The tavern reeked of smoke, stale liquor, and sex. It clung to the worn wooden walls like sweat on skin. My stomach twisted from the scent, but I was ignited deeper. I felt his gaze burning into my back, tracing every curve of my body with dark possession. I didn’t turn. Not yet.
When I finally did, my eyes met his with blazing defiance.
“We like when people suffer,” I said, voice velveted with lust and truth. “And I like that we no longer have to pretend otherwise. I want a world shaped in our image—merciless and beautiful.”
Balthazar’s eyes glowed—one burning like a star, the other a portal to hell itself. “Where have you been all my life?” he murmured. “The others always wanted to tame me. To win my love. But you—” He stepped closer, reverent, dangerous. “You want tobewith me. You want torulewith me.”
Heat flared through my chest, spreading lower. There was nofear left in me—only fire. I stepped forward, my gaze never wavering. He smiled. The sort of smile that promised ruin. The kind of smile that said I’d be worshipped and destroyed equally.
Then he spoke a silky hiss, “Come. I must claim you… as the darkness you are.”
The stairs creaked beneath our steps, every groan of the wood echoing with anticipation. The scent of musk and old sex thickened the air, stoking the flame building inside me. My pulse quickened. My thighs clenched.
At the top of the landing, he kicked open a bedroom door. The room was dim and raw, the bed unmade, the sheets stained with past sins. Before I could speak, Balthazar swept me into his arms like a god claiming his offering. He tossed me onto the mattress, and I sank into its roughness, breathless and aching.
He stood at the edge of the bed, looming.
Half-human. Half-nightmare.
One side of him was all carved muscle and taut sinew—beautiful, lethal. The other was grotesque—flesh peeled away in places, revealing twitching veins and bone that pulsed with ancient power. One eye shimmered with icy hunger, the other glowed with something darker than death.
I should’ve been afraid.
Instead, I was drenched in want.
He looked down at me like a king surveying the altar of his worship. A wicked smirk played on his bloodstained lips.
“My wicked temptress,” he said, voice low and intimate, like a secret dragged across satin. “I want to make you scream until the gods look away.”
He crawled on top of me like a god forged from nightmares and desire—power incarnate, muscles coiled like a predator’s, every inch of him vibrating with unearthly energy. His skin shimmered faintly, as if lit from within, glowing with a dark, seductive power that wrapped around me like a spell I could never break.
I felt myself drawn in, helpless to resist. His confidence radiated from every movement—deliberate, commanding, wicked. He didn’t just want me. He intended to consume me.
He slid beside me, his massive form pressing into mine. Heat rolled off his skin, and where our bodies touched, I ignited. His lipsbrushed mine—soft, teasing, almost reverent—before they claimed me with scorching fire. I melted beneath him, every thought stripped away until there was only this—him, me, and the hunger between us.
I trembled—part fear, part fascination—but refused to cower. I wanted him. I wanted his ruin, his fire, his shadowed need. And he knew it.
His hands roamed my body with reverence and hunger, fingers like flame and ice, powerful enough to bruise yet gentle enough to worship. Clothing slipped from my skin, forgotten. The cold air kissed my bare flesh, but I barely felt it, not with his touch branding every inch of me.
Then came the horror—and the pleasure.
Maggots spilled from the open seams of his monstrous form, writhing as they landed on my naked skin, soft and wet. I gasped, terror flickering—but even as I flinched, my core throbbed for more. For him.
His cock pushed into me—hard, thick, relentless—and I cried out, not just from shock, but from a jolt of blinding, soul-splitting ecstasy. The grotesque and the divine collided inside me, until I didn’t know if I were sobbing or moaning, begging or unraveling.
The larvae slithered across my stomach, my thighs, my breasts—and I screamed, brushing them off in panic even as my hips bucked upward, desperate for every brutal thrust Balthazar gave me. He seemed to understand the mangled contradiction inside me, his body moving with perfect, punishing rhythm—like a beast worshipping the temple of my body, dragging me to the edge of sanity.
The walls blurred. Candle smoke curled through the air, casting a hellish red light across the bed and the cadaverous beauty of his face. His eyes—one blazing with supernatural fire, the other black with ancient death—pierced me. And I shrank under the weight of his gaze.
We moved in a dark and sensual rhythm, limbs tangled, breaths stolen, flesh crashing against flesh. His skin, cool and slick in places, felt like a balm against my fevered need. He was at once corpse and god, nightmare and lover—and I wanted all of it.
With every stroke, with every growl he let loose against myneck, my grip on reality slipped further away. I was becoming something new. Something dark. Somethinghis.
And I never wanted to return.
I looked up at his face—so eerily still, so maddeningly unreadable—yet somehow brimming with unspoken emotion. Balthazar overwhelmed me. It was beauty and horror, divinity laced with decay. He radiated something ancient and primal that made my soul quake and my body burn.
I was fucking a half-corpse, half-god—his flesh both rotting and radiant, his body giving off heat like the heart of a furnace. Every thrust was a plunge deeper into madness.
