Author’s Note: Do mind that this story is only for NSFW purposes, thus there is not much lore going on. If this blows up, a chapter two will be made.
The library the two were in was quiet, save for Isabella’s drumming heart that threatened to burst out of her ribcage. Isabella stared at the impossible points of his teeth, her mind scrambling to reconcile the man she knew with the monster before her. "You did that?" The word was a breath, a prayer, a curse.
Ethan moved then, a blur of black wool and pale skin that brought him flush against her. The hard edge of the desk bit into her lower back. His hands came up, caging her in, palms flat on the polished wood on either side of her hips. His scent enveloped her—starch, bergamot, and something older, like frost on stone.
"Every one of them," he murmured, his lips a hair's breadth from her ear. "Every pretty lordling with empty eyes and emptier hearts. I watched them look at you. I heard them dream of your fortune, your body. It was an insult."
His nose trailed down the column of her throat. She shuddered, a violent, full-body tremor. "You… killed them."
"I devoured them." The admission was hot against her skin. "Their lives were currency. I spent them to keep you pure. For me."
His tongue flicked out, tasting the frantic pulse at the base of her neck. Isabella gasped. Her hands flew up, pressing against his chest. The solid, unyielding muscle beneath the fine linen shirt felt like marble. She meant to push him away. Her fingers curled, clutching the fabric.
"Look at me," he commanded, his voice dropping into a register she'd never heard, dark and velvet-wrapped.
Her green eyes, wide with terror and a shocking, blooming curiosity, lifted to his. The centuries stared back—endless, hungry, utterly focused.
"You are mine, Isabella Virelli. You have been since the first day I smelled your blood, sweet and sharp like ripe cherries. I have polished silver and poured tea and murdered gentlemen for the privilege of breathing your air."
His head dipped. His mouth opened over the tender slope where her neck met her shoulder. Not a kiss. A claiming.
The sharp, sudden puncture was a white-hot spike of pain that melted instantly into a deep, radiating heat. She cried out, a short, sharp sound swallowed by the library's silence. His arms wrapped around her, one hand splaying against the small of her back to arch her into him, the other tangling in her chestnut hair to hold her still.
The suction began. A pull that drew the very life from her veins into his mouth. It was lewd, intimate beyond anything she could imagine. The wet, hungry sound of him swallowing her blood filled her ears. A dizzying, euphoric weakness flooded her limbs. Her knees buckled.
He held her up effortlessly, drinking deeper. The pain was gone, replaced by a spreading, liquid warmth that pooled low in her belly. A moan escaped her, unbidden, wanton.
Ethan growled against her skin, the vibration traveling straight to her core. He tore his mouth away with a wet, ragged sound. Blood, dark as rubies, smeared his chin and stained his perfect white collar.
His eyes were black, pupils blown with primal need. "Do you see?" he rasped, thumb swiping through the blood on his lip before pressing it against her mouth. "Do you taste what you do to me?"
The metallic, coppery flavor burst on her tongue. It should have revolted her. It ignited her. Her lips parted, and she sucked his thumb into her mouth, cleaning the digit with a slow, deliberate swipe of her tongue.
A shudder racked his frame. The control he’d worn for centuries shattered.
His mouth crashed down on hers. The kiss was a brutal, bloody conquest. He tasted of her, of iron and life, and something darkly exotic. He ravaged her mouth, his tongue claiming it with the same possessiveness as his fangs had claimed her throat. She kissed him back, her fingers clawing at his shoulders, pulling him closer.
He spun her around, bending her forward over the desk. Leather-bound books and a crystal inkwell scattered to the floor with a crash. The cold, smooth wood pressed against her cheek. His body covered hers, heavy and demanding.
His hands found the back of her gown, and the sound of rending silk was obscenely loud. Cool air hit her exposed skin, followed immediately by the searing heat of his palms sliding over her back, her hips, gripping the bare swell of her rear. "Mine," he snarled again, the word a litany against her ear.
One hand fumbled with the fastenings of his trousers. The other slid around her throat, not squeezing, just holding. A collar of flesh. His thumb rested over her pulse, feeling the wild, frantic rhythm of the blood he’d just drunk.
She felt the thick, blunt head of him press against her entrance. She was slick, achingly ready, her body betraying every sane thought. "Ethan," she whimpered, a plea for something she didn't have a name for.
"Look at me," he growled again, twisting her head to the side so her cheek was still against the desk but she could see his reflection in the dark window glass. His face was a mask of savage beauty, blood-smeared and fierce. "Watch the monster take what belongs to him."
He entered her with a slow, devastating roll of his hips. The stretch was immediate, a burning fullness that stole her breath. She felt every inch of him, thick and hard and insistent, carving a space inside her that had never existed before. He groaned, a raw, animal sound that seemed to vibrate from his chest into her back.
"So tight," he hissed against her ear, his breath hot. "So perfect. My perfect girl."
His patience, already a phantom, evaporated. He withdrew almost completely and slammed back into her. The force drove a shocked cry from her lips and pushed her breasts harder against the cold desk. The slap of his body against hers was obscenely loud in the quiet library.
"Watch," he commanded, his hand tightening on her throat just enough to make her gasp. Her eyes, wide and dark, flew to the window. The reflection was blurred, but she could see the outline of his broad back flexing, the pale skin of her own body splayed and pinned beneath him, the wild tumble of her hair.
He set a brutal, punishing rhythm. Each thrust was a claim, a punctuation to the word he kept snarling. "Mine. Mine. Mine."
Isabella whimpered, a mixture of pain and overwhelming pleasure coiling in her belly. The initial burn melted into a deep, throbbing ache that demanded more. Her fingers scrambled for purchase on the slick wood. Her body, traitorously, began to move with his, meeting each drive backward with a needy rock of her hips.
He saw it in the glass. A feral smile touched his bloodstained mouth. "You want it. You want your monster."
His free hand slid from her hip, around to the front, dipping between her legs. His fingers found her clit, swollen and sensitive. He rubbed tight, hard circles in time with his thrusts.
She cried out, the dual assault shattering her coherence. Pleasure, sharp and bright, began to spear through the rough handling. Her inner muscles fluttered, clenching around his invading length.
His fangs ached, a phantom pain in his jaw. The scent of her blood and her arousal was a narcotic. He lowered his head, nuzzling aside the torn silk at her shoulder. His tongue lashed out, tasting the sweat-salted skin, before his teeth found the curve where her neck met her shoulder.
He bit down.
This was not the controlled puncture at her throat. This was savage. Isabella screamed, the pain a white-hot brand. Yet, as his mouth sealed over the wound and he began to suck, the pain twisted, melted, fused with the rhythm of his hips and the relentless pressure of his fingers. It became another thread in the tapestry of sensation, dark and primal and essential.
He drank in deep, greedy pulls, his hips never slowing. Each swallow seemed to fuel him, make him harder, his thrusts more powerful. She could feel the vibrations of his growls against her skin.
Her world narrowed to the points of contact: the desk against her cheek, the hand on her throat, the bite on her shoulder, the devastating friction inside her. The coil in her belly pulled impossibly taut.
"Ethan," she sobbed, the word mangled by pleasure and pain.
He released her shoulder with a wet pop, blood trickling in a warm rivulet down her back. "Come for me," he demanded, his voice guttural. "Now."
He shifted his angle slightly, tilting her hips up, and drove into her. The new depth was shocking. She felt him everywhere, a bulge pressing against her lower belly from the inside. A jolt of pure, undiluted sensation tore through her.
Isabella shattered. Her climax ripped through her with a violence that mirrored his. A raw, continuous scream was torn from her throat as she convulsed around him, her vision whiting out. She felt herself clamping down on him in endless, pulsating waves.
He fucked her through it, his pace turning frantic, chasing his own end. Through the haze, she saw their reflection—his face a mask of ravenous ecstasy, her own expression utterly broken and blissful.
He was still moving, his control a frayed thread. He was holding back, waiting, watching her come apart. The realization, in her spent and vulnerable state, felt like the most intimate violation of all.
He flipped her over, his hands rough on her hips, and pulled her up to meet him.
The desk was cold against her back. Her shoulder throbbed where he’d bitten her.
“Look at me,” he said, his voice a ragged command.
She forced her eyes open. His face was inches from hers, his pupils blown wide, his lips stained dark with her blood. He looked like a god carved from marble and sin.
He didn’t move. He just held her there, his cock buried to the hilt inside her, a hard, impossible presence. He was waiting. Demanding her focus.
“Every time,” he whispered, a promise and a threat. Then he pulled back and thrust.
Isabella’s back arched off the desk. A punched-out gasp left her lips.
He did it again. Deep. Hard. A relentless, perfect rhythm that stole the air from her lungs and the thoughts from her head.
His eyes never left hers. Each savage drive was punctuated by that unblinking, possessive gaze. She was pinned twice over—by his body and his will.
Her whimpers were soft, broken things. Her vision blurred at the edges, the library melting into a haze of leather-bound shadows and golden lamplight, and him. Always him.
The coil wound tight again, faster this time, fed by the raw intimacy of his stare. She was so full. Every thrust hit a place that made her see stars.
“You see this?” he growled, his hips snapping against hers. “You feel who you belong to?”
She could only nod, a tear tracking through the sweat on her temple. He leaned down, his breath hot against her ear.
“You are going to watch me claim you.”
His rhythm fractured, turning erratic, brutal. His control was gone. A low snarl vibrated in his chest, feral and ancient.
He surged into her one last, devastating time and held. His whole body went rigid.
Isabella felt it—the hot, pulsing release deep inside her. He groaned, a raw, shattered sound, and his eyes finally closed. He kept thrusting shallowly, spilling into her, claiming her in the most primal way.
She watched it happen on his face. The ecstasy. The surrender. The centuries of hunger finally, briefly, sated.
He stilled, his forehead dropping to her collarbone. His breath was cool against her feverish skin.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the slow, wet trickle of blood from her shoulder onto the leather desk. After minutes of silence, filled nothing with the sound of their bated breath, Ethan finally pulled out with a slow, sickening pop that echoed througj the library walls.
Then, with a tenderness that felt more shocking than the violence, he gathered her into his arms. He lifted her as if she weighed nothing, cradling her against his still-clothed chest.
He carried her to the leather chaise by the dead fire and laid her down. He retrieved his discarded waistcoat and draped it over her.
Isabella trembled, exhausted, every muscle liquid. She could feel the evidence of him leaking from between her thighs.
Ethan knelt beside the chaise. He took the blood-stained handkerchief from the floor—her evidence, his confession—and with a frightening gentleness, began to clean the wound on her shoulder.
His eyes, when they met hers, were no longer black with hunger, but soft with a terrifying devotion. The monster was gone. The butler had returned. But she had seen the truth. He had made sure of it.
“Sleep, my lady,” he murmured, his thumb stroking her cheek. “I will watch over you.”
As her eyes fluttered closed, the last thing she knew was the cool press of his lips to her forehead, and the silent understanding that nothing would ever be the same.