Enjoy this teaser from Chapter 3.

“We should make the most of this moment. There’s no telling how this operation will go down. As good as we are, the company’s got big assets. Clever people who work for them, aside from me.”

The gap between us closes. Lust prickles beneath my skin, but there’s something entwined with it. Hot rage accompanies it, but that doesn’t make sense.

I’ve never been mad at Leet.

He’s always been there for me. He was the one who helped me get my life back on track after the asylum.

I haven’t talked to my parents in the better part of a decade, and Leet fills that gaping hole in my heart that I pretend isn’t there.

“I think I’m falling in love with you,” I murmur.

He cups my jaw and caresses along my cheek with his thumb. His skin is cold and firm, like marble.

This isn’t real. It’s a memory.

A bittersweet memory.

It’s comforting to lose myself in it. To pretend this is reality. I don’t fight it as he shifts in closer on that posh, expensive sofa of his, and our faces drift closer together.

“Teach me what love is.”

Something feels off.

That isn’t what he’s supposed to say.

He leans in and kisses me, our lips glancing. “Is this love?” he asks in a breathy voice. His hard, tall form presses into me tighter. The kisses grow frenzied, assertive.

For a while, I’d wondered if Leet was gay, or asexual, maybe. Or, yeah, maybe he just thought of me as a friend, a peer. I was happy he thought of me at all, and being his friend was almost as good as being his lover.

These kisses contain all the things I’ve been longing for.

I part my lips, my hand on his leg as I lean in towards him, matching his passion. I’ve fantasized about this, and this is all my dreams coming true.

It’s unsettling the way he responds to my desires with such speed. Every time he gets too aggressive, he backs off. When I want more, he’s back. His hands move just where I want them, his nimble fingers unfastening the buckles on my top.

He takes the lead, but he follows my unspoken directions with ease.

The room had grown dark behind him while we’d been making out. He peels back my top and takes hold of a breast, caressing it.

“I want you,” he says, and his eyes are like dark pools now in the dim light. “I’m glad for all the circumstances that brought you here, to this moment. To me.”

I melt.

Those words. Ah fuck, they just totally unravel me, get through to my barbed wire heart. I’m trembling and there’s a hot warmth behind my eyes. I deny myself that childish impulse and kiss him hard on the mouth, hungry to swallow those words. To absorb them into me, and my consciousness. To make them a part of who I am.

Our mouths are locked together, tongues entwined. And my hands move to his chest, feeling that hard physique through his vest and shirt, before beginning to unbutton and remove them.

This isn’t a memory.

It’s changed, but it’s pleasantly different. Better. So much better.

His cool hands slide along my body, feeling me up, marvelling over my flesh as he looms over me.

“Shayde…”

He says my name with such poignancy and desire. It’s hunger laced with longing greater than anything I’d ever heard before. As if he were starved for human contact, and then found me, surpassing all desires and expectations.

His hands are working open his belt and pants, and I look at him, watching that unveiling of his manhood.

Leet and I had fucked in the actual moment, but in this memory it’s more passionate. Love radiates out from him. His cock spills out, already engorged.

“I need you,” he says.

His face is a little off. His familiar dark eyes seem to cry tears of ink. The ceiling of the room beyond him breathes. Great roots pulse like veins. Concrete gives way to life.

Don’t pay attention to that. I’m just trying to ruin the moment like I always do, shying away from the intimacy that I desperately crave.

His hips angle down, his manhood pressed to my slit.

“I need you,” I breathe back, my mouth pressing against his as his body weighs down on me. “Never leave me. Promise you’ll never leave me.”

I haven’t even finished the words when a rumble passes through me, through the ground, dark and rolling.

“I promise.”

It feels so good to have not just his physical presence and desire, but his devotion. It’s euphoric. He penetrates me and I moan. He’s big and filling, stretching me wide.

“I want to know what it’s really like.”

There’s a strange reverberation in his voice, an echo. His hips pump to the perfect tempo, at the perfect angle. He knows my body better than I do. His pace rises gradually, and I writhe beneath him in bliss.

I never want this dream to end.

“Come…” he bids me. I’m already perched at the edge of orgasm. So close to giving him what he wants.

“Come to me.”

To me?

That’s a strange thing to say. He’s already inside me. I’m as close to him as can possibly be, and the pleasure is mounting higher and higher. I wrap my arms around his back, surprised by how large he feels.

“Find the centre of the eye…”

I don’t understand. My body is buckling under the intensity. I force my eyes open to catch his gaze—maybe he wants more eye contact?—but everything is wrong.

The walls lined with throbbing, vein-like tubes pulsate and ooze, as if we’re inside some big heart of a blackened demon. And Leet…

Leet’s eyes are still wrong, but now that ink has begun to consume him. His whole being is black now, instead of the pale flesh I knew. His powerful hands grip me tighter, the feeling of long sharp claws glancing my flesh.

He’s not Leet. Not the Leet I knew. Not in action or looks. And there, perched on the edge of orgasm, I scream and scream until I awake on the forest floor.

I’m sticky with sweat and it reminds me of the ooze. My inner thighs are wet beneath my jeans, and I worry I pissed myself, but the reality is worse. Arousal wafts in the air, and that dream is so vivid, even as I suck in cold air, my frantic eyes searching for something I can’t see. Something no one should see.

The monster of my dreams.

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