The Annihilator (Dark Verse, #5)

by RuNyx

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.

"I'll always come for you."

“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.”

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

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.

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.”

“Every. Single. Second.” His thumb pillowed her lower lip, his eyes intense on hers, his body pressed against hers, everything about him fierce and powerful and so dark she wanted it all for herself. “I was with you. You didn’t go through any of that alone.”

“I will set the whole world on fire before I let anything hurt you again.” The dark promise full of violence made the black hole take a step back. “Give me your eyes, flamma. I want to see the fire in them. Show them to me.”

“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?”

“If there was any love in this world of mine, Lyla, it would be you.”

“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.”

“You’re the oxygen that feeds my flames—without you, my existence is questionable.”

“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.”

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

He wasn't a believer, but she was his miracle.

Where she loved him with all her light, he possessed her with all his shadows.