It should’ve been enough to sate my hunger for her, and yet it feels as though it’s done nothing but fan the flames.
Pushing away from my desk, I get to my feet and slip from the office as the knocking grows incessant, hoping carolers haven’t decided to stop by again this year.
Keying in the code for the room, ensuring no one could accidentally see my workspace, I move down the hall, taking the stairs two at a time, and throw open the front door.
Elena’s mother stands on my doorstep, a red parka buttoned up to her delicate chin. Dark eyes peer into mine as she presses her pink lips together, familiarity floating in the depths of her irises that I refuse to read into.
Something sharp flares in my chest, an abscess that’s gone untreated for far too long and is now infected, more sinister and malignant than ever before.
Reaching for the doorframe, I grip it in my palm and keep myself from swaying beneath her penetrating perusal. “Carmen. To what do I owe this immense displeasure?”
Her foot taps on the concrete, a look of annoyance flickering over her face. “It’s rude not to invite people in when it’s snowing.”
Glancing over her shoulder as flurries drift from the gray sky, I slide my gaze back to her and do my best to ignore the irritation spiking in my gut.Things were just going too well for me.“It’s rude to show up to people’s homes uninvited.”
“Ah, but that never stopped you, did it?”
A tic forms in my jaw, thrumming through the muscle there and pulling it tight.
Stepping out on the porch, I yank the front door closed and pounce on her, wrapping my hand around the slender slope of her neck and pressing her into one of the porch columns.
I don’t press hard enough to rob her of air or leave a mark, my fingers placed just so she’s aware of who she’s dealing with.
I’m not anything like the idiot boy she once claimed to love. Thechildso desperate for attention and affection that he debased himself at her feet to get it.
Something that looks a lot like disappointment flashes over her face as her skull connects with the pillar. “It’s nice to see some things never change, Kal.”
“You’ve got three seconds to explain what you’re doing here, before I take you down to my basement and send you home so disfigured, even the man who’s been buried in your dried up pussy the last twenty years won’t recognize you.”
“Mature.” She rolls her eyes, then narrows them when I don’t move. “I might be more willing to confess if you took your hands off me.”
“You’re a part of my world, Carmen. Don’t pretend to be ignorant of why I am the way I am.”
Because your evil made me like this.
Still, I release her, if only because it burns my palms to have my hands on her skin so soon after caressing the smooth curves of her daughter.
My obsession, my ruin.My Persephone.The one woman I’d kill to have rule at my side.
And yet, the woman in front of me is the main reason I know I can never have her.
CHAPTER6
Kal
Normally,I welcome silence.
Crave it, even.
After a decade of either relishing or squirming in the agony of others, the deafening quiet became the only solace available. The only place I could go where not even my darkest sins could try to kill me.
I try not to think about how it morphed into a psychologicalneed.
Tonight, the silence only furthers my own personal torture, twisting the white-hot metaphorical knife of betrayal and admonition in my gut until it feels like I might pass out from the pain.
My fingers grasp at my cotton bedsheets as I thrash from one side to the other, replaying the words of my former lover—if you can call her that, given the fact that I was a child during all but a year of our “relationship”—in my mind like a broken record.
How could Carmen ever think that showing up and begging me to leave her daughter alone would do the trick?