The dark presses against my skin as I remove my clothes and slide between the cool sheets.
One trembling breath to fill my lungs, then I reach beneath the covers and touch the sigil on the inside of my thigh. I trace the curved lines of raised, damaged skin. The tender pain resounds like a summons across my body, my heart beating so fiercely in my chest I know he can feel it.
My eyes have barely closed with sleep when I hear the door creek open.
Breath caught in my lungs, I sense Kallum before I’m brave enough to open my eyes.
He’s the shadow creeping from the corner. The monster under my bed.
Cloaked by the dark, he stands at the threshold, his promise not to cross it there in the heated, defiant flare of his clashing eyes. The raw intensity in his steely expression pins me to the bed, his gaze a physical touch, like fire licking my flesh.
As a flash of lightning illuminates the room, my gaze roams the valleys and reliefs of his bare chest, mapping the dark ink covering his skin. The stag skull shaded in dramatic blackwork, the antlers branching up his shoulders and neck. My breath shallows as I trace the leanly carved definition of his strained muscles, made more apparent as he braces his palms on either side of the doorframe. A beautiful god barely restraining the demon within.
My heart tears at the cage of my chest as my gaze is drawn to the alluring V-shaped grooves cut diagonally along his abdominal muscles and the sight of his erection directly below.
I take in every inviting inch of his naked body, the monitor strapped to his ankle the only article, his desire a maddening, destructive force that threatens to devour me if unleashed. If I let him cross that threshold, whatever willpower I’ve sustained will shatter.
I’ll be lost to him.
Kallum glances at the chair abandoned at the table, a knowing, savage curl to his lips. His animalistic hunger reaches out to me from his depths, a dare to deny I feel this wicked craving to surrender.
Inhaling a shaky breath, I push back against the headboard, allowing the sheet to slip down to my waist and reveal my breasts. He makes a move forward, but I hold up my hand. Kallum stops, held at bay by my silent command.
A taut stillness infuses the room, humming at the highest frequency. The vibration courses my blood, a current strung between us where, if either one of us utters a word, the spell will break.
The tension arcs between us in challenge to either give in, or deny ourselves. The agony of that denial is an empty ache in my core. The need to rake my nails down his skin and twine myself between his bones is an itch so deep I feel it dig beneath my muscle.
The intense way he watches me forces the throb deeper, the empty pain begging to be filled. He doesn’t even have to touch me; he’s already branded in my flesh. He hasn’t left me since the moment he entered me during the ritual. A dark god I can beckon with my desire alone.
I’m connected to him in a way that defies logic. It’s primal and terrifying, and I should escape now before I’ll never be able to escape him again—but I’m caught in the entrancing lure of his eyes, helpless as I obey the command there to tow the sheet the rest of the way down my body and expose every mark and bruise to him.
He drinks in my fear like sickly-sweet nectar, laps at my wounds and pain like a starved beast. While the storm rages right outside these walls, he admires me, bared and vulnerable, like I’m the most beautiful creature in the universe to him.
There is no mockery, no innuendos. Only absolute, carnal lust. The power to corrupt, to be corrupted, and enticed into his frenzy.
To go mad with pleasure.
The words he whispered as he seduced me into a hedonistic dance. And I gave in, just as I’m caving under the seduction now, the lure into a moment of pure, decadent oblivion.
Ekstasis.
A form of ecstasy so transcendent, you feel as if you’re outside of yourself. A depraved pleasure so debaucherously wicked, it takes over your body, your mind. Your soul.
Base desires are experienced in the dark, where we feel safely hidden. But I can’t hide from Kallum. Pretending this is some sordid dream.
I’ve never been more awake.
Kallum widens his stance. Unashamed, he grabs the top of the doorframe and lifts his chin, staring down on me and thrusting his hips, his rock-hard erection impaling the air.
Adrenaline winds through my veins, the chambers of my heart burning from the force.
I feel it in my womb. The stabbing, needy pain that draws me to my knees. I’m tethered to the rock of his hips, the lewd sight of his engorged, erect cock fucking the air.
The sheet scratches abrasively across my knees as I spread my thighs. Gravity grips my spine, and I roll my hips in time with his, the sweet ache becoming a throb as it pinches deep in my core.
Kallum strains against the doorframe, the pronounced veins webbing his forearms a tantalizing aesthetic. The building drum of rain is a song, the crashing thunder his soundtrack. He owns the strike of lightning that illuminates his body to reveal the poetry scribed on his skin, becoming a piece of his art.
But it’s the frantic way in which his gaze hardens on me, a threat to tear through superficial bonds and annihilate his prey. His fight to hold back so erotic, the control I possess over him a drug.
And I am drugged, slipping beneath an otherworldly trance where I harbor no shame as I let the untamed, unadulterated lust rule me. My damp hair a wild tangle, it falls over my shoulders the way he loves it as I touch my body. Eyes fastened to the fiery embers in his, I draw my hands over my breasts, pinch my nipples. I scrape my nails across the bites and bruises covering my skin his teeth left behind, trailing down to my thighs. All the while, Kallum’s thrusts intensify, his vulgar movements guiding me past the bounds of my limit.
He’s a fever beneath my skin, cooking my blood and burning away the infection. Until all I can feel are his hands touching me, his mouth tasting me. His cock thrusting inside me.
At the dominant command in his darkened eyes, I slip my finger over my clit, nearly shattering at the white-hot, electric sensation that flickers across my body in time to the lightning strike. Fire curls in my belly as I swirl my fingers and undulate my hips in pace with his, dangerously close to breaking.
Racked with shivers, I strain to keep my eyes open and on him. It’s more than the lewd, lusty sight of Kallum; it’s the intoxicating enthrall, the freedom to be lost to pleasure that holds me captive.
Nothing outside this room is real.
I’m stitched to his body, a part of him, as he fucks me with his eyes. The crazed gleam there takes over, and his cock jumps, hips thrusting faster with each desperate stab to be sheathed.
Kallum feels what I feel. And it’s heady, how he doesn’t have to touch himself, how he’s so close to shattering just by watching me. My pleasure slashes a wild tear through his resistance. But it’s the very terrifying, visceral connection I feel with him that allows me to experience what he’s feeling; the painful need to connect, the starved desire never to be satiated.
It feels like dying.
I fall forward on the bed, my arm stretched out as I curl my fingers into the coarse sheet. My hips thrust against the bed, my fingers slick with my arousal, my back rising and falling as I bear down to drive the throbbing ache deeper and latch on to that sweet, edging explosion teasing every cell of my body.
Euphoria singes the edges until the fire envelops me, and I go up in flames.
Kallum bares his teeth, every muscle clenched. The rock of his hips increases, his muscles flexed taut. He never touches himself as he thrusts his hips in crazed frenzy, his stomach muscles contracted, his cock so fucking hard I can feel the hot pulse of it against my inner walls as he relinquishes a groan, and a thick ribbon of ejaculate spurts forth, the erotic sight taking me right over the edge with him.
