“Cal?”
“Is that what you want? Twisted?”
She crawled to the edge of the bed and stretched out a hand. He was wearing the towel still and nothing else, and when she tugged on the knot of it, the fabric clung for a moment before dropping free.
She felt him shudder when she ran her hand over the hard rises of his abdomen. Slowly, one by one, she let her fingers fall away, until just a single one was following the crease of his hip. Her breathing increased, and she felt him strain as her warm breath heated his sensitized flesh.
He seemed to be holding his breath.
“‘These violent delights have violent ends.”
“I know that one. ‘Which as they kiss consume,’ right?” She leaned up, arching, to graze her lips first against his nose, and then, his mouth. His cock brushed her ribs, already hard, and she heard him bite back a groan when she rubbed against him.
“Goddamn it,” he hissed. “I will be the end of you, Nadine.”
“Then we’ll start from the beginning and try again, Daddy.”
He made a sound—wild and desperate. And then she felt herself flung back against the bed, so roughly that she bounced. He didn’t let her come back up for air; she felt him yank up her shirtdress before sliding into her on a single, violent stroke that rocked her back on her tailbone and had her gasping into his mouth at the urgency of it.
“You really are mine, aren’t you, Nadine? Ever since you came to Ravensgate, you were practically begging to be corrupted. Didn’t I tell you that you could only be mine in ruin?” His fingers spread over her thigh. “What dark magic did you work on me to make me feel like this?”
“Love,” she whispered.
He groaned a denial, even as his hand came up to cradle her face towards his. “Kiss me, then,” he whispered. “Love me, then. Let me be your cage and I’ll give you an open door.”
Later, she would be grateful for the darkness because it shielded her from the darker truths about herself. That she liked the snarls that came from his throat and the way he gripped her just tightly enough that she could feel the marks beginning to bloom on her skin.
His ferocious need to possess her filled a hollow inside her that had always gaped like an open wound. At that diner, Cal had told her that some women needed bars to feel safe.
Well, maybe she needed to drown in someone just to fucking breathe.
When he reached between them as she came, smearing his come over her hips and belly, and whispered,“Mine,”she had felt the blood pulse throughout her body in feverish response as his mouth seized hers and he fucked her through all the pain and protests, until the shadowy bed yawned like a great abyss at her back and everything else fell away but him.
And this.
E P I L O G U E
? raise the blood ?
Nathaniel Cullraven was never found.
Nobody in Argentum was particularly sorry to hear he was missing, either, although his disappearance was given all of the proper gravitas that would have been accorded to anyone else.That family, people whispered.If you look back far enough, everything that goes wrong in this town always comes back to them.
From the closure of the mine to the various missing persons over years and now, to the Master of Ravensgate’s own mysterious disappearance, it all came back to the Cullravens. Argentum’s own House of Atreus; they had, at long last, finally reaped a bit of the bad luck that they had continually and recklessly sown for countless others.
This condemnatory sentiment had only strengthened when Ben’s body was found in the woods a few weeks later. A hiker had come across it with her dog, who had been chasing a sparrow through the trees until he’d caught the scent of something of far more immediate concern. By the time that the girl and her dog had discovered Benjamin, his body had become badly decomposed. An animal had dragged it around, scattering pieces around the grounds, and ravens and other birds had pecked away even more. When the county coroner and the forensic team were called out to the scene hours later, he was crawling with beetles and other scavengers.
The sheriff determined that he had probably been hit by a stray bullet during the festival, which everyone had found strange, because Gideon Crocker didn’t know human anatomy from Adam. Even when the coroner did reluctantly agree that the trajectory of the bullet was unlikely to have been self-inflected, there were still whispers: that he had been found with a faded, blood-soaked cardigan, that it looked like there had been signs of a struggle.
Maybe his wife killed him, people said in hushed tones.Maybe that’s why she disappeared.
Because Noelle Cullraven had never turned up, either. Not even when her younger sister had shown up and started stirring things around.
Some of the gossip-mongers were pessimistic. They thought that maybe Benjamin had killed his wife and couldn’t take the guilt. People had been calling Ravensgate “Killraven Castle” for years now, going all the way back to the days of the first Caledon Abial Cullraven and his two miserable wives. At least four men in that family had lost their wives in tragic or suspicious circumstances. Maybe the father had been involved in this one.
People like that, they said,they do things—sick things—when they’re rich. It’s like a disease. They get corrupt with power and it rots them from within, and that’s when they’re liable to start doing those sex things that get them into trouble . . . and the papers.
A few days later, a KETCHUP WITH JESUS shirt appeared on the statue of Caledon Cullraven. Nobody saw who put it there, but the next day someone added a flower crown, and an old pair of leggings knotted around his neck like a scarf.
