Her cry tore into my thoughts, pulling me back into the moment, where she was wrapped around me, squeezing me so fucking tight.
“Perfect,” I murmured against her trembling lips, drinking in the wreckage I had created. “Now, let’s see how much deeper I can take you, my tattered, broken doll.”
My thrusts grew impossibly deeper, possessive, reaching a part she wasn’t even aware of within her. I thrust hard and madly, dangerously, as if I was making a promise, staking a claim, trying to carve myself into something eternal.
“It’s almost as though you were made for me, Elizabeth.” My lips pressed to hers, deceptively gentle at first, then slowly, I devoured her, claimed her, every inch of her swollen lips.
Panting, hungry, falling apart, I dragged my teeth down the column of her throat. I bit her skin again, sharp and punishing, until she gasped, her body tensing beneath me.
The sting bloomed into something hotter, something she should resist but didn’t. The metallic tang of her blood smeared across my lips, and a dark growl vibrated from my chest, reverberating through her.
She was drowning in me, just as I was in her, in the weight of my body, the punishing thrust of my cock, with a hand around her throat, owning her every breath. And when I pulled back just enough to meet her gaze, her eyes burned like fire in the dark.
She was clenching around me, tears streaming down her cheeks, her body desperate, greedy, needy…perfect.
I chuckled darkly, the sound curling around her like a vice. “You’re so pretty when you cry.”
My hand moved from her neck to grip her thigh, fingers pressing bruises into her skin as I pulled out agonisingly slow just to hear her whimper, just to see the frustration flicker in her glazed eyes. And then, with a sharp thrust, I was buried inside her again, forcing a shuddering moan from her lips.
“Fuck, look at you.” Hunger bled from my voice, while my pace remained relentless, punishing. “So tight, clenching around my cock, like that. Christ, you’re so fucking perfect for me, Elizabeth. If there is a chance you’ll live to see tomorrow, I’d have killed anyone that thinks you and I aren’t a perfect match.”
Her moans dissolved into cries, her fingers fisting the sheets, her body writhing beneath me as I fucked her raw.
The wet slap of skin, the obscene sound of her drenched pussy taking every inch of me… it was pure fucking bliss.
“You feel that, Beth Fraser?” I plunged deeper, rougher, meaner, savoring the way her breath stuttered. “Even your body knows me already.”
I could feel it in the way she gripped me, in the way she chased my pleasure with her own. She was made for me, sculpted to take my madness, to drown in my depravity.
If only she wasn’t meant to die.
24
BETH
Zaghan…
The heavy slam of a door rattled the bed frame, sending a shudder deep into my bones. My eyes cracked open, tears clinging to my lashes.
Someone was here. It wasn’t Callan. Not really. It washim. Something else, a shadow wearing his skin, pulling the strings of his body and mind. Something twisted, something terribly, unnervingly… wrong.
I had seen versions of it on screen, flipped through pages whispering the same possibilities; bipolar disorder, dissociative identity disorder…the Jekyll-and-Hyde curse. A man possessed by a ghost.
I had studied them, fascinated, but only from a safe distance. Never did I imagine I would one day be living it, caught in the crossfire of a fractured mind, trapped between the two versionsof the same man. He wasn’t a ghost. This, I knew for a fact. His touch wasn’t cold. If anything, it seared into my skin, like a branding.
I believed in the extraterrestrial, in vampires and in faeries and demons. I believed in dark forces. I believed that some souls–especially the ones that died unjustly–never truly found an eternal resting place, and instead, roamed the edges of here and the afterlife, searching for a means to exist, to be seen and felt, searching for a host.
I believed in ghosts, alright? But that man whose touch was still burning into my skin wasn’t. No matter how badly he wanted me to believe he was.
He came closer, Zaghan, or whatever he called himself, his looming shadow stretching towards me, thick with menace. The dark aura that wrapped around him cloyed, suffocated, and swept across my skin, leaving behind, tiny, raised bumps.
I remembered all the time his hands had touched me, how it felt like something was being stripped away from me, something fragile, something innocent.
He commanded me like I was meant to obey him. He touched me like I was sculpted just to be broken into shards and remodelled to fit into his darkness.
I hated it. I hated him. But I let him. Why did I let him? I didn’t know.
I was supposed to fight him. And I remembered fighting him. I remembered wishing to be anywhere else but there. But I didn’t remember when I gave in. It was as if I stopped resisting before I meant to. Like my will to fight suddenly froze.
