Black smoke began to cloud the shop, and I started to cough. I looked around for my escape and ran through the doorway. I stopped mid-step, recognising my bedroom.
“Was it fair that my life was cut short by my father?” the hollow words echoed around me.
I spun around, but the shop was gone, and William was nowhere to be seen.
The door.
I slammed my bedroom door shut and leaned against it with all my might.
“What does that have to do with me?” I screamed into the empty room.
“You're susceptible to the unnatural. Not many are.”
I pressed my hands against the door and waited.
“That’s why I chose you.”
“For what?” I whispered, fearing the answer but needing to know.
“To be my vessel and become immortal.”
His whisper slithered into my ear, too close, his breath reeking of charred flesh and old cinders. The scent of his death clung to him—a funeral pyre trapped in time.
I should have run. Screamed. Fought.
But my body wouldn’t obey.
“You’re already changing,” he murmured, his hand splayed over my hardening belly. “Haven’t you felt it? The cracks? The hollowness?”
A tap echoed from inside me, responding to his words.
I gasped, but my body didn’t recoil. It arched, traitorous and eager, as he peeled my shorts down with methodical precision. The fabric pooled at my feet.
“Please—”
The ragged word tore from me.
His fingers dipped between my thighs, icy against my fevered flesh. A whimper escaped my lips—not from pain but from the obscene contrast. His touch was so cold, my body so desperately warm.
“Please, what, darling?” he crooned, thumb circling where I ached most.
I shook my head, teeth sinking into my lower lip.
“Too late for shame,” he whispered. “You’re mine now. And dolls don’t say no.”
His hands yanked my T-shirt over my head, the fabric fluttering to the floor like a shed skin. Then he lifted me, effortlessly as a child picking up a doll, and threw me onto the bed.
I barely registered the softness of the sheets before the tendrils struck—black, glistening things erupting from his back. They coiled around my wrists and my ankles, pinning me spread-eagled. One slid up my throat, its tip searing my flesh with a hiss.
The smell hit me first—burning meat, melting wax—before the pain did. I screamed, thrashing, but his grip on my wrist was iron-cool and unyielding.
“Now you’re marked as my property,” he purred, watching where he burned his mark on me with glassy-eyed delight.
I twisted, catching a glimpse of myself in the dresser mirror. Beneath my collarbone, a red mark bubbled up.
WM 666
The brand wasn’t carved. It wasn’t inked.
