Once a Myth

It didn’t matter my heart lashed with pain.

It didn’t matter my stomach coiled against my wishes with worry.

This was business.

She was my possession.

I had a contract to fulfil.

With my thumb over the button, ready to send her far, far away, I walked into her embrace. I let her snake around me. I permitted her wet pussy to grind against my thigh. I cupped her cheek and kissed her sweetly on the forehead.

She moaned. “Please, keep me for yourself.”

“I can’t,” I breathed.

“Why not?” She tried to dig her way into my suit, her body blazing like wildfire, her skin damp with sweat and sensitivity-switching oil.

“Because I don’t trust myself around you.” I nuzzled her ear. “I don’t trust you.”

“Trust me. Take me.” She kissed my cheek feverishly.

Pika shot off the trolley, finally bored with his game of shredding cardboard and flipping lids, fluttering around our heads as if searching for a way to join.

I looked from the free bird, flying whichever way he wanted and back to the woman tethered in hell. And I whispered the truth that I’d tried to keep even from myself, “You’re dangerous, Eleanor Grace. You have the power to ruin me.”

“I don’t. I won’t. I’m yours. You made me yours.”

“Yes, I did. I made you mine.” I pulled away. “And that’s perhaps my biggest mistake of all.”

Stepping back, I pressed the upload button. My phone paused for a second, then the success screen showed.

For a moment, nothing changed.

Eleanor still stood in front of me. Beside herself with lust. Miserable and wet.

The next, her body jolted in the harness.

She went lax.

Her legs buckled.

She hung from the ceiling as if dead.

I knew it was just the initiating process. That in a couple of heartbeats, she’d be standing upright and breathing, but…I wouldn’t be there to see.

Markus would.

Markus would be the one she begged.

While I went fucking wild with regret.

“Goodbye, Eleanor.”

Turning, I forced dead legs and reluctant heart to leave her for my guest.

Chapter Thirty-Three

EVERYTHING WENT BLINDINGLY WHITE.

It all disappeared.

The need.

The heat.

The hunger.

Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.

I was sucked into a vacuum of nothingness.

I died.

Is this what death is?

Just…emptiness?

Everything deleted, including you? Including all your thoughts and feelings, your triumphs and tragedies?

I tried to breathe, I couldn’t.

I tried to move, nothing obeyed.

Panic grew.

Terror overflowed.

And then…the white exploded in colour. A palette of bleeding pigments as if splashed on a virgin canvas, smearing and dripping, painting a masterpiece in its wake.

I blinked.

I struggled to understand.

I was in a cave.

An earthy, rustic cave with charcoal drawings of a mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger. A cave with damp coils from underground springs staining the walls. A cave with furs piled on the floor, a crackling fire in a stone hearth, a tower of hand-smoothed wooden bowls and utensils, and the scent of roasted meat almost ready to eat.

The moment I smelled the charred flesh, my heart bucked.

Smell!

I smelled everything.

The mustiness of the dirt floor. The sourness of tanned hides. The smokiness of the fire.

Along with smell came sensitivity.

I felt the warmth of the fire. I wanted to crawl closer, to soak up the flames because the cave was cold. Icy breezes kept sneaking in around the large fur pinned on a frame against the entrance to whatever landscape existed outside.

My eyes noticed every detail. The groves on the floor where sleeping holes had been dug with primitive tools. The broken chips from the cave walls from someone trying to create another entry. This place wasn’t made up.

It was real.

As real as the island had been with Sully Sinclair.

But the tropical heat had gone.

The scents of pineapple and salty sea no more.

The inherent sixth sense of knowing you were surrounded by water was replaced with the undeniable reality that I was now deep in some savannah. Surrounded by land, locked by plains and terrain.

But how?

How was I here when I’d just been there?

How could I bend and scoop up a handful of dirt and have it trickle through my fingers? How could the fire hiss and spit when I threw the remaining grains into it?

I stepped forward, panic plaiting with the horrible sensation that I’d lost my mind. That I’d had a stroke, and this was the most vivid dream of my life all while I lay in a coma somewhere.

Something stopped me.

The slither of leather against earthen floor.

I looked down.

A tear rolled down my cheek.

A heavy cuff latched around my ankle, trapping me to this cave. I followed the leather rope, picking up it and tracing its length until it vanished into the floor.

No.

I looked around for a knife to cut myself free. Suddenly very aware of the coiling desire still prominent in my belly. The wetness smearing my inner thighs. The hunger that’d been kind in a tiny reprieve of my surroundings had now returned in full force.

My breasts tingled and throbbed for touch. My clit begged to be played with so I could come. Walking caused friction. Friction caused desire.

Who cared if I was in a cave?

Who cared if none of this could be explained?

My body was hungry for something only a man could give. No amount of food or liquid could sate me. Only pleasure. Climaxes. Orgasms.

Sully.

I needed him.

He’d made me like this. He could fix me. He had to fix me because I couldn’t survive this again.

I can’t.

I can’t do it.

Already my heart galloped at an unsustainable beat. My stomach gnawed on emptiness, doing its best to chew its way to my core so I could come over and over again. To use the last of my reserves, hurtling me into death on a rain of climaxes.

My teeth ached as a full-body shudder tried to make me come from air alone.

My legs wobbled as I stumbled forward, tearing at my hair, wishing I could crack open my skull and pour out the elixir that broke me.

Stop it.

You can fight it.

I collapsed to my knees, moaning in despair as my hand went between my legs. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t fight it. My eyes rolled back as I played with my clit. I moaned as my tease became vicious and violent, desperate to eradicate the bubbling, pressuring lust.

“No!” I ripped my hand away, launching to my feet. The leather cuff almost made me trip as I paced wildly, trying to figure out a way to stay sane.

Another couple of minutes and I would revert to what I’d become a few days ago—a poor girl who sobbed in her villa, screaming in ecstasy over and over as she came a thousand times.

I need him.

I needed his cock.

I needed to be filled and ridden and—

Almost as if I’d conjured him with my explosive desire, a foot scuffed against the ground, ripping my attention to the mouth of the cave.

Sully—

My body melted further. My core clenched hard.

The fur was pulled back, and a man appeared.