I could feel it poisoning my thoughts.
Dissolving reason like acid eating through glass. Every rational impulse I had left corroded on contact.
Groaning, he dug his fingers into my jaw, bruising my brown skin and tilting my face until there was no angle left to escape.
Yet, the pressure anchored me.
Held me still while his venomous passion worked its way deeper, until my blood felt wrong—too hot, too fast—racing to carry the sensual infection everywhere at once.
A sound tore out of me—too broken to be called a moan—caught between our bodies as my spine bowed against the restraints biting into my wrists. The bite of the cuffs grounded me in reality even as his erotic poison turned everything fever-bright and delirious.
Ohhhhh.
My nipples hardened, aching, hypersensitive, every nerve screaming for more toxin.
I was overdosing on his kiss.
Rook was the needle in my vein.
The disease that convinced me it was a cure.
The ruin my body broke for.
The rot that bloomed sweet instead of foul.
When he finally tore himself away, a thin, glistening strand of saliva stretched between us before snapping—the last drop of poison delivered.
My head was now a haze.
Thoughts fractured.
Mind scattered.
Old beliefs detonated into tiny bits of shrapnel.
Our breathing filled the cell, wild and uneven. Every exhale felt like a symptom. Every inhale like craving for another dose.
Was this what being soul-bonded meant? That his venom would colonize my bloodstream and trigger my cells to surrender one by one?
He raised his hands and tenderly ran his fingers through my braids. “Did you feel that, Beloved?”
I shivered. “Y-yes.”
“Our souls found each other before we were born, before we knew what this experience on Earth would be.” His eyes watered and his gaze intensified. "We were woven together in the dark. Two threads of the same cosmic fabric, separated only so we could have the pleasure of finding each other again."
My breath hitched. "That's not. Not possible. Not real. Not—”
"Not scientific?" He smiled, and it was devastatingly beautiful, delivering yearning to my core. "This is older than science. Older than language. Older than the first heartbeat that ever echoed in the void."
Another wave of heat rolled through me, and I whimpered as my hips shifted against the straitjacket. The slick between my thighs was obscene now, soaking through the canvas beneath me.
Rook's fingers continued their gentle path through my braids, and each stroke sent shivers cascading down my spine. "Your soul recognized mine the moment it heard about me. It’s why you wrote the book about me—”
“I was intrigued—”
“You were obsessed—”
“You are a unique serial killer that I had to study—”
