The room was dark, the night darker between us, but I had the eyes of a predator, and I saw what stood in the window between the curtains.
Bea.
Watching me.
Always.
Much the way I watched her.
It should have shocked me, the little ways we mirrored each other, the slight similarities between two such vastly different personalities.
Yet it didn’t.
It underscored why I didn’t believe in religion. In the archaic notion of good versus evil, heaven versus hell. Because I was death and the devil, ruler of life’s underworld, and Bea? Not even an angel fallen from God’s own palace could be so bright and exquisite as her.
How was it possible that we could even co-exist on the same planet, let alone fall into something that was more than that?
That was more than anything.
Before her, I had lived only to feel the pain I felt was my atonement and then, after Zeus, to serve the only family I’d ever really known.
Now, I lived for them still.
But if I had a metaphorical heart in my chest, it only beat for her.
Mo cuishle. My heartbeat.
I watched her through the rain, unable to see her expression but knowing somehow that she was calling for me, a siren luring me deeper into our shared fantasy.
I blinked hard and looked away.
She was mine, mine, mine in a way that echoed with every beat of my heart, but she could be owned wholly by me without sex, without greater intimacy.
I could protect her until my dying breath, stalk her through her life the way she liked to shadow me when she could. I could just exist as she existed, and the pleasure of that, of not being utterly alone, would be enough for me.
So much more than enough.
To have more was to sin in a way even I as a seasoned sinner was hesitant to do.
Because I would ruin her.
I would eviscerate her morals to ash until she giggled when I brought her a dead man’s head just because he had wronged her. I would burn away her inhibitions until she begged me to desecrate all the holy places of her body with my tongue, my cock, and the cold edge of my steel.
I would, I knew, steal all her goodness, gluttonous as I was for her, greedy and depraved as I’d been born and made. I would devour her entire soul until she was just a husk.
Alive, but dead.
Like me.
And there was no fate worse than death than that for my sunny Shadow.
So I evaded my nature, ducked around the pitfalls of temptation, and exacted all of my iron will every single day I protected her to not give in to the monster inside me that yearned for just one taste of her flesh.
One taste would never be enough.
My cock hardened in my jeans at just the thought.
Even seeing that motherfucker Eric touching her knee like he had the right to know the texture of her bare skin had nearly sent me into a cold rage I couldn’t recover from. I wanted to slit his throat for wanting her and, while he bled out, fuck Bea on the desk beside his body so she could watch him die and know that I’d always keep her safe from others even though the true threat to her safety was between her legs.
It’d made me feel a fuckuva lot better when I got my hands on the fucker later on at the clubhouse. When I strung him up from the ceiling and worked him over like a human punching bag. Normally, I liked my knives, but sometimes fists, intimate and painful pounding in a man’s flesh, suited me just fine.
Unfortunately, he knew nothing. Or not nothing. He seemed to know too much about Bea. Enough to make me wonder if I wasn’t the only one in her life with an obsession. Me and the serial killer. Eric didn’t suit the profile for the murderer, but I didn’t believe in psychology so much as I believed in my own intuition. And something told me that little creep was up to no good.
I warned him to keep the fuck back from Bea, but refrained from killing him then and there or threatening to do so if he didn’t get the fuck out of her life. Bea liked the asshole for some reason, and while normally I gave zero fucks about what people thought, the idea of making that pretty face frown skittered disappointment down the piano keys of my spine.
When I looked back at the window minutes later, a routine check, Bea was still there.
And the light was on.
I blinked, hoping the image was a mirage, a hallucination cast by the devil to tempt me inexorably into the only sin I’d ever feared.
But she was still there in the window.
Even backlit, it was obvious what she was doing.