Page 50 of Cardinal House

My eyes move to hers, but her own are shut, heavy fans of black lashes like butterflies settled upon her cheekbones. She hums, not focussing on anything but the feel of the blades as I slide them down the dip of her belly, and start cutting through the shorts sitting low on her hips.

When I reach the hem of the last leg, I place the scissors back down on the table and then I gently roll her onto her side. She lets me move her like she really is a corpse, it’s both thrilling and disturbing as I tug the clothing out from beneath her. Getting another good look at the fading bruises, yellows and sickly pale greens.

Once she’s bare, she shivers, her skin pebbling with goosebumps, her dark nipples pricking into sharp points. My mouth waters with the desire to suck them into my mouth, to bite down so hard around each of them that my teeth marks scar into her perfect skin.

“Then what did you do?” she asks, her voice trembling.

“Luna-”

“Then what did you do, Wolf?” She cuts me off with a sharpness I’ve not heard in her before.

“I cried.”

My lungs deflate as I admit it, my hands trembling with a mixture of rage and hatred and so much fucking lust, it feels like it’s going to explode out of me at any second.

I think of my mother, the way she would mock me for being soft. When she lopped my ponytail off and then taunted me with the rubber band of chopped hair, I cried, and she would scold me for it, mock me.

“Oh,” Luna says breathily.

“I fucking cried, Luna, that’s what I did,” my voice is like the crack of a whip, dark, violent. “Then I cleaned you up, and I washed your battered body and I fucking cried every moment while doing it, before I laid you in that coffin. Then I sobbed all fucking over again.”

Luna’s eyes pop open, her lips parted as she watches me grasp my hair in my hands, losing the elastic tie and yanking at it so hard it makes my eyes sting.

This is like reliving my own fucking trauma, and I feel selfish for even thinking about my own feelings in this moment, but I just… today has been a long fucking day.

“Did you find me attractive?”

“What?” I feel like I’m coming unstuck, I’m a good man to her, but I feel unhinged, here, in this moment, I feel like a monster.

“When I was dead, did you look at me? Did you think I was pretty?” all of her words were cold, but these ones, these questions, fuck.

My breathing is ragged, loud, rasping heaves of breath, my heart battering against my sternum, the only thing containing the wild, erratic organ, because I can’t lie, “Yes.”

“Did you want to fuck me?”

An eruption of stars explode in my vision filling the dark room like a clear night sky. Ears muffled, the pounding of my blood shooting through my veins the only thing I can hear, can focus on as I think of her, only days ago, lying here, upon this slab, in this same position, naked and wet and bleeding.

Did you want to fuck me?

There are no morals with obsession, nothing can quell the desire, murder the lust, decapitate the hungry, pounding need to consume.

I am a monster, but I know I am, and I’m not ashamed, so I speak the only truth I know.

“Yes.”

“Wolf,” she says, a hitch in her voice.

At the same time I say, “Luna.”

“Kiss me,” she quietly demands, and I’m gone.

There’s no real way to explain what it feels like to kiss a girl I once thought dead. Laid upon this morgue slab and readied to cremate. But the way her lips feel moving against mine with wild, hungry desperation, fills the hole in my soul like a black, poison laced, cure.

Quite literally, every ounce of hesitation, of worry, about what the fuck is happening here, dissolves like smoke whipped away in the wind. I throw myself up onto the slab, knees and hands bracketing her in against the tiles. My mouth descends on hers with the wild ferocity of an animal. She groans into the kiss, the sound rocking through her entire body.

Tongues tangling, violent, quick, collisions, I growl into her mouth, tasting her sweetness, consuming it.

My teeth clash with hers as we fumble together to get my slacks down. Her hands lift first, those long taped fingers struggling to pop open my button, but she tears down the zipper as I aid her, and then she’s shoving her hand beneath the waistband of my boxers and dragging my cock out in a grip that’s so tight it actually hurts.

---