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.

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.

Fire. Heat, warmth, and light. Heat, destruction, and death.

The nature of fire had always fascinated him, the colors even more so.

Whatever it was, from the moment her fire had found his, her fate was sealed. He sat in the shadows watching her.

As though feeling his gaze, she looked up. Her eyes swept the crowd of well-dressed men, going straight to the shadowed corners, knowing that’s where he stayed. He liked that. He saw the moment she saw his silhouette, a mix of hatred and betrayal etched on her face for everyone to see. Her hands fisted at her sides. His obsession deepened.

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.

"Eyes, flamma." Her eyes flew open, shock, something else filling her system as she tilted her head back. Devilish, mismatched eyes locked with hers through a mask, and her breath caught. He'd come. He'd come for her. He'd killed for her.

"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."

He was cold and manipulative. Just because he was fixated on her didn’t mean a thing.

He wasn’t the best-looking man she had seen. No, she had seen many, many more beautiful men. But he was, without a doubt, the most dangerous-looking.

She watched as his hand went to his inner jacket pocket, bringing out a black eternal rose, and putting it on the counter beside the sink. “If I stay away from you, you’ll miss me, flamma.”

She wanted to ask him why he left those for her, why that specific rose, why specifically after a kill. She had fifteen of them now, an entire bouquet worth that she kept hidden in a box lest someone steal it. As twisted as it was, they were the only gift she had ever received, and she was possessive of them, along with the clothes he brought her every time.

'Your voice makes my atoms sing.’ She didn’t understand the rush she felt at those words. It was... beautiful. Almost poetic, and she wouldn’t have called him poetic in her wildest dreams.

He affected her, no matter how much she tried to resist.

Since then, for years, he had become a constant presence in her life, an anchor she had become emotionally dependent on even though she knew she shouldn’t be. He was dangerous, he was manipulative, and he enjoyed playing with her emotions a little too much. And yet, when he came seeking her, she was found.

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

He’d marked her. For the first time, he’d visibly marked her. In her experience, marks were never good. Marks meant pain and cruelty and carelessness. The mark he had given her had been pleasure and tenderness and deliberation. It was a gift, a claiming for her to remember she was his, that no one could get to her as long as he was there. And to someone who had been owned but never belonged, it meant everything.

He was clearly someone important within the underworld. She’d seen him make public appearances too many times since then, around too many powerful-looking people to question it. Mr. Blackthorne, as they called him, was someone important. He also walked the night as the Shadow Man, though she doubted anyone even suspected it. The Shadow Man was a hot, unhinged killer, thriving in the chaos he created. Mr. Blackthorne was cold, self-contained, and meticulous. If anyone suspected they were the same men, it was genius.

“Your trust, flamma, is the most addictive drug.”

The quiet words penetrated her hazed mind as she looked down to where his voice was coming from, seeing nothing, almost like an invisible man was touching her. The Shadow Man. Her man.

Every atom in your body sings for me too.”

But seeing her had felt like finding the richest shades of his favorite colors, seared across his retinas with a taste of something sweet on his tongue.

The first time he heard her speaking, the sound had sent vibrations over his skin, like a tuning fork hit with something, rippling across his body with such vividness it was unheard of, again leaving him with the sweet taste on his tongue.

It was real. And whatever it was, it was his. He didn’t care if she had this effect on any other human. He would eradicate them all until he was the only one left standing, if that was the case.

Lush lips pillowed under his touch and he wondered what she would taste like there. He had never kissed someone on the mouth, never really had the urge to.

He was going to be her last and she would be his first in so many ways.

She was it. She was the reason. She saw him for who he was, and she melted for him. She hated him, and yet she trusted him.

What had begun as intrigue had turned into fascination, slowly morphing into a fixation, culminating in an obsession so deep he was incomplete without it. And one day very soon, she would be entirely his.

She had spoken to him, to warn him, to save him. Despite all her anger and hurt, she cared for him. Soft-hearted little fool, but his fool.

She was rare, the fire of life, of warmth.

They didn’t know she wasn’t the bait he would bite, she was the prize he had already won in this bloody game—he just had to claim the winning.

In his head, it was a simple equation that had been messed with. Emotion didn’t fit into that; it didn’t need to. Was that psychotic? Maybe. But he had never pretended to be anything else than the devil he was.

“Touch her and you die,” he remarked quietly. “Touch her worse, die worse. It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? I don’t know why you didn’t understand it.”

He needed to finish his final mission before he took her home. He needed to get her home, get her trust and her loyalty before he opened the door to her past. But that was later. He was leaving breadcrumbs to figure things out, and that brought him enough time. For now, she’d be safe, she'd be unharmed, and he could live with that.

Death had come to take her, after all. She smiled.

“Take me gently, death. I’ve been waiting for you,” she whispered, her mind dizzy, her eyes closing again. “Open your eyes, flamma.”

“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.”

He had almost lost her, and for the first time in his memory, something livid lay breathing in his chest. Emotions weren’t something he felt, but he was feeling. Mainly, at himself for not finding her sooner, for taking so long to wrap up loose ends. Also at her, for thinking he would let her go, for even contemplating that she could and he wouldn’t bring her back from the jaws of death itself. It couldn’t have her, nothing could have her, not until he released his claim.

If she didn’t feel again, the world would cease to be.

He’d missed her. And he'd almost lost her. That wasn't okay. That wasn't in the vicinity of okay.

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.

Handling the chopper easily with years of flying experience, he turned right toward the mountains that lined the land before the sea gaped open, heading to the home he had built for them over the years.

Flying was one of the only things, besides playing with fire and stalking her, that he enjoyed.

In her conscious mind, a part of her hated him. But her heart was soft, and it was starved for him, and he would do whatever it took to make her feel for him again.

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.”

Lyla sat up on the bed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, watching the dark silhouette of the man leaning on the railing in the cold. Keeping the softest, thinnest blanket wrapped around herself, she padded out to him, drawn like a moth to the flame, a moth that knew it would burn but still unable to resist the pull deep inside.

“How long have you lived here?” “A few months.” She took a step closer. “And how long have you had it?” “About five years. It took a year to build.” That was a long time. Stepping closer to the railing, heart racing at the nothingness beyond, she gripped the blanket. “Why not live here before?” He turned his neck to look at her. “You weren’t here.”