Page 59 of Mortala
What?
“Yes, I fucking want you!I want to brand you.Carve my name into your skin.Punish you where you bruise for weeks.I want to own you, Sadie.I want your whole fucking life to revolve around us.I want to sink between your thighs every night and hear my name screamed from your goddamn throat.I want fucking forever with you, but that’s not the problem!”
“Then, what is?”She reaches up to slap at my arms so she can escape.
I refuse to let go, not after she provoked me.Driving her back to the bed, the backs of her knees catch the edge and she drops.I don’t stop until I’m crawling over her and pinning her by the very face that invades my every thought.
“This, Sadie!All of it.Your psychosis.The constant struggle for dominance.Keeping the cops off your ass.Not letting you spiral so catastrophically you kill yourself, and from putting me in a grave where I can’t save you!”
“I don’t want to be saved,” she shrieks, thrashing her rebellious body under me.
“No…you want to be punished!That all, Sadie?Need me to put you in your place?Take away your choices?Make you face the evil living in your fucking head?Turn you into my hostage instead of theirs?”
“Yes!”
One word.
Three letters.
All the fucking regret.
“Fine.”
Adrenaline pours into my veins when the man shuts down and the soldier takes over.She’s my target, and I’m settling for nothing but complete submission and her fucking tears.
Lugging her off the bed and onto the floor, my hand fists in her silky hair.I don’t wait for her to settle on her knees before I crush my lips against hers and speak.
“Your safe word is ‘red.’”
Chapter twenty-one
Sadie
“Yoursafeword’s‘red.’”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t the dread rolling in my belly and coiling around my bones in thick swaths.They’re ice-cold layers, drawing a shiver out of me, awaiting the heat of his fury.
Dilated pupils stare through me as I taste the remnants of lust-induced worry on Elias’s breath.He doesn’t want this—to touch me when he’d rather run like everyone else in my life.Fucking coward.
Asshole made the mistake of obsessing over me, now look at him—unraveling at the seams while trying to gorilla-grip his composure.He isn’t going anywhere; he may physically leave in the next few hours, but he tied himself to me.I’ll be damned if I let that declaration go without him honoring every word.
Not now that I wear his visible claim, the necklace he clasped around my throat the first night we fucked, and not when my demons finally found a way to jab at his.
He.Is.Mine.
Ours.
Ours.
Elias Sullivan, my Moros.
With gentle hands built to wield doom as he walks about Earth’s many faces.His death will be tied to mine.I’ll break all that’s left of the young man who left home and came back a withered soldier.He claimed my body, the demons have my head, and I’ll have both his heart and soul.
“W…what’s a safe word?”I ask innocently enough.
I have an idea but I need him to spell it out for me—this is what he’s hungry for, compulsion.Owning a woman he has no right being with.He thinks he’s in control, but I’m the one with claws stabbing so deep into him he’s confused them with his own.
“It’s your get out of jail free card.Use it and everything stops.Doesn’t matter what I’m doing.I could be punishing you, fucking you into the goddamn mattress, forcing you down on my cock, tormenting your senses, or anything in between.If it hurts beyond what you enjoy, too intense for you to handle, you say ‘red’ and it ends.Do you understand?”
