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He hadn’t always understood what that look had been. 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. Maybe it was because she emoted more than he had ever seen anyone emote. Maybe it was the flame in her hair. Or maybe it was because she had bound them with something she couldn’t take back. Whatever it was, from the moment her fire had found his, her fate was sealed.
One day, she would be an inferno, and he would be the devil who controlled it.
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.
"I'll always come for you."
It was easier to deal with a monster who was a monster up front and not a snake in the grass.
God, she hated him, she hated her response to him, hated that she wanted to hate him deeper but couldn’t, and she hated that he knew it and didn’t care one bit.
“If I stay away from you, you’ll miss me, flamma.”
She was beautiful; she had been told many times. But when she looked at the mirror, it wasn’t her beauty she saw. She saw her only tie to her past, and she saw questions. Did her genetics come from her parents or grandparents? Were they alive or dead? Did they have eyes like hers or another color?
'Your voice makes my atoms sing.’
“The world isn’t ready to see who I would become if this—” his thumb pressed on her pounding pulse “—ever stops.”
She wasn’t important and he was mistaken. If her heartbeat ever stopped, it wouldn’t change a thing.
“Do you want me to cut his hand off or burn 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.
And she knew his secret. She could use it against him, threaten him with exposure, but she couldn’t. She was weak and powerless, and the Shadow Man was the only being giving her a modicum of protection for whatever reason. She couldn’t jeopardize that.
“If it’s him, we might finally have something,” Mr. H continued. “If it’s not, the girl is useless now anyway.” “The girl has more uses than you know of,” the light-haired man replied in a cool tone. “But I hear you. He’s been... disruptive for too long.” “Sir,” Mr. H leaned forward. “We can kill two birds with one stone. Let’s make an example out of it.” The light-haired man gave a nod, and Mr. H grinned. Lyla felt her blood run cold. Either they were talking about her or someone else who had recently become a problem for them. And she had a very strong feeling it was the former.
“Who do we have here?” Lyla swallowed as Mr. H stood up and came to her, grabbing her by the arm and bringing her forward. “She’s the one I was talking about.” The light-haired man with light brown eyes and a hook-like nose smirked, straightening in his seat. “Come, sit here, sweetheart.”
The light-haired man tugged her suddenly, making her fall into his lap. She tried to get up, struggling as he made her sit on him, chuckling while looking at Mr. H. “Get the drink.” Lyla turned sideways, watching in horror as Mr. H mixed some kind of blue powder in the stranger’s remaining drink, handing the glass over to the man. She began to struggle harder as the man restrained her with one hand, pushing the glass against her lips with the other. “Drink up like a good girl now.” The same words that had filled her with a rush filled her with nothing but dread. She sputtered, wriggling to get
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Light. She felt light, like the weight of the world had been taken from her shoulders, like there was nothing to worry about. What was this thing they had given her? She didn’t know and didn’t care. Her body began to sway in the rhythm of the music, her insides heating up and buoyant after endless drowning, a high hitting her so suddenly she didn’t know what she would do when she crashed. “Yeah, leave her like that. I want the hotel premises secure. She’ll crash in a bit.”
Rough hands grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her around, taking her deeper into the building to the elevators. Moments later, she felt herself being escorted somewhere, her eyes unable to focus on the moving view as the exhilaration changed, transformed into the sharp edge of pain. She heard herself moan in the biting agony but it didn’t relieve her, only elevated the pinching sensation under her skin. Suddenly, she was horizontal, a bed beneath her back, and she blinked her eyes to see the ceiling.
“We live online?” “Yeah.” A sharp pain in her nipple made her cry out as someone’s mouth covered it. “No!” she tried to push them away, struggling, and someone slapped her hard, making her head spin faster. But thankfully whoever it was left her alone. “Upload the feed. He’s going to come once he sees this.” Someone spoke, and she knew she needed to focus on the words to understand what was happening, but it felt slow like she was trying to walk through sludge. Where was she? What bed was this? Who was coming? Him. He was coming.
Something cold pressed against her cheek, making her seek more of the coolness that gave her a brief moment of respite. A hand. Leather. “Shh.” The voice of death came from the darkness, his voice, right next to her ear. “I’m here, flamma. Shh.”
“It...it’s...a tr..trap,”
“Don’t worry about it,”
“T...they drugg...gged me.”
“And they will pay.”
“The drug is fatal. I don’t know the dosage they gave you, but I’m not willing to take the risk. You have two options,” he told her quietly, his dark voice making her focus for a moment. “Either I work the drug out of your system while you’re barely conscious or I make you unconscious and let it flush itself out. That is longer and riskier.”
“The drug will make you delirious as the effects sharpen. You won’t be fully conscious.”
“I trust you,”
“That’s exactly what sealed your fate all th...
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“Your trust, flamma, is the most addictive drug.”
“I won’t give you more of it,”
“You will. Every atom in your body sings for me too.”
“My body’s reactions mean nothing.”
“Even meaningless, they’re all mine.”
His body still buzzed from the vibrations of her words, her little cries, her strangled moans, his mouth filled with both her juices and the sensory sweet taste, a combination he was becoming addicted to with each passing second. 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.
He had never kissed someone on the mouth, never really had the urge to. Why would he want a stranger’s mouth so close to his own and their fluids in his body? It made no sense. Fucking, he could understand. It was a biological need, but kissing wasn’t. Oral wasn’t either, which was one of the reasons he had never tasted pussy either. But he was well-versed in the ways of pleasure, and with her taste cemented on him, he doubted he’d taste another again, just hers.
He was going to be her last and she would be his first in so many ways.
Oh, he was going to fuck her, fuck her hard. He would take her like that one day, he decided. Maybe slide inside her while she slept, make her give him her trust to the point her body intuitively reacted to him even in her sleep. And in the morning, she would wake up sore with no memory of how but feeling him in every inch of her delicate, delicious cunt. He was going to test her trust, take every little ounce that she had in her capacity, until her body, her mind, her fucking soul believed in how important she was.
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.
And no one in this world in their right minds wanted to face the Shadow Man in the dark.
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. He didn’t understand emotions, but he understood science. Something happened chemically in his brain and his body where she was concerned. He looked at her, heard her, and felt sensations in his system. It was the oddest response, one he had extensively researched, only to realize it was some form of synesthesia and it didn’t have a rational explanation in all cases. The wires in his brain were simply crossed, and
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He liked heights. It reminded him of the home he would take her to one day.
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. But he realized a message, a louder message, needed to be sent.
“What’s the status?” Howard asked, the sound of sucking resuming. “The room has been quiet for a few hours. Dark too. We don’t have visual.” “You think he’s come yet?” “Doubt it. The entrances are monitored. We’re on high alert.” Their security was laughable. He wondered if the Syndicate knew how terrible the operations were on ground level or if they even cared.
“Keep an eye on her room. If he doesn’t show up by dawn, kill the girl.”
Any normal man would’ve felt anger perhaps, or even lust for revenge. He felt neither. 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.
Howard jerked awake with a sputter, his eyes flying everywhere until they fell on his silhouette, terror taking over his face. They said you saw the Shadow Man before you died. And from the look on his face, Howard knew of the rumors.
No, his message had to be clear to every single one of them.
