Page 28 of Captive Souls

And I may be a devil in many respects, but never that kind of devil. Never would I sentence a person to hell without the mercy of death.

Shame.

The unfamiliar, uncomfortable emotion coated me as I prowled through the woods.

Shame at just how fucking close I’d been to losing control.

Me.

But was shecompletelyunwilling?

She despised me. Feared me.

But I saw something else beyond hatred and fright in her eyes. I saw lust.

The gold in her eyes turned molten. Was the flush in her cheeks solely from the run, the hitch in her breath caused by just fear and physical exertion? The way her rosebud lips had parted, her long eyelashes fluttering…

But I couldn’t trust my eyes. Not with my traitorous cock telling them lies. A cock that had never once influenced my decisions.

I rubbed at my eyes, the brush crumbling under my feet.

Fuck, I needed a coffee.

But I didn’t since Piper was a ‘caffeine addict’ as declared on social media. I was going to strip her of all of her vices, comforts. Withdrawal from substances even as seemingly benign as caffeine could help break a person.

Under the right circumstances.

I’d been confident that I had all of the right ingredients to break Piper. I just hadn’t accounted for my hunger for her. Hadn’t thought that she might possess all the right weapons to break me. An easy, lyrical laughter, a soft exterior hiding a will of stone beneath.

“Fuck!” I roared, slamming my fist against a tree, disturbing the silence of the woods.

Blood trickled from a cut in my knuckle.

Though I relished the pain, the relief that came from tearing open my skin, this mark was a problem.

It was not easily hidden, masked. It was somewhere that would declare my lack of control. Lack of power.

I thought about my initial feeling, waking up to find Piper gone. To discover I’d slept through her moving around the cabin. Leaving.

She could’ve taken the opportunity to kill me in my sleep. That’s what I would’ve done in her position.

But not everyone was like me. Not everyone killed easier than breathing, became a living nightmare to escape their own demons and needed to split their skin open to feel anything.

Not everyone was a monster.

Somehow, Piper was gentle. In this cruel world, she hadn’t been beaten down, embittered. Not even with the proof that goodness was not rewarded. It was only coveted by men like Stone, destroyed by men like me.

That wasn’t what captivated me about her, though. It was the fire that burned through that gentleness. She wasn’t weak. That defiant tilt of her chin, the way she overcame her fear of me. The confidence of her gait as she tore through unforgiving woods. Her sense of direction in a place that almost turned me around. Her chopping fucking wood.

I stared at my blood staining a tree that had likely been standing longer than I’d been alive, in woods that were older than our civilized country.

Civilized.

That’s something I wasn’t. Something I’d never be. A demon in a suit, masquerading as a human but not quite pulling it off.

We were different species. I needed to remind myself of that.

I did not deserve an ounce of pleasure or happiness the prospect of her promised.

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