I thought after murdering the man responsible for almost every single scar on the inside and the outside of my body—the man who killed my daughter—I’d be filled with some kind of peace. Some kind of closure.

This was not the case.

I did not find peace with the murder I committed.

It didn’t bother me. That wasn’t it.

“I want more,” I informed Lukyan.

He glanced across at me, satisfaction flickering for a second on his face before he looked to my empty plate. “I’ll get Vera to get you a second serving.”

I looked down too, surprised I’d even finished the food. I’d barely even tasted it. I only forced it down because of Lukyan’s subtle hints about nourishing my body and punishing me—not in the good way—if I didn’t.

“No.” I waved my hand. “I want more blood.”

His eyebrow jerked slightly in either interest or surprise. I was still learning Lukyan subtleties.

I knew he was going to wait until I explained, so I did. “Blood of the people who hurt me. Who made me bleed,” I clarified.

“Your family?” he guessed correctly.

I nodded. “And every single person who watched me get beaten, degraded, tortured. Everyone who contributed,” I added.

He regarded me. Long and hard. “We can do that,” he said finally. “But there are only so many people I can go and retrieve for you,” he continued. “I could possibly retrieve them all, but it would take time. A lot of it. Not that we haven’t got it.”

His meaning was clear. He didn’t do subtleties when it came to things like this. Hadn’t pushed me about leaving the house, about getting psychological help. This was him broaching the subject. Not because of my mental health or the repercussions of suffering from something like this. No, for the finer details on mass murdering everyone who’d ever hurt me.

I’d never loved him more than I did in that moment. Of course, I didn’t say this.

“You’re referring to me being able to go outside?” I asked.

He nodded once. “I expect it’s not going to be as easy as opening the front door and stepping out.”

The mere thought of it ramped up my heartbeat. I shook my head.

“I’ve never expected so,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “If it was that easy, you likely would’ve done it already. When you first woke up and found yourself facing me and the possibility of certain death.”

“Perhaps.” I smiled. I was doing more of that. Not a lot. Not even enough to perfect the expression, but I was doing it sporadically. Lukyan didn’t particularly know when or how he was being funny, but I knew he enjoyed my smile. He didn’t say that, of course. He wasn’t a man to engage in something so asinine as sweet nothings.

His eyes moved over my lips, and he leaned forward and grasped my fingers in his hands. “We will begin our plans,” he said. “And I will retrieve some of the lower-risk targets for you to get started on while we find a way toward you retrieving them yourself.”

That was Lukyan. Making plans. Making things manageable. Even the condition that I was sure would never be anything less than a death sentence.

Lukyan made me think different. He made me hope.

Which of course was a dangerous and fatal emotion. I knew that at the time. But I did it anyway.

Because humans were stupid like that.

* * *

My stomach was full of butterflies.

With knives instead of wings.

Lukyan had been true to his word, as he always was.

Two days after our conversation, Brad—the man who’d sometimes watched as Christopher beat me, sometimes contributed—sat in the same spot where his cousin twice removed took his last breath.

I was making sure he had the same fate.

Lukyan had given him the same treatment he had Christopher, but all the fingers on his left hand were gone this time.

I didn’t go for theatrics, an epic speech while I circled him with my gun. No, I was like Lukyan in that respect. I just put a bullet in his brain and didn’t go for the torture business.

My hand was still vibrating with the shock from the gun, my blood singing with the heat of revenge when Lukyan’s cold lips were at my neck.

“How do you feel?” he asked, circling my body with his hands, yanking me back into his chest.

I melted backward. “I feel… not much,” I admitted. “No guilt.”

“Guilt is for those who pretend to be saints. We do not pretend,” he murmured.

His hand moved to mine, lifting the gun. His other hand ejected the magazine, then emptied the chamber. It clattered to the floor.

“No,” I agreed, my voice husky.

“You’re doing good,” he said, kissing my earlobe, then moving downward.

“At killing?” I breathed.

“At abandoning your humanity,” he said against my neck.

My heart raced.

His teeth scraped the area that vibrated below my skin—my pulse. It thundered harder with the knowledge of what his teeth could do, what he could do. Open my vein with the ripping of my skin, hold me while blood poured over both of us and I died in his arms. I could almost feel the wet stickiness of it clutched to our skin.

Instead of his teeth, his lips circled the area, kissing it, tasting the life beating under my skin.

I sank back, both relieved and somehow disappointed with the lack of blood, despite the thin trail creeping toward our feet.

Lukyan’s lips left my neck and he turned me.

“I will clean this up,” he said, nodding to the body. “You wait for me in our room.”

It was our room now. There was no conversation, no questions. One day all my things disappeared from my old room and appeared in Lukyan’s suit-filled closet. Twice the size of mine.

My toiletries were neatly arranged in his bathroom exactly the way they’d been in the one across the house.

I didn’t say anything.

Neither did he.

“Okay,” I whispered, pressing onto my tiptoes to lay my mouth against his. I couldn’t resist slipping my tongue inside, tasting him, letting him taste the death on me.

I was getting better at it. Touching him. Kissing him. Not less afraid, exactly. I’d always be afraid of Lukyan. But I was more willing to ignore my fear, let it excite me, fuel me.

He let out a sound in the back of his throat and his hand went to my hair, yanking at it and deepening the kiss, extending its ferocity.

It was safe to say Lukyan liked my confidence.

His lips released mine. “Bedroom,” he commanded.

I nodded once but didn’t move.

He stepped back, yanking himself away from me with force that looked painful. That excited me more.

“I’ll be waiting,” I whispered.

Another growl.

I all but skipped through the house, my mind on the man who would fuck me after he cleaned up the body I’d created, not even focusing on the murder.

Times were changing.

I was changing.

* * *

My plans had been to take off all my clothes and wait for Lukyan. Perhaps thumb through a book while I did so.

These plans changed as I wandered into the walk-in to deposit my clothing in the laundry bin. Lukyan liked things kept neat. He didn’t drop clothes on the floor, not even a rogue sock. I wasn’t quite as pedantic as Lukyan, but I also liked neat, so it didn’t bother me.

My eyes caught on some of the things that were moved with the rest of my clothes. The garments I supposed were mine, despite the fact that they’d never touched my body.

I stepped forward to finger the fabric. It was smooth, buttery underneath the rough pads of my fingers.

Black, of course.

Sexy.

Elegant.

I glanced to Lukyan’s suits.

This was the dress that matched these suits. That matched the man who wore these suits. Not my rotation of skintight black jeans and long-sleeved tops. They were the uniform of the woman who liked to hide indoors and nurture her pain.

I bit my lip.

This would show skin.

Scars.

Not that Lukyan hadn’t seen them before. He’d explored every inch of my naked body. But there was something different about exposing yourself when you were meant to be naked than when you were meant to be clothed.

My stomach prickled.

I slipped the dress off the hanger and onto my body. It fit almost perfectly. A little loose around the hips and breast area. I was eating more, which meant my body was bigger than it was, and Lukyan’s training meant it was defined with a small but impressive amount of muscle.

It didn’t mean I wasn’t still small. Virtually curveless.

But it was going to have to do.

I padded over to the mirror in the middle of the room, regarding the stranger staring back at me. She looked much different than the woman I’d stared at weeks ago. And it wasn’t just the dress.

She looked more dangerous.

Unhinged.

She was wearing her depravity on her sleeve instead of hiding it from the world. Hiding it from herself.

I touched my cheeks, fuller with a slight flush.

It suited me.

As did the dress.

But it needed more.

So I opened the lingerie drawer, and I got more. Snatched a pair of spike-heeled patent leather shoes and got more. Walked to the bathroom and spread out the cosmetics and got more.

When I was done, I was more.

* * *

He had paused for a split second when he entered and saw me standing in the middle of the room. Then he walked, not toward me but toward the hidden weapons case behind his dresser.

He plucked a long, curved and sharp knife from the wall before pressing the button that hid it once more.

I didn’t move when he picked up the knife.

Nor as he approached me with it.

His face was blank, but that didn’t mean much. His face was always blank. Wiped of all conceivable human emotion, to the point you were almost certain that human emotion never once existed within this thing doing an almost perfect job of impersonating a human being.

On the outside, that’s what he made you think.

But even now, I—maybe the only person who saw a scrap of the fullness behind all of that—even I only saw blank. I imagined my face might’ve been blank now too. It wasn’t my default like his. I hadn’t mastered it the way he had. But around him, somehow I could present the blankness I couldn’t even perfect in solitude. Around him, I was nothing. And that meant everything.

His eyes flickered upward and downward, again blank, predatory in a cold and detached way, and my heart skipped slightly.

So maybe I wasn’t quite nothing, but something less than the sum of my parts.

Of my suffering.

My pain.

It was all sucked into the void that was him.

It was nice.

My heartbeat increased only slightly as he approached with the knife. As he trailed the cold steel across my collarbone.

His eyes were glued to mine. Capturing them. I wasn’t fooled by the obvious weapon at my chest. That was a distraction.

A trick for new players.

Those new players, they’d focus on the sharp steel as the threat.

They’d be wrong.

And being wrong in Lukyan’s world—what I guessed was my world now—meant being dead.

Watching him, I didn’t know what he was going to do. But I knew he was going to do something. He always moved with purpose and no threat was empty.

He was going to use the knife.

The purpose he was going to use it for remained to be seen.

I failed to muster any fear. I had it with other things. With everything else in the world that existed outside these four walls. But I didn’t have it with him.

The one creature every human on this planet should fear.

He didn’t speak as the knife cut through the fabric of my dress, right down the middle. It paused, moving to the space right above my heart, scoring the skin so red blossomed at my chest, escaping the confines of my skin. A crimson rose pooled above my now-exposed nipple and trailed downward, following the continuing stroke of his knife.

It didn’t break the skin anywhere else.

This was all deliberate.

There were no accidents—especially not with deadly weapons—in Lukyan’s life.

He didn’t stop until scraps of expensive fabric, including my lace underwear, pooled at our feet. My naked skin prickled with the chill that came with his presence.

But I didn’t move to cover myself, didn’t open my mouth to protest. I was always naked in front of Lukyan, no matter what.

His gaze trailed up and down my naked body, still blank, not even a flicker of heat that usually lurked at this point in our relationship—the sex point. So I guessed this wasn’t about sex.

“I just wanted to be beautiful for you,” I whispered so softly I was barely audible.

His eyes flickered upward. “Well don’t do it again,” he commanded coldly. He lifted the knife so the back edge of the blade ran along my cheekbone.

I failed to breathe as he did so, desire pooling at the bottom of my stomach. The dark and ugly desire I felt whenever I was around him. And whenever I wasn’t.

“I want you to be ugly,” he continued, watching the knife as he used it to play with tendrils of my hair. “Anyone can be beautiful. It’s so common. Effortless. Empty. I need you to be ugly so I can be too. I need to see your ugly because that’s the only thing I want. That’s real. That, I can possess.”

The knife cut through strands of my hair and they fluttered soundlessly to our feet, mixing with the scraps of fabric lying there.

“You can possess all of me,” I croaked, not moving to stop him. He could’ve hacked off everything for all I cared.

It meant nothing to me.

He lowered the knife, shaking his head.

“No one can possess beauty,” he said. “It’s like trying to hold onto water, grasp it in your fist. It doesn’t hold its shape. Doesn’t mean anything. Isn’t worth anything.”

His knife moved back down, trailing the scars on my abdomen.

“Ugliness, on the other hand,” he murmured, “is lasting. Is tangible. It can be taken. Owned.” There was a pregnant pause. “Loved.”

I froze. And not because the knife was edging around my pubic bone, the tip trailing the hair below.

“You love me?” I whispered. He’d never said it after that time before I’d killed Christopher.

Lukyan pressed the flat of his knife against my clit.

My breathing quickened and desire rushed through my body like a drug. My cheeks flushed with the flame the cold steel was turning into an inferno.

“I love you,” he agreed, voice flat. “More than I hate you.”

“I thought I was of too little consequence for you to hate,” I rasped, challenging him in the midst of my desire.

Lukyan’s hand moved in place of the knife, exploring my wetness. “You know that was a lie. And not one I was telling you.” His fingers entered me, and his eyes darkened with my sharp gasp. “One I was telling myself.”

The knife moved back up my body as his fingers moved inside me. Pain mingled with my pleasure as the sharp edge punctured my skin on its journey. It settled at my neck as Lukyan’s gaze went from the blood it created to my eyes.

“I’ve been the villain from the start, Elizabeth,” he said. “You met me as the villain, got to know me as the villain…”

He trailed off, and that in itself was jarring. He didn’t pause in the middle of sentences like other people did when their words caught up with them, affected them. That would be a sign of weakness, of humanity. He didn’t show such signs. Not until lately.

“You fell in love with me as the villain.” His voice was little more than a rasp. The knife pressed harder. “Make sure you remember that I’m not going to turn into the hero just because I love you back.”

I climaxed the second his lips met the spot where the knife had cut open my neck, kissing the wound, the blood. His teeth grazed the area as aftershocks rattled my bones.

I was dimly aware of the knife clattering to the floor, of him lifting my limp, twitching, naked body and carrying me to the bed. Of the soft embrace of the mattress as he threw me onto it.

My focus became sharper as his eyes ran over my bleeding, exposed body. His hands made quick work of his shirt, smearing bright red stains over the fabric as he undid the buttons.

My blood.

Staining his shirt.

I liked that.

I loved that.

I took one long blink and he was naked. Standing over me like a jackal. Like a predator. I expected him to kneel on the bed, cover his body with mine, roughly enter me. Make me pass out with his relentless pursuit of my pleasure.

He did not.

Instead, he stalked to his closet, disappearing in its depths.

The words “Don’t move a fucking muscle. Don’t even breathe” floated behind me, settling on my skin.

My lungs somehow obeyed.

Time flickered and he was back at the end of the bed, like he’d never left. Nothing had changed. His body glistened in the dim light, carving itself out of the black of the room. His muscles were etched from stone, his erection the only thing signifying his desire. That and the thickness to the air in the room.

“You can breathe now,” he said.

I exhaled, roughly, long and hard. The control he had on my most basic of instincts, the control I gladly gave him, taunted the edges of my retreating climax, shaking me with the knowledge that there was more to come.

Silver glinted off the object in his hands, the object I hadn’t seen before because of my distraction. Instantly, the fear that was only contributing to my desire took over, chasing it away.

I didn’t move because my limbs locked up, frozen with the jarring effect of such intense pleasure chased by such visceral and intense terror. All coaxed out from the steel in his grip.

Handcuffs.

I liked his control. I liked that he caused me pain. That he was rough. That he yanked my hair, bruised me, took me in every space available to him. All the things Christopher used to do. The violence of it all was not so different but somehow worlds away. I’d learned to welcome the marriage with that terror etched by Christopher and the pleasure tattooed by Lukyan.

It had contributed to it, the pleasure. The wrongness of it somehow comforted me. There was no need to hide my depravity. Lukyan needed it.

But the handcuffs aroused something different in me.

“Lukyan,” I choked, fear a vise around my throat.

His expression didn’t falter, though I knew he sensed the change in the room. That he was attuned to even the slightest hitch in my breath, so he was aware of the fact I was no longer comfortable in my discomfort.

He didn’t speak. Instead, he advanced, not even giving me the chance to retreat as I tried to do at the last minute. His body trapped me underneath him, and I restrained the urge to struggle like a banshee.

Lukyan’s eyes stilled me.

Still, he didn’t speak. Didn’t try to comfort me, placate my fear.

Instead, his hands went to my back. I flinched at the cold impact from the handcuffs, despite not even moving when Lukyan had cut me with a knife moments before.

This was different.

The handcuffs rattled against the pipe as I struggled, as blood ran down my wrists with the force of my struggles. I felt the warm liquid on my frozen skin, but not the pain. There should’ve been pain. There had to have been pain. Pain was meant to come with blood.

It didn’t.

I was numb.

My insides and my outsides.

Outsides because of the fact that I was in a damp basement with no electricity, let alone heating, and it was the middle of December. Or it had been. Maybe it was later now.

I didn’t know how long I’d been in here.

My skin was alternately as heavy as lead and then so light I wondered if I’d died already. But if you were dead, you weren’t cold. Your bones weren’t so cold that it seemed they were frozen to your flesh.

Beautiful icicles clung to lank strands of my hair matted in the blood around my face.

There was a sharp clang, and the floor rattled with the opening of the door. I didn’t have time to be afraid of what fresh horrors awaited me because in one blink, Christopher was in front of me.

Maybe I passed out.

I had to have passed out.

Did it matter?

Why didn’t I die?

There was a deafening click and my hands, the ones I thought now belonged above my head, fell to my sides. They must’ve had weights attached to them, because their downward trajectory didn’t stop at the place my shoulder sockets allowed. They continued to fall, taking my body with them until I was little more than a crumpled pile on the floor.

Still, I didn’t die.

Christopher watched me. Smiled at me, the handcuffs dangling between his thumb and forefinger. They were rusted from the damp in the room.

I squinted. No, that wasn’t rust. That was my blood, dried and rotting against the metal. My stomach roiled, and I somehow moved to my hands and knees to dry heave.

There was little more than remains of the yellowing acid in my stomach. But I had to expel it. Something about my blood rotting on those handcuffs sickened me more than anything else that had happened down here. Rotting like my body inevitably would when I did something else wrong.

“You’re lucky I’m forgiving,” Christopher said, his voice far away, an echo. “I didn’t kill you for trying to organize your little… extended holiday? Is that what we should call it?”

My escape attempt. The one that took all my effort, all my scattered and shameful courage to plan.

He tapped the cuffs against his thigh. “Yes, I think that’s the best thing to call it,” he decided. “And we’ll call this the lesson for thinking you could plan, let alone execute such a thing.”

Another skip in time, because Christopher was bent at the knees, eye level with me. The handcuffs swayed in front of me as he dangled them almost playfully.

My eyes couldn’t escape the coppery tint of my blood. Closer now, I could see some chunks of my skin I’d peeled off in my struggles when the rats had started nibbling at my bleeding and bare feet.

They’d probably saved me, the rats. Because of them, I was forced to keep moving so they wouldn’t feast on my flesh. So then I didn’t freeze to death.

I thought rats were meant to bring death. Encourage it. They carried the Black Plague, didn’t they? Caused millions of deaths. What was one more?

But God wasn’t that gracious.

So there was more pain. So I lived longer to endure more pain.

And those handcuffs and my rotting flesh attached to them were burned into my brain.

The memory shook my body with its force. I had to twitch my hands, gaze desperately down at my feet to make sure there wasn’t a rodent trying to devour me while I was still alive.

“Elizabeth?” Lukyan asked, still on top of me, watching me. A small glimmer of worry shadowed his blank face.

I clutched the image of him, of the pressure of his body against mine. I was here. This was real.

“I lied,” I whispered.

He jerked his eyebrow.

“When you asked if I ever tried to run,” I clarified, my voice shaking. “I didn’t know I was lying, exactly. I just… it was so unpleasant that I didn’t let myself consciously remember it. Maybe that’s why I told myself I didn’t run. Clung to the fact that I was a coward. That was easier to live with than the memory.”

I shivered as the cold basement beckoned me back. Damp air assaulted my senses, the smell of my blood. Of the rats. Of my own waste because I couldn’t go anywhere but the bucket positioned crudely below my naked body. Cold nipped at my skin, more biting than the tiny sharp teeth of the rodents.

My eyes went to the handcuffs, still in Lukyan’s hands. “I—he used them to… teach me a lesson,” I whispered. “I think I was down there for a week.” My brow furrowed. “I don’t know, though. I don’t know how someone could survive that for a whole week. But I guess I did. Because I’m here.” The last sentence was more of a plea, a desperate reminder that I was, in fact, alive.

“You’re here,” Lukyan said firmly. No other whispered words of comfort. No tenderness. But I didn’t need that. I needed the iron of his voice to weigh me down in the moment.

He rolled swiftly and smoothly so I was on top of him, pushing at my chest. I let him manipulate me like a puppet, my body moving upward so I straddled him. I gasped at the brush of his hardness against my sensitive core.

His eyes were brands, owning me, searing my skin. Cold metal was pressed into my hand. It shocked me enough to move under my own power and look down at the cuffs my fingers had reflexively closed around. My first instinct was to throw them as far away from me as possible.

Lukyan’s hands closed around my own as if he sensed I was going to do so.

“Elizabeth.”

My eyes snapped back up to his instead of inspecting the clean metal, searching for a coppery stain.

He didn’t say anything. No, he just made sure I was looking at him when he purposefully let my hand go so he could extend his hands above his head, wrap them around the wrought iron headboard.

His meaning was clear.

I looked from his arms to the cuffs in my hand.

He didn’t say anything. Didn’t command me to do anything. Words had abandoned us, leaving us both with instincts.

I let the meaning, the invitation, hang in the air for a long while, sucking in the rough air. The handcuffs that had originally felt so repulsive in my grip were now morphing. They were heavy, but much like a gun was. Power from the object seeped into my palm. Into my blood.

The click of the fastening alerted me to the fact that my monster had already made the decision I had been too afraid to make. I trailed my fingertips along the flexed muscles of Lukyan’s biceps, veins straining against the skin from the unnatural angle.

He hissed as I tightened the steel. His teeth grazed my nipple as I leaned forward just enough to give him purchase on the sensitive skin.

I sank deeper, let him close his mouth against me, let him work at my breasts violently.

His cock pulsed against me as I rubbed my arousal against him, soaking us both in the truth of what the handcuffs, the power, was doing to me. My hips started to move against him. His growl vibrated my nipple.

I leaned back, the cold air an assault on my bare skin. His eyes glowed with the ferocity of a caged animal. The cuffs rattled against the metal as he bucked up, trying to touch me.

My palms flattened against the mattress and I began to crawl upward, my clit crying out with the loss of his hardness to create friction. I let my bare core rub against his abs as I crawled farther, as my lips touched the area where the metal met the skin of his wrists. My hands gripped the top of the headboard, and I used the metal to pull myself up so I hovered just above his mouth, my knees on either side of his face.

His rough exhale sent a warm rush of air right against the skin that was crying out for his mouth. My stomach flipped with the reaction of his breath against the most intimate part of me.

“Elizabeth, lower your fucking pussy so I can taste how much your control turns you on,” he demanded, his voice tight from frustration.

The bite of his tone, the rattling of his cuffs in his desperation sent another rush of desire through me, almost enough to send me over the edge without any contact.

My fingertips trailed over his. He locked them together, in the only gesture of force he was currently allowed.

Power.

Control.

He was giving me that.

The man who valued these things above all else.

“Elizabeth,” he warned. “If I don’t get to eat your cunt at this moment, I won’t let you come until you’ve crossed over into insanity.”

My hips lowered.

He ate me.

Furiously.

Exquisitely.

Beyond the realm of sanity.

His fingers stayed clutched to mine as I let him take control over me. My hips ground against him. White stars exploded in my vision as I climaxed again and again.

His mouth chased away the cold. Took me to the edge of the grave and back again. Made me forget about the rot and the copper stain on the handcuffs.

There was nothing but his mouth on me. His surrender to my power.

I gasped as I surfaced from his assault. No longer content to slowly tease him, draw out the movements, my body slid down his and I impaled myself on his cock before he even knew what I was doing.

His entire body strained against the handcuffs, tensing as he let out a feral growl. His eyes glowed with desire so dark it melted into the walls behind us. I rode him. Hard. Despite the sensitivity of my skin, despite the fact I was sure I might not survive another climax, I slammed us together again and again, milking both of our depravity into each other, into the air.

“Get your fucking mouth down here now,” he choked out before his cock tightened inside me.

I did as he asked, and he claimed it the second I pressed my lips to his. I drowned in him, in the taste of my power on his lips. He immediately took control of the kiss, since it was the only thing he had control over.

Everything was visceral, carnal, between us, like we’d carved out a piece of the world that was our own to be as dark and depraved as we wanted.

His body stiffened against mine, and my insides began to pulse with yet another climax. His teeth sank into my bottom lip as I milked his brutal and intense orgasm out of him.

It lasted for an age, our pleasure, more intense than anything that had come before it.

Time wasn’t to be trusted, because in one long blink, I was collapsed against his chest, our bodies damp with sweat, sticking to each other. The air was perfumed with the sharp scent of our sex. It settled into my bones.

He was still hard inside me, body still taut as he strained against the cuffs.

I blinked, moving slightly to meet his eyes. Even the small movement jostled me, and I let out a small cry as he twitched inside me.

His eyes darkened. “You’re going to uncuff me,” he instructed, “so I can show you how fucking magnificent that was.” He jerked his hips up. “So I can worship and punish you at the same time.”

It scared me, the darkness, the animal growl in his voice.

But I uncuffed him anyway.

* * *

“That was cruel,” I whispered into the darkness.

Neither Lukyan nor the darkness answered.

“You knew they’d do something to me, the cuffs,” I continued.

“I suspected,” he answered finally, the darkness of the room injected into his tone.

“And yet you still brought them,” I accused.

“You’re complaining?” he asked, his hand ghosting between my legs, brushing at the area that had never experienced such condensed amounts of pleasure as it had been subject to in the hours previous.

“No,” I whispered. “But in order to get there”—I hitched my breath as his hand flattened between my legs—“I had to go through hell first.”

“There’s no going through hell, Elizabeth,” he said. “Not for us. We’re in it. We’ll always be in it. Some parts are harder to wade through. Others are worth damnation.” His voice thickened.

My breathing came in rough pants.

“Neither of us has known kindness in our lives,” he continued, rubbing against me gently. But even the gentlest touch was too much, more than I could handle. But I wanted more. “We aren’t wired for it. We’re not designed for it. There’s no place for it here.” He pressed with the pad of his thumb to make his point before releasing me. “Not with us.”

I took a couple of seconds to recover, to find words. “So cruelty is all I’ll ever get from you?”

He yanked me to him—roughly, of course, like always, but there was a tender edge to it I couldn’t explain. Like the man who might’ve been Lukyan, if things were so very different, was trying to reach out from a parallel universe and give me comfort.

“No,” he rasped. “You’re going to get everything from me. Everything I’ve got. Not an inch of it is kind or empathetic or soft. But I’ll carve out my fucking heart and serve it to you on a platter. That’s what I was trying to demonstrate to you. That must count for something.”

Things like that, people said with conviction, with passion, and on some level, they meant them. But not really. Of course no young lover is going to take a sharp-edged blade and cut into their chest cavity.

But I didn’t have a young lover holding me. This was a man who would, quite literally, yank out his bloody, blackened and mangled beating heart if I so asked. He was that fucked up.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “It counts for everything.”

* * *

Lukyan

Three Weeks Later

Lukyan shut the door the second he glanced at the caller ID on his ringing phone. Not that it would make a difference. His operations room was isolated and all but hidden. She hadn’t been in here. Didn’t know it even existed.

And even if she did, Lukyan knew she wouldn’t be lurking around, trying to snoop, uncover information. If she wanted to know something, she just asked. She may have been a natural at killing, but she was not a master of deception.

Not like him.

He closed the door anyway.

It was too much of a risk. If she heard a snippet of the wrong part of this conversation—any part, since the whole conversation was wrong—she’d ask a question. And Lukyan was deceiving her, but he would never outright lie to her. So he’d tell her the truth.

Then he’d lose her.

The knowledge might push her over the edge she was dangling off, even if she didn’t realize it yet. The edge of recovery. Of stepping out into the world and being able to handle it.

He should’ve wanted that.

He did.

But he also didn’t. Didn’t want the world to have her, experience her brilliance. He wanted it to himself.

“Lukyan,” the voice greeted his silence. One of the few on this planet who knew his true name.

Lukyan waited.

“I’m hearing murmurs,” the voice continued. The man on the other end of the phone had not gone to the pains Lukyan had at disguising his accent. The harsh cadence of his words taunted Lukyan. Which was why he’d been avoiding the calls.

The only reason he’d answered this one was because if he didn’t, the owner of the voice might put it upon himself to locate Lukyan. It would take him a while, but he’d do so. Then he’d pay Lukyan a visit. And see Elizabeth.

Then it would be the end.

Lukyan still didn’t speak.

“Christopher Atherton has disappeared,” the voice continued.

“I’m aware,” Lukyan said evenly.

“Some of his lieutenants too.”

“Obviously someone is cleaning house,” Lukyan replied, unflappable. “Happens when a power vacuum is created and the minions are scrambling for control.”

There was a slight crackling on the other end of the phone. Most likely a tap. Or some kind of tracing device. Lukyan worried about neither. Such efforts were so elementary they barely warranted a thought.

“Yes,” the voice agreed. “That’s what does happen, in the cases when there has not been a replacement to take the reins.”

Lukyan paused, his eyes on the monitors. On Elizabeth in the kitchen with Vera. They were baking.

It should’ve irritated him.

Elizabeth fraternizing with the help. Trying to make her feel like she was something more than an employee. Lukyan himself had barely talked to the woman, only seen her a handful of times in the span of the six years she’d been in his employ.

How he designed it. She was the only one who had lasted this long. Ones previous hadn’t understood. She took care of the household with efficiency, and the best, invisibility. Lukyan had deduced it was because she was from his native country and she was also brought up with the cold distance required to survive in it.

Elizabeth smiled at something the older woman said. It didn’t look quite right, the expression. It was rusty, unused, her facial muscles not quite sure of how to flex with outward happiness.

But it was still beautiful.

Which was why Lukyan didn’t mind.

But the structure of the sentence uttered at the other end of the phone, coupled with the slight bite of satisfaction, had Lukyan’s attention ripped from the monitors.

“And by your insinuation, someone has taken the reins,” Lukyan bit out.

There was a pause, of course designed to taunt Lukyan. If not for the woman with a smear of flour on her cheek, it wouldn’t have.

“Yes,” the voice said.

“Are you going to move to Hollywood and get yourself an agent? With your penchant for theatrics, I’m sure the Americans would love you,” Lukyan said dryly, his bored tone forced.

A cold laugh at the other end of the phone. “Humor, brat? My, something has changed you.”

Lukyan clenched his fists. “Impatience tends to do so. I’m not one to waste time on a conversation that should’ve reached its conclusion minutes ago.”

There was a pause. “Hades,” he said. “The Hades family have made the most of their son-in-law’s disappearance, and have rather successfully taken over. I would assume it has something to do with the fact that they’re legally family, even with their daughter dead.” Another pause. “Of course, they don’t know that. I’m sure they’ll be looking for her now, to help cement their position.”

Lukyan watched Elizabeth’s body bend while she put something—scones he guessed, since he’d mentioned something about how he enjoyed them and now that was all she made—in the oven. Her body moved fluidly. With more confidence, with more grace than he ever thought the broken creature of months ago would’ve been capable of.

Every day a new discovery.

“But you took care of that, didn’t you, brother?” his younger sibling answered.

Lukyan didn’t hesitate, even a beat. “Of course I did. You know better than to question me.”

“Of course I do,” his brother placated. “You are a man of your word. The pride of our clan. You wouldn’t let us down. You wouldn’t let yourself down. Since you were the one who suggested eliminating her in the first place.”

“Is there a specific reason you called?” Lukyan asked coldly. “Or was it just to endanger yourself by insulting me and informing me of news I would’ve found out on my own?”

His brother laughed. “Of course, Lukyan. So serious, driven only by death and revenge. No time for pleasantries for your own blood.”

Lukyan didn’t answer.

“Father is coming to town. He wants an audience.”

Lukyan’s blood froze. “And I have refused such audiences for the past decade. What makes him think it would be any different this time?”

“Because your wife’s going to be there too.”

And then, before Lukyan could do it himself, his brother hung up.

Lukyan had thrown the phone against the wall and watched it explode into small chunks before he could find control.

He stared at the remains of the phone. Then he went back to watching Elizabeth dry her hands, sit down and take the cup of tea Vera offered her. She wasn’t smiling. That was never going to be something that happened all the time. Or even often.

Her face would always be just a little bit pinched with that pain he knew would never escape her, no matter how strong she got. Those eyes would always be a little bit too hard for her features because of the calcified horror living behind them.

These things would always stop her from being obviously or classically beautiful.

They would also be the things that made her so extraordinary it was hard to focus on anything else if she was in the room.

And that’s exactly what happened to Lukyan.

Distraction.

Affection.

Love.

Unwelcome emotions that he hated. He hated her a little too, but he reasoned he couldn’t love her without hating her. Much like her.

He also found himself with another unwelcome emotion.

Fear.

It uncoiled like a snake, slithering through all his limbs as he became more attached to Elizabeth, as she melded herself to his bones.

For her well-being, of course. For her prolonged life that would last as long as his own. He suspected the usual fears of the fool in love.

But there was something else. Fear of a thing that he’d never once been afraid of in his life. The thing that he usually used as a weapon.

The truth.

Because if she discovered it, then it was all over. Everything. Her life might very well last as long as his own—longer, in fact. Because after the truth killed whatever was left in her that she’d given to him, she’d kill him. And not figuratively either.

* * *

Elizabeth

“I’m going to warn you, I’m not much of a baker,” I said, measuring out the flour.

Vera glanced upward. “Oh, that’s not why we’re here,” she replied. Her sharp eyes went back to me and what I was doing. “Cold chunks of butter. Mix it with your hands,” she instructed.

I did as I was told. Vera and I had struck up somewhat of a strange friendship over the time I’d been here. Not that I was looking for a friend, or a good conversationalist. I wasn’t much of a person. The only reason Lukyan and I worked was because he wasn’t much of a person either.

But there was a strange pull to Vera, the shadow of the woman I had known for less than a pinch of my lifetime, but she gave me a glimpse into what a mother might’ve been like. A real one.

Not that Vera was warm or cheerful. She was rather cold and distant. But still, she didn’t make an effort to become invisible as she once had. And because I didn’t like the idea of her waiting on us, and missed having the purpose of cooking, I’d wandered in here one day to ask if she needed help with anything. She’d surveyed me for a long moment before she replied.

Then she’d thrust a bag of potatoes at me. “Peel these.”

And that was that.

We barely talked.

I liked that.

It wasn’t that horrible itchy silence that fell when you ran out of words to put in the empty spaces. It was compatible.

But now it seemed Vera had something to say. The air wasn’t comfortably empty.

“You’re in here because, although there are cameras in the kitchen, there are no microphones,” Vera said, not glancing up, moving closer to me and looking at the bowl in which I was mixing.

“There’re microphones too, in the other rooms?” I asked, not surprised but interested that she knew.

She nodded once.

“And you asked me here because you have something you wanted to say,” I deduced.

Another nod, accompanied by a lifting of the milk jug and splashing the liquid into the bowl and my sticky hands. “Keep mixing.”

My hands moved.

“You know, if this doesn’t work out, he’ll kill you,” she said conversationally.

My head snapped up, but I kept my face clear, remembering the cameras. Then I glanced around the room subtly, to take note of where the knives were, just in case.

This was Lukyan’s world. No one was to be trusted.

Vera’s eyes were sharp, not just in appearance. “I’m not going to hurt you. He’d kill me if I did that. And I rather value my life, such as it is. Plus, I don’t want you hurt. I do like you.”

I chewed over the words as she added more milk and the sticky mixture in my hands became somewhat of a dough.

“Has there been—am I the only one?” I asked as she floured the table top.

“Oh yes,” she replied. “That’s why he’ll kill you if it doesn’t work out. Heartbreak doesn’t work well in people who’ve never loved before. Especially people like Lukyan. It’ll destroy them. But not before they take out everyone around them.” She took the dough from my hands.

I walked over to the sink to wash off the gunk that had attached itself to my skin. The water washed away the mixture, but not the film of unease that had settled over my skin with Vera’s words.

“You know who he is, then?” I asked.

She smiled at me, and I somehow found myself smiling back.

“Oh no, no one but Lukyan—and perhaps you—might know who he is,” she said, kneading at the dough. “But I do know what he is.”

“So do I,” I said, wiping my hands and preparing the tray for the scones.

She quirked her brow at me, inspecting me. “I suspect you do.”

There was a long silence, and I bent down to put the scones in the oven. I straightened, wiping my hands, and accepted the tea Vera offered me.

“I also suspect you know what you’re getting into,” she continued. “And that you’re one of the people who have never loved before either. I suspect your heartbreak might be even more dangerous than Lukyan’s, should it come to pass.”

I didn’t reply, just sipped my tea.

“You’re stronger now than when you came,” she continued. “You know you could probably leave now, if you so desired.” She glanced at the door off the kitchen, then gave me a shrewd look. “But I suspect you already knew that.”

I swallowed the sweet liquid and her bitter words.

My eyes fastened on the door, searching for truth in her words. Was my pain no longer my captor?

Was it Lukyan’s love?

Did I care?