Page 71 of Devour

I didn’t need to go to him. All I had to do was sit down at the bar and flirt with the male bartender for this guy to gravitate to me. Oh, so smooth and so suave. He could easily pick up anyone he wanted, even someone like me, who appeared at least half his age. He didn’t need to do what he was thinking about, but he would. It was how he liked to prey, and he was undoubtedly a predator. Time for him to learn he wasn’t at the top of the food chain.

Once he deemed me cute and naïve enough, he ordered my next drink for me. I pretended to be distracted by my phone, but his thoughts screamed. He couldn’t hide his intentions from me. Right around the ten-minute mark, he grew tired of waiting and went for the kill.

“Why don’t we get out of here?”

I smiled. “I told you I came here with friends. Dunno where they went, though. Hope they didn’t ditch me.”

“I did spot a bunch of college kids leaving maybe ten or fifteen minutes ago.” Not my group, but not the point when no such group existed. Liar, liar—his whole body should be on fire.

“Shoot.” I pouted.

“Come on, I’ll take you anywhere you want.”

I became visibly impatient, but not for the reason he thought. “I dunno… ”

“You can trust me.”

“Oh, yeah?” I cocked my head to the side. “Well, there is something about you I like.”

“Then, let’s leave.”

“Okay, but you have to promise me.” I giggled, and he’s the one who became overeager this time, smelling the blood in the water. So did I. Maybe I had a wonky moral code, but everyone got one last chance at redemption.

“I promise.”

“You promise what?” I purred.

“I promise you can trust me.”

Just for him, I broke into a dreamy smile and beamed up while appearing to consider his offer. “Okay, but I’m going out for a quick smoke and to text my friends first.” I offered him my hand like I needed help sliding off the barstool, being sure to giggle and stumble the entire way to the exit to the parking lot. Then I waited.

Right around this time, Eli started getting extremely worried. Which, aside from being utterly ridiculous, also struck me as ridiculously sweet. My hubby actually got himself all worked up thinking he should come save me from the big, bad and scary. I wasn’t particularly big, and I liked to think I wasn’t terribly bad, but I could be scary—and a literal man-eater.

Before I could appease my hubby by going into further detail about my plans to eat this creep, the door to the parking lot opened. I leaned back against the building as if I needed the brick wall to stay propped up. He smiled. I smiled.

When we kissed, I made sure to keep my body loose and relaxed. Even after he rested a hand on the wall by my head and thought for sure he’d trapped me, I kept everything about me slack. That still wasn’t good enough. He wanted me out cold. And the fact that I wasn’t pissed him off. Mid-kiss, he pulled away and head-butted me so hard the back of my skull made contact with the brick wall—and yeah, that fucking hurt. Probably would’ve given anyone a concussion, but I wasn’t an anyone. I was an anything. A scary, mostly feral creature, who’d now collect on a broken promise.

“How the fuck are you still standing?”

Flopping my head forward, I gently hissed in his ear, “GHB doesn’t affect me, fucker.”

I hadn’t let go of his shoulders and he had yet to realize my grip was tightening. It had been… fuck, I couldn’t even remember the last time I ate someone, which meant it had been too long. The key here was getting my teeth in him before the fear took hold. He remained stunned and silent—until my teeth broke the skin of his neck.

“You bit me,” he shrieked, trying and failing to shove me away.

No shit, I did. He promised me. And I took him up on that promise because I knew he wouldn’t keep it. I could smell the stale scent stuck all over him, and I knew he was a bad person. I wasn’t talking about the average shitty person with the residual stench of hurting a few people. More like the overwhelming odor of hurting many people over his entire life, smudged all over him like dirty handprints.

That smell was as unmistakable as the smell of death itself. And I’d heard him thinking about spiking my drink, and I’d heard all the shit he wanted to do to me after he did. Things he’d done many times and somehow gotten away with doing until now. I even gave him one last chance at using his free will. He could’ve had an epiphany or even a crisis of conscience and walked away. Instead, he took the bait I threw. He stalked after me without realizing I lured him all the way out here, where I could eat him, because I was the apex predator. Not him.

Even though I always called this eating, that hardly described what I did. Humans ate. Inhumans devoured. We consumed our fuel like a fire. When we were done, nothing would be left.

After he let me gulp down everything that made him a person, I dropped what remained to the ground with a wet “thud” and threw my head back. Sucking out someone’s soul always filled me, without fail. The natural high of eating kicked in and left me panting from sheer bliss. I felt amazing. Him, probably not so much. Even if the blood loss didn’t kill his physical body right away, he was as good as dead. Slowly, his chest ceased rising and falling. Immediately upon death, his body blurred into dark wisps until all that remained was a dense black fog which crawled across the ground at my ankles and disappeared into the night.

Too bad for him, I had the same free will. I could have bitten down only once and drained him. I could have stopped myself from ripping out entire mouthfuls of his flesh. I could have made it not hurt so much. I could have—I didn’t. After spitting out the last of the blood in my mouth, I watched the droplets sizzle on the ground. Good riddance, fucker.

“Rhory?”

The door banged shut as soon as I turned and did hubs ever look concerned. Which, to be fair, would’ve worried anyone given my appearance. Most definitely standing here covered in blood, none of it mine, and with quite a bit still dripping down my chin and throat. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and smiled.

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