Beauty in Lies Box Set

by Adelaide Forrest

I couldn't imagine any single woman ever being worth risking my life for.

"Que te folle un pez," I spat with a chuckle. I hope you get fucked by a fish.

Hugo laughed, the sound far more menacing than anything I'd ever heard as his voice filled my ears. "Man, you have no fucking clue the shitstorm you just unleashed on yourself. Bad fucking move."

I'd thought myself the captor in our relationship, but I suspected she'd own me just as thoroughly as I possessed her.

I came for war. I left with an obsession.

But there’s a nightmare hiding within his multicolored gaze, a phantom rattling at the cages who wants to devour me, to take me and claim me as his.

She lived a life of half-measures, even when expressing her desire for me. I'd fucking fix that.

"Esta boca será mi muerte," he groaned. I didn't even know what the words meant, but they brought a flush to my face anyway as he helped me up from my aching knees and plundered my mouth as if he didn't care what I'd done with it. As if it was his, and he'd do as he damn well pleased, regardless.

She'd left me.

If I couldn't have her, no one would. I'd kill us both before I ever let her walk away.

Even in the horrifying circumstances, the cadence of his voice was like the sweetest torment, drawing me deeper into his web.

But I couldn't let him have me, no matter how much I wanted to love the monster like I loved the man.

Even if we weren't together, I didn't want to exist in a world where his overwhelming presence didn’t exist.

She'd be mine until her dying breath, and then I would chase her into the afterlife.

It would take the flames of Hell to bring her back to life, to resurrect her as Mi Reina so she could withstand the fires to stand by my side.

I’d break her body down until her walls disappeared and she let me inside her head.

The man I’d known hadn’t ever really existed. He’d made me fall in love with a gentleman tinged with darkness, when he was really the devil in a suit.

We all lived with formative events in our lives, moments that defined us as people.

For better or worse, he stained my soul with his darkness, tangling it with my own until I couldn't deny what stared back at me from the shadows. I'd never been meant for the light.

She was my weakness. My everything. She was the heroin I would willingly inject into my veins, even knowing it would be the end of me one day. She owned me, body and whatever remained of a soul inside me.

We'd come together under the moonlight. We'd love under the stars if we survived the night.

"Eres el amor de mi vida, mi reina," he murmured as my hand trembled on the knife. His stare was trusting and resigned all at once, like it didn't matter to him if I killed him. "I won't live without you."

"You made a mistake, mi reina," he said. "You fell in love with your nightmare."

“How do you know you won’t get tired of me?” “Never, Isa. I’m yours,” he said sternly, lifting a hand to cup my cheek. “Until forever ends.”

"The words to describe what I feel for you do not exist.

But what did it say about me that I looked into the eyes of a nightmare and loved him?

Be the woman who looks the devil in the eye and says ‘fuck you.’"

She couldn't survive in his world. But the little demon who wanted to dance with the devil in the moonlight would thrive there.

I'd fallen in love with my captor.

Whether I loved Rafael or not, he brought out all the parts of me I'd thought long dead.

Mi reina was part of me. Printed on my very soul in a way that I couldn't escape.

I wanted to be a fucking Queen.

For the girl I'd been. For the girl who would never exist again. El Diablo had been reborn in flames. Mi Reina had been reborn in water. But our love was born in blood.

I'd let Rafael drag me into the night with him, dancing with the devil in the moonlight and seeing the beauty in the shadows.

I felt more understood in the moments when the devil moved inside me than I had sitting in a room with my family. I felt more alive with my hands on the knife protruding from a man's heart, watching the life fade out of his eyes as his blood soaked my fingers.

He would claim me and mark me and take me, but my nightmare wouldn’t damage me.

“There is never a reason to run from me. I am a monster, Isa. I always will be, but I’m your monster.”

"I don't need God when I have you, mi reina. You're my religion,"

He'd broken me, turning me into his nightmare.

“I’m not strong enough to lose you,”

El Diablo was on his knees before his queen.

Real life, real love, was bloody and unforgiving, but it was worth every bit of the pain just to feel it.

The devil didn’t slake his thirst for blood when he reached the deepest well of his anger, only seeking his vengeance with the kind of detachment that lacked all traces of humanity.

We were born in blood and forged through pain, until all that remained was a mindless killing machine that thought nothing of snuffing out life repeatedly.

“Nosotras pensamos que este día nunca vendría,”

Trapped in the shadow of the vindictive twin who seemed to haunt her even in the death that had been decided thirteen years prior. Death came for us all.

The shadow of grief wrapped me in a dark embrace, clinging to me from the sidelines and making me move through my life in a fog for the next week.

Living like a Queen with the King of Hell came with a price.

Rafael Ibarra was the devil incarnate, and only an idiot would have expected him to be anything else.

“Are you still nervous?” Rafe asked, smiling as he looked down at me from the corner of his eye. “Not unless you count thoughts of castration as nerves,” I growled.