J Ward - Crave

This was not working.

Deep down in the anus of Hell, where her captured souls were kept in flypaper walls, and the still air echoed with the oily moans of her servants, Devina was suffering from a serious case of buzz kill.

Which was why she’d sent everyone away.

Hanging back, she regarded the piece of meat wired to her table. In the candlelight, Jim Heron was Jackson Pollocked with blood and black wax and other liquids of various descriptions, and he was having trouble breathing through his swollen, cracked lips. On his stomach, there was a road map of carvings she’d done with her own claws, and his thighs were marked as well with her name and her symbols.

His cock had been used until it was as raw as the rest of him.

And yet he hadn’t cried out or begged or even opened his eyes. No curses, no tears. Nothing.

She wasn’t sure whether to be pissed off at herself and her minions for not working him hard enough… or to fall in love with the bastard.

Either way, she was determined to get a piece of him. The question was how.

She was well aware that there were two ways of breaking someone. The first was from the outside in: You whittled away at the individual’s skin and bones and sex until the physical pain and exhaustion and shame annihilated their inner mental core. The second was the inverse: Find the fissure inside and tap it with a proverbial hammer until everything crumbled.

For her, usually the first was enough, given all the tools at her disposal-and it was also more fun and therefore always where she started. The second was trickier, although no less satisfying in its own right. All people had keys to open their interior doors; she just needed to sort through and find the one that got her inside a given individual’s head and heart.

In Jim Heron’s case… well, it was clear he was going to make her work for it. And didn’t that give her Adrian some competition for Favorite Toy.

What to choose, what to choose…

His mother. His mother was a good one, but Devina wouldn’t be able to get ahold of the real thing, and he might just be smart enough to figure out she was faking it.

Fortunately, there was another solution that happened to be under her control.

Outside of the pools of candlelight, trapped in her viscous walls, the souls of those she’d captured writhed. Hands and limbs and feet and heads made undulating appearances that never quite broke the surface of the suspension, the tortured ever searching for a way out.

The satisfaction of seeing her collection distracted her, but also made her hungry: She had to have Jim in and among her trophies. Was desperate to get him into her. At first it had been merely a case of the game; now, after this session, it was so much more than that.

She wanted to own him.

Refocusing on his face, she found his calm expression nearly impossible to comprehend. How a man could have gone through so much… and there wasn’t even a grimace. And no fear of what was to come, either.

She would fix that, however.

And she liked to think this power in him came from that portion of his makeup that was hers. Those bleeding-heart angels with their holier-than-thou morals and strictures-weak, so weak. To the point where she didn’t want to lose the game against Nigel not only because she could rule the earth and the heavens and all that was betwixt the sun and moon… but because what an ass slap to be bested by that bunch of pussies.

Jim, however… he was better than that. He was more like her at his core.

What a tragedy that he had to be sent back up to Earth soon; but play, after all, had to be resumed. Before he went, though, she was determined to make an imprint on him, give him more of a taste of what their Hell Ever After was going to be like. After all, the cuts in his skin were relatively shallow. Marks on the mind, however, went far, far deeper.

And immortals were especially satisfying in this regard because, as the brain persisted, so did memory-and that meant she could leave eternal scars in her wake.

Glancing at her wall, which stretched upward for miles, Devina thought of her therapist and the work they were doing together. This was one domain that was off-limits to her “recovery” and this situation with Jim was proof yet again of how her little hoarding problem came in handy.

You never knew what you’d need.

Extending her hand, she pulled down from the upper reaches one of the more slender shapes, moving it in and around the other souls, calling it to her. When it was by the floor, she summoned forth the soul and clothed it in the corporeal form it had worn on Earth.

Devina smiled at it. So much utility in such a bland and forgettable little package.

Turning to her table, she said, “Jim? I have someone here who you’ll want to see.”

As Jim lay on Devina’s table, he doubted that. Very sincerely doubted that.

Besides, at this point, vision was probably a no-go.

Nothing hurt anymore, which made shit so much easier. The trade-off for that blissful numbness, however, was that his consciousness had receded into a dim corner of his inner house. It hadn’t quite put its head down for a nap, but it was getting there: Hearing had hit the cotton-wool stage where everything was muffled, and things were pretty fucking cold inside his skin.

The classic signs of shock made him wonder if she did in fact have the ability to kill him.

She hadn’t finished off Adrian, but had that been a whim of affection?

“I’ll just leave you two to get acquainted.”

Devina’s satisfaction was not good news, considering she’d done everything inhumanly possible to break him down for the last… how long? Hours? Had to be.

Footfalls. Retreating.

A door. Shut.

Silence.

Something was with him, though. He could sense the presence to the left of him.

From behind his closed lids, he knew two things for sure: Devina couldn’t have gone far, and whatever she’d locked him in with was close by.

The breathing was the first thing he noticed. Soft, hitched. The kind you drew when you were in recovery mode. Maybe it was his breath?

Nope. Rhythm was different.

He turned his head carefully toward the thing and drooled, his mouth clearing of what he couldn’t swallow because of the wire around his neck.

Whatever was with him let out another hitch of breath. And then he heard a subtle clicking.

What the fuck was that?

Curiosity eventually got the best of him and he cracked one of his lids… or gave that a shot, as it were. Took two tries and he had to push his eyebrows all the way up into his forehead before the fucker opened-

At first, Jim couldn’t fathom what he was looking at. But the blond hair couldn’t be denied… that long blond hair that fell to fragile shoulders.

Last time he’d seen it had been just days ago. In Devina’s bathroom.

It had been streaked with blood.

The girl who had been sacrificed to protect Devina’s mirror was dressed in a stained sheath, her thin arms covering her breasts, a small hand protecting the juncture of her thighs. She appeared to be miraculously unmarked, but the trauma was there: Her eyes were wide and horrified…

Except they were not on the room. They were on him… on his body and the glossy, sticky remnants of everything that had been done to him.

“Don’t…” His voice was too damn weak, so he forced more air through that wire roadblock at his throat. “Don’t look… at me. Turn away… for God’s sake, turn away…”

Shit, he needed more oxygen. He needed to make her-

Her eyes met his. The shock and terror on her face told him more than he needed to know, not just about what had been done to her by Devina, but what the sight of him was doing to the poor girl.