The Devil's Favourite Obsession

”You are cruel,” Cixi panted. Her voice trembled, but her words did not. ”You use temptation to avoid the truth. You manipulate so beautifully that by the time I realise you have not answered a single question, and I have almost forgotten what I asked.”

She said all of this while his fingers rubbed her clitoris gently in circles beneath the warm water.

”I will return the favour, Cassian.” Her grip tightened on his knee as she arched back. ”You are torturing me today. I will torture you tomorrow.”

Instead of feeling intimidated by Cixi’s threat, it sparked something inside him.

Behind her, where she could not see, Cassian grinned wider, his fangs flashing, though she couldn’t see them from her position. ”I like the challenge, Darling.”

His canines lengthened, gleaming faintly under the soft light. Fangs that had no business existing inside the mouth of an ordinary man were now becoming prominent.

He pushed two fingers all the way in, and Cixi cried out. Her nails dug into his knees that bracketed her body. His other hand cupped her breast, squeezing the firm flesh, his thumb flicking over her nipple until she arched back against his chest.

The water rippled outward from them in small, concentric waves that sent the rose petals drifting toward the far end of the tub.

”You are going to regret this,” she told him.

His low chuckle vibrated against her spine. ”No, Darling. I am going to enjoy watching you try.”

Cixi pressed her lips together. She promised herself she would teach him a lesson, someday, somehow. Every dog has its day, and hers was coming, and when it arrived, this man would learn what it felt like to be undone by someone who had studied his methods and perfected them.

The thought dissolved as his fingers started taking their pace, the water gently rippling with each thrust. Pleasure built hot and tight in her belly, her pussy clenching around his invading digits.

’Lust demon,’ she repeated in her mind. ’He is a Lust Demon.’

Cixi’s mind spun. Thought ceased to function. Language reduced itself to single syllables and sharp exhales. She existed only as nerve endings and heat and the unbearable, escalating pressure of his touch inside her.

Cassian’s other arm wrapped around her torso. His hand found her two mounds, cupping them firmly, pressing her body back against his chest until there was no space between them, until his heartbeat thudded against her spine like a second pulse she had not known she needed.

His fingers worked their rhythm. His mouth rested against the curve of her neck.

Two sensations. Three points of contact. One man controlling all of them with the casual mastery of someone who had done this before, but never quite like this.

Cixi cried out.

The sound echoed off the stone walls. Her hands gripped Cassian’s knees, which bracketed her on either side, and she held on because letting go would have meant losing whatever remaining connection she had to the physical world.

Now she understood.

Now she knew why people craved physical intimacy. Why they risked everything for it. Why empires had fallen and treaties had shattered and marriages had burned to the ground because of this one act, this one meeting of bodies, this one surrender that felt nothing like weakness and everything like power.

She understood it now. And she would never un-understand it.

In the ecstasy, Cixi did not notice what was happening behind her, or what was happening with Cassian.

She did not notice Cassian’s fangs had grown longer. Much longer. They extended past his lower lip.

His tongue crossed slowly over one fang as if tasting the anticipation.

His eyes had changed. The dark irises had narrowed into vertical slits, contracted and feral, the eyes of an animal that had been watching its prey with a patience that only something immortal could sustain.

He looked at the back of her neck. Her neck looked so delicate, and at the soft exposed skin where her hair had been pushed aside, and at the pulse that beat beneath the surface.

He pressed his fangs against her skin.

Cixi felt it. Felt a pressure against her skin. Something sharper was trying to get inside her skin. But the pleasure was so consuming, so total, that her mind catalogued the sensation and filed it under ’his mouth on my neck... biting’ and moved on.

His fingers moved faster inside her core. In and out. In and out. The rhythm building inside her felt like a wave gathering height before it broke.

Cixi moaned. She cried louder. Her nails dug deeper into his knees. Her toes curled against the bottom of the bath.

And Cassian’s fangs pressed harder.

The more she cried out, the deeper they pressed. As if her pleasure was permission. As though each sound she made loosened every restraint he had been keeping for so long, thread by thread, until there was nothing left.

Cixi felt her skin tear.

She screamed in pain.

She cried both in pleasure and in pain. The two sensations collided inside her body and became something she had no name for, something that burned and sang and broke and rebuilt all at once. She did not know where one ended and the other began.

His fingers did not stop. In and out. Precisely timed to match the escalation of what his mouth was doing to her neck.

His fangs sank deep.

Blood rose to the surface, and Cassian tasted it. The first drop hit his tongue, and something shifted inside him... a satisfaction, perhaps. He had been waiting since the first time he had caught the scent of her. His fangs had been itching since long before tonight. Since the first time he had held her in his arms. Since the first time her blood had called to something inside him that he had spent centuries trying to silence.

Now it was doing what it wanted. And he let it.

He did not waste a single drop. His mouth sealed against her skin, and he drank slowly, enjoyably.

As Cixi’s orgasm built toward its peak, and the chemical composition of her blood changed, Cassian tasted it. The hormones. The endorphins. The raw, flooding chemistry of a body surrendering to pleasure. It coursed across his tongue and down his throat, and it was satisfactory in a way that no wine, no whisky, no substance in any world he had inhabited had ever managed to be.

Cixi trembled. Her entire body shook against him, vibrating with the approaching release that was building inside her like a sound building toward a note too high to hear.

And Cassian, who was pleasuring himself on her blood while his fingers pleasured her beneath the water, did something else. Something deliberate. Something that Cixi, lost in ecstasy and pain and the obliterating weight of sensation, did not feel and would not notice until the next morning when she looked in the mirror and found something on her neck that had not been there before.

But that was tomorrow’s discovery. Tonight belonged to this.

Cixi’s orgasm hit.

It tore through her body like lightning splitting a night sky. Her back arched against Cassian’s chest. Her mouth opened in a pleasured scream. Her hands clenched his knees so hard her knuckles turned white beneath the water, and the rose petals surged outward from them in a wave that sent water spilling over the edge of the bathtub and onto the warm stone floor.

At the same moment, Cassian withdrew his fangs.

He did it slowly and carefully. His tongue ran once across the wound, sealing it like a ritual of something he had done many times before, in many lifetimes, to women who had not survived the experience.

But he let Cixi survive.

But she did not know what had just happened. All she knew was that the pain in her neck had dissolved into a dull, warm throb that felt strangely pleasant, like a bruise that wanted to be touched. And the pleasure that had ravaged her body was ebbing now, pulling back like a tide, leaving her empty and spent and impossibly, overwhelmingly tired.

Her eyes closed.

She did not mean to sleep. She did not choose it. But her body had been emptied of everything it had, every ounce of energy, every shred of resistance.

Her head rested against Cassian’s chest. Her breathing slowed. Her grip on his knees loosened, her fingers drifting open beneath the water.

She fell asleep in the bathtub.

In the arms of a man who had just drunk her blood. In the arms of the Devil who might have told her what he was and watched her not flinch. In the arms of a creature whose fangs were already retracting behind his lips, whose eyes were already returning to their human dark, whose mouth still tasted of her.

Perhaps she should have been terrified.

Perhaps she should have run.

But Cixi McLore had met the Grim Reaper, survived a curse, faked a pregnancy, been thrown from a terrace, and sat through a dinner with a family that wanted her dead. She had reached the point where a man revealing himself as the Devil was not a reason to run, but simply another piece of information to process in the morning.

She slept.

And Cassian Crown held her in the warm water, surrounded by rose petals, and looked at the mark on her neck that was already changing colour beneath the surface of her skin.

He had done what he needed to do.