Orgasm after orgasm, sensory overload for him, changed everything.
Since his memory served, his sensory receptors hadn’t worked right. He had never been able to respond to any sight or sound, even if he registered it. But seeing her had felt like finding the richest shades of his favorite colors, seared across his retinas with a taste of something sweet on his tongue. People had said that was an odd experience because of his eyes, but he knew it wasn’t that. His perception of things was just different. But it was her voice that he couldn’t explain. The first time he heard her speaking, the sound had sent vibrations over his skin, like a tuning fork hit with something, rippling across his body with such vividness it was unheard of, again leaving him with the sweet taste on his tongue. He had sought her out again, just to see for himself if it had been a fluke or real.
His body still buzzed from the vibrations of her words, her little cries, her strangled moans, his mouth filled with both her juices and the sensory sweet taste, a combination he was becoming addicted to with each passing second. It was real. And whatever it was, it was his. He didn’t care if she had this effect on any other human. He would eradicate them all until he was the only one left standing, if that was the case.
Her exhausted body jerked in her slumber, and he ran a finger over her delectable mouth. Lush lips pillowed under his touch and he wondered what she would taste like there. He had never kissed someone on the mouth, never really had the urge to. Why would he want a stranger’s mouth so close to his own and their fluids in his body? It made no sense. Fucking, he could understand. It was a biological need, but kissing wasn’t. Oral wasn’t either, which was one of the reasons he had never tasted pussy either. But he was well-versed in the ways of pleasure, and with her taste cemented on him, he doubted he’d taste another again, just hers.
He was going to be her last and she would be his first in so many ways.
He pressed the heel of his hand down on his cock, the piercings straining as it continued to throb, hard for the hours he’d been wringing out delicious orgasms from her pussy. His tongue, the same tongue her pussy had spasmed around through the night, was swollen with sensation.
Oh, he was going to fuck her, fuck her hard. He would take her like that one day, he decided. Maybe slide inside her while she slept, make her give him her trust to the point her body intuitively reacted to him even in her sleep. And in the morning, she would wake up sore with no memory of how but feeling him in every inch of her delicate, delicious cunt. He was going to test her trust, take every little ounce that she had in her capacity, until her body, her mind, her fucking soul believed in how important she was.
She was it.
She was the reason.
She saw him for who he was, and she melted for him. She hated him, and yet she trusted him. What had begun as intrigue had turned into fascination, slowly morphing into a fixation, culminating in an obsession so deep he was incomplete without it.
And one day very soon, she would be entirely his.
Not right now. Right now, the drug was bad enough to mess with her system. She didn’t need him to add to it.
Covering her with the blanket in the hotel room above the club, a place he knew like the back of his hand thanks to his own past, he was on the move, able to see through the pitch black thanks to his night-vision glasses. The darkness was for her, to shield her from the cameras, their audios disabled. With the way the room was locked and darkened, no one would dare to come in, not unless they wanted to risk facing him.
And no one in this world in their right minds wanted to face the Shadow Man in the dark.
Touching her cheek with his gloved hand, his mouth and chin wet from her, her taste etched on his tongue and his memory, he let the neurons in his brain register the rush they were feeling.
She had spoken to him, to warn him, to save him. Despite all her anger and hurt, she cared for him. Soft-hearted little fool, but his fool. She was rare, the fire of life, of warmth. He didn’t understand emotions, but he understood science. Something happened chemically in his brain and his body where she was concerned. He looked at her, heard her, and felt sensations in his system. It was the oddest response, one he had extensively researched, only to realize it was some form of synesthesia and it didn’t have a rational explanation in all cases. The wires in his brain were simply crossed, and they simply electrified when crossed with hers, and that was something he knew already.
Leaving her in the aftermath of her intense drug-induced episode, he walked to the door and looked out the peephole. Three men with guns waiting for him, as expected. Idiots.
Taking steps back into the room, he checked the feed on his phone before pushing it into his pocket, and headed for the window. Wedging it open easily, he jumped on the ledge, the adrenaline rushing to his body at the height. He liked heights. It reminded him of the home he would take her to one day.
Holding the upper edges of the window, he jumped onto the pipe that ran on the side of the building, his trained muscles working with memory, and began to climb up, one foot on the window edges, another on the pipe, glad that he’d worn his athletic workout gear. That had been more incidental than deliberate though. He had seen the feed from her room coming online, and known within seconds it was a trap for him and she was the bait.
They didn’t know she wasn’t the bait he would bite, she was the prize he had already won in this bloody game—he just had to claim the winning.
But he realized a message, a louder message, needed to be sent.
Coming to a stop on the window five stories above where she was, he looked in and saw it occupied with Howard and two girls, both of them sucking on his cock as he lay in bed, grinning with the mouth he had put on his girl.
The other man was going to regret that.
With the stealth of a cat, years of martial arts and parkour training kicking in automatically, he swung himself to hang from one hand until his other got a solid grip on the windowsill. Holding himself steady, checking to see all occupants of the room were distracted, he slowly opened the window and jumped in noiselessly, immediately ducking behind a giant couch on one side.
“Blasted window,” he heard Howard mutter. “Doll, go shut it.”
He stayed still as one of the girls closed the window and turned back, just as a knock sounded on the door. Someone, he assumed the girl, opened it.
“What’s the status?” Howard asked, the sound of sucking resuming.
“The room has been quiet for a few hours. Dark too. We don’t have visual.”
“You think he’s come yet?”
“Doubt it. The entrances are monitored. We’re on high alert.”
Their security was laughable. He wondered if the Syndicate knew how terrible the operations were on ground level or if they even cared.
The noise of Howard’s grunt came, followed by the rustling of the girls scrambling up and leaving.
“Keep an eye on her room. If he doesn’t show up by dawn, kill the girl.”
A burn began at the base of his spine at the words.
Any normal man would’ve felt anger perhaps, or even lust for revenge. He felt neither. In his head, it was a simple equation that had been messed with. Emotion didn’t fit into that; it didn’t need to. Was that psychotic? Maybe. But he had never pretended to be anything else than the devil he was.
A few minutes later, the door shut, and he heard the other man settling down in his bed, the lights going out.
Shadows formed over the room, and that’s when he took over.
Straightening from his crouch, he walked on silent feet to the bed, watching the out-of-shape shirtless man slumbering. The man was a spineless coward on a power trip. Having the meeting with him at the housing complex alone had made him realize that.
He had visited the housing complex to see their security under the guise of a meeting as an investor looking to purchase assets. The complex had incredible security, one he would need to navigate if he had to get to her once they locked her in, and after this, they probably would. But she had to keep trusting him—he would find her and this time, he would take her out.
Something akin to excitement filled him at the thought.
Walking to the table, he checked the bottle of whiskey. 100 proof. Good.
Taking the bottle, he opened it and poured around the edges of the bed first, slowly emptying it. He then went to the cabinet, got another 100 proof bottle, and returned to the bed. Tipping it over, he poured some down on the sleeping man.
Howard jerked awake with a sputter, his eyes flying everywhere until they fell on his silhouette, terror taking over his face. They said you saw the Shadow Man before you died. And from the look on his face, Howard knew of the rumors.
“No, please, I’ll give you whatever you want,” he begged like the spineless swine he was, wetting the bed with fear, the stench of alcohol and urine mixing with the stink that his voice left in his nose. It was odd, how he smelled and tasted voices, none of them palatable except hers.
He looked down at the man, remembering the video footage he had pulled up from the club on his way, remembering the way Howard had touched her hair, his hair, and poured the drugged concoction down her throat, put his filthy mouth on her breast as she begged and cried for mercy.
The burn in his spine rippled into a blaze at the memory.
No, his message had to be clear to every single one of them.
Taking the other man’s hair in his gloved fist, he pulled it hard, making the man cry out. “Please, no, let me go. I’ll do whatever you want. Please.”
“Drink,” he threw the same word out that they had used with her. He hadn’t been able to see the other man who had drugged her, one with the lighter hair, but he would find out. If there was one thing he was good at, it was at finding information.
Gulping, shaking, Howard opened his mouth.
Tipping the bottle, he poured the drink raw down the other man’s throat until he spluttered and coughed. Finally, once the entire bottle was almost empty, he stepped back. A look of relief came over the other man’s face, thinking that was it.
He let him think it.
Pouring the last of the alcohol in his mouth, he pulled at his hair. ‘Hold it.’
The shaking man held the alcohol in his open mouth, his eyes wide with such sheer terror it made the Shadow Man calm. He dumped the empty bottle to the side and took his lighter from his pocket, flipping it up.
The other man begging in noises, he kept Howard’s neck tilted completely back, and touched the flame in the lighter to the liquid in his mouth.
The fire took over, heating up the alcohol surrounding his tongue, the same tongue that had touched her. The man began to scream, struggling, but he held him immobile as the fire found its way into his throat just like the drug had gone down hers.
“Touch her and you die,” he remarked quietly. “Touch her worse, die worse. It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? I don’t know why you didn’t understand it.”
The other man was too gone in his pain to focus so he stepped back, walking to the door, seeing Howard trying to get off the bed toward the bathroom. Before he could set his foot down, the Shadow Man took flipped the lighter again, the lighter with the snake insignia of The Syndicate—an ouroboros, to be precise—and threw it on the bed, watching in satisfaction as flames erupted on the soaking sheets, spreading to the boundary of the bed, burning the man alive inside and out, his screams grating on his senses.
He left his lighter behind so the message was clear to everyone in the system—he knew their symbol, he knew who they were, and he would not hesitate in doing to them what he’d done here. She was off-limits.
This time, he left through the main door, keeping away from the cameras, taking the fire exit stairs out of the building.
Things had changed.
He needed to finish his final mission before he took her home. He needed to get her home, get her trust and her loyalty before he opened the door to her past.
But that was later. He was leaving breadcrumbs to figure things out, and that brought him enough time.
For now, she’d be safe, she’d be unharmed, and he could live with that.
