Born, Darkly (Darkly, Madly Duet Book 1)

GRAYSON

Abuzz fills the night air, a charged current caressing, embracing. I feel the electric pulse of it vibrating along London’s skin.

Our first kill.

I’m drawn to her heat like a moth to the flame, like her body can ward off the demons of our past. She’s my temple, and I want to kneel at her feet and worship.

“I’m on fire,” she says. Adrenaline still courses her bloodstream, her flesh simmering beneath my arms. The tendons of my forearms tense as I ache to crush her body to mine.

She doesn’t need to explain. I understand what she’s feeling. I’m lit from the thrill of our kill—I can’t stop touching her. Every texture between us a tantalizing, erotic pleasure.

“You’re beautiful,” I whisper in her ear. “So alive.” I find the clasp of the dress and drag the zipper down her back. My fingers trail her skin, my whole being ablaze, desperate to touch her.

“I may have passed your test, but I failed mine.” Her body goes rigid.

The boy. I can’t help the smile that steals across my face. We’re so close to being one. “Would knowing the boy was out of harm’s way have changed the outcome for you? Would you have chosen differently?”

She turns in my arms, her eyes seeking the truth. “How?”

I push a loose wisp of hair behind her ear. “Trust, London. It’s what comes next. You have to trust me. Do you think I’d want you to suffer an innocent child’s death?”

She blinks up at me. “He was safe the whole time.”

I press my lips to her forehead, unable to deny myself the taste of her. “We’re not those monsters,” I say, my hands mapping a path across her back and waist, gripping the satin dress. “But we aren’t mundane, either. We’re ravenous, and we have to feed.”

She’s touching me, too—her hands tracing the ink and scars on my forearms, palms seeking friction along my chest, fingers entwining my hair and stroking the back of my neck. Every intimate quest to get closer sends an arousing shock to my flesh.

We’re uninhibited. Unleashed.

“It would’ve changed nothing,” she admits. “And now, I’ll never be sated. How will we ever stop? Filling the void is an endless cycle. We’ll always need more and more until it consumes us.”

I palm her face and stare into those dark eyes. The gold flecks sheen with the reflective sparkle of keys. “We never have to stop. Never. I no longer have my penance to bear, just as you no longer have to live a lie. Shame doesn’t exist between us. As for the maddening need…” I drag the dress down her body, letting it fall to the ground. “We’ll find a way to satisfy ourselves.”

Bathed in starlight, her body is achingly beautiful. A tantalizing tease finally within reach. I’m drunk on the sight of her. I lower my mouth to her shoulder, tasting the hint of lilac on her skin—my aphrodisiac, my drug. She’s my addiction.

Her breath hitches as I grasp her tiny waist in my hands. Then as she tilts her head back, surrendering to the spell, I drop kisses to her flesh. Greedily taking every bare inch of her for myself.

Her gaze slips to the trap, where our victim erodes into nothing. “It’s too much—keep touching me, Grayson. I’m burning up. I need more.”

“God, I love it when you talk dirty. Tell me all the bad things we’re going to do.” My knees hit the ground. I suck a trail over the soft skin of her pelvis, loving the way she grips my shoulders, her legs trembling from need.

“We can do anything,” she says, the throaty rasp of her voice tearing at my control.

I graze my fingers down her thighs, then bring one of her legs over my shoulder and bury my mouth against the tender flesh of her inner thigh. She jolts at the feel of my teeth, and I groan when her heat touches my face. Her hands sink into my hair as I kiss and bite my way up her thigh, her breathy, broken cries making my cock so hard it aches against my jeans.

I taste her then. I grasp her ass and force her sweet center to my mouth, my tongue slipping between her silky lips. She’s wet and hot and I can feel every constriction of her muscles as she grinds against my face.

“Grayson…” My name is a prayer on her lips. It makes me crazy. The need for her unbearable. My desire roams wild, tasting her until she’s throbbing against my tongue.

I pull away and push off the ground. I lift her into my arms, seating her right up against the achingly hard member of my body that yearns only for her.

“Take me,” she breathes over my mouth before she nips my bottom lip. I groan, thrusting a hand into her hair and pulling her down against me. “Fuck me until I’m begging you to stop…until we’re on the brink of death.”

“Shite.” I tremble as I lower her to the earth, every muscle and sinew strung tight in anticipation. “Christ, you’re so fucking perfect. I won’t ever hold back with you. That would be a sin.”

Her hands fight to remove my shirt, her nails digging into my skin. It’s agonizing and pleasurable and unadulterated. I hiss out a tense breath as her fingers hit the fresh wound on my stomach.

“Do it again,” I say.

She strokes the injury she inflicted with a sure hand, owning me. “Is this what love feels like?”

I crave her pain like my lungs crave oxygen. “This is what our love feels like.”

“Then make me a sinner, Grayson. I don’t want redemption. I want us.”

I kiss the cuts on her wrists. The marks I put there. It heightens the urge to mark her body even more, to make her mine in a way that she’s belonged to no one else. I rake my teeth over her shoulder, then sink into her neck, eliciting a soft, breathless cry.

We work my clothes off in a frenzy of stolen touches and heated avowals, impatient. Ravenous. The pain building to a staccato beat between us that pulses with insatiable need. To be closer. To be skin to skin. The hard slab of earth beneath us amplifies my awareness, the night clear and flawless. Nothing impure to hold us back.

I roll her on top of me, gazing up at her naked body, breasts bared to me with no trace of shame in her bottomless eyes. I flatten my hand along her stomach as she arches her back, working a string of expletives from me as she grinds her slick lips against the shaft of my cock.

“Fuck. You’re killing me.” I lift up to meet each of the sexy rolls of her hips.

She falls over me, her hair cascading down her shoulder and creating a curtain to shield us from the world. I let her cage me in, the undeniable power flowing from her limbs jacking my heart rate. She wears her sin beautifully.

“What if I could?” she whispers into the shell of my ear. Her teeth nick my flesh as she finds purchase on the ground to push back hard, decimating my restraint.

A growl works free, and I capture her wrist. I bring her hand to my throat and squeeze her fingers to my jugular. “If you’re going to tease, you better be willing to back it up.”

A deviant glint ignites her eyes. “You’re serious.”

“I’d suffer any torture willingly if it came at your hands. My sick matches your sick.” I move her fingers to my mouth and suck the pads, tasting her fevered arousal. “Touch yourself,” I command.

She does. Arcing back, she pushes those delicate fingers to her clit, rubbing and ratcheting her desire higher. I groan at the feel of her heated flesh sliding over me. Torture doesn’t begin to describe how punishing the feel of her is. Her mounting orgasm grabs hold, and her thighs grip me, her muscles clenching for release.

Wild and unfettered, with zero control tying me down, I rise up and hook an arm around her lower back. I anchor her to me, swallowing her gasp, as I sink into her. Our gazes connect. Every torturous second I hold still inside of her is an eternity.

Her nails slice into my back, and that simple action triggers her body to flex around me, detonating an explosive response. I slam into her. Gripping at the dirt behind me, I thrust into the perfect center of her, unrestrained. Her breathy cries fall close to my mouth. I taste her pleas, answering each one with another unguarded thrust.

The feel of being inside her annihilates every single belief I had before her.

This is heaven. The only heaven I care to witness.

She’s my truth now—the rules ours to make.

She peaks, I peak. Our bodies rise and lower in tandem, cresting higher, falling farther. The emotion thrumming our bodies almost unbearable. The desire to inflict and experience pain is damn near overwhelming. It’s too much. Feeling is too much. It’s maddening.

“Hurt me,” she pleads.

A violent shiver riots through me.

When pain is the only emotion you’ve ever known, it’s all you crave. It lets you know you’re alive.

My hands are touching, roving over every delicate region of her flesh. I scrape my fingers down her skin, marking her body with dirt from my hands. The abrasive grit of it rubs between us as we fuck. There’s nothing tender in this moment as every ravenous desire demands to be sated. We’re filthy. Fucking like two insatiable, wild animals that are starving for each other.

I bite down on the firm peak of her nipple, and she throws her head back, welcoming the sharp pain. Too many ways in which I can hurt her assaults my thoughts, tearing at my weakening control.

I cup her shoulders from behind, forcing her to arch and bare her tits to me. As I drive into her, the need to be deeper seizes my sanity. “It’s not enough.”

“Fucking make it enough, Grayson. Hurt me.”

I growl and force her onto the ground, dragging her leg over my shoulder and slamming our hips together. Her fingers splay over the hard slab of muscles along my stomach as I rut into her. The need still demands more.

Her petite body fits seamlessly against me, begging me to manhandle her into any position I want. With a low growl, I flip her over and slip a hand beneath her pelvis, angling her beautiful ass up. Then I grab her wrists and anchor them to her back.

The position makes her vulnerable and bared, my cock throbbing as I ease up behind her, my heart thundering. I push inside her to the hilt. Her body bucks at the pressure, but then she’s undulating those sexy hips, begging for more.

“Fucking hell,” I breathe as I thrust deeper, forcing her wrists toward the middle of her slim back.

She releases a throaty curse, her core pulsing and tightening around me. I’m a starved animal with no remorse, my desire to fill her and take her all at once unfurling in the sweetest agony.

I fuck her violently. I fuck her brutally. Against the cold, unforgiving earth, under the open night sky, I make love the only way I know how to the woman who’s dominated my being since I first tasted her.

As the most shattering pleasure claims me, I’m lost. Her name a chant ripping free.

She comes shamelessly. She comes with abandon. She comes so hard she nearly pushes me out, but I crash back into her, breaking against her wave.

For a few tender seconds as London and I come down, ethereal bliss suspends the pain, and I fall against her, heaving strenuous breaths, sweeping my mouth over her so I can consume every bit of her and this moment.

Euphoria.

She frees herself of my weight and pushes me to the ground, where she curls on top of my body. “Peace,” she whispers.

I wrap my arms around her. I’ve never felt peace before. I cradle her to me, allowing this foreign emotion to own me the same way she possesses me entirely. We lie like this beneath the canopy of red until her breathing evens out.

I don’t want it to end.

But all too soon, the world and its constant constraint reminds me there’s still work to be done. There’s only one way for London to be completely free.