Page 42 of Tangled at the Root
My fingers are tipped with wicked black claws when my hands land on her chest, which is heaving rapidly. Gently, almost lovingly, I push a knuckle underneath her chin until her mouth presses shut. She’s still staring up at me, almost in supplication, like I’m her god, and she a poor devotee at my altar.
“You’re so beautiful,” I murmur as my claw, sharper than a blade, rips open her dress at the front, and the thin material holding the cups of her bra together. Green, as I’d suspected—silky lace on top of soft, thick pads.
I part both slowly, enough to expose the thin strip of flesh from her throat all the way down to her belly button.
She’s breathing faster, though she doesn’t—can’tmove.
“Are you ready for me, omemi?” I whisper. Her heart leaps at the endearment, thudding hard behind her ribs. I hope she feels the same visceral bliss as I had when she’d first used the term for me.
I press a claw directly in the dip of her throat, where her pulse beats madly.
Of course, she can’t respond. But her eyes lay bare her soul, giving me everything, telling meyes. It stomps out the lingering shadows of my insecurities, my fear that if she knows—if shesees, she’ll surely recoil. She’ll surely leave me.
She’s not leaving. She’s not recoiling.
She’s fuckingmelting.
Fuck. She’smine. My entire body pulses with it. She’s fucking mine. Now and forever.
I stare, my mouth flooding with saliva as her skin breaks open, blood spilling in thick, hypnotising rivulets from from the wound. I dig deeper, through the layers of fat and flesh, muscle and sinew, clawing my way down from her beating pulse to the base of her stomach so all her innards are exposed.
Shockingly, she clings to life. Her body doesn’t shake—with the paralytic, all she can do is stare, wide-eyed, her heart beating fast, her lungs rapidly expanding and contracting. The only evidence of her reaction is in her scent, flooded with fear and shock and fuck, that delicious, despicablewant.
I’m openly drooling like the dog I am, my saliva dripping from my slack mouth and onto her bared thighs as I stare at the red, vulnerable curve of her ribs uselessly hiding her beating heart, her heaving lungs. Blood pulses rhythmically from her torn, ripped skin, bathing her, soaking into her split dress. When I glance up, her eyes are glistening, a trickle of blood bubblingin the corner of her mouth before spilling down her cheek, underneath her ear.
I catch the drop before it reaches the floor, sliding my thumb up her cheek to wipe the corner of her mouth. I bring the thumb to my own lips. She keens in the back of her throat as I lewdly lap and suck at the digit, savouring the spill like the first sip of a fine wine.
“You taste so fucking good, Rosemary,” I whisper.
The scent of her arousal is as thick as the scent of her blood, a heady, dangerous combination.
My claw thickens, sharpens even more as I press it against the centre of her rib cage.
She stares up at me, her tears spilling over as I gently, silently break her rib cage in half while she remains shockingly, wonderingly alive. I don’t know if it’s her own sheer will or the venom keeping her clinging stubbornly to her mortal flesh. Perhaps it’s both.
I break her ribs open like I’d been dying to for God knows how long. The sound of each loud, sharpcrackmakes my heart leap with elation, saliva practically pouring out of my mouth. I want to bury my face inside her, coat myself in her blood.
So I do. I slurp at the jumbled mess of her insides with that monstrous, dark grey tongue—her intestines, her stomach, liver and exposed lungs—at all that red spilling from her still beating heart.
Jesus. My eyes roll back into my skull at the taste of heat and iron, the feel of the organ pumping hard against my tongue, against my lips when I kiss it. I’m so wet I’m soaking my briefs.
I sit up, trembling, my entire face dripping with red.
“I knew you’d be so fucking pretty on the inside,” I whisper nonsensically, cupping a clawed hand gently around her heart.
My jaw unhinges like a snake’s, my mouth parting all the way up to my temples.
Her body jerks despite the paralytic when I gently tug out her heart, her insides flooding with rivers of red. I swallow the still beating organ down in a single bite as I watch the light finally fade from her open eyes.
I moan, my thighs jerking instinctively, trying to get pressure between my legs. It’s pure relief and euphoria. I hadn’t known how noisy my mind was, how every inch of me had screamed and screeched with agony at this hunger seemingly all my life. Now that I’ve given in, for the first time, all the noise is gone.
When I’d started falling in love with her, a part of me had begun to suspect no amount of hunting and killing and feeding on anything else would have helped. The second I’d claimed her as mine, somehow, Rosemary had become the sole remedy to this wicked affliction. My hunger had focused unerringly on her, a bullet to a bullseye, morphing into something even darker and uglier after my mother had died.
Perhaps this was why my mother and grandmother hadn’t formed any relationships. Why our own relationships with each other had been so toxic—so strangely detached. Maybe, for every attachment, the hunger seeps itself into our everyday desires, altering it until it becomes something twisted and unrecognisable.
I lick the blood clinging to my lips, heady and lightheaded with it.
I watch in fascination as Rosemary’s heart rapidly grows back. Her expanding and contracting lungs had slowed down, but now, they speed back up, working feverishly. Her ribs close with those sexy, soft cracks. Her skin knits together, like an invisible hand pulling up a zip, gently and neatly sealing her flesh until her rich, deep brown skin is back to being smooth and unblemished, stained only with her spilled blood.
