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I was tarnishing.

“Cassia,” I rasped, my voice a ruin.

She didn’t answer. Against the room’s dim light, she just stood, a powerful silhouette.

She slowly crossed the room, her hips moving with a dangerous grace. From the kitchenette, she pulled a wooden stool into the open, right in front of me, and slid her slacks off, revealing pale skin underneath. No underwear. She then sat, her legs spread with shocking casualness.

Her hands slid down to the apex of her thighs. She didn’t blink as she dragged them lower, her unwavering gaze locked on mine, a challenge.

My throat constricted, a fresh wave of shame and helpless desire washing over me. I couldn’t look away. I was a prisoner, bound by more than just shadows.

She spread her legs wider, a taunting display. She then slowly ran two fingers up the pale skin of her inner thigh and along her glistening slit. It looked exquisitely wet. My cock, still brutally hard and still aching from her assault, twitched. My whole body shuddered with the torment of this forced observation.

She softly moaned, more breath than sound, as she stroked herself, one hand circling her clit with a relentless rhythm while the other slid inside her own heat. Her chest rose and fell in time with each self-inflicted thrust. The shadows, darker now and more substantial, curled at her feet like smoke.

She stared straight into my eyes, her eyes half open and her mouth parted, and smiled. But it wasn’t her smile. For a split second, her face rippled like water. Her mouth stretched too wide, revealing sharper teeth, and her eyes flashed with a vertical slit-pupiled darkness that swallowed the irises whole. It was a monster’s face, overlaid on the face of the woman I loved.

“You can’t touch me,” she whispered, her voice a silken lash. “You can’t stop me.”

My hips bucked against the shadowy restraints in a futile, desperate movement.

“Please,” I grounded out, the word torn from me. “Cassia—”

“Please what, Guardian?” Her voice was laced with a dark, mocking amusement.

“L-let me touch you.” My voice cracked, shame and desire warring within me. “Let me taste you. Let me in. I—fuck, Cassia, please…”

She laughed then. A low, triumphant sound that echoed the shattering of my soul. “No.” Her fingers moved faster, her rhythm more urgent.

I swore I could feel her through the chain connecting us, through the very air between us. Every flick of her wrist, every pulse of her pleasure, was a fresh wave of torment. I was unraveling at the seams, coming undone in a way I never thought possible. My cock throbbed so hard it was a physical pain. Sweat was trickling down my brow, my thighs, and my chest. I wanted to scream or sob. I wanted to kneel before her, not as a lover but as a broken worshipper.

“Cass…” I gasped, her name a ragged prayer. “You’re…you’re killing me.”

Her pupils blew wide then, blazing now with raw, untamed power. Infernal gold, the color of her deepest shadows, licked at the edges of her irises. She looked like a goddess at the altar of her own terrifying damnation.

And then she stood and leaned over me like a predator closing in.

She climbed into my lap, never touching my bound hands, and straddled me. My aching cock pressed against her sleek heat, but she didn’t take me in. She rocked instead—a slow, torturous, exquisite friction grinding against me in a rhythm designed to shatter what little remained of my will.

My head dropped to her shoulder, defeated. Undone. I was panting, whispering pleas I couldn’t even hear myself, and lost in a vortex of shame.

She moaned again, louder this time, and her hand curled into my hair, yanking my head back with brutal force. I had no choice but to meet her blazing, victorious eyes.

“I want you to see me when I come,” she said, her voice a guttural growl.

I shattered again. Utterly. Completely.

She was close. So close. I could feel it in the way her body trembled against mine, in the way her heat pulsed against the head of my cock. Still not inside. Just against. A torment of almost unbearable proximity.

And then, right when I thought I would lose my mind, she slammed down onto me.

I screamed a raw, animalistic sound. She was so tight, so hot, and so wet, her all-consuming heat clenching around me like a vise. I bucked upward, uncontrollably and helplessly fucking her with a desperate, savage intensity.

Her head tipped back, her throat arched. She came so hard that her body shook with the force of it, her mouth parted with a beautiful, terrible curse ripping from her throat. I followed a heartbeat later with a roar echoing my undoing, spilling into her with a violence that emptied me of everything. My whole body jerked, hips still thrusting with a desperate, primal rhythm.

We had moved as if we were trying to destroy each other. To unmake each other.

And maybe, in the end, we did.