The Annihilator (Dark Verse, #5)

by RuNyx

To everyone who cannot find themselves in a world full of people, Being lost is a hard prologue, but a much beautiful story awaits you. Find the courage, and turn the page.

Alone. Silent. Locked in. Hands around her knees. Shivers wracked her slight frame. Locks of hair hanging limp over her shoulders. She took a deep breath in, resisting the urge to look around herself. She’d been shoved in the little closet for hours, each hour becoming more and more unbearable. The dark, which had been oppressing her little mind, gradually became familiar. The blackness that had been a stranger, now a new friend, enfolding her in its arms. Her own arms relaxed as her legs folded, crisscrossing on the cold ground, and her fingers started playing. Playing with the locks of her hair, over and over, again and again. To see, she stopped trying to blink. She just breathed easy now. Three was her age. Locked in. Silent. Alone.

demon eyes,

Emotions escaped him. He saw them, and could recognize them afterward, but he didn’t understand what that terror felt like, or how the pain was experience. How others laughed and cried and empathized and he felt nothing. Perhaps that was why she caught his attention.

Though she wasn’t a blaze yet, only an ember, she was his. He watched her, intently focused on the nuances of her face. One day, she would be an inferno, and he would be the devil who controlled it.

“Into this wild abyss, the wary fiend stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost

"I didn't think you'd come," she whispered in the space between their lips, her body overcome with the emotions she'd felt in the last few minutes. His gaze intensified, and he leaned down, speaking right against her mouth, his words brushing her lips but barely, so close she felt them on her skin, a promise and the threat all in one sentence both claiming and capturing her. "I'll always come for you."

“The world isn’t ready to see who I would become if this—” his thumb pressed on her pounding pulse “—ever stops.”

Her room was small. Her bed was small. Her life was small. And it didn't matter. She didn’t matter, nothing mattered. She was the black hole and the black hole was her, endless nothingness with no capacity for light. She didn’t know who came to her room, who left, who did what to her. She felt nothing; she spoke nothing; she saw nothing. She just stared at the cracked ceiling, recognizing the cracks within herself, widening, sharpening, lengthening. Purposeless. Endless. Lifeless.

“You have many wishes left in you, flamma, and I will lay every single one of them at your feet. Just keep fucking breathing, got that?”

“You have been, you are, and you will always be my only obsession, Luna Caine.”

She needed to feel safe to heal, and no one would make her feel safer than he would. Because they had conscience, morals, ethics, and he? He had her.

She could never be anyone else’s. She’d been claimed by a devil in the shadows long before anyone could bring her to light.

No, he’d had to choose, and he hadn’t chosen her in the short-term, but she had always been his choice. Everything he’d done for the last six years had been for her, so she could live one day freely without looking over her shoulder all the time. And after what they had done, The Syndicate was going to fucking burn.

“I know you, flamma,” he reminded her. “The deepest desires of your heart, the softest secrets of your soul, the meanest moments in your mind. I know them all, I own them. Every desire, every secret, every thought.”

He was tickling her. The feared Shadow Man was tickling her.

wondering if his arms would cage her in from the world or hold her down for his pleasure, wondering if he would stare into her soul as he claimed it or if he would suck it through her lips.

Dainn Blackthorne.

Knowing he had seen her be used and discarded, and knowing he still wanted her, it made something in her chest go tight in a way her heart bloomed. He had seen her at her worst, witnessed as they broke her, found her in the jaws of death, and somehow, he’d still found her worth saving. Even after all of it, he had brought her to his house and given her a safe space to heal.

“I will set the whole world on fire before I let anything hurt you again.”

“Why?” he pressed, not letting go. “Because you’re mine!” She slammed her hands on the table, standing up. “You’re the only person, the only thing in this entire world that is mine!” Her chest heaving, she glared at him. “My killer, my stalker, my lover. The thought of sharing your obsession makes me sick to my stomach. You have power over me. Is that what you wanted to hear? That your claim makes me an idiot because my stupid fucking heart believes you? Is that it?”

It was the little things—the way she broke down over tea in his kitchen and put herself together again, the way she thirsted to learn and constantly be better for herself, the way she forgave him and let him in. It was the way she staked a claim on him and the way she trembled for his touch, the way she didn’t run when he told her of the death he wreaked for her, the way she accepted his soulless form into her soft heart. It was the way she stole glances at him, the way she stole his t-shirts, the way she stole parts of him too. There was no fucking way he was ever going to let go of her. He had long left obsession and entered into a whole new territory, one he didn’t even recognize because it was more. More obsessive. More intensive. More possessive. More. If he'd been ready to burn the world for her before, it was nothing compared to the destruction he would cause now. And though he had no plans to keep her from Tristan, he needed to be sure that she wouldn’t leave him in the dust when the time came. The world wasn’t ready for what he would unleash if that ever happened.

"How can you become new if you haven't first become ashes?" —Friedrich Nietszche

“If we do this,” he said quietly against her mouth, “I will be your last everything. You choose this, you choose everything I am, every twisted, deranged, obsessed part of me. You choose this, and I will never fucking let you go. Do you understand?” Her eyes fluttered close. “I do.”

After a lifetime of looking at cracked ceilings and peeling paint while pieces of her were ripped from her, he had given her a ceiling of beautiful stars and slowly put the pieces back together again. He had touched her soul.

A dildo. An ice dildo. A dildo made of ice, a little smaller than he was. What in the everloving fuck?

“Will you ever love me?”

“What is love to you?”

“I think it’s feeling safe,” she told him after a long moment of thinking, a moment where he patiently waited for the answer. “Emotionally, sexually, physically, safe in every way. It’s knowing you can be yourself with someone and they won’t judge you. It’s feeling like equals when need be and being able to give up control if need be. It’s... feeling like you can trust someone with the darkest secrets and knowing they’ll keep them safe. It’s the ability to trust without thought. It’s—” her voice shook as his gaze intensified “—being able to give up something important to yourself if it will help the one you love. It’s putting their needs above your own. It’s unconditional. That’s... that’s the idea of love for me.”

“What does love mean for you?”

“If there was any love in this world of mine, Lyla, it would be you.” Her heart stopped. “Dainn,” she whispered, knowing this wasn’t something he would just say casually, knowing it meant something. “I am darkness.” He kissed her softly. “I live it, I breathe it, I am it. There is no redemption, no emotion, nothing for me. Nothing but you. You’re the moon to my dark night, flamma. You’re the only thing in this black sky that can thrive when I swallow everything else whole. The stars don’t exist in this space. Just you and I. You need me to glow and I need you to exist. It’s simple as that.”

“If you ever choose another, make sure you kill me first. Because I—” he bent to whisper against her lips “—will annihilate the fucking world before I let you go.”

“When you feel that insecurity, touch this, remind yourself who claimed you, remind yourself of the last six years and how I never let you go once, and ask yourself if you ever think I’d let you go now. The world could tilt on its axis, flamma, and I’d still be the most certain thing in your life.” A soft kiss. “You’re the oxygen that feeds my flames—without you, my existence is questionable.”

She was free. She was fearless. She was flying. And it was all because of him. And that was more than enough.

“I could fuck you raw with the whole world watching, Lyla. Watching from afar, knowing they couldn’t have you, couldn’t even touch you, that you were all mine to play with as I pleased. But I wouldn’t let you come. That is for my eyes only.”

A man with nothing to lose was the most dangerous creature on this earth. And as long as she breathed, he had something to lose, something to long, something to live for.

“You invited the devil to play, don’t beg for mercy when he shows up.”

you had been there, I would have fucked you. Then, I would have stalked you, and I would have made you mine. There is no reality where you and I exist that we don’t end up exactly where we are now. None.”

"What are you feeling?" She locked their eyes in the mirror's reflection, provoking him. "Imagine that I'm leaving you." She saw his body stiffen. "Imagine that this is the last time you'll touch me." His eyes blazed. "Imagine that you can't do anything to stop it. Think of that, and how pissed you'd be. Would you even be angry?" "I don't know if it'll be anger," he stated softly. "But if that ever happened, there would be absolute annihilation."

He didn't know if what happened inside him where she was concerned was love. It felt wrong to say that. Love was light, love was beautiful, love was pure. What he felt was dark, obsessive, deviant, and utterly possessive. He would kill for her, as he always had, and he would die for her, if need be. He would slay her demons and give her the sword to slay them if she wanted. He would hold her close and protect her from anything wanting to tarnish her being. She completed parts of him that had been jagged and raw, fitting inside them with softness and fluidity, soothing some latent beast within him. Where she loved him with all her light, he possessed her with all his shadows. That's why she was his. As he braced himself for the two days he had before their world changed, he held her, knowing that despite whatever came their way, he was never, ever letting her go. And if anyone tried… it would be the end.