by Lana Sky
But when I glance down, her eyes hold me captive. Wide. Clear. Unafraid. We have both seen the Devil and lived to tell about it—not that we fucking do. It’s not enough to merely bitch about evil; you emulate it.
“You think your fiancé is so terrible,” I tell her, my words landing with flecks of spit against her back. “You think you’re the only woman in the world to experience the pain of an abusive prick? Think again.” I chuckle darkly while she calmly stares back. In the end, I’m the one forced to look away, but I settle for eyeing the steady rise and fall of her chest. The bitch may have aced her poker face, but her body gives her away. Her pulse is ten beats too fast. She flinches every time I exhale, though she makes her limbs stiff in an attempt to disguise the reaction.
She’s not afraid of me...no. But she is wary, and I intend to go from there. Inspiring fear is like stoking a flame into a full-fledged inferno. All you need is a spark.
When I reach down and graze her breast through the fabric of the borrowed shirt, it’s like striking a match. It’s the pain she expects—not this...soft, gentle, squeezing motions. I can see her eyes flicker as she struggles to process the sensation. Pleasure?
Though the bastard may have held back from fucking her, he never gave to her either. He never ground his presence into her skin with his bare hands. Never tasted her cunt on his tongue. He never made her writhe, wanting his cock. I knew better than most that pain could be withstood and faced with gritted teeth—pleasure wasn’t so easy to resist.
Her body tenses when I lower myself against her back like a wolf aiming to deliver the killing blow. I continue to stroke her while my mouth grazes the nape of her neck, my tongue attacking the line of her pulse. Her nipples rise sharp to attention, greedy and demanding, practically grazing my palm through the layer of fabric. From the corner of my eye, I see one of her hands flutter as if she meant to shove me off before she braces them both flat against the mattress.
When I tease her with my teeth, she jumps, and an answering jolt shoots through my cock. This game is a double-edged sword, but I intend to win.
“Get...on your knees.”
I pull back and watch her consider disobeying. Her eyes stray, fighting to return to that distant place—but she can’t, and she resigns with a slow, deliberate shift of her ass. Suddenly, she’s on her back, looking up at me. She pulls herself upright and then leans forward on her hands, arching her spine...
Fuck. I shift backward, dismounting the mattress altogether. Her eyes glow through the shadows, daring me with a silent taunt. Make me bleed. Scream. Do it. Erase him. Make me yours...
I don’t want her. I don’t, but I’m reaching for the buckle of my jeans anyway. I’m hard, a shock that I ignore in favor of watching her gaze drift down to find me erect and straining. She inhales, the broken sound playing like some fucked-up melody. Her tongue shoots out, dabbing her bottom lip as if in anticipation of my taste.
“Open,” I grit out, rising to my feet.
She obeys, parting her teeth, her tongue lying passive in the center. I use the pink flesh as a bull’s eye as I shove my cock deep into her mouth. Her cheeks contract automatically trying to force me out, but before I can, she relaxes, and fuck...it’s like the bitch tries to swallow me down whole. She’s sloppy. She’s never sucked a man off before me—I can see it in her eyes as they meet mine, taunting me to make her stop.
My fingers grip the back of her skull instead, using the contact to guide her, steer, control. Once again, she proves to be a fast learner. Her tongue strokes the underside. Her teeth graze the shaft. The tension ratchets up, coiling in every muscle until I’m rocking on my heels, grunting out curses through clenched teeth. Damn. Fuck. Shit.
Too soon, I have to shove her back, panting while my body struggles to regain control. I clench my cock at the root, tightening my grip until the impending release gathers in the pit of my stomach and stays there. I consider just jerking myself here and now, pelting her with the evidence. Her owner would surely like that.
But she wouldn’t. She’d want me inside her, deeper than the fucker could ever reach. She wants to be tainted, owned, and destroyed—but I’m not sure if I want to be her pistol this time.
I don’t know how long I fucking stand there, about to boil over into my own fist. Maybe it’s the sound she makes when I start to turn away? It’s a gasp—a protest, a plea. Words are beyond this little lamb now.
“Take the shorts off—” The command is barely out of my mouth before she has the boxers shed and tossed onto the floor. She lays back when I step forward, her eyes roving up to the ceiling while her hands grip the sheets until her knuckles turn white.
I can feel her breath on my neck as I mount her. She doesn’t make a sound when I find the opening to her cunt and thrust balls-deep. Her head falls back. Her toes curl. She clenches, her thighs tightening around my hips. Her breasts heave against my chest, and then I just let go, giving her every bit of violation she seems to crave.
For two, maybe three thrusts I’m in control. Then something shifts somewhere during the fourth plunge inside of her. She grinds her teeth together, her hands clenching more of the sheets. More. More. More. Then she grabs my thigh, sinking her nails in deep and drawing out a groan I can’t silence. Her own gasp mingles with it, breathy and vulnerable. Stacatto’s whore likes it rough, apparently. Before I can find a rhythm, she arches up, deepening every thrust and hastening the burning, savage need humming through my blood.
I grab her by the waist and pin her down, but she twists and writhes forcing her own ragged pace. When I don’t comply fast enough, her nails rake downward ripping bits of skin away.
“Shit!” My vision shoots red—but it’s a different shade from before. No matter how many men I’ve beaten with my fists or whose faces I’ve smashed into a wall, I’ve never breathed this violent shade of ruby before. It drenches everything, and then...there’s clarity. It’s brief and lasts only for as long as I thrust inside of her, grunting with the effort. Faster. Faster. Harder.
As if from far away, I hear her moan. I see black. My ears pop with the violent disruption in gravity. I feel electricity crackle all the way to my fucking toes. I’m alive with the sensation of her—her heat, her silky fucking wet...
Then too soon, it’s over. I’m tumbling back down with only seconds to pull out before I come so hard my teeth chatter. I don’t notice that she hasn’t climaxed until I hear her gasp and feel her shift underneath me. Her nails return, catching the left side of my ass, and I rise up on my knees and snatch her hand away, pinning it above her head.
“No.” My voice is too jagged to hold any true anger, and she’s too far gone to hear me anyway. With a hiss, I flip her over, and then shove my fingers inside her, thrusting them in and out. Her breath catches. She whines when I grind against her clit with my thumb and words tumble out into the sheets, broken, hoarse, and definitely not English.
“Filho da puta! Merda. Merda. Merda—” She breaks off. Her spine curls, and then she comes hard, riding my fingers so violently the knuckles pop.
When I pull my hand away, I swipe it against the sheets to erase her, but something makes me pop my thumb into my mouth for a second, swallowing down her taste. I shouldn’t feel hard again already, watching her. I shouldn’t wonder what the hell she’d said. I should kick her out of the fucking bed. Make her sleep in the tub.
I shouldn’t collapse down beside her, high on the aftermath of the sex. But what the fuck. She can’t seem to move either, so I decide to chalk it up as a victory. I let my eyes drift shut, and I nearly convince myself that she isn’t there.
“Who hurt you? Was it a man or a woman?” There’s no hint of fear or restraint in her voice. Just plain, shameless curiosity. “Who made you carve those marks into your skin?” she adds when I don’t respond.
My eyes open, and I can’t stop my hand from sliding down my left thigh, sensing the tiny nicks and scars left there. Irritation gives way to suspicion. “How do you know I made them myself?
”
She sighs and the mattress shifts beneath her. Suddenly her forearm juts across my vision, but she makes no attempt to attack me with it. For a moment, my eyes trace the pale skin until I notice the near-invisible flaws that catch the glow from the alarm clock: ten thin, delicate scars that form a neat row right before the juncture of her elbow.
“The first days,” she says. Exhaustion thickens her accent, and I try to remember where she said she was from. Brazil. “The worst days. I needed to remind myself that I was still real...”
It’s a morbid topic for pillow talk. I close my eyes again and ignore her, unwilling to take part in her post-sex game of tit for tat. But the joke’s on me. I close my eyes, and I see his face. I hear his voice trickle into my ear while my face is pressed into the pillow. God forgive me...
I bolt upright and rise to my feet. She’s watching me, her eyes tracing my own row of scars, openly curious about the story behind each jagged line. Fuck her.
I needed to remind myself that I was still real, she said. I’d needed to remind myself that I was still human. That I could bleed. That I still had control over some part of my skin. An injured beast caught within a trap would chew its own limb off to escape, after all.
I grit my teeth and try to smother the emotions by shoving my legs into my jeans and dragging them up. It doesn’t help. Thanks to Stacatto’s nosy bitch, I will need to find some asshole to punch to drive the fucking buzzing from my skull. I let the anger push me to the door, and I slam it shut behind me...but somewhere between the front door and the couch the buzzing dies down, and I slump onto the cushions instead.
I don’t sleep.
I breathe. I feel. I count every surging beat of my heart, and I tally up all the ways that I’m still—biologically at least—somewhat human.
Lucifer is breaking me.
In three days, he’s cast five years’ worth of Vinny’s hard work down the drain. Lynn wouldn’t ask questions. Lynn wouldn’t defy. Lynn wouldn’t crave the fiery hell that only the Devil could deliver...
I would give anything in the world to be that cold shell of a woman again, if only for a second—it would certainly make it easier to drive a blade through my chest.
Lucifer has his own demons, it seems. Secrets he just won’t spill. Vinny loved to spin the tale of the poor immigrant boy who—with “fucking hard work and determination”—grew up to be one of the most feared crime lords at the ripe age of twenty-nine. He saw himself as an inspiration, I think. He saw himself as a warning sign. The little meek, poor boy who most men picked on could one day grab a gun of his own. His heart, hardened by years of neglect and bitter jealousy, could easily pull the trigger.
Monsters were never born—not the evilest and most demented, at least. They were made; forged within the fires of rage and pain.
Vinny and Lucifer were cut from the same cloth, but they aren’t entirely similar—a bit like steel and silver. Both nearly identical at first glance, but made from different materials at their core. One was meant mainly to adorn and be adorned. The other was for cutting. Carving. Slicing. Killing.
Which one was which?
Silver, I thought, picturing Vinny. Lucifer’s ice-blue eyes were pure steel.
He didn’t like me. He didn’t like that he had to tolerate me. It was so strange to be around someone so open in their hatred—someone who called it what it was and didn’t try to describe it as something else. In Lynn’s world, violence had always been garnished by love. I love you, Daniela. I’ve done it all for you. I would bleed the world for you.
How ironic was it that Lucifer couldn’t even seem to hit me? Oh, he wanted to. Some moments, he even came close to it. I’d learned to steel myself around men when their shoulders tensed or their eyes got mean. Vinny rarely showed restraint, and the warning signs were almost always followed by a blow.
Lucifer displayed his anger in nearly the same way. Sometimes I’d swear he was about to lash out. But he still had yet to hit me.
Even when I’d prodded him to.
You never asked a man—a beast—about his scars. Even Vinny for all his bravado and ‘success’ got touchy if someone remarked on his limp or stared too long at his unsteady gait. Touchy, as in he’d break their jaw, or even worse, he’d give them a scar of their own to ogle.
Lucifer has thirty-three marks on his hips, each one carefully cut into the skin. Not too deep. Not too light. Just enough to bleed, but not enough to draw attention. It was a careful method that I’d taught myself. Poor Vinny had learned within a week of moving me in that it was better if he stripped my room of razors and scissors. One cut per day—just one—like a morbid trail of breadcrumbs left behind for a woman in danger of going insane.
Daniela was still there somewhere, screaming through pale skin. She wasn’t dead yet.
Vinny had chalked the mutilation up to grief at first, but it wasn’t long before he realized that every cut on Lynn’s pure flesh was an insult to him. They had been my way of saying that I wasn’t his, not really. Not back then.
I bite back the memory and drag myself upright, pulling on the gray boxers with my knife still inside the pocket. Gray light streams in through the windows, fighting back the shadows that still linger stubbornly in the corners. Shadows linger over me as well—dark marks over my hips and thighs and most likely my throat, left by groping fingers and brutal strength.
I wince when I stagger upright and make my way to the bathroom. I brush my teeth. Wet my hair. I go through the motions of cleaning myself with a filthy washrag. When I finally creep into the living room, I don’t expect to find Lucifer there, lounging lengthwise on the couch the same way a panther might lurk within a tree. He’s asleep. His chest rises and falls in a steady but fast rhythm. Without those eyes to give it harsh definition, the planes of his face softly catch the light. He’s entirely angelic, the Devil right before his tumultuous fall. His bare chest ripples with tension, however, even in his sleep. Muscles flex and twitch beneath tanned skin, constantly on edge. If I touched him, he’d spring away before my fingers even made contact.
I tiptoe around the outer edge of the room instead and make my way into the kitchen. I find the box of Chunky Bites in a high cupboard, pour myself a bowl of it, and eat it dry with my fingers, watching Lucifer all the while. Tattoos dot his skin, more deliberately etched than mine. Letters span his neck, though I haven’t bothered to read the word they spell. There’s also a six-pointed star over his left breast and a plain cross inked high onto his left hip. More scars form subtler designs, spanning across his ribcage and arms, but they aren’t neat like the ones I know he made himself.
It’s a strange sensation to watch him like this. In a matter of days, I’ve learned his body more intimately than I know Vinny’s, and I can’t help this greedy part of myself that feels compelled to memorize him. Every inch. Every strand of black hair. Every indigo hue of his eyes...
I claw each part of him away to horde somewhere inside myself, where no one will find him.
He doesn’t wake by the time I’m nearly finished with my dry cereal. I toy with the idea of taking a shower and sneaking on some of the deodorant the boy gave me—his borrowed clothing carefully hidden underneath the sink. I begin to shift toward it, keeping my gaze on Lucifer the whole while...
Then the door opens, flooding the room with the scent of alcohol and stale body odor more potent than my own.
“You.” Green eyes bore into mine, and I don’t even have the time to react before the red-haired man crosses over to me and seizes a handful of my hair. Using his grip like a leash, he drags my head down to hiss into my ear. “You stupid little bitch.”
He shoves me hard, and I go flying. Wham!
I taste pain—wet, coppery, and vibrant—as my head ricochets off something and my shoulder strikes an even harder surface.
“Arno? What the hell?” The growl taints the edges of my periphery, but before I can pinpoint the direction it’s coming from, someone seizes my shoulder and drags me forward.
The air changes. We’re in the hallway where there is no scent of lust or stale sweat or sugary cereal. I tense up, instinctively trying to feel for the stairs, but the grip on my arm is insistent, and I’m dragged down every last one, stubbing my toe on the landing.
I stagger to keep my balance, still held by my hair. The red-haired man nearly wrenches part of it out by the root as he hauls me across a room that smells like cigarette smoke. I hear a door open, and I recognize this section of the flooring as it gives way to the rickety basement steps.
He doesn’t bother to drag me this time—he shoves, and I land on my knees two steps down. A foot being rammed into my side kicks me down another four. When the world finally stops spinning, I see flashes of light mingle with the otherwise dreary backdrop of the basement interior. Standing before me, the red-haired man glowers, his eyes bloodshot.
“Tell me,” he demands. “Tell me again what your little plan was supposed to achieve?”
I don’t know what he means, but I recognize the murderous tension in his left arm. I brace myself for the blow, and he doesn’t disappoint, slapping me hard across my already bruised cheek.
“Read.” He reaches for me again, pulling me by the arm to the table where a cell phone lies upturned on the surface, its screen displaying a single text message. My eyes stream. I have to blink twice just to clear my vision enough to make out the words that speckle the screen.
No deal. Tell Lynn that I’ve remembered my purpose.
“I don’t see him rolling over to get you back,” the red-haired man growls. He says something else, the words dying down to nothing more than burning embers crushed beneath the inferno of terror that consumes me whole.
Vinny. Vinny. Vinny.
How could I have been so stupid?
I see nothing but the flickering light bulb dangling from the ceiling as my hand slips into the boxers and encloses around the knife. I pull it out, feeling its weight against my palm. The next second it’s on my neck, pressing, tearing, sawing...
