“Did I freak out?”
I lean closer.
He grinds in a violent circle, chafing my inner walls. “Do you think you freaked out?” When I shrug, he growls and cups my throat. “Oh, I could see your fear. But…” I hang on his every word, “You tilted your head, looked at me with the most cat-killing curiosity I’d ever witnessed, and you…fucking…smiled.”
I almost melt. My brain short-circuits. Heat floods me.
One more thrust, and I fall apart, breath heaving and cleaving as the orgasm surges through me in an intimate rush of molten pleasure. Raphael fucks my ass through my cries, and I come down, gasping the whole time.
“Thing of beauty,” Rory remarks, and the others echo their agreement.
“It was the first time anyone had ever smiled at me,” Raphael adds. “Except for Rory’s crazy devil grins.”
“Not even your parents?” I wonder.
He peels away a few of my curls, clinging to my sweaty skin. “I wouldn’t know. I was four when they died. Domestic dispute was the vague explanation. The cops came into the house three days after their deaths, and I was sitting on the couch in bloody pajamas, eating Pop-Tarts and watching cartoons with them dead and rotting on the floor below me.”
I shudder at the image, my throat arching in longing as my heart cries out.
Raphael kisses me again. Brief but searing while he rocks his hips—in and out—sending more hot pleasure into my blood.
“You smiled in your sleep, too.” My spine nearly bows when he touches his lips to my brow in a surprising and tender kiss. “I knew he’d come. I was only there to watch you. Nothing more. Nothing less. I felt nothing but an innate truth. The truth that I could not allow something so…” He breaks off, like evenhecan’t believe the words. “…so fuckingaliveto be gutted by that kind of filth.”
I go still. I can feel the tension thickening in the room, pouring from the others like vapors, but they don’t matter right now.
Only Raphael. We are in our own universe. He doesn’t orbit me. We’re fused. I’m dancing in his Abyss.
“You were whole.” He presses a thumb to my chin, locking me in his gaze. “Untouched by rot. Wild, reckless, defiant—butwhole. Like a match that hadn’t been struck yet. And I wasn’t going to let that depraved, sick fuck snap you in half just to watch you burn.”
He moves inside me like he’s claiming it all over again. Like my survival is his. I’m drunk on it. On him. On everything.
“You woke up during the hour I stood there.”
He pauses inside me, his hand sliding to cup my cheek, his eyes stroking mine. Some sense crawls along my spine like cold spiders. Something in the darkness. Something not safe. But safe for me.
“You saw me. Stared at me like the prey you were. You knew I was a fucking predator. And then you?—”
“—crawled across the floor with my teddy bear and blanket.” I blink rapidly as the deja vu creeps into my thoughts, becoming a…“I thought it was a dream.”
He shakes his head and kisses my eyes. “You curled up at my feet. You knew I was dangerous. A monster, even. But…that night, I wasyourmonster.”
This time, I kiss him. I take my monster back. Now, I’m curling up in his abyss, making my bed in it, and feeling its weight on me every night. He has his eternal hooks in me. Blood and bones and scars.
But everything began that night.
“You weren’t a dove or a lamb or any of that soft, breakable shit,” he tells me, quickening his thrusts, driving his erection in more. “You werelightningin a bottle. And I would’ve razed the whole damn building before I let someone uncork you for their own twisted fun.
“So, when he came into your room, I dragged him out, offered myself instead. That’s what he wanted. Not just someone to break—but someone who wouldn’t fight. He liked the quiet ones. But he hated them, too. They faded too fast. He wanted it raw. Real. Wanted to know Ifeltit. Never saw the monster hiding in me. I gave him everything he asked for. And you?—were gone by morning.”
The gravity of his words hangs in the balance between us. Raphael’s gaze never leaves mine. There is no question about it. No uncertainty. Whatever lives inside him has already found its mirror in me.
It isn’t emptiness within him. It’s a black hole. A force of inevitability. A monster like he said.
Mymonster.
I didn’t need a hero. I didn’t need a savior. I needed the villain.
Raphael didn’t just burn the world for me. He fed his soul to hell itself.
