Page 72 of The Beautiful Dead

He stroked faster, his rhythm brutal, his hand unrelenting. My mind fragmented, lost to him, to this, to the way he owned me so completely.

“Come.”

My orgasm crashed into me without warning, thick ropes of cum painting his chest and abs. The sight, the feeling, the sheer intensity of it pushed him over the edge, his release spilling hot and wet between us.

I collapsed against him, my body spent, my skin tingling in the aftershocks.

His hand curled around my nape, fingers sliding into my damp hair. He turned my head, his lips brushing my ear, his breath still ragged.

“We will make her lose her mind,” he murmured, dark and promising. “So when the time comes, she will beg for it to end.”

We didn’t goafter Brielle immediately. No matter how much I wanted to see her bloodied and broken beneath me.

I wanted her tofeelit first.

To suffer like she’d made so many others.

To feel the slow creep of paranoia sinking into her bones like venom. To see the way shadows stretchedtoolong, twisting unnaturally at the edges of her vision. To suffer through the silence that pressed in thick and suffocating—not empty, butwatching. Waiting.

I let it take root inside her, sink into her bones inch by inch.

By the time I truly started, she was already fraying at the edges. I saw it in the way she flinched at the softest sounds, how she clutched her purse with white-knuckled desperation, her breath catching when her own reflection flickered in a passing window like an unfamiliar ghost.

She was afraid, but she didn’t knowwhyyet. I wouldgiveher a reason. That was the best part.

I wanted her to unravel before I ever laid a hand on her. I wanted her to come apart at the seams, piece by agonizing piece, until she was raw and trembling. Until shebeggedfor the end.

And I wantedhimto see me do it. I wanted Domino’s approval like I needed air. He was my center. The blood in my veins. My gravity.

Her predictability made it easy. She was fragile. And fragile thingsshattered.

The first time I followed her, I kept my distance—just a shadow slipping between the cracks of her awareness. But the second time, I let herfeelme.

A dark figure in the reflection of a store window. There and gone, just long enough for the hairs on the back of her neck to prickle. Just long enough to send her heart skittering against her ribs as she whipped around, eyes wide and searching.

That’s when I melted back into the shadows.

A fleeting presence in the parking garage.

The softclickof a shoe on pavement behind her—too quiet to be real, too loud to ignore.

She started clutching her purse like a lifeline. Breathing in quick, shallow gasps. Shefeltme now. She just didn’t know where I was.

And Domino was watching.

He liked watching melearnand let go of the restraints society imposed on me. He wanted me to be free to be exactly what I was always meant to be, and with him by my side, I was starting to embrace it all.

“You’re enjoying this,” he murmured one night, trailing his fingers along the nape of my neck.

We were parked outside a restaurant, engine off, the streetlights throwing fractured shadows over the sharp angles of his face. His gaze never left mine.

I swallowed, pulse thrumming under his touch. “I like watching her fall apart.”

His smile was slow. Indulgent.Proud.

“Good.”

It wasn’t enough.

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