Alina inhaled deeply, her eyes fluttering shut, her lashes casting shadows on her cheeks.
“Answer me!” I growled, my voice ragged with desperation and desire. “I’ve shown you what I am. The monster I’ve hidden from you all these years. Look around you. Look at what I’ve done. Tell me, how does it make you feel?”
She opened her eyes.
And smiled.
Slow. Lethal. Beautiful.
Her fingers lifted to the clasp of her cloak. She unfastened it, letting the heavy fabric fall to the floor with a whisper, where it pooled in a sea of blood. She stepped forward, radiant in the carnage, her lips parted slightly in something between awe and hunger.
“Alina!” I shouted again, desperate to break the silence that choked me. “Don’t you fear me now that you’ve seen me for what I am?”
When it came, her voice was breathless and trembling, delicate, but unwavering.
“I’m happy you killed them… my lord.”
I flinched at the title but held her gaze.
She moved closer, every step deliberate, graceful, hypnotic.
“I’m proud of my dark, wicked monster,” she whispered, her breath a caress. “I despised my adopted family. Their voices. Their rules. Their pathetic attempts to control me. And now... now you’ve freed me.”
Her fingers brushed my shirt collar, gentle and intimate, and a shiver raced down my spine. She wasn’t afraid of what I had done.
She was aroused by it.
“You crave a monster,” I rasped, curling my fingers around her chin, tilting her face to mine. “You crave the man who kills.”
Her heart thundered, the rhythm pounding between us like a war drum. But her face remained composed, porcelain smooth, serene in the wreckage of death we stood within.
Only her body betrayed her.
Heat rolled off her in waves, thick and suffocating like lust-drenched smoke. Her lips, swollen and parted, whispered silent pleas for my mouth, my hands, my ruin.
And her eyes… gods, her eyes.
They didn’t shimmer with innocence or fear.
They blazed with hunger. A deep, deviant hunger that mirrored my own.
She wanted to be devoured.
She wanted to be undone.
She wanted to be corrupted by the darkness I had spent years trying to keep buried.
“I don’t fear you,” she said, her voice soft, sure. “I want you. All of you. Finally, I feel alive. Liberated. And it’s because of you.”
“Fuck, Alina,” I growled, breath catching in my throat. “You have no idea what you’re doing to me.”
She reached up, her touch featherlight but commanding as her fingers traced the edges of my face. Then she slid lower down my chest, across my stomach, until her hand disappeared into my breeches.
Her grip closed around my cock—tight, claiming, merciless.
“Watching you kill,” she whispered, eyes locked with mine, “makes me soaked.”
I nearly lost control right then.
