turned eighteen, fulfilling a favor owed to her father before allowing my depravity to take hold, giving in when she asked me to ruin her.
Jealousy isn’t a quality I typically look for in a woman, but the existence of it within the spring goddess before me is like fresh soil, ready for me to dig in and plant my roots. It’s the foundation for corruption, that green emotion, and I plan to use it to build us from its rubble.
She’d say humans are made up of energy, and that energy has a certain magnetism to it that attracts both what we fear and what we desire, and it was up to us to reflect the kind of life we wanted to the universe so it would be able to deliver.
“Do that again,” he breathes into my ear, a slight strain lacing his voice. “And I’ll fuck you in front of everyone.” I scoff, my voice just as soft, just as strangled. “You wouldn’t.”
“Would you have said yes?” I blink, frowning. “What?” “If I’d asked.” He pulls one ring out, a simple black band, and shoves it onto his own finger, then reaches for mine. “Would you have said yes?” “I…” In truth, I want to say yes.
Touch has a memory. O say, love, say, What can I do to kill it and be free?
“I’m not like the boys from your little private schools. I’ll ruin you and not think twice about it.” “So ruin me,”
That’s part of my problem when it comes to the little goddess; I’m hyperfocused on every move she makes, my body so used to studying her from behind a screen that the openness of our interactions now feels somewhat alarming.
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.
“Don’t worry, my little Persephone,” I say, releasing myself and sucking in a deep breath before getting to my feet. “You’ll get fucked. Just not immediately.”
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.
“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?”
If Elena is even half as divine as the fruit in the Garden of Eden, I absolutely understand Eve’s surrender.
“Once we do this…” She scrapes my neck with her nails, sending a jolt of white-hot electricity down my spine, right to my balls. “Once we do this?” “I’m not going to be able to stop.” “Who’s asking you to?”
“Whoever said Kal Anderson isn’t husband material clearly never felt his hand between their thighs,” I mutter, biting back a moan at the memory. “Is that so?”
“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.
“Yes, Jesus, please. Right there.” “No saviors here,” he says, teeth grazing my forehead. “Just me, your husband, dragging you to hell with him.”
“I’ll admit, your jealousy is fucking delectable, little one. Gets me hard as a goddamn rock just thinking about it.”
“If you’re jealous, I’m a goddamn psychopath.”
“Oh God.” My head slams back against the door, eyes fluttering shut. “I doubt He could get you off like this,” Kal says, teeth nipping at my second pulse, pulling me to attention. “Eyes on me.”
“I’m no god,”
“Just an unlucky soul who somehow has managed to cheat death over a hundred times.”
I’m not usually a gambler. Don’t like leaving my life in the hands of fate. But something about this woman makes me want to risk everything.
What kind of wife doesn’t recognize her own sister-in-law?” “The kind who doesn’t know what she looks like?” “Great, Kal. Now she thinks I’m an asshole.” “Join the club.”
Months ago, when I forced her hand, I hadn’t even realized anything in my life was missing. Didn’t realize I wanted someone there to balance me out, to peel back the curtains and shed a little light, so long as I also got to paint her in shadows.
Anguish claws a path up my spine, leaving behind bloody, gaping wounds that only deepen with each passing second I spend not chasing after her.
“Let that be your fucking lesson here,” I say, stepping away. “You get to live, because I don’t care enough to kill you.”
They’re dousing me in kerosene as she steps back to admire the flames. I would happily spend the rest of my life on fire if it meant getting to keep her.
“Don’t kiss me like this is goodbye.”
I loved thee, though I told thee not, Right earlily and long, Thou wert my joy in every spot, My theme in every song.
And while all of that’s true, it no longer negates what happened after we married. The comfort, solace, and acceptance I found in the arms of this killer. My obsession. My ruin. My husband.
You cannot love a person fully without knowing the darkness etched into their soul.
