“Than tell me something real,” she demands. She moves closer and places her hands on my chest. Her touch is like fire. My breathing ratchets. “Tell me what you crave and why you crave it.”
My forehead creases as I shake my head. Why is she torturing me? “I crave you, goddess. I crave you so badly. That moment when I first looked into your eyes and I saw your fear…that fear. It’s powerful.”
“Why?” she prompts, twisting the knife right into my heart.
“I crave your fear because…it means you don’t desire death. You’re not lost to it. I can never look into the eyes of a lost soul seeking death again.”
She nods encouragingly. “Because you’re not a sadist.”
“I’m a killer!”
“She was in pain!”
Her words splinter my head, and I fall to my knees. “That doesn’t matter.”
Then she’s there with me, kneeling beside me. “Marni was living, if you can even call it that, in a kind of torment most people never experience,” she says. “Pancreatic cancer, stage four. At the time of the endocrine tumor’s discovery, she was already in so much pain. She was given six months, and she spent the first three in treatment. In hell.”
I open my eyes only to fall into hers. “She went to Julian first. She begged him to end her life. He was terrified by the whole thing. Her sickness, her desire to die. So he left her. He couldn’t handle—” I break off. “He couldn’t cope, and he wouldn’t even try. God, his rejection broke her. She loved my brother so damn much, and what fight she had for the cancer just disappeared after that. He destroyed her.”
“But you loved her. You loved her for a long time, and you never spoke up out of respect for your brother.”
“Is that in my file?”
She shakes her head. “No. That’s the behavior part that links to the facts, Colton. Me deducing what I know about the man with what the file states.” She rests her hands on my thighs, bringing her face level with mine. Her eyes sear me. “What happened, Colton? What else is missing from your file?”
I lick my lips, desperate to keep the words inside. But they’re already known. My secrets already exposed. “It might have been different if he’d stayed with her through it. I don’t know. I try not to think about it. I took time off from work to take care of her when Julian moved out. She asked me one night…she asked me to make it stop, but I couldn’t. God, I couldn’t. She was more a part of the scene than Julian ever was, so I introduced her to Shibari. She got a little relief from the pain when she was in her subspace, and so I increased the sessions. I thought I was helping. I thought she was doing better…but she was just hiding the pain from me. I should’ve seen—”
Her hands find mine, and her touch grounds me. “What happened that night.”
“I came in and she was hanging. In her bedroom, a rope around her neck. But she was still alive, if barely. Autoerotic affixation. She’d done it before, but she was too smart, too aware, and too cautious…this time was different. When I pulled the rope away, her eyes pleaded for me just to let her go. It’s what she wanted. She was too weak to even kill herself. She would’ve continued living in some morbid state, between life and death, with the damage she’d caused.” The scene replays vividly against my closed lids. “With her last breaths, she fed me what I needed to hear. She convinced me…and I finished it.”
I feel Sadie’s soft hand against my cheek. The words won’t stop.
“I couldn’t let her family find her like that. The embarrassment…most people don’t understand autoerotic affixation. I recalled the serial killings. All the news reports. In a moment of blind panic, I slipped on a pair of gloves and…I strangled her. I stared into her eyes for what felt like eternity, watching her soul leave her body. I watched the whites of her eyes fracture with red. I watched her blood stain the rope. When she was gone, her silence mocked me. I staged her death like one of the killings before I left. Not just her house, but the city. I never went back.”
I open my eyes, finally able to hold Sadie’s gaze. “And now the demon inside me is blood thirsty. What I did opened a door—one I can’t close. I’ve been haunted, trying to find a way to exist with the fact that I’m a killer. I killed the woman I loved. I gave my soul to the devil, and the fucker punished me by turning me into a sadistic monster who craves to look into your eyes and witness your fear.”
Both her hands move to my face as she forces me to hold her gaze. “Listen to me, Colton. You got no enjoyment from taking her life. No pleasure from watching her suffer. You are not a sadist.”
I try to shake my head, but she holds me securely. “No,” she says, straddling my lap so that I can’t move out of her touch. “I know evil. I’ve seen evil like you have never known. I’ve stared into its eyes and suffered at its hands. You are not a killer, and you are not a sadist. You would’ve never been able to reach me if you were—and you pushed past my pain to pull me out of the darkness. We found each other. That never could’ve happened any other way.”
I grasp her close to me. “Save me, goddess.”
With the lips of an angel, her mouth crashes against mine, encasing me in her light. I don’t deserve atonement, I haven’t earned her redemption, but I crave it just the same. My goddess lavishes me with her beautiful forgiveness, and I’m bound to her because of it.
My fingers dig into the fabric of her dress, gripping her to me so tightly they ache. The pain feels right. Something so maddeningly right, that I need more. She understands, because her nails dig into my back as I kiss her harder, demanding without words that she finish me.
Just slay me here and now.
She breaks away, her breath searing against my lips. “I trust you,” she says. “I have never trusted anyone more.”
God, but I believe her. “I’m yours. Completely yours, goddess. Trust that.”
“I want you to take me there. Away from the pain, and torture, and darkness. So far away from my dungeon.” She brings her hands between us and presses her wrists together. An offering. “If you belong to me, then I belong to you. Take me.”
My arms circle her waist, holding her to me as I lift up and lay her on her back, my body blanketing her in whatever shelter I have to offer. I drive her hands over her head, anchoring her wrists to the floor as my mouth seeks the silken flesh of her neck.
Her gasp ignites a fire in my chest, and I’m engulfed by the flames, the smoke curling around us and blotting out the harsh, judgmental light of the world. Here, with her, I’m the man who loves her. Who worships her. Who will save her right back. If this is what my goddess demands of me, then I’m but her servant.