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spikedfearn · 16 days ago

Text

I Thee Bled

one-shot

Remmick x fem!reader

Summary: On the eve of your arranged wedding, you flee into the woods with trembling hands and a bloodstained gown—only to slip a ring meant for another onto a graveyard root and wake something ancient beneath the soil. Remmick is not a man, not anymore, but he remembers how to be tender. Touch-starved and centuries dead, he offers you the one thing the living never did: choice. In a forest that breathes and remembers, where the dead dream and the moss learns your name, you find yourself questioning everything you left behind. After all, what is a monster—if not a man who waits for you? And what is love, if not something you’re willing to bleed for?

(or: A Corpse Bride au)

wc: 15.2k

a/n: thank you all so much for the overwhelming love and support you’ve shown my fics, it means the world to me!! I originally planned to release I Thee Bled on Monday to celebrate one month since Brittany Broski posted Mercy Made Flesh to her Insta story (!!!), but life had other plans, so she’s arriving fashionably late. This one’s especially close to my heart, and I want to dedicate it to the lovely Moga @somnolenthour, whose beautiful fanart for this fic when it was still just an idea (completely unprompted!!) lit a fire under me, this one’s for you <333 shout-out to my beta readers, starting with Liz who also came up with the title: @fuckoffbard @titaniasfairy @jaythewriter @anhelconhmuda @kkniveschau

warnings: Corpse Bride!au, gothic horror, supernatural romance, blood, vampirism, smut, oral sex (f!receiving), praise kink, dirty talk, creampie, touch-starved monster, monsterfucking, sub!remmick, ghost town setting, period-typical misogyny, vague Victorian era, Tim Burton aesthetics, mutual pining, tragic undertones, Remmick in his final monster form

likes, comments, and reblogs as always appreciated, please enjoy!!

Masterlist

It was a quiet kind of death—to walk toward a future that never belonged to you.

The candlelight danced in its sconce like it too was afraid of the dark, throwing gold and shadow in uneven patterns across the walls of your bridal chamber. The air was heavy with the scent of crushed lilies—white, thick-stemmed, and already browning at the edges—as though the blooms themselves had second thoughts. A bridal veil hung limp from the mirror. You had not put it on.

You sat at the edge of the chaise, corseted to breathlessness, the bony ridges of your knuckles straining beneath the thin layers of skin from how hard you're clutching the ring.

Not your ring. Not yet. It was his—your would-be husband's—a man who smiled without his eyes and spoke of love like it was transactional. Whose name alone made your face pucker like you just smelled curdled milk. Mr. Langdon. So old your mother whispered “distinguished.” So cold the maids whispered other things when they thought you couldn’t hear.

Outside, the wind howled through the wrought iron balcony rails, shrill and wild like something mourning. You stood slowly, your bare feet silent against the marble floor, gown whispering around your ankles like the ghosts of every woman who’d gone quietly before you. The gown had been sewn for beauty, not for running. But you would run in it anyway.

You packed light, brought a white shawl and gloves to combat the chill. You brought the ring.

Not because you meant to keep it. Not because it held sentiment. It didn’t. It had no warmth, no story, no soul—just gold, cool and dull beneath your thumb. But it was worth something. Enough to pawn. Enough, maybe, to buy a train ticket. A meal. A room somewhere with a bed that didn’t come with a price pinned to your spine.

You told yourself that was why you kept it clenched in your fist as you slipped out the servants’ gate and into the dark. Not because it was his. Not because it had ever touched your skin. But because the world beyond your wedding had no place for a girl with nothing—and a gold ring, even one never worn, could be a lifeline.

Or a curse.

Fate hadn’t decided yet.

A band of simple gold, dull with fingerprint smudges, too loose for your thumb. You had not even worn it yet. It was handed to you this evening after supper, set beside a slice of blood-orange cake you hadn’t touched. “Keep it close, darling,” your mother had said, smoothing your hair as if you were already a corpse. “It will be yours come morning.”

You slipped it into your palm. And now it pulsed there like a secret.

The hallway outside your chamber creaked and groaned, the house settling into its evening sighs, and still you waited. You waited until the grandfather clock struck eleven, slow and solemn, each chime echoing like nails hammered into your future. Then—silently, so silently—you fled.

The woods did not wait to welcome you.

They swallowed.

The moment your slippered feet hit the dirt path behind the manor gates, the trees leaned in like they were listening, thick with Spanish moss and shadow. The moonlight fractured through their limbs, casting the path in broken, silver stripes. Your breath came out fast, clumsy, fogging in front of you as the night grew colder with every step, every frantic press forward into bramble and black.

The hem of your gown—once bone-white satin—darkened with mud. Then blood. A snag of thorns caught your ankle, sliced skin. You barely flinched. Pain felt like permission.

You weren’t sure where you were going.

Only that it has to be away.

You didn’t stop until your lungs burned and the trees had turned unfamiliar, too thick, too silent, the air tasting of copper and something older—stone, earth, iron. You collapsed against the base of a twisted tree, your gown a tangle of ripped silk and smeared petals, a bridal bloom gone to ruin.

The ring was still in your hand.

You looked at it—glared, really—angry at its weight, at the heft something so small contains. “To have and to hold…” you muttered under your breath, voice bitter, breathless, a mockery of a vow.

Your fingers fumbled blindly through the loam, sticky with sap and rainwater, until you found what you thought was a root. Something slender and pale rising from the earth like a bony finger.

You laughed, delirious. “Here,” you whispered, sliding the ring onto it. “Do you, strange tree, take me to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

The wind rose.

“I do.”

You reached out to steady yourself against the gnarled bark—but as your hand met the tree’s twisted surface, a sharp edge of wood caught the pad of your finger, snagging your bridal glove and the soft meat underneath. You hissed.

Blood welled—bright and living. It wobbled off your fingertip and fell. One drop. Then another. The red hit the base of the tree and sank into the soil like ink into paper. The bark beneath your palm felt warmer now. Almost…breathing.

Something moved. Beneath the dirt. Beneath you. You blinked. Sat up straighter. Listened.

Nothing.

Then—again.

A twitch. A shift. Like the earth itself was exhaling after a long silence. The root curled, moved, wrapped just slightly around your finger. Cold as the grave.

You yanked your hand back with a startled gasp. But it was too late. Blood had already spilled from your hand, sliced on bark or thorn or bone, and soaked into the black, thirsty soil. You watched it disappear.

The tree shuddered. Not in the breeze—there was no breeze anymore. The air had gone still, heavy as boiled milk, clinging to your throat, your hair, the space behind your knees. Your breath hitched. The birds had gone quiet. The crickets. The frogs. The world was listening.

And below you, the earth moaned.

A sound like old wood splitting. Like ribs breaking beneath dirt. Then, suddenly, a violent lurch—wet, sucking, earthly. The ground near the tree root cracked open, moss peeling back like flesh. You scrambled backwards on your palms, your gown tangling around your legs, but you couldn’t look away.

It didn’t feel like waking the dead. It felt like being watched by something that had never closed its eyes to begin with.

First came a hand.

Wide-palmed, thick-knuckled. Fingers unnaturally long, his nails cracked and gray and dirty, like shale. A gold ring gleamed faintly from the third finger. The wedding band you slid onto what you thought was a gnarled uproot.

Then the second, this one skeletal, stripped clean of flesh and muscle and tendon.

And finally, the rest of him.

He rose in pieces, as if gravity itself hadn’t yet decided whether to allow him back. His body pushed through layers of sod and clay and root like a memory that refused to stay buried. His shoulders were broad, shoulders that had once carried something heavy—tools, a body, a burden. One arm braced against the edge of the grave, veins bulging under pale, slick skin.

You saw the sweep of a dark, deep blue tuxedo, its fabric dulled by dirt and time, stitched with the memory of ceremony. The jacket clung to his shoulders unevenly, one side sagging low with centuries of damp, the lapels wrinkled and soil-smudged. Beneath it, a white collared button-up lay partially unbuttoned at the throat, the linen stained faintly at the seams.

A slightly lighter blue tie hung askew from his neck, knotted but loosened, the silk puckered where it had weathered through the grave. His trouser legs matched the tuxedo, tailored once, but now creased and grimy at the hem. Shoes to match—oxfords, maybe—scuffed to near ruin, soles coated in moss and wet earth.

He pulled himself from the dirt slowly, deliberately, like someone waking from a sleep they weren’t meant to return from—each breath thick in his throat, each movement dragging time behind it.

And his face—God, his face.

He was beautiful. In the way statues are beautiful. The way a ruin is beautiful. Pointed cheekbones beneath a mask of grave-filth. Mud in the seams of his short, messy brown hair, clinging in dark curls across his forehead. His mouth parted as he panted for breath he didn’t need, and you saw the right side of his jaw was ruined—torn open, exposing ribbons of raw muscle and the gleam of sharpened teeth. All of them sharp. Uneven. Crooked in places, silver-fanged and jagged like they weren’t made for a human mouth.

He drooled. Milky and thick, slow as syrup, threading from his teeth to the black soil.

His skin was a deep, post-mortem blue—something between bruised flesh and storm-lit sea, like teal left to darken in shadow. In the moonlight, with his veins just barely visible beneath the surface, it looked like cracked glass. His chest heaved. His head turned. And then—

He looked at you.

His eyes were wide as a frightened dog’s. But in the shadows, they shifted—black, almost red, glowing from somewhere behind the pupil like dying coals still clinging to that cherried spark.

He didn’t speak. He just…stared. Watched. Not like a stranger. Like someone trying to remember you. Like someone who knew you. Maybe before. Maybe in another life.

“Are—are you…” Your voice broke, shamefully small. You didn’t finish the question. Couldn't.

He swallowed, thickly. The sound was wet. And then—he smiled. Not cruel. Not ghoulish. Soft, tender.

“I knew ye’d come,” he said.

His voice came low and lilted, thick with the cadence of an Irish accent—rounded consonants, vowels pulled soft and long, a kind of music in his throat whether he meant it or not. The kind of voice made for stories. For lullabies. For oaths.

He took a single, stumbling step forward, mud pulling at his shoes, laced tight enough to keep the soil from suctioning them off his feet.

You couldn’t move.

“Ye put a ring on me hand,” he said again, gentle this time. Coaxing. He held up his fingers, all blood-caked and twitching, the wedding band glinting faintly beneath the filth, fractals of moonlight dancing off the polished gold, a stark contrast to the dirt and grime clinging to his skin. “And ye spoke a vow. That counts, don’t it?”

He tilted his head, like a curious animal. “Didn’t reckon ye’d be so bonnie.”

You should have run.

You knew that. Every part of you knew that. The sensible part. The terrified part. The part that still heard your mother’s voice whispering warnings about strange men, and worse things still, things that didn’t breathe right, didn’t die right.

But something rooted you.

Maybe it was the ring still snug around that pale, twitching finger. Maybe it was the way he looked at you. Like you were the first warm thing he’d seen in centuries.

He took another step forward. Then another. His oxfords left deep, sucking impressions in the soil, and his gait wasn’t quite right—like a marionette with its strings pulled too hard, or a man remembering how to be one. You flinched when he got too close, but he didn’t reach for you. Not yet. Just stood there, arms slack at his sides, mouth slightly open, that thread of spit still hanging from one fang like an afterthought.

His head dipped low, curls shadowing his brow, and when he spoke again, his voice was almost shy. Like he feared you might bolt.

“Was it the blood that roused me, then?” he asked, one brow raising slowly. Thoughtful. “Or the vow ye whispered?” He swallowed, working his jaw with a faint wince. “Might’ve been both. Hard to say.”

You blinked at him. Swallowed the lump that had risen hard and high in your throat. “Who…who are you?”

His smile faltered. Just a flicker. Not hurt—more like confusion.

“Don’t remember me, do ya?” His voice dropped low, almost tender. “But you called, lass. I heard ya—clear as day, so I answered.”

He tapped his skeletal palm against his chest, right over his sternum, his eyes round and brows raised in a puppy dog look, a pleading little tilt to his head like he's desperate for you to believe him.

“I felt you in here.”

You opened your mouth. No sound came out.

The man—the thing—before you cocked his head again, just slightly. His eyes were too soft for the rest of him, too warm. And the accent in his voice made everything worse, somehow. Made it gentle. Comforting. It stripped you of fear, piece by piece, until all that remained was the strange throb of something you didn’t understand.

“What’s your name?” you asked, finally.

His gaze lit up like the question pleased him. He didn’t answer right away. Just dragged a hand through his hair, leaving streaks of mud and grit and grave soil across his temple.

“I’ve been called a lot o’ names,” he said after a pause. “Some of ’em I earned. Some I didn’t. But the name I remember best is…” A thoughtful frown pulled at the less-damaged corner of his mouth.

“Remmick. That’s what me ma called me,” he said, almost shy now. “Back when the sky was still thick wi’ peat smoke and the land hadn’t yet learned the sound o’ English steel. When we carved prayers into stone ‘stead o’ paper, and the rivers boiled not from fire, but from the rage o’ gods long buried.”

He glanced at you then, as if expecting you not to understand. But you didn’t flinch, causing his smile to grow like a decaying flower that didn't know it was dead yet.

“Back when the forest had a name you weren’t meant to speak after dark,” he added, voice gone soft and faraway. “And folk still left cream out on the stoop, hopin’ to keep the hills quiet.”

You said nothing. You had no words.

He glanced down at himself as though just now noticing the state he was in. Fingers touched the torn lapel of his jacket before dusting the front off next. His nose wrinkled faintly, sheepish, eyes round and sorry.

“Would’ve cleaned meself up a bit had I known,” he said, glancin’ back up at you with a crooked smile. “But by Gods, ye caught me right in the middle of me dirt nap, didn’t ye?”

And then he laughed. A soft, broken sound. It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t hollow. It was almost—sweet. You didn’t realize you’d taken a step back until your spine hit bark.

He noticed.

“No need to fear me, lass,” he said, quickly, voice pitching soft, hands raised just a little, his eyes bleeding red like a freshly weeping cut, “I won’t hurt ye. I wouldn’t.” His fingers curled back toward his chest again. “Not you.”

“Why me?” you asked, finally. “Why—why do you think I called you?”

His smile returned, slow and tender. He lifted his hand—the one with the ring, the one that was intended to collar you to Mr. Langdon before you turned tail and fled, looking sleek and shiny against grimy blue skin.

“’Cause ye put this on me finger,” he said. “Ye made a promise. A vow.”

You shook your head, your breath catching like a bird startled mid-flight, wings beating frantically in your throat. “It wasn’t real.”

“It was real enough for me.”

He looked down at the gold band, turned it with his thumb. “You bled for it, didn’t ye?” he murmured. “Spoke words into the trees. Placed a ring on a buried hand. That’s old magic, love. Older than graves. Older than the Gods above.”

His eyes flicked back to you—red blooming around the edges now like ink through water.

“Old magic don’t care whether you meant it.”

You didn’t know if it was the way he said love, like it meant something eternal…or if it was the silence of the woods, how they held their breath around him…but your world had suddenly been flipped upside down like you'd been living inside a snow globe and someone decided to just come along and shake it. All because you'd gotten cold feet. All because you couldn't bring yourself to walk down the aisle and wed a man who barely made your acquaintance prior to the arranged ceremony.

You recall last night in great detail, the last time you were alone with Mr. Langdon. It had been in your father’s study—dark-paneled, smelling of tobacco and power. He hadn’t touched you, not exactly. But his hand had rested too long on the curve of your shoulder, fingers splaying toward the top of your spine like he was trying to gauge how much pressure it would take to snap it.

“I prefer quiet girls,” he’d said with a smile that didn’t reach his shrewd eyes. “Ones who don’t ask so many questions. Obedience is a virtue, you know.”

You had smiled. You nodded. Because what else could you do?

He had leaned in close, breath stale with wine and something bitter, suppressing the reflexive urge to recoil, “After tomorrow, your body belongs to me. That’s what marriage is. Best you start getting used to the idea.”

You hadn’t answered. You’d gone to your room and vomited in the basin. And tonight? Tonight—you ran. You didn’t bring a bag. You didn’t bring a plan. You brought the ring.

And you brought the no you hadn’t dared speak aloud.

It’s only then that you start to notice—the world around you moves. Not with the subtle rhythm of wind or wildlife, but with a kind of strange, theatrical breath, like the forest is alive.

The tree behind you creaked like a yawning coffin, bark groaning against your spine as if waking from its own long sleep. Overhead, the moon hung too round, too large, almost theatrical in its glow—more paper lantern than celestial body. It cast light not white but a washed-out bluish silver, the kind that made every shadow look like it was up to something.

There were no clouds. The sky didn’t need them.

Instead, the forest itself began to shift—bending at the edges like a curtain drawing inward, branches twisting and stooping with exaggerated grace, their tips curling into crooked little hooks. The trees no longer stood tall and noble; they hunched and leaned like gossiping old women, knotted spines cracking as they bent to get a better look at you.

The leaves above clinked faintly like dry metal. One branch spiraled down and hovered beside your shoulder, like it was waiting for permission to touch you.

And still, Remmick didn’t seem to notice.

Or maybe he did.

Maybe he was used to it—the way the world rearranged itself around him, the way nature bowed and blinked and breathed differently wherever he walked.

Maybe he’d never known a forest that didn’t follow.

He took another step toward you.

He was close enough now that you could see where the flesh on his cheekbone pulsed faintly, still clinging to old life. Where blood had dried in a crooked path down his exposed jaw. Where some of his teeth weren’t perfectly sharp at all—some had chipped, split, yellowed in ways that proved he hadn’t always been what he was now. He had once been a man.

You stared. Not at the horror. At the detail.

His collar was unbuttoned. There was a ring of skin just below his throat that was somehow clean, as if protected by the chain that still hung there.

“You’re real,” you breathed, as much to yourself as to him.

He smiled again. Small, head bowed slightly. Like the thought embarrassed him.

“Aye,” he said. “At least I was.”

Your heart skipped. The accent curled around that last word—was—turning it melancholic and soft. He sounded deeply lonely in a way that didn’t scream or shudder, but bled slow and quiet—like a candle left to burn itself out in a chapel no one prayed in anymore.

You didn’t realize your hand had risen until he caught it. His grip wasn’t strong. In fact, it was hesitant. Loose. Like he feared you might flinch, and he was giving you time to do it. To reject it.

You didn’t.

His thumb dragged over the small wound on your finger where your glove was torn. The one you’d cut on the tree. Your blood had dried there, rust-colored and still.

“’S’what woke me,” he murmured. “This wee thing.”

You tried to speak, but the words tumbled over each other, panic and fascination tangled in your throat. “What are you?”

Remmick looked up at you, then down at your hand in his. He didn’t let go.

“I was a man once,” he said. “Before they put me in the ground like a secret.”

There was no anger in his voice. No grief. Just barebones honesty.

“I remember cold,” he continued. “I remember bein’ bound.” His brows drew together. “I remember hunger.”

You swallowed.

His head tilted slightly again. “But now I remember you.”

You opened your mouth to deny it, to tell him he was wrong, that you weren’t anyone, that this was all a mistake. That you weren’t his. That you weren’t meant to be anything.

But the woods behind you had gone too still. And he was staring at you with a gaze so tender it made your stomach twist.

“Ye came in white,” he said, voice softer now. “Like a bride. Ye gave blood. Ye spoke vow.” He brushed a skeletal knuckle to your chin with aching slowness, the bone surprisingly soft, “don’t reckon the veil’s far behind.”

The branches rustled above, though there was still no wind. You realized the forest wasn’t closing in. It was gathering.

And Remmick…he was looking at you like he was home.

It was no longer night in the way night should be.

Time moved differently now. The sky above bled grey and silver and rust, but the moon never shifted from its throne behind the trees. The light stayed fixed in place, like the forest had slipped sideways into some pocket behind the world. Hours passed like fog. You slept, but never fully. You walked, but your feet left no prints.

And Remmick—Remmick stayed near.

Not hovering. Not leering. Just there, always just far enough not to crowd you, yet always within reach, like the forest had redrawn its laws to keep him at your side. Like you were its axis now.

You thought of Langdon.

Of his voice—measured, polished, practiced. The kind of voice that never raised itself above a certain register, as though passion was unsightly. He had a way of looking at you that always felt more like study than affection. Like you were something to be assessed, not adored. His fingers, when they grazed yours, were cold from gloves and colder still beneath them. Everything about him had been lacquered to a shine: his shoes, his manners, his hollow future he spoke of with such sterile pride.

You remembered one night, not long ago, when you’d dined together at his family estate. A private supper. Three courses. Too many forks. You’d asked him if he liked poetry.

He blinked. Set down his wine glass. “I tolerate it,” he said. “In women.”

That had been it.

No questions in return. No warmth. No wanting.

You’d spent the rest of the meal smiling at your plate, wondering if it would be considered madness to simply climb out the window and run.

And now—here.

Now, you were with a man who’d crawled out of the earth, with dried blood under his nails and a ruined jaw, and somehow he made you feel safer than any lace-draped parlor ever had. Remmick, who flinched when he touched your skin like you were the sacred thing. Remmick, who didn’t ask you to perform, or flatter, or prove anything—who simply stayed close because he wanted to be near.

He was a walking corpse.

And he seemed more human than Mr. Langdon had ever been.

Remmick spoke in murmurs. Half-conversations.

“My folk used to call this part the belly,” he said, gesturing toward a clearing that bloomed only with pale fungi and white moss. “Said the trees grew too thick with memory. Said it weren’t safe for the livin’.”

You stepped forward slowly, the hem of your gown brushing through the hush of strange underbrush. The clearing pulsed in stillness, like something held its breath just beneath the surface.

The fungi were long-necked and ghostly, some capped in translucent bells, others curled like fingers mid-spasm. They glowed faintly in the dark—not enough to see by, but enough to feel seen.

Overhead, the trees now leaned inward with impossible arches. Their bark smooth and gray as drowned bone, and where knots should’ve been were instead hollowed faces, soft and suggestive, as though the trunks had grown around someone who once leaned too long against them. One of the branches creaked in a slow, pendulum sway, even though there was no wind.

You tilted your head. The white moss underfoot looked soft, inviting—until you noticed it wasn’t growing in any natural pattern. It coiled in tight spirals, some large enough to circle your slippered feet, others small and delicate as lacework.

When you asked what he meant, what memory had to do with the trees, he only gave a crooked smile and pointed at your feet.

You looked down. The moss had formed perfect circles beneath your heels.

Spirals.

“See?” he said. “She’s already learnin’ you.”

And sure enough, even as you stood there, the spiral beneath you shifted. Just slightly. Not like a plant reacting to pressure, but something alive—tracing the shape of your sole, marking your weight, remembering the heat of your blood. It liked you.

Or worse—it recognized you.

He never called the place a graveyard. He called it “the kept.”

You first saw them while following a worn path between black pines—stones laid flat into the dirt, unmarked, sunk deep with age. You almost stepped on one before he reached out and caught your wrist, not harshly—just quick.

“Aye, mind where ye tread,” he said, voice gentle, Irish vowels lilting around the warning. “They don’t take kindly to bein’ disturbed.”

You stared at the stone. And then you realized it was moving. Not rising. Not moaning. But the soil above it—it breathed.

You took a step back, heart climbing into your throat.

“They don’t wake unless they’re called,” Remmick said softly. “But they listen.”

Far off, from a hollow deeper in the woods, a chime echoed. High and delicate, like a piano key played underwater. Another answered, lower, more metallic. You didn’t see the source, but you could feel them vibrating in your bones. And yet it didn’t frighten you.

He never told you how he died. You tried to ask. More than once.

The first time, he looked away. The second, he closed his mouth mid-sentence and didn’t speak for a full hour. Not angry. Never angry. Just—withdrawn. The third, he reached up and touched the ruined side of his jaw, as if he’d forgotten it was there.

Then he whispered, “Not yet,” and nothing more. You didn’t press.

Some things, you could feel, were kept buried by more than soil.

It was on the fifth day—if you trusted your own body’s clock—that you tried to leave.

You didn’t make a show of it. You waited until Remmick went still beneath the shade of a hollow tree, head tipped back, eyes closed like he was listening to something beyond your hearing. You crept away quietly. You didn’t look back.

You hadn’t meant to stay that long. You told yourself it was only curiosity, only caution, only until you understood what he was. But the forest had begun to feel too quiet in the right places. Remmick had begun to speak too softly, like a prayer meant only for you. And that was precisely the problem. He was too gentle. Too kind. Too patient.

You weren’t supposed to like any of this—weren’t supposed to be lulled by a dead man’s voice or find comfort in a world where bones lined bird nests and laughter came from unseen mouths. You ran not because you feared him. You ran because, terrifyingly, you didn’t.

At first, the trees parted for you. The path unfolded.

You ran.

You didn’t cry. You didn’t call his name. You just ran. But the forest…it shifted.

The branches overhead grew too low, too tangled. Vines curled beneath your feet like hands reaching out to stop you. A bramble reached out like a whip and slashed across your collarbone, slicing clean through the dress, nicking your skin just enough for blood to bead along the uneven seam of your cut. Still, you kept going.

Until you hit it.

The edge.

It wasn’t a wall—not exactly. It was air. Thick, humming, wrong. The veil between life and death. When you stepped into it, your skin felt like it peeled. Your lungs refused to fill. The world blurred and bent at the corners like warped glass.

You stumbled back, coughing. Gasping. Remmick was there. Not chasing. Not angry. Just there.

He caught you around the middle before your knees buckled, arms strong but careful, like you were made of spun sugar and he was afraid you'd shatter.

“Sshh, now,” he whispered, curling you to his chest, soothing, the brush of his lips, the bloodied network of muscle fiber and tendons woven through his jaw pressed to the side of yours, wet and textured, “easy, easy, you’re alright.”

“I—I had to try,” you managed, fingers curling into the lapels of his jacket. “I didn’t want to stay. I didn’t mean to—I can't stay.”

“Shhh,” he soothed again. “I know.”

You felt him exhale into your hair. Slow. Shaky.

“I know wee bride,” he murmured, the accent softening everything it touched. “But she don’t open the same way twice. Not once she’s taken a name.”

You pressed your forehead into his shoulder, trembling. And for the first time—you wondered. Not how you got here. Not how to undo it.

But if you even should.

You thought of Langdon. Of his thin lips, the contracts, the expectations. Of your mother, her quiet threats tucked into lace gloves. Of the veil that felt more like a burial shroud than a blessing.

And then you thought of the way Remmick had caught you—like a man catching the last soft thing left in the world.

Later—how much later, you couldn’t say—you sat with him in the moss-ringed clearing where the mushrooms bloomed like broken teeth, soft and damp and glowing faintly blue at their tips. The forest had gone quiet again, but not heavy this time. Not watching. It simply…was.

Remmick had taken to lying on his side, propped on one elbow, his ruined jaw turned slightly from view, though you were never sure if it was for your comfort or his.

His fingertips brushed through the withered stems, and chose one near the base of a crooked stone. It was long-dead, crumpled and brittle at the edges, the color all but drained. He held it up between thumb and forefinger, and as he rolled the stem, you watched something shift. The petals darkened—deepened—like blood soaking back into flesh. It bloomed, slow and unnatural, into the shape of a dried red rose. Not living, not quite—but remembering life. Like something dressed for mourning.

“These only grow where the veil’s thin,” he said quiet-like, voice laced with that low, lilting Irish bend. “Where things slip in and out. Couldn’t say for certain which side they’re meant for, if I’m honest.”

You didn’t reply. You just looked at him.

There was dirt under his nails. sediment clinging to his collarbone. His oxfords were still caked in grave mud, but he hadn’t touched you with anything other than gentleness.

Your voice felt small when you spoke. “Why did you wait?”

Remmick blinked slowly. His fingers stilled.

You clarified before he could pretend not to understand. “All this time. You said you felt me. But you were already down there, weren’t you? In the earth. Waiting for someone to call you back. Why?”

He didn’t answer right away. Didn’t shift. Didn’t look at you. And just when you were sure he wouldn’t speak—he did.

“I didn’t know I was waitin’,” he said, voice gone low, just a touch rough. “Not truly. Time goes quiet when you’re laid under like that. Y’don’t count the years. Some days, y’don’t even remember your own name.”

He looked at the sky through the trees.

“Sometimes I’d dream o’ faces. Yours, maybe. Or someone who looked like ye. Sometimes I’d think I heard someone weepin’. I’d think, was it me?”

You felt your chest tighten. Remmick smiled again, faint and lopsided, like a man recalling a song he hadn’t sung in years.

“But when I felt ye, I knew. I knew it weren’t just hunger or ghosts or wind. I knew it was real. Ye bled for me. Ye called for me.” He glanced over. “No one’s ever done that before.”

You stared at him. At his hands, broad and veined. At the faded chain around his throat. At the ring you’d slipped, thoughtlessly, onto the hand of a tree like a promise.

A tree that had promised back.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” you said.

“I don’t care.”

You swallowed.

He said it without venom. Without accusation. Just—resolute. And maybe something softer curling underneath. He rolled onto his back, the moss giving way beneath him like a cradle.

“I’d have waited another thousand years for that drop of blood,” he said, quiet now. “Another thousand after that just to hear your voice say I do.”

You turned away. Not because you didn’t believe him. But because some part of you did. And it made your throat ache.

Your gaze drifted to the edge of the clearing, where the trees stood thick and close.

“Will it ever open again?” you asked. “The forest.”

Remmick didn’t move. “Aye. Someday. When she’s good and ready.”

“And if I’m not here when it does?”

He was quiet for a beat too long. Then:

“Then I’ll follow.”

That made you look back. He didn’t smile this time.

“I’d walk through fire to find you, wee bride.”

His voice was still Irish—but there was something else behind it now. Something old. Ancient. Something so sure of its longing it didn’t need to shout. It just was.

You realized, in that moment, how terribly lonely he must’ve been. How quiet his world had become. How loud your heartbeat must be to him now.

And how warm you still were.

He asked if you wanted to see the rest.

Didn’t demand. Didn’t lead without waiting. Just…offered.

With a hand half-outstretched and those eyes still puppy-wide, still lit like you were a miracle he was afraid to touch too quickly, lest you vanish into smoke.

You hesitated. But not long.

The forest parted for you both this time. Not like it had when you tried to run. Now it was more like—inviting. The way a house might creak its doors open when it recognizes one of its own.

You slipped your hand into his, the one that still wore flesh. His fingers were cold, yes—but not corpse-cold. Not the kind that bit. His hand was rough in places, as though he’d lived long enough to carry calluses even through death. His thumb flexed gently along your knuckles, testing. Not possessive. Just…checking.

Reassuring himself you were real.

He showed you the orchard first. Or what was left of it.

A grove of trees that no longer bore fruit, only ribbons—hundreds, thousands of them, hanging from the branches like wilted party streamers. Blue, white, ivory, pale lilac. Some patterned, some torn, some fraying from centuries of wind.

You reached up and touched one.

“They’re wishes,” Remmick said, voice softer than ever, his breath beside your cheek. “Made by the dead. Before they were buried.”

You turned to him.

“But they never came true?”

His expression shifted—fond, wistful.

“Some did. Some didn’t. Doesn’t matter.” He touched the ribbon nearest to him, the pad of his thumb brushing its edge. “It’s the hoping that counts, innit?”

You said nothing. The breeze moved the orchard like a lullaby.

Further in, he showed you a town of sorts.

Carved into the side of a crumbling cliff where the rock split into ribs and the stone seemed to breathe, the little village clung to the earth like a half-forgotten secret.

The houses were squat mudstone cottages, weathered and slouched, their chimney pots crooked like snapped fingers. Moss crept up their sides in thick velvety bands, swallowing old lanterns, window frames, and entire doorsteps. Windowpanes blinked with eyes pressed from the inside.

The doors were low and arched, some made of driftwood painted in peeling funeral hues—deep violet, waxy blue, iron black. A few homes had teacups balanced on their roofs. Others had shingles shaped like fingernails or pressed flowers. Bones hung from strings between rafters, clacking gently in the hush, arranged like wind chimes or family crests, each one carved or etched with little initials, or painted with the ash of something you couldn’t name.

A skeletal cat darted past your ankles, all jangling vertebrae and twitching tailbone, its paws clicking faintly against the cobbled path. Its jaw hung open in a rictus grin. You didn’t scream. It looked up at you once—empty sockets glittering faintly—and carried on.

And then the town began to move.

A shutter creaked open. A door whined on its hinges. A hatless man with no lower jaw swept the stoop of what looked to be a bakery, the scent of charred sugar and burnt cinnamon floating faintly from within. He nodded at you politely, bits of soot falling from the collar of his shirt, and kept sweeping. Further down the lane, a trio of old women sat in rocking chairs that had been nailed directly into the wall of a house—sideways, five feet off the ground—and knitted with thread made of silver hair. One of them had no eyes. The second had too many. The third winked at you with a socket.

“Don’t mind them,” Remmick murmured. “They been there long as I can remember. Like to keep to themselves.”

He led you past a crooked fountain that spewed a slow, syrupy trickle of black water, and through a crooked square strung with dim, blue lanterns that hung from lengths of discolored intestine braided like ribbon. In the center was a music box the size of a carriage, its brass bell warped and dented, still playing a waltz you could swear you remembered hearing in a dream long ago. No one danced to it—but some of them swayed.

There was a tailor’s shop with mannequins made of stitched skin and bent spoons. A chapel whose bell tower rang without sound. A bar, glowing faintly green from the inside, where shadows moved across the windows though the glass had long since clouded over with frost from the wrong side. A child floated by without legs, giggling into a jar that held a swarm of candleflies. You saw a man with a flowerpot for a head watering it with tea. A woman selling buttons shaped like teeth.

This was not a place that mourned death.

This was a place that remembered it, wore it, built tea tables from it.

Remmick led you down a sloping path toward a cottage built halfway into the stone, the door crooked, the curtains made of faded funeral veils.

“This was mine,” he said, his voice almost sheepish. He toed at the dust near the doorstep, head ducked slightly.

“When?” you asked.

He smiled faintly, lifting a shoulder. “When the veil was thinner. When the dead and the livin’ shared more than just memory.”

He said it like someone recalling the smell of something they’d never taste again. Like someone who’d tried, once, to live after he’d been buried.

You looked around you.

The town wasn’t decayed. It was…rearranged. It had rules you didn’t yet understand. Gravity worked only where it felt like it. The dead did not walk in straight lines. Some glided. Some bounced. Some stitched themselves together fresh each morning and wandered about humming.

And the strangest thing of all?

You didn’t feel afraid.

Not in the way you should have. Not even when you turned around and the fountain had grown teeth. Not even when a man tipped his hat and his entire scalp followed. Not even when a door sighed open with a voice like your own and whispered, Stay.

Remmick was beside you, his body casting a shadow even here, where most things didn’t. He looked at you not like you were lost—

But like you were home.

That night—you still called it night, even though the moon hadn’t moved—he brought you to a bridge.

It spanned over nothing. No river. No ravine. Just a stretch of fog and sky. A ghost bridge.

You sat beside him at the edge, your legs dangling off as if you could fall somewhere, though you knew you wouldn’t. He sat close. Close enough that your shoulder brushed his.

He didn’t move away.

“Used to dream o’ this,” he admitted, after a long silence. “Not the forest. Not the dirt. Not the blood.”

He looked over at you, slowly.

“Just this. You. Here.”

You couldn’t answer. Your throat ached again.

His voice dropped, deep in his chest, accent thick with emotion he couldn’t hide. “Haven’t been touched since they put me down.”

The confession wasn’t vulgar. Wasn’t even pleading. It was starved. He smiled, crooked and small. “Can’t remember the last time someone just…looked at me. Like I wasn’t somethin’ to be feared.”

He didn’t touch you again, not even your hand.

He didn’t need to.

Your fingers brushed his pinky. Slowly. Once.

And his breath hitched so sharp you felt it in your bones.

By the next day—if you could still call it that—you weren’t watching the sky anymore. Weren’t thinking about what the world looked like outside these woods.

You walked the paths beside him. You listened to the hush of wind that sang like violins through cracked branches. You let him point out where the ghost-lanterns grew, little flowers with glass bell-heads that chimed when you passed them. You started remembering the feel of his shoulder bumping yours and missing it when it wasn’t there.

And you started to wonder.

Would it really be so terrible if you stayed?

You asked yourself that once. Then again. Then again.

At first it was just a whisper behind your ear. A suggestion. But now it nestled behind your ribs. Grew there. Took root.

Because you remembered Langdon, didn’t you?

You remembered his hand on your waist at supper, always too firm, like you were something to steer. You remembered how he spoke over you in every conversation, like a man correcting a child he hadn’t bothered to raise. You remembered how the ring—his ring—had been handed to you by someone else. No kneeling. No asking. Just expectation.

You remembered the way his lips never curled unless he was closing a deal.

And then there was Remmick.

Who asked if you wanted to see the rest. Who offered you his hand like it might be too much. Who waited every time you hesitated, and looked like it hurt him to do so.

He smiled with his whole mouth—ruined and all. He grinned when you laughed, even if he didn’t understand why. He softened around you like someone desperate to remember warmth. Every time he brushed against you, it wasn’t accidental. It was careful. Measured. Hopeful.

He looked at you like he was still not sure he deserved to.

You sat on the bridge again. Together.

Remmick had his hands in his lap, thumbs tracing nervous circles against each other. Every now and then, he’d glance at you. Say nothing. Then glance again.

You finally looked back.

“What is it?” you asked.

He startled slightly, sheepish. “Ah—nothin’. I just…”

His jaw clicked when he closed his mouth, then tried again.

“Ye don’t wear nothin’ on your finger,” he murmured.

Your breath caught. “Remmick—”

“No, no, love, I didn’t mean it like that,” he said quickly, huffing a laugh with no sound. “I know ye didn’t mean what ye said under the tree. I know ye weren’t…ye weren’t askin’ for all this.”

He paused, eyes dropping to the ring still on his own hand, the one you'd given him. “I just thought,” he added, quieter now, “maybe it’d feel a little less lopsided, is all.”

You didn’t know what to say. But your silence wasn’t rejection.

He must have felt that, because something flickered behind his eyes. He turned his palm over, and reached into the inside pocket of his coat. From it, he drew something strange.

A spool of hair, spun fine as thread—white and silvery-blue, like spider silk in moonlight. A broken thorn. A sliver of bone, no longer than a sewing needle. And the petal of one of those ghost-lantern flowers, shriveled but still glowing faintly at the edges.

He looked at you. Not for permission, exactly. Just to be sure you were still there.

Then he began.

He wrapped the hair into a loop, whispered to it in a language you didn’t understand—soft, low, rhythmic, like a lullaby hummed through soil. The thorn pierced the bone. The petal melted as it touched the band, fusing everything together in a slow flicker of light. It wasn’t magic like fireworks. It was quieter than that. Sadder. But it was real.

When it cooled, it had taken shape.

A ring. Fragile-looking, but solid. Matte white, like pearl gone to sleep. Veined faintly in red.

He offered it, resting on the flat of his palm like an offering. You looked at it. Then at him.

“It’s not a bindin’ spell,” he said softly. “I’d never do that to ye. It’s just a…a mark. That ye’ve been seen. That someone loved ye enough to make it.”

Your breath caught. You reached out, fingers trembling, and took the ring. And when you slipped it on—

The forest sighed.

Branches curled in. Flowers blinked open. The bridge beneath your feet thrummed like a harp string plucked once, gently.

And Remmick—Remmick made the smallest sound.

A choked inhale. Then, in a voice so soft it broke your heart:

“Ye look like someone worth waitin’ for.”

You don't remember dozing off.

But you did—still sitting beside him on the bridge, the soft weight of the ghost-ring warming your finger, his presence beside you steady as the moon that never shifted in the sky.

And when you woke, he was gone.

You startled upright, heart lurching. Your hand flew to the ring first—still there. Then to the edge of the bridge—still solid. The air felt heavier. Scented with something faint and iron-rich.

You called his name.

No answer.

Not at first.

You stood, blinking the fog from your lashes—and that’s when you saw it.

Laid carefully across the planks of the bridge, stretching in a line from your feet to the treeline beyond, was a trail of dead butterflies.

Hundreds of them. Each one perfectly intact, wings folded like prayer hands. Black as pitch with veins of crimson. Their bodies still. Sleeping. Dreaming. Waiting.

You followed.

Each step brought a rustle beneath your slippers, the softest stir of powder-dust wings. And up ahead—beneath the crooked trees that hung low like eaves—there he stood.

Remmick.

He had one hand behind his back, and his head tipped, sheepish as ever, like he’d been caught with something sinful in his pocket.

“Didn’t mean t’worry ye,” he said, voice soft.

You looked at the butterflies. Then back at him.

“What…is this?”

His smile wobbled.

“A bit of foolishness, maybe. Or maybe not.” He stepped forward, still holding whatever it was behind his back. “Back where I’m from… when we had no coin, no land, no dowry to offer—only things we’d taken from the earth—we’d still find a way t’make a gift.”

He stepped closer.

“An’ the most prized thing a man could offer…” He brought his hand forward.

In it, he held a locket.

But not gold. Not silver. It was made of bone, carved smooth and rounded into the shape of a heart. Not anatomically perfect—no, it was whimsical and off, a little uneven, the way a child might draw one. Etched into the surface were little spiral markings—like the moss had made beneath your heels that first day.

He opened it.

Inside was a pressed bluebell, perfectly preserved, its color dimmed to twilight. Across from it was a single moth’s wing, paper-thin and gleaming dully like wet stone—its veins iridescent, its edge slightly frayed. It shimmered like dusk and felt like a secret, as if it had been plucked from some dream before it could end.

Remmick didn’t explain right away. He only watched you open it, watched your thumb trace the curve of the petals, the fragile line of the wing. When he did speak, his voice had gone quieter, almost reverent.

“Th’bluebell,” he said, “they grow o’er graves where the dead were loved. Not all graves. Just the ones where someone wept hard enough t’water the earth.”

Your fingers stilled.

"And the wing?" you asked.

He hesitated. His eyes—those soft, wolf-sad things—lowered.

“She followed me once,” he said. “When I had no body. When I weren’t really a man at all. She’d land on me shoulder. Wouldn’t leave. Thought maybe she’d carry me soul somewhere if it ever got light enough.”

His smile came crooked. “She never did. But…I kept her. Just in case.”

You looked down at the locket again. At the love tucked carefully inside it—not gaudy, not gold, not spoken in flowers or poems, but in grief. In memory. In quiet things that didn’t ask for attention, only to be kept.

That was how he loved, you realized. Not loudly. Not demanding.

But devoutly.

With mourning in his blood and hope in his teeth. And you, wearing that little bone heart, felt something ancient stir beneath your ribs. Like maybe you'd been waiting for this place—this grave-bound man—just as much as he'd been waiting for you.

You blinked. Then laughed. It startled even you, the sound of it. But he didn’t flinch. Just watched, like you’d handed him the sun.

“I know it’s not what you’re used to,” he said, scratching the back of his neck, that left side of his face pulling with a skeletal twitch where the wound exposed too much. “But I’d like you to have it. If you want it.”

You took it with both hands.The weight of it pressed into your palms like a heartbeat. You looked at him.

At his eyes—those wide, sorrowful things that glowed only faintly red now, not from hunger, but hope. At the way he didn’t reach for you, didn’t presume. Just stood still. Waiting.

You reached up. Tied the chain around your neck. It settled just above your collarbone. Close to your throat. Close to where he watched your pulse.

When your hand brushed his chest after—just lightly, just shyly—he let out the breath he’d been holding like it was his last. That was the moment you knew.

Not the rose. Not the bridge. Not the ribbon orchard. Not even the ring.

This.

This strange, mournful creature who had carved you a heart from the bones of the dead. Who watched you like you were worth every moment of his waiting. Who asked for nothing except to love you.

And you thought—

I feel more alive here, in this place of ghosts and ghouls and goblins than I ever did among the living.

You didn’t say it. But you didn’t have to. Because the forest heard you.

And so did he.

You held the locket in your palm long after it cooled, long after the weight of his gaze had eased—but not faded. He didn’t speak again. Only watched you with that tremble behind his smile, like he was scared his own heart might make too much noise and scare you off.

You looked at him. Really looked.

The sharp, wolfish teeth. The wound yawning over the right side of his jaw, red-veined and lipless but somehow not grotesque—just raw, unhealed, honest. The way his suit jacket hung slightly crooked over his frame. The moss in his hair from when he’d laid down in the grove beside you and listened to your voice like it was music. The wedding band still on his finger, slightly dirty with time passing but not with meaning.

You thought of the bluebell. Of the moth wing. Of all the things buried. And you asked, gently, “you never did get to kiss your bride, did you?”

He blinked. His breath caught like a match about to light. “No,” he said, slowly, voice cracking around the edges, thick with barely restrained emotion. “Never did.”

You stepped closer. Bare feet brushing bone-white moss, slippers silent as ghosts. The town behind you stirred like something dreaming—warm, moon-drowsy lamplight spilling from crooked windows. A cart creaked past on rusted wheels, pulled by a skeletal mule with eyes like glow-worms. Somewhere overhead, a thousand paper bats took flight from the belfry, flapping on stringy wings like dying leaves.

You lifted your hand.

Touched his face—gently, gently—cupping the uninjured side, but letting your thumb rest just at the edge of that ruined jaw. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t lean in.

He just…stood there. As if he was scared his own desire might shatter him.

“Then kiss her now,” you whispered. “She’s right here.”

Remmick’s eyes burned. Not metaphorically. Literally.

A ring of red swallowed his dark gaze—glowing like coals in a hearth that hadn’t felt breath in years. His lips parted, a tiny whimper caught between them. His hand twitched at his side, then lifted—hovering over your waist, then pulling back, trembling.

“I—” he choked. “Tell me if y’don’t want it. I’ll wait, I swear, just—just say it, an’ I’ll wait ‘til the grave grows cold.”

You didn’t answer.

You kissed him.

It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t chaste. It was raw and starved and aching. His hand finally landed on your back, gripping your gown in a fist like it was the only thing tethering him to the world. His mouth was cold—unnaturally so—but the longer it moved against yours, the warmer it got, like you were coaxing heat back into him.

He whimpered into you.

That sound—ragged and small—was almost too much.

His other hand found your cheek. Not greedy. Just reverent. Like he couldn’t believe you were solid under his fingertips.

And all around you, the forest bloomed.

Not with roses or lilies—but with boneflowers and glowing toadstools, with lantern-bugs that lit the air like constellations. Wind chimes made from ribs began to sing, and the belltower rang once, a low, humming note that quivered like a heartbeat.

You didn’t want to pull away.

Not because it was perfect. But because it wasn’t. Because it was messy and trembling and stitched together from grief and longing and the quiet, sacred madness of being wanted exactly as you were.

When you finally parted, his forehead dropped to yours.

“Christ above,” he whispered, voice gone soft and accented and wet with disbelief, “Ye taste like warmth. Like bloody spring after a thousand years o’ frost.”

You smiled.

Because for the first time in your life, you believed someone meant it.

His forehead rested against yours, breath shaky and uneven as if he’d forgotten how to need anything until now.

The world around you hummed in its stillness. Lantern-light flickered like breath behind gauze. Something in the cliffs sighed—the sound of wind moving through the hollow spaces of a place not meant for the living. The scent of old parchment and smoke-moss clung to the air. The boneflowers glowed dimmer now, like candles burned low in anticipation.

Remmick’s hand still cradled your cheek, reverent as a benediction. His thumb moved once, a trembling stroke along your jaw.

You looked at him. Really looked. The way his lashes fluttered like he couldn’t hold your gaze too long. The way his lips—wet, bitten, parted—trembled just slightly even though he’d stopped kissing you. He looked stunned. Like a man waking from a century-long dream and realizing heaven hadn’t been a lie after all.

You pressed your hand over the one still clutching your back.

And you asked, very softly, “Is there somewhere we can go?”

He blinked. “Go?”

Your thumb brushed his wrist.

“Somewhere private,” you said. “Somewhere we can be alone.”

You let the weight of your meaning hang there, open. Raw.

His eyes—still rimmed in that glowing red, still almost black where the light didn’t touch—widened just slightly.

He didn’t speak right away.

Then: “Y—ye mean…”

You nodded.

He let out a breath that wasn’t a laugh, wasn’t a sob, but something caught in the middle. His jaw flexed, the muscles around the torn part twitching as if it ached to smile and didn’t remember how.

“Aye,” he said at last, breathless. “Aye, I—Christ. C’ourse there is.”

You followed him through the quiet town, through paths lined with broken gravestones and wrought-iron gates wrapped in black ivy. The skeletal mule lifted its head as you passed, but didn’t move. The sky flickered between colors that didn’t exist aboveground—indigo, absinthe green, deep plum, midnight rust.

The house he led you to was small, crooked, nestled between two weeping trees. Its windows were frosted over from the inside, but lanterns glowed behind them—soft and inviting, not gold but something bluer, like the edge of candlelight seen through tears.

He opened the door and held it for you, eyes not leaving your face even once.

And when you stepped inside, the house breathed around you.

Like it had been waiting too.

The moment you stepped inside, the door shut behind you with a hush like a drawn curtain. No click. No finality. Just the sound of something sealing the world away—just the two of you now, cocooned in this crooked little house where time didn’t dare intrude.

It was warm, impossibly so. Not with fire, but with memory.

Lanterns floated untethered above the room, bobbing gently like sleeping fireflies in glass cages. Their glow was the color of old violets pressed between pages—dim, wistful, soft. A chair sat crooked beside a hearth with no fire, its frame carved with sigils too old to name. The walls were mismatched wood and stone, patched in places with stained-glass panels that bled moody light across the floor. Dust danced in the air like confetti made from ash and pearl.

And across the room stood a bed.

Not some pristine matrimonial thing. No, this was older. Lovingly worn. A frame of twisted wrought iron and bone-white wood, headboard etched with curling ivy and crescent moons. The sheets were moth-gray and velvet-soft, tucked in neat but frayed at the edges like they'd been waiting for years—centuries—to be touched again.

Remmick lingered behind you, his presence like a shadow you didn’t want to outrun. He hadn’t stepped closer yet. He was giving you space. But you could feel the way he vibrated with restraint. His hand hovered just inches from your back, like he couldn’t trust himself to touch without unraveling.

“If ye…” he began, and his voice cracked down the middle. He cleared his throat, tried again. “If ye’ve changed yer mind, just say the word. I’ll not take a thing ye don’t want to give, not even a breath.”

You turned to face him.

There was nothing hungry in his stance. Not yet. Just reverence. Just awe. But something in you had already begun to ache with want.

You stepped closer, silent as snowfall, until your fingers found the button of his collar. He startled at the contact—but didn’t stop you.

“I’m not scared of you,” you said, voice hushed. “I want this.”

You slid off the suit jacket, palms skimming the broad expanse of his shoulders, Remmick's lashes fluttering in response. Underneath, you found a pair of suspenders stretched taut over his chest, creating wrinkles in the fabric of his collared dress shirt.

You undid the top button. He didn’t move. Then Another.

His throat worked around a swallow, breath trembling. The glow in his eyes flickered, pulsing, softening. Like it responded to your touch.

Another.

You watched his chest rise and fall, slow and shallow as he tried not to pant. As if the sheer fact of you, undressing him—not in horror, not with trembling hands, but deliberately—was too much.

Another.

You laid your palms flat against his chest now, pushing the shirt from his shoulders. The white wife beater underneath clung to him, threadbare and soft, stretched over his broad frame. He was muscular in that quiet, devastating way—someone who’d labored long past death. His chest heaved with breath he didn’t need.

He hadn’t stopped watching your face.

Not once.

“I dunno if I remember how to do this slow,” he murmured, voice hitching on every word. “I’m too far gone for gentle if ye ask me to take too much control.”

You smiled, cupping the side of his neck. The unbroken one.

“Then let me.”

You stepped back once, your own hands now at the hem of your gown, torn at the hem, blood dried like rust at your shin. You pulled it loose now, bit by bit, letting it fall from your shoulders with the softest sigh of fabric meeting floor, leaving you in just your panties.

Remmick stared. His lips parted. No sound. His knees bent slightly, like he was fighting the urge to fall to them.

“Sweet hell,” he whispered, reverently. “Ye look like…like the night I died dreamin’ someone might love me anyway.”

And then, as if the words had summoned it, the lanterns above bloomed brighter, casting kaleidoscope patterns over your bare skin. The stained-glass windows threw ribbons of blue and red and indigo across your collarbones, your hips, your thighs.

Remmick reached out—slowly, slowly—and let the backs of his fingers trail along your arm. He didn’t dare touch your breasts. Not yet. He touched the hollow of your elbow. The dip of your wrist. The edge of your shoulder where your gown had once kissed your skin.

“Are ye sure?” he breathed.

You nodded.

“Lay with me.”

He exhaled like he’d been holding that breath since his last life.

And then he moved.

He moved like he wasn’t sure he was allowed.

Like the spell might break if he touched you too boldly—if he let himself believe for even a moment that he could have this. Have you.

You were already on the bed, the velvet beneath you rich and rippling like ink-stained water. Your head resting against moth-gray pillows. The locket he’d given you pressed cool against your breastbone, shifting with every breath. The air smelled of petrichor, moonlight, and something sweeter—something you’d begun to associate only with him. A scent like charred lilac and old longing.

Remmick knelt beside the mattress on one knee, wide palms gripping the edge of the frame like it was the only thing keeping him from coming undone.

“Christ, darlin’,” he rasped, his voice thick, slurred just slightly with his Irish cadence. “Ye don’t know what ye’re doin’ to me.”

But you did.

You could see it—see the way his jaw clenched, the left side twitching faintly where the skin had long since been torn away. The way his fangs caught on his lower lip, not bared, but there—unavoidable. You could see how hard he was fighting himself, how deeply he was suppressing the parts of him he feared you’d flinch from.

You didn’t flinch.

Instead, you reached for him, fingers curling into the front of his thin undershirt. Pulled him closer.

“Remmick,” you whispered. “It’s alright.”

He froze above you, nose inches from yours.

“I can’t—”

“You can.” You cupped his cheek, gently thumbing along the edge of exposed muscle. Not in disgust. Not in pity. But in affection. “I want all of you.”

Something in him broke.

He surged forward with a noise caught between a sob and a growl, his mouth crashing against yours. It was not the kiss of before—this one had heat, had desperation, the kind of longing that hadn’t been touched in over a thousand years. His lips were cold, but his tongue burned. You tasted the salt of old grief and something copper-sharp beneath it. His hands—God, those hands—one cupped your jaw while the other slid around your ribs, feeling flesh and bone simultaneously, cradling your back like you were sacred, like he might be punished for touching you too hard but couldn’t stop himself even if he tried.

��So soft—” he whispered, kissing the corner of your mouth, then your cheek, then your neck. “So fuckin’ soft, love, like the world before it soured…”

His fangs dragged the faintest line along your throat. Not piercing—just testing. Just tasting. His breath hitched like it pained him to hold back.

And you whispered again:

“It’s fine.”

That was all he needed.

A low, guttural moan tore from his chest as he finally let himself grip you harder—your hips, your thighs, hauling you into his lap like he needed you closer, needed your skin pressed to his or he might rot again right there on the floor. His body was strong, stronger than a man’s should’ve been, and you could feel that strength now as he spread your thighs wide and settled between them, the weight of him pressing down deliciously heavy.

He groaned when he felt the heat of you beneath the fabric, when your legs wrapped around his waist. He wasn’t shy anymore. His teeth caught on your lower lip as he kissed you again, hungrier now, drooling slightly with want—not from gluttony, but from sheer, unbearable starvation.

“Ye smell like everythin’ I’ve ever lost,” he murmured raggedly. “And everythin’ I thought I’d never be allowed to touch again.”

His hips rolled once, helplessly, against yours. You felt the hardness of him, thick and restrained behind old linen and buttons. His breath hitched, head dropping to your shoulder.

“I’m tryin’, I swear it, I’m tryin’ to be slow…”

“You don’t have to be,” you told him, voice gone small and shaking. “I’m not afraid of you. I want you. All of you. Even the parts you’re trying to hide.”

He lifted his head slowly—eyes glowing red now, the pupils huge and blown with need.

“Fuckin’ hell,” he breathed. “Marryin’ me twice over, sayin’ that.”

You hadn’t meant to tempt him. Not exactly. But you’d said the words—I want all of you—and now you could feel what that meant in the trembling of his fingers as they hovered over your body. Not touching. Not yet. Just breathing you in like he couldn’t quite believe this was happening. That you were happening.

His voice cracked through the hush of the room. “D’you know what yer sayin’, love?” He cupped the back of your neck, gentle as a grave flower. His thumb dragged along your pulse like he was listening to it. “A thousand years o’ hunger in me…an’ you go sayin’ that?”

Your answer came not in words but in action—pulling his hand down, pressing it against your chest so he could feel your heart race for him. For this. For the way his eyes glowed like twin embers in the dark.

That did it.

He surged forward, lips grazing the shell of your ear. “Then lie back for me, mo chroí,” he breathed. “Let me see what I’ve been dreamin’ of since before I knew what dreamin’ meant.”

You reclined against the velvet, heat curling low in your stomach, and Remmick followed you down—kneeling between your legs like a knight in a fairy tale gone all wrong and better for it. His skin caught the light, that blue like moonlight over still water, marred only by the right side of his jaw—where muscle and bone were laid bare, yet never once did he try to turn his face away from you.

Because you didn’t flinch.

You reached up and traced the edge of the torn flesh, and he shuddered, a sound like something old breaking loose in his chest.

He kissed you then—not hurried, but deep, wet, needy—and his hand came to rest between your thighs, warm despite everything. His fingers traced the seam of your inner thigh first, featherlight, before his mouth followed. Down your jaw. Your throat. Lower.

Praise spilled from him like prayer:

“Look at ye—soft as sin, warm as summer rain—ain’t never seen anythin’ like ye.”

He mouthed at your thighs, biting down just enough to make you gasp, but never break the skin. He lapped at the indentations like he wanted to memorize every tremble, every twitch. When your legs started to close reflexively, he hooked an arm around one, spreading you wider with a low, sinful groan.

“No, no, love. Let me see. Let me taste. It’s been so long—I’ll be good, I swear it, I’ll make ye forget everythin’ but me.”

His hand moved between your legs again—rough palm against soft heat. He doesn't remove your panties yet, content to tease you through the., letting the slick there soak into the cotton. He rutted his palm against you, slow and grinding, until your hips started chasing it.

You keened. And he moaned in response—open-mouthed, desperate.

“Fuckin’ drippin’ f’r me already…ain’t even had a taste…”

And he did.

One long stripe with his tongue over the damp cotton. Then another. Until he was panting into you like a starving man nosing through the seam of your underwear. One hand splayed over your belly, keeping you still.

Then he sucked the fabric into his mouth like he could wring the taste of you through it.

When you gasped, he looked up—eyes blown wide, red rimmed, lips wet and parted.

“Beggin’ ye,” he whispered. “Let me have ye proper, yeah? Just me mouth for now—let me make ye sing, mo chroí, let me worship ye like the altar ye are.”

And when you nodded—more a whimper than a yes—he pulled your panties aside and groaned, deep and broken.

You didn’t expect him to kiss your cunt.

But he did.

Like he meant it.

Like it was holy.

He parted you with reverence—his breath hot against your folds, one trembling hand holding your thigh like it anchored him to the earth. The other lay against your belly, fingers twitching as though resisting the urge to claw, to grasp, to sink into your softness and never let go.

And then…he kissed you.

Not rushed. Not ravenous. Just lips to flesh, slow and aching, as if the act itself might undo him. As if his very mouth might shatter around you—and he’d welcome the breaking.

Your back arched.

Not from shock—but from the texture.

Because his mouth wasn’t whole.

His lips were soft, yes. Warm, even. But where the skin gave way—where bone and sinew lay exposed, where every sharp, imperfect tooth glistened with preternatural hunger—his kiss became something otherworldly.

It should’ve been frightening.

It wasn’t.

It was devastating.

You felt it not just in your cunt, but in your spine, your ribs, your soul. He didn’t just use his tongue—though God, that tongue, wet and thick and curling with practiced strokes that told you he hadn’t forgotten how to ruin a woman—he used his mouth in full. The broken parts. The jagged ones.

He scraped—not hard enough to hurt, but just enough to tease. Just enough to remind you this wasn’t a dream. That this was him. Remmick. The dead man with the living hands. The monster with the gentle touch.

He licked you like you were spun sugar and sacrament, and when he pressed his tongue flat against your clit and sucked, your hands shot to his hair, tangled in it, dragging him closer—

He moaned. Moaned into you, like the taste alone could kill him.

“Christ alive,” he rasped, pulling back for half a second to pant against your slick. His voice was wrecked, thick with emotion and want, thick with his Irish cadence.

He ducked back down—open mouth, flat tongue, slow circles that made your thighs tremble—and then slid two fingers inside you in one smooth, devastating motion.

“Tight little thing,” he whispered, “grippin’ me like ye missed me your whole life.”

You sobbed something between his name and God and yes, your thighs clenching around his ears, and he groaned again—deeper this time—rutting against the bed like he was getting off on the noises you made alone.

And somewhere between the moaning and the wet pop of his mouth over your clit, somewhere between the slurp of his tongue and the squelch of his fingers moving inside you, the thought came—

My mother warned me of what goes bump in the night.

She whispered it when you were little. When the winds howled. When the floorboards creaked.

She said, “There are monsters, my love. Stay in the light.”

And now here you were, sprawled beneath one, flushed and soaked and gasping, letting him drag you apart with teeth and tongue.

You wondered what she’d say if she saw you like this.

If she knew that you’d chosen the dark—and begged it to keep you.

You felt it coming.

Not like a storm—fast and brutal—but like a tide, rising slow. Heat bloomed between your hips, slow and dangerous. Your thighs ached with the effort of keeping him there, like if you let go he’d vanish back into the earth that made him.

And still he stayed. Mouthing at your cunt like a man devoted. Like a man damned.

His eyes fluttered shut as his tongue circled your clit, drawing wet, lazy shapes—infinity, you thought, or a name—until you couldn’t tell where his mouth ended and your body began.

And then—

His eyes opened.

They glowed dimly at first, that reddish hue flickering like coal beneath ash. But when he felt your hand trembling against his scalp—when you whimpered “Remmick, I—”, his gaze snapped to yours.

Locked. Frozen. Held. It wasn’t lust you saw there. It was awe. It was reverence.

It was a man who hadn’t been touched in thirteen hundred years, now watching you—bare, flushed, trembling—fall apart beneath his mouth like a blessing.

His lips glistened. His fingers curled inside you, stroking something sharp and sacred. And still, he didn’t look away.

He stared at you like he was watching the stars be born. Like you were the only heaven he ever hoped to find.

And you knew—without him saying it—that if you asked him to stop, he would. If you asked him to die again, he would.

But you didn’t want that. You wanted more. So you said nothing.

You only whispered, voice shaking, “Don’t look at me like that.”

His jaw twitched. His breath caught. Then came his voice, low and ruined:

“Can’t help it, darlin’. Ye look like salvation.”

And you broke.

Your thighs clamped around his ears. Your back arched. You came with a sound so soft it felt like mourning. Like prayer. Like surrender.

And Remmick—beautiful, monstrous, trembling—moaned like he’d been given breath again.

He kept licking you through it. Slower now. Gentler. One last kiss to your clit, soft and grateful. He pressed his cheek to your thigh, jaw wound resting against your skin like it belonged there.

And still, his eyes never left your face.

After, you pulled him up.

He came willingly. Crawled over you with something almost shy in the set of his shoulders, the way his body trembled despite its strength. You reached for him—and for a moment, he hesitated, like he couldn’t believe you were still here. That you wanted this. That you wanted him.

You cupped his face.

Cold skin. The torn edge of his right jaw like worn marble. One fang brushing your thumb where it passed his lip. His eyes flickered between black and red—uncertain, afraid he might be dreaming.

“Remmick,” you said, your voice thick and still breathless, “do you want me?”

The question broke something in him.

He nodded too fast, like a man who’s never been given permission to hope. “Aye. Christ, aye, I do—been wantin’ ye since the trees took yer scent. Since ye bled on the bark and woke me.”

Your fingers trailed down his chest, down the wife beater—until you reached his belt. He sucked in a breath, whole body twitching when your knuckles brushed the tented front of his trousers.

“Then show me,” you whispered. “Show me how much.”

His mouth twitched into a smile, wide and crooked. “Ye don’t know what ye ask, lass.”

You leaned up, lips brushing his jaw, your whisper soft and sharp against his skin. “Then show me anyway.”

He kissed you—harder this time, desperate now, hips grinding against your thigh with the ragged rhythm of a man barely keeping himself leashed. His tongue pushed into your mouth, all heat and hunger, and you could taste blood and lavender and something older, something wild, on his tongue.

And God, he kissed like he meant to die in your mouth. When he pulled back, his voice rasped, thick and low:

“Ye sure?”

You nodded once. Twice. Then said it, clear and sure:

“I want to feel you inside me.”

He shuddered. Not just a tremble—but a full-body quake, as if your words went deeper than skin, straight to the buried places inside him.

“Then lie back, ma wee bride,” he murmured, voice shaking, thick with that Irish lilt you’d grown to crave. “Let me make a proper mess of ye.”

He moved slowly, reverently, as he undressed you fully, fingers shaking as they peeled your underwear down. His breath caught at every inch of exposed skin, like he was memorizing it with his mouth slightly parted.

He bent low, kissed the inside of your thigh again—then your hip, your stomach, your ribs. Worshipful. Starved.

And when he reached for himself, undid the buckle of his trousers with fumbling hands, he looked up at you once more, almost apologetic.

“I—ah—may not last long,” he confessed, shame flickering across his face. “Not when ye’re lookin’ at me like that. Not when I’ve waited this long. I’ll—I'll make it up to ye, I swear it—”

You touched his face again.

“Then come undone for me, Remmick,” you whispered. “You’ve waited long enough.”

He lowered himself between your thighs like a man preparing for worship, not fucking.

His forehead pressed to your sternum. His breath trembled. You felt him—not just the weight of his body, but the heat of him, pulsing against your thigh, thick and straining beneath your touch.

And God, he was big.

You glanced down and saw it—long and flushed dark at the tip, veined like marble, so hard he twitched in time with his breath. The way his cock curved heavy toward his stomach made your breath catch. He looked like something carved from sin.

He saw your eyes widen and started to pull back.

“I—I’ll wait, love, I’ll—”

“No,” you breathed, grabbing his arm. “I want it. I want you. Just…slow.”

He swallowed, hard. His throat clicked.

“Gonna ruin ye,” he whispered, voice thick with Irish dusk and awe. “Gonna stretch ye wide and deep and still wish I could go deeper.”

Your legs parted further on instinct. Your heels dragged the sheets. He looked down at you like you were something sacred, worshipped and half-afraid of.

Then his hand moved between your thighs.

His fingers—two at first, slow and careful—slid back into your soaked heat, working you open gently, watching for every flinch, every sharp breath. His jaw—half-torn and glowing faintly with the light of his hunger—tightened.

“Look at ye,” he whispered hoarsely, breath like a vow. “So soft f’r me. So warm already.”

Your hips arched into his hand. You whined when his thumb brushed your clit, your hands clutching at his shoulders, his name escaping your lips again and again in half-sobs.

“Please, Remmick,” you gasped.

He kissed your knee. Your hip. Your inner thigh again. Then—

He lined himself up with you, shaking. “I can feel ye callin’ f’r me,” he said, voice low, trembling. “Can feel yer body beggin’ mine to belong.”

You didn’t have words for what he made you feel. Only need. Only the hot, aching stretch inside as he finally pressed forward, the thick head of his cock nudging into you with aching slowness.

And God—the burn. It wasn’t pain. It was too much and not enough all at once. You clutched his arms. Gasped. He froze.

“Too much?” he rasped. “Do I stop?”

“No—Remmick—don’t stop,” you moaned, “just—go slow—”

And he did. So slow, like he was trying not to shatter.

His cock dragged deeper, inch by inch, your walls clutching at him, your slick coating him as he bottomed out in you with a shudder that shook his whole body. His arms shook. His forehead dropped to yours. His mouth opened but nothing came out—not until your name escaped his throat on a cracked, desperate sound that felt more like prayer than pleasure.

“Fookin’ Christ,” he choked, barely moving, buried to the hilt inside you. “Ye feel—Gods above—ye feel like fire.”

You were full. So full. Stretched in a way that left your eyes fluttering, your voice catching in your throat. You didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to breathe. You only wanted to feel him there, pulsing deep inside, trembling like you were the first sunrise he’d ever seen.

And maybe you were.

He stayed there, deep and still, as if even the smallest movement might break you. His eyes squeezed shut. His jaw flexed against the side of your throat. You could feel him shaking—not from strain, but from the restraint it took not to move.

You wrapped your arms around his neck.

“It’s okay,” you whispered, mouth brushing the shell of his ear. “I can take it.”

He didn’t answer at first. Just trembled, breath warm on your shoulder. But the sound he made when your hips tilted up—when your walls squeezed gently around him—wasn’t human.

It was a groan wrenched up from the deepest part of him. A sound centuries old.

“Ye don’t know what ye’re sayin’,” he rasped. “Ye don’t know what I’ll do if ye tell me I can…”

“I do,” you whispered, meeting his gaze. “I want you to.”

And that’s what broke him.

The first thrust was shallow, but sharp—his hips twitching forward, grinding deep. Your mouth fell open, a gasp slipping past your lips. He did it again. Then again. Each movement just a little rougher, a little more desperate. Until he was fucking you with the kind of pace that spoke of appetite, not lust.

He pressed you down into the sheets, breathing ragged, body arched over yours like he couldn’t get close enough. His lips dragged down your throat, over your collarbone, mouthing at the tops of your breasts like a man starving.

He muttered something in Irish against your skin—raw, thick, ruined—but you didn’t need to understand it. You felt what it meant in the way he rutted into you, deep and fast, his cock dragging along the parts of you no one else had ever touched.

You sobbed his name.

Your nails dug into his shoulders. You felt his back ripple beneath your hands, all sinew and strength, every part of him working to fuck you the way he’d been dreaming of since long before your first breath.

“You feel me?” he groaned into your mouth. “Deep in that sweet lil cunt, aye? So warm—so wet—I could drown in ye.”

You cried out, back arching, thighs trembling.

His mouth kissed down your breast, licking over your nipple before sucking it between his teeth. Your whole body jerked beneath him.

“Fook,” he breathed against your skin. “Ye’re squeezin’ me like you like it when I lose m’self.”

“I do,” you sobbed. “I want you to—Remmick, please—don’t stop—”

He didn't.

He pounded into you, hips snapping, the slick drag of his cock obscene as your bodies slapped together. His jaw wound gleamed faintly with wet, his eyes glowing a deep carnelian red. But even with his mouth parted, his teeth sharp, even with the beast in him taking hold—he still looked at you like he loved you.

Loved you, even if he didn’t dare say it yet. You clenched around him. His rhythm faltered.

He growled, low and broken, “Tell me if I hurt ye, love. Tell me—swear it—”

“You’re perfect,” you whimpered, tears slipping down your cheeks. “You’re perfect, Remmick.”

His forehead dropped to yours. Then he rutted into you with such bruising depth, you saw stars.

He couldn’t stop shaking.

Even as his body rocked into yours, even as your legs wrapped around his hips and your nails raked down the meat of his back, Remmick trembled like a man possessed.

“Can’t hold m’self back,” he whispered, voice rough and wrecked and soaked in longing. “Not when ye’re like this—soft and beggin’ beneath me—so fuckin’ warm—”

“Then don’t,” you breathed. “Remmick, please—don’t stop—don’t hold back—just take me—”

Your words undid him.

He groaned low in his chest, mouth falling open, and something inside him slipped. His pace turned brutal—not cruel, never cruel—but driven. Like centuries of craving finally had a body to answer to.

Like you were the only thing he’d ever wanted, and the wait had nearly broken him.

The frame of the bed creaked beneath his rhythm. Your thighs trembled around his hips, slick and trembling, your body rocked with every deep, ragged thrust. And still—still—he tried to speak.

“You feel me, yeah?” he rasped, forehead pressed to yours. “Deep in that sweet cunt…like I belong there. Like I was meant to be there—"

Your hands curled at his nape. Your lips brushed his ear.

“You do,” you said.

That was all it took.

Remmick let go.

His body slammed flush against yours, hips stuttering hard, cock pulsing deep inside you with a heat so full, so heavy, it knocked the breath from your lungs.

He groaned brokenly against your skin, his whole body arching as he spilled inside you—deep, thick, endless—his forehead resting against yours like he had nowhere else left to go.

You clung to him. His breath hitched. Then again.

And when you looked down between your bodies, when your thighs parted with a sticky ache—you saw the proof of him leaking back out of you, thick and warm where you were still stretched around the base of his cock.

A creamy ring of white.

Remmick saw it, too.

He moaned—deep, guttural—and pulled you closer, nosing at your throat like he was afraid you’d disappear. “So full of me,” he whispered, dazed. “Look at ye. Stuffed so pretty…”

You kissed the corner of his mouth.

“Remmick,” you whispered.

His eyes fluttered open.

And when you looked into them—when you saw the pain, the wonder, the sheer reverence—you knew. He’d been waiting longer than you’d been alive. For this. For you.

His voice cracked, Irish accent trembling:

“Don’t leave me, love. Not now. Not ever.”

You kissed him back.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

The air felt different after.

Not warmer, not colder—but fuller. As if something ancient and unseen had exhaled at last. A spell released. A promise made flesh.

Remmick lay tangled beside you, arms wrapped tight around your body like he didn’t know how to let go. His cheek pressed to your shoulder, jaw wound cool and tender against your skin. His breath was shallow, uncertain—like he still couldn’t believe you were real.

You watched the glow-worm lanterns drift lazily overhead. Somewhere outside, the bones in the wind chimes knocked gently together like teeth. The forest whispered.

You should’ve been afraid.

Of the damp, breathing woods. Of the moss that learned your name. Of the way the moon never moved and the veil hung so thin you could taste it when you kissed him.

But you afraid. You were…calm.

He stirred slightly when you traced a lazy pattern down his back—soft whorls against undead skin still damp with sweat. A low, content sound rumbled in his throat, and he nosed into the crook of your neck, whispering something like “m’wife…” so quietly, you weren’t sure if it was meant for you or just the silence.

And God help you, you smiled.

It hadn’t been love with Mr. Langdon. It hadn’t even been kindness.

It had been a future written in ink not your own. One you’d been expected to accept without complaint, because it was tidy. Respectable. Fitting of a girl raised to smile politely, to never contradict her elders, to marry for property and speak only when spoken to.

Your mother had called it security.

Had warned you to stay away from things that wandered in the woods. From things with glowing eyes and sharpened teeth. Things that hungered.

And now—

Now you lay in a moss-slick bed of dirt and silk, bare and marked and full of one such thing. You wore his locket. His bite. His ring.

You brushed your fingers along the smooth place at your neck where his lips had lingered. A perfect bruise. A signature.

And still you weren’t afraid. You weren’t ashamed. You were…

Content.

“I wish I’d met ye sooner,” he whispered against your collarbone. “Back when I still knew how to be a man.”

You turned your head, met his eyes. Those wide, glowing eyes.

“You still are.”

He swallowed, expression caught between reverence and disbelief.

“I ain’t decent,” he said, voice thick with that Irish lilt again. “Ain’t clean. Ain’t right. I sleep in the dirt, I feed when I must, and I carry more ghosts than I do breath in m’lungs.”

“You’re kind,” you said.

“A monster.”

“You’re mine.”

He closed his eyes at that.

You rested your palm over his heart—cold and still. But when you pressed closer, you could swear something stirred there. Like an echo. Like a wish.

He buried his face in your chest, arms tightening around your waist. And you let him hold you.

You never looked back again.

Not at Langdon. Not at the mother who warned you off the dark but allowed the devil in anyway. Not at the world where your name was written beside a stranger’s in a church you hated.

Instead, you stayed in the belly of the forest. In the town built of bones and moss and memory. You watched the ribbons in the orchard sway like breath. You fed the skeletal cat scraps of peach and laughed when it swiped at your slipper. You kissed your husband when the wind moaned, and whispered promises against his cheek when his hands trembled.

Because you loved him. Because he waited.

And because when you reached for a tree with trembling hands and a bloodstained ring, he was the one who answered.

Not Langdon. Not God.

Him.

On the morning the bluebell bloomed again—only one, shy and frost-bitten—you knelt beside it with Remmick and whispered,

“Maybe this was the wish that came true.”

He stared at the bloom, then at you. And smiled.

“I ran from a man with a pulse,” you whispered, lacing your fingers through your undead husband’s. “But I stayed for the one with a soul.”

#what if you eloped with a folkloric cryptid and it was romantic actually #macbre meet-cute #arranged marriage to a living man? cringe. spontaneous vows to a crypt-dweller? peak.#i hope the world translated well!! Tim Burton is a very visual storyteller so I'm nervous lol #i had a lot of fun writing this one!!#sinners remmick #remmick #remmick x reader #remmick x you #remmick smut #remmick x reader smut #jack o'connell

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lefteagleblizzard · 10 days ago

Text

𝔑𝔬𝔱 𝔰𝔞𝔣𝔢, 𝔧𝔲𝔰𝔱 𝔥𝔦𝔰 Remmick x male reader

Summary: He came to your doorstep burning, hunted, half-dead and you let him in. Now you’re bleeding, fucked open and ruined by the monster who calls your name like a prayer and kills for you like it’s love.

Tags: set years before the main events of the film. Strangers to lovers. Vampire x human. Possessive Remmick. Hints of stalking. Protective Remmick. Minor characters death. Vampire x human sex. Monster fucking. Blood drinking, blood kink, blood play (Our boy needs to be kept hydrated). Rough sex. Dominant Remmick. Submissive male reader. Anal sex. Riding. Vampire stamina. Overstimulation.

Part 2

ℳ𝒶𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉

Words count: 10000

The morning hadn’t come yet, you’d been out in the field since god knew when, still in boots damp with dew, thighs sore from the bent squat you held as you weeded patches of yellowing wheat that shouldn’t be dying, but they were nonetheless.

From the porch behind you, the barn loomed skeletal and you were reminded of the time it had creaked full of life, livestock restless in the dark, but now it held barely a pair of half-blind goats, hens too dumb to lay proper anymore and a horse so old his back dipped like a broken bow. You still fed them all and hauled their water.

Each season you turned the soil, tilled by hand, rain or no rain, with blistered palms and still the wheat came up thin, the corn patch went to rot and the beans curled yellow at the edges.

You were about to pack in for the hour, maybe sit on the porch with black coffee, when the wind stopped and soon a loud sound followed.

A dragging noise that came out of nowhere. You squinted into the tall grass that bordered the back acreage. Something was moving. Not walking, dragging.

You were already on your feet before the porch made a crack like a board snapping under pressure. Something slammed on it hard.

There was a moment where you thought maybe a coyote had gotten into the trash again but then your eyes found the trail.

A long, shallow dent carved through the dirt, like something had been pulling itself forward with little strength, all leading to a crumpled figure past the steps.

Brownish tank top clinging to a body cut with lines too harsh to be healthy, twisted over one shoulder and torn. Skin pinkish and scraped raw in places like it had been burned badly.

A groan peeled out of his throat, ugly and guttural. His hands scrambled against the wooden steps. His arms shook, muscles twitching as he tried to haul himself up before stopping. His head slumped as his gaze drifted across the tall grass, to the edges of your broken field.

You followed it and there, small at first but growing clearer, was a group on horseback. Four, maybe five riders, all slow and scanning the horizon.

They were looking for something, or someone.

A hitch in his ribs as he shifted again, another low groan forced between clenched teeth. His face turned to you, still slack with exhaustion, but his eyes were not human.

Gold, lurid and lightless. They flickered once before sliding shut, his whole body slackened as he collapsed against the porch rail.

You stepped back, one foot on the soil, sinking slightly into the trail he’d carved, one heartbeat thudding into the next as something cracked open inside your head.

The blood in your head roared, thoughts came in floods.

You should’ve called out right then, raised your voice and flagged the riders combing the fields. Or hell—the porch was soft, the wood old. One kick could snap a plank in half to plunge into the exposed part of his chest.

He wasn’t supposed to be here, just like you.

The sun had started to crawl up the slope of the field. It was touching the lower stalks now and the tall grass still sheltered most of the porch in patchy shadow, but the light was rising too fast.

A beam lanced across the steps and touched his arm first.

It immediately began to burn.

You didn’t remember deciding to move but your knees were soon on the wood and your hands pressed flat to his big biceps.

He groaned against your touch, his head lolled and fell against your shoulder. The weight made your spine bow as you pulled with everything you had.

Your lips were near the shell of his ear, voice smaller than you remembered it ever being, even when you were a child hiding behind barn doors from men.

“You can come in.”

Palms slick against the dark line of his shoulder, one hand clutched too tight around the burnt curve of his bicep while the other braced awkwardly to keep his head from rolling to the side as you began to drag him backwards through the door all the way down to the cellar.

You let him slump against the far wall, trying not to drop him too hard but unable to control the last fall. His back hit the stone with a heavy thunk and he didn’t stir.

There was a bucket placed under the leak like always, catching the rain that slipped through the warped ceiling beams and you took advantage of that to splash the water across his shoulder and over the burn, the water hissed when it hit him, steam rose fast.

You dipped a rag in what was left and wiped at the worst of where the skin had pulled back, where the blood had dried into thick crusts.

Under your hands, his chest rose in steady breaths. His pulse flickered faintly in his throat and his face remained slack. High cheekbones, brows low and tight even in sleep like he’d never relaxed a day in his life.

You leaned in close enough to see the edge of one pupil under his lashes twitch.

With shaking legs as you stood, you went back up outside the house to get some fresh air and something else for him.

The old goat, the mean one with the single bad eye, shifted in its pen and gave a low, disturbed grunt. It didn’t want to follow and you had to tug hard on the collar.

The walk back was slow as it pulled against the lead once, twice. Then reluctantly came with you.

When you opened the cellar door, the goat stepped in as you let go of the rope and closed the door immediately.

Hands braced flat to the wood, heart pounding. Still not sure what you’d done.

Three hard knocks were heard. The door didn’t rattle, no voice came through.

You moved down the hallway, the door handle felt warm when you opened it, the light struck you square in the eyes, bright after the cool of the parlor.

Those men were dressed in long oilskin coats dark with wear, silver buttons tarnished black. One had a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his brow, the edges feathered by years of weather.

Another kept one hand on the stock of a rifle strapped tight across his back.

“Morning,” the middle one said, voice even, polite the way barbed wire is.

You nodded.

“We’re tracking something dangerous,” he said. “Something we saw came through this region. Likely came down from the ridge. Might’ve crossed your back field. You see anything strange this morning?”

You crossed your arms, one hand over the other, trying not to make it look like a shield.

“Been up since four,” you said. Your voice came out calm. Steady. “Working the field. Haven’t seen a damn thing I didn’t put there myself.”

His eyes flicked down to your hand.

You hadn’t noticed it until now the dried blood on it.

His gaze didn’t change but something behind his eyes clicked.

“You alright there?” he asked, as if casual. “You get hurt?”

You let out a breath through your nose and shook your head.

“One of my animals went into labor,” you said, voice thick with irritation. “Didn’t go clean. Took half the morning. Made a hell of a mess out back. Field too.”

You let your eyes harden slightly, like a man tired of being questioned. That was the trick, you couldn’t play it soft.

“Shame,” he said, stepping back. “Hope she pulls through.”

“She won’t,” you said quickly. “Too old. Should’ve been put down last season.”

The man in the coat gave a grunt that might’ve passed for sympathy.

He turned and took one step.

Then stopped and looked back over his shoulder, head tilted and eyes narrowing slightly.

“I hope,” he said, “you didn’t let him in.”

The words fell like wet stones in your chest while you said nothing.

“There’s no saving that one,” he murmured. “That thing doesn’t just feed. He twists someone from the inside, leaves holes in the memory where people used to live. Whole families are gone because of him.”

You could have sworn you heard a creak from behind you, a soft groan of wood strained under weight.

Could it have come from the cellar stairs?

The blood in your veins ran cold and you did your best effort in offering them a tired smile, one you practiced after seeing it so often on your parents' faces.

“Well,” you said, voice pleasant. “I’d best get back to it. Still a mess to clean.”

He nodded once more and didn’t thank you this time, just turned and walked away.

You shut the door carefully, felt your palm against the wood and exhaled.

The sun was already bleeding out behind the ridge by the time you came back.

The old road back from town ran crooked between black pines and fields gone brittle with drought. You hadn’t made much from the morning’s haul, but it was enough for salt, some oil and garlic.

You’d picked it out yourself, heavy bulbs still clotted with dirt. It took you most of the late afternoon to crush it, pressing each clove into the mortar until they burst into pulp until you grounded it into powder, packed it dry into a paper pouch and shoved it deep into your pocket, ready to see if he was gone with all the time that had passed.

Maybe you expected the walls painted with what used to be the old goat and nothing else.

What you didn’t expect was to get slammed against the rough wood of the wall there. A hand clamped around your throat and claw curled into your hip as he pinned you against him.

His body was pressed close, towering over you, heat pulsing off him in waves.

He was covered in blood, soaked completely. Dried at the corners of his mouth, thick around his chin, darker still where it had run down the exposed column of his throat.

It had soaked into the fabric of his tank top, darkening it from chest to hem, clinging to every plane of muscle beneath.

His chest was bare in places, the shirt torn in places and allowing you to see a sliver of his scar already healed from the morning’s burn, new skin glowed faint and pink beneath the drying blood.

His face was sharp, high cheekbones flecked with grime and dried gore, lips parted, dark and bloodstained, the edges drawn tight with restraint and those golden and lurid eyes locked on you, but not focused exactly, because his face was pressed against your neck.

Mose dragging slowly along your skin as he inhaled deeply, the shudder of breath making your hair stand on end.

His mouth brushed your pulse and you felt his fangs resting with pressure to make it clear they could end you in a second.

He didn’t bite even though he could have. His jaw was tense, the muscles shifting under your fingers where they trembled against his chest.

The bloodlust he felt for you was immense, hence why it surprised you when his breath hit your lips and he pulled back to meet your gaze, face only inches from yours.

The fangs were out, fully exposed, long and lethal, still wet at the root and lips curled slightly in something conflicted.

“Why didn’t you kill me?” His voice was hoarse and raw, scraped low in his throat, heavy and desperate.

Your lips parted but didn’t know what to say. Nothing came, not even breath as his eyes dropped to your mouth and lingered, drawn and mesmerized.

You could feel the warmth of his breath, panting now, his chest rising faster, whole body tensed like he was fighting something.

He took one step back while his hand stayed on your throat before throwing you against the wood.

Silence flooded your ears as the breath left your body for the second time in seconds. Your vision blurred, a sick blackness curling at the corners as you hit your head.

When you woke, it was due to the whisper of curtains rustling. Soft morning gold filled the room.

You blinked, groaning, the back of your skull throbbing with a dull ache. The pain was manageable, surprisingly so, but your whole body felt stiff. Your limbs were heavy, your mouth dry and your fingers curled instinctively into the sheets around you.

You were in your bed.

Maybe it had been a dream, that one hell of a day had just been a dream all along.

Except, you saw dark and dried stains on the bed, two handprints. One to either side of where your body had laid, too large to be yours and pressed down as though someone had hovered over you and watched.

You stood weakly, stepped toward the mirror and noticed droplets of blood on your shirt and at your neck, just below the collar, dried and rust red.

Your gaze drifted to the window outside, the yard stretched long and quiet, automatically counting your old and weak companions.

One…two…three-four-fiv—

You were missing some.

Yep, definitely missing some.

He was gone completely. Maybe he’d fed, healed, moved on and silently thanked you for your hospitality, but even that lie came half-formed because something was still watching.

At first, it was your own shadow shifting wrong at dusk. You’d glance left and see movement to the right.

A shape among the trees, you’d think it was nothing.

When the sun dipped fully and the land fell into that deep amber haze, you’d look up and you’d see two dots glowing, low to the ground, far off past the fence line.

Gold, twin and sharp. Too symmetrical to be lanterns and too still to be fireflies, you’d blink and they’d be gone.

One evening, you found yourself in the barn again.

The sun was low and slow, fat rays of honey-colored light poured through the hatch, catching in the dust motes that danced weightless through the barn air. You’d climbed up out of old instinct, your boots knowing the ladder before your mind caught up. Same perch as always: back braced against the inner slats, one leg dangling over the open drop, the other curled close, elbow resting on your knee.

It was too high and never safe but it had always been yours.

A loop of frayed rope sat to your left, half-tangled through a rusted pulley. The hay down below was thin now, barely a pad against the ground if you slipped.

The wind was sweet, full of grass and old flowers, sun-warmed and still clinging to the scent of day.

“Y’don’t get any less strange, do ye now?” A voice casual and drawing.

Your breath caught and your eyes opened slowly.

He stood below you, hidden from the golden light due to the high plants, shirt wrinkled, collar open and slack, a white undershirt visible beneath the cotton where it clung slightly damp to the shape of him.

The first few buttons were undone and you saw the line of his chest, the faint ridges of muscle moving with his breath.

His curls were dark and wet, still dripping at the ends like he’d just walked through rain or worse, rinsed off something red in the stream.

He grinned too wide, lips stained faint with something that might’ve been berries hadn’t you known what he really was.

His eyes tonight were not glowing but no less inhuman.

And he held a banjo. It looked as old as the barn. The rim dulled, rimmed with brass so worn it had turned brown at the edges. The skin was taut, marked with the small nicks and divots of long, hard use. You could see faint finger-oil stains on the wood.

He strummed a lazy chord, dissonant and loose before stopping and tucking it behind his back, letting the strap slide over one shoulder.

He stepped into the barn and without warning he floated until his boots touched the edge of the loft’s beam not two feet from you, not even trying to hide his nature.

He tilted his head, watching you.

Up this close, the skin of his face was too smooth in some places, too rough in others.

“Darlin’,” he said at last and the way the word wrapped around his teeth made your chest clench.

“That day,” he murmured, accent thick like it’d been pressed in whiskey, “all that blood, y’holdin’ me like I were somethin’ worth savin’, an’ I never asked ye your name.”

He blinked, slow.

“Can’t have that, now.”

He gave a mock bow, hand splaying across his chest.

“Name’s Remmick.”

The way he said it made your stomach turn over. You swallowed, caught off guard by the sudden intimacy of it and the fact that he even cared.

You quietly answered your own name and he repeated it under his breath once, like he was testing it in his mouth, weighing it on his tongue. A small exhale slipped through his teeth and he looked at you again, this time with something darker curling behind the faint gold in his eyes.

“Mm. Suits ye too well.” He took a step forward, eyes never leaving yours.

You said nothing but your jaw set tight, you couldn’t afford to let him see how your breath hitched when he called you that. Not when your spine still remembered the feel of that wall, his hand on your throat, the flash of teeth and blood.

“What are you doing here?”

He chuckled, low and amused, like your question cracked something open in him he didn’t bother hiding.

“Y’make it sound like I’ve got a plan t’ finish somethin’.” He said, boots creaking faint on the old wood as he took a step closer.

Your hand curled tighter over your knee, your nails digging into soft fabric. “Don’t you?”

He grinned wider, flashing just the tip of his fang, no threat.

“If I wanted ya dead,” he said softly, voice dropping, banjo shifting across his back, “I’d’ve ripped your throat out the second I had ye under me that night. Ye remember it, don’t ya?”

Of course you remembered it, the fear had never fully left your limbs, but it didn’t change the fact that you’d dreamed with your mouth open, lips parted for fangs that never came.

You didn’t answer with words and he noticed, eyes flickering down to your throat, then back up again.

“Been lookin’,” he said, voice low and strange. “Y’know, since that night. T’find anythin’ t’tell me who you were, what you are. Found nothin’ on your bloodline.”

Your stomach turned while your hands clenched.

His gaze softened dangerously.

“Darlin’,” he murmured, “how d’you manage t’live this long bein’ so…” His tongue clicked. “Unnoticed.”

He grinned again but this time, it wasn’t mocking, rather curios.

“My parents owed the wrong people,” you said quietly, eyes on your hands. “They never registered me. Not just because they didn’t plan on me. A kid’s a liability when your house is already balanced on rot, it gives the enemy leverage.”

Once the first sentence slipped out from your mouth, there was no stopping it.

“So they taught me to hide.” How well you’d learned. You told him about the floorboards your father marked with chalk when they squeaked, the way you memorized engine sounds like lullabies, the rules about lights and shadows.

“I worked the fields when no one was looking, learned to lie properly—”

You didn’t realize how tightly your hands were curled until the knuckles turned white.

“Last year—” Your throat closed for a second. “Last year, I was up here just like this. The sun had gone down and I was thinking about sleeping up here again. Then I heard them coming.”

You didn’t need to describe the truck or the boots.

“It all happened so fast.” You looked at him and there was again that thing you hated most.

It was like a mirror.

You saw him that day broken, slumped, oozing blood onto the porch with those hunters behind and it had hit you with recognition as you saw yourself in his shoes after hours of hiding that night.

For a second he looked so much like you.

Remmick’s jaw tightened, his now gold eyes never left you.

“I waited hours after they left to finally get inside.” Your voice had gone hollow.

“I didn’t know the whole story. Not right away. I found letters hidden in the kitchen drawers, receipts with names scratched off. That’s how I found out everything.”

You paused, fingers flexing on your thighs.

“Over the months, I visited the town to find them. The town doesn't ask questions if you got a hat brim low. You bring in things and keep your voice down and they give you what you need. That’s all.”

He had a thousand things to say, a thousand wrong things that clawed up the back of his throat and he couldn’t say a single one of them without breaking something.

You were made invisible because no one ever thought you mattered enough to remember. They tried to erase him by force, you were forgotten by design.

You could vanish tomorrow and the world wouldn’t even blink.

He hated it.

He hated the men who made you suffer. Hated the town that didn’t care. Hated the way you still looked at him like you were waiting for him to leave, too.

He wanted to bite it out of you, hold you down and remind you what it meant to be seen and wanted so completely it made your bones ache. He wanted to ruin solitude for you, make it so you couldn’t work through the day without feeling what he did to you.

Those unnatural gold eyes gleaming faint as he watched you with a strange, shifting tension.

“Who were they?” Simple words, but the way he spoke through his teeth like each syllable had to be restrained with a jaw clenched too tight, left a cold taste in your mouth.

“I don’t know,” you muttered, your fingers clenched over the beams, knuckles pale. Your voice wavered in frustration, an exhaustion so old it had hollowed out a space behind your ribs and built a shrine there.

“I don’t fuckin’ know. I’ve spent the whole year since digging for answers.”

Still not meeting his eyes, you shifted, boots scraping against the old frame, finding a foothold as you stood up tall along the crossbeam and the hayloft groaned below you.

You stood balanced between memory and impulse, arms slightly out, not steadying so much as existing and testing gravity.

“I come up here,” you said, voice tight, “every time it gets too quiet in my head.”

The wind teased your shirt, catching the edge like it wanted to help make the decision.

That was when you looked down at the ground. It was black beneath you now that the sun ran away, pure darkness.

“Some days I want to fight them,” you said, barely a whisper. “Tear the truth outta someone. Other times I’m not scared anymore of dying, not when I know it won’t change anything or that there’s not a soul who’d notice.”

The silence crept back in and your voice broke at the edge.

“What if I told ye there was a way t’see ‘em again?” His voice came soft and barely above a breath, interrupting your thoughts.

Your head turned slowly, spine still straight against the sky as you looked over your shoulder at him.

His eyes shimmered low-gold in the dark, steady and locked on yours. His tongue wet his bottom lip, fangs just visible in the motion.

“There are people,” he said, “who can bend the fabric o’reality with nothin’ but the right tune of music t’pull the dead back across the veil.”

You swallowed as he stepped closer now, almost directly beneath you.

“I’ve been chasin’ them,” he said, voice low and tight. “A long time t’bring back my people. My kin. What’s left o’them.”

He lifted his hand up toward you, not reaching blindly, rather offering.

“Ye want answers?” he said, the words low, rolling like smoke from a dying fire. “Then we do it right. You search in the light, scour every road, every shite town with a name. I’ll search when it’s dark.”

His eyes locked to yours, gold, unblinking and fierce.

“An’ when we find ‘em,” his voice dropped lower, softer and more dangerous, “…we’ll make sure yer mam an’ da ain’t just bones in some field no more. Ye’ll see them again. I swear it.”

Silence wrapped around you then until you asked, brittle, unsure but brave. “You think that’s possible?”

He didn’t laugh, just gave a crooked smile, bare but real.

“I know it is.”

Hope began to rickindle in your chest at the confidence in his words and you’d been turning, one hand on the railing, eyes already halfway down to where Remmick waited with that crooked grin.

The wind howled suddenly through the slats and you weren’t steady enough. Your balance broke, foot slipping and gravity yawned open.

The barn flipped sideways, the floor gone pitch-black beneath you while the wind roared through your ears as adrenaline flooded your system.

A brutal grip wrapped around your wrist, fingers locking bone-deep just as your other foot left the ledge and you were yanked forward not gently.

The impact was jarring, your chest slammed against his, breath ripped from your lungs by the sheer force of his catch. His arms closed around you with terrifying strength, pulling you flat against him.

Your heart was a war drum, hammering so hard in your ribs you could feel each pulse crash against his chest and he didn’t flinch.

His head was in the crook of your neck, mouth open against your skin, breathing you in like the scent alone steadied him.

The grip he held on your wrist hadn’t loosened, fingers digging into your skin. His other arm was a band across your waist, clenched so tight you could feel every tense muscle shaking faintly.

“Next time ye try that,” he growled, voice scraped raw, a rasp at the back of his throat that barely sounded human. “I won’t catch ye.”

“I’ll let y’hit the ground and stay there. I’ll wait ‘til you’re broke on the ground, drag what’s left up and make the rest o’ it hurts tenfold worse than the fall ever could’ve.”

The silence after was louder than any scream. You shifted slightly, breath rattling in your chest and he let your wrist go but that one arm still clutched around your waist.

You looked up and wished you hadn’t.

Full red eyes, no softness in them. Lips parted and fangs fully lengthened, the edges catching the faintest starlight and his thumb, longer than it should’ve been, dragged slowly up your cheek.

“Ye think death’s worse than me?” he whispered, followed by a smile you don’t want to see. “Go on, try it. I’ll show ya what it means t’beg for the end.”

The words chilled your blood and you yanked away hard and this time, he let you go.

You didn’t look back while jumping from one beam to another lower, boots slamming into the next support and then down again.

The ground met your boots and you staggered. Your knees trembled, the wrist he gripped ached, skin bruised in the shape of his grasp and you cradled it to your chest, breathing fast.

When you turned back, the barn loomed dark and tall, and there, high above and exactly where you’d been, he stood balanced perfectly in your place, eyes glowing down at you, watching and unblinking.

You didn’t know if you were afraid because he’d saved you or because he hadn’t let you die.

You hadn’t seen him in days, gone completely.

Still, like some goddamn fool, you did your part out there in town, faking smiles.

You grinned when you didn’t want to and shook hands you’d rather avoid. You nodded to women at the produce stand, asked soft questions about music of all things. If they knew of anyone in town who sang too well, played too often, left too much behind in their wake. It felt absurd and humiliating.

It almost made you laugh as you recalled what you were doing just for him while the sickle in your hand swung slowly, slicing stalks of tall grass, pulling bundles into rough armfuls to harvest for the dying animals still too stubborn to follow the quick ending Remmick could offer them. You’d wake up and count one less goat, one fewer hen.

Greedy bastard.

By the time the sky dipped into copper and rust, you were back on the porch, sweat dried to salt across your brow, the sickle’s curved blade hanging limp at your side. The last streaks of light stretched long over the dirt road, still visible and bright.

Heavy tires gritting over the gravel were picked from your ears, growling engine rolling low and mean, heavy and fed on oil.

Your whole body went cold as you forced your boots not to move. Your legs itched with the urge to run, to dive into the barn behind hay like you were ten again and still small enough to hide perfectly.

You stood there instead, heartbeat rising to your throat, scythe tight in your palm as the truck stopped and two doors opened.

The first thing you saw were their boots. Clean and polished in a way that didn’t match the mud, then the rest followed.

Two men stepped down and they froze when they saw you, faces shifting in subtle shock. The one on the left stepped forward slow, his coat brushing behind him in stiff gusts. His face was pinched tight in recognition. He looked at you like he’d already seen your face before.

“What’re you doin’ here?” he asked, simple words and soft voice.

You licked your lips, tongue dry, chest tight. You tried to answer even and calm.

“Just workin’ my field.”

He scoffed, a bitter and ugly laugh.

“This field?” he repeated, gesturing out with a mocking sweep. “Hell, this field’s about to be ours. We’re just waitin’ for the last damn paper to go through now that the last two owners finally did somethin’ useful and died.”

The second he referred to the last two owners, he stopped and really looked at you.

A snicker came soon after, the one behind joined in, low and sharp as he played with the knife in his hands.

“You look just like ’em,” the man murmured, cocking his head.

The one behind chewed the inside of his cheek, smirking. “Your folks,” he said, “they used to check that barn like it was rigged t’blow. Every time we pulled up, they went white.”

Your grip on the scythe tightened.

The tallest man, rifle slung on his back, fingers twitching, stepped closer.

“You lookin’ to square their debt?” he said, voice was almost warm but definitely mocking.

The shame came fast of how little you had and the horror arrived with it because you knew now who these men were.

“Maybe it’s time you saw ‘em again,” the man said with a smile, hands moving behind his back. “Reunite the family. The last thing we need is an heir out of nowhere."

To your own shock you noticed how he was reaching for the rifle on his back when talking to you in a poor attempt to distract.

Fear overtook your body and the sickle snapped upward in your hand, arc perfect, aimed right for his neck.

He caught your wrist before the blade connected. His fingers snapped tight around your arm and turned it hard. You snarled, twisted, tried again, but his grip didn’t budge.

The other laughed harder as he watched his buddy redirect your own scythe and forced your arm back toward your own throat.

You struggled with all of your abilities, he was just stronger, drunker on cruelty. The blade crept closer and he slammed you into the side of the house hard.

The scythe glinted under the last shimmer of light, the sun dropped behind the ridge and darkness fell in your last seconds of life.

“You dumb little fu—” the scraping breath of the man trying to kill you ended abruptly and the pressure on your arm vanished suddenly.

His body jerked back too far, like something yanked him from behind and the blade in your hand turned, slipping through your palm and cutting you shallow there.

You gasped, stumbling sideways, blood trickling from your fingers, looking up to see Remmick standing next to him.

His face so still it might’ve been carved, so furious it looked downright terrifying, lips peeled back to bare the full length of his fangs.

The man’s jaw was completely shattered, bone split out beneath the skin like a hinge kicked off its frame and he barely had time to gurgle before Remmick sank his fangs into his throat.

The noise was wet and he was vicious as he tore the skin of the man’s throat wide. A gape opened, red and yawning, skin shredded like paper. Blood poured in sheets over Remmick’s lips, down his chest and into the ruined grass.

You staggered backward, sick already twisting your gut, hand that clutched your other one.

His shoulders rose and fell with each suck, each drawn pull from the dying man’s artery, curls soaked with droplets of blood now, shirt clung in streaks and mouth that shone crimson.

When he finally released the man, he collapsed in a heap, neck an open pit until no more air went through it.

The second charged, knife gleaming beneath the moonlight to avenge his buddy.

Remmick turned and caught the man’s wrist mid-swing. The crunch was sickening when he squeezed, bone and tendon collapsing as he reversed the knife to slide it into the man’s chest until the handle was buried deep in there.

The scream that tore out was cut short when Remmick took the neck next and bit harder on the jugular.

The man spasmed, twitched, to then go still and collapse on the ground.

Remmick turned to you, covered in blood and chest heaving, still dripping from his mouth. The light in his eyes flickered unstable like a candle flame caught in the wind that refused to die.

The once white shirt he had, already ragged before, now with the entire right side soaked through in scarlet. The fabric stuck to his body, plastered down over the curves of muscle, over the shifting planes of his torso as he breathed.

The veins in his neck pulsed, jaw twitching and lips parted slightly.

“Yer bleedin’.” The words hit like a whisper against your pulse. You looked down, dazed at your hand. The cut from the scythe throbbed as blood smeared your palm.

When you looked up again, Remmick was now in front of you. There was no restraint in his posture nor any pretense of humanity left. What stood in front of you was a monster, one who’d just torn apart two men for touching you and still, your chest only throbbed because he was finally here again.

You didn’t care about the wet copper smell clinging to his ruined shirt and splashed up his throat, still tinted red with someone else’s end.

Blinded by desire, it was your turn to move now, stepping into his space and lifting your hands and cradling his face like he hadn’t just killed for you.

His skin was burning hot under your palms, warm, blood-wet, trembling with barely leashed need and the second your touch landed, he let out a deep, possessive purr from the back of his throat, ragged and feral, bursting through bloodstained lips and twisting into a growl as he looped one strong arm around your waist.

He pulled you against him tight, your chest crushed to his, ribs against the firm weight of muscle soaked through with metallic and red liquid. His shirt clung to both of you now, ruined fabric pressing to your clothes, bonding you in blood and heat.

He caught your injured wrist and lifted your hand to his mouth, eyes never leaving yours as he licked.

Tongue hot, soft at first but insistent, dragging slow over the cut in a wide, possessive stroke. The moment he tasted your blood, his body shuddered and a groan vibrated from deep inside him, pressed right into your skin.

He licked hungrier and more aggressive, tongue flattened against your palm, then curled between your fingers to catch every trace of what you’d spilled. He groaned rougher now, needier and that sound went straight to your spine, made your legs unsteady and your cock twitch with heat.

His eyes fluttered shut, lips sucking the wound clean, mouth still hot and wet around the heel of your hand.

“Knew ye’d taste sweet,” he groaned into your skin, the words muffled by your hand but rough edged all the same. “Spent days thinkin’ on it. Dyin’ for this, darlin’.”

Your hand was still cradled between his fingers as he crashed forward, mouth catching yours in a heat, blood-tasting kiss so intense it knocked the breath out of your chest. His lips were wet and you didn’t care as you moaned into it, kissed back with everything you had, hands fisting in his ruined shirt as your teeth clashed and tongues warred.

His fangs dragged along your lower lip as he kissed you, sharp and wicked, cutting tiny slits when you leaned in too hard and that only made it worse, his groan deepened as soon as he tasted the blood you didn’t mean to give.

He invaded your mouth with his tongue, hot and greedy, diving deep to collect every drop of what he’d drawn, lapping at the cuts like a man starved, hands grabbing at your hips, possessive and grateful.

You whined when he pulled away from your lips and he chuckled into your mouth, full of teeth and want.

“Givin’ it t’me now, are ya?” he murmured, voice of all heat-soaked filth and velvet pride, “Knew I’d get a taste o’ye one way or another.”

Your own hand slipped away from him and wrapped around the scythe still clutched loosely at your side. This is to bring it up and press the cold, curved metal lightly to your own neck.

He froze, breath ragged as he watched you dragging the scythe’s edge across the side of your neck. A sharp sting that left a trail of red beading along the skin like pearls, you tilted your head to the side as you moved it again up over the hill of your shoulder, a second trail joined the first, bright red and fresh in the pale light.

His hands went tight around your waist, pupils blown now, eyes gone molten, teeth visible, saliva thick at the corners of his mouth and dripping at the corner of his bloody chin at the sight of the gift you made for him.

He surged forward.

The scythe clattered to the porch as he buried his face in your neck and began feasting. His tongue ran over the blood again and again in broad strokes, dragging every single drop you’d offered him.

You arched into him to allow better access, whined low in your throat as his tongue found the base of your neck and sucked, moaning openly against your flesh like the taste of you was killing him.

His mouth crashed against yours the second he pulled back, lips slick with your own blood, the taste of yourself lacing between your teeth as his tongue forced its way in.

He groaned into your mouth and it vibrated straight through your jaw and down into the center of your chest.

His grip tightened, arms locked around your frame and suddenly you weren’t on the floor anymore.

It felt like a lurch in your gut as the air dropped away, ground vanished beneath your feet. Eyes still shut, tongue still tangled with his, he lifted your body off the floor with a growl buried deep in his throat. You gasped into his mouth and he ate the sound, tongue dragging over yours again and again.

The wind cut around you for only seconds before your back slammed into the mattress and tangled sheets, the window behind him shattered light across the floor, curtains ripping as his boots tangled in them and landed on the floor of your bedroom.

Blood smeared across the floorboards where he stepped, where you’d landed, his hands never once letting you go. He tossed you down hard enough to bounce the bed frame against the wall with a crack and he was above you in seconds, blood staining the sheets.

He landed between your legs, one knee shoved them apart as he pushed forward, hips tight and low, the full press of his cock, heavy and huge through blood-soaked pants grinding slow against your own with purpose.

He grunted and rolled his hips once, dragging the thick length of him right along your own, the heat of it unreal, obscene through clothes already clinging with blood.

His eyes glowed gold and his fangs were gleaming and shining with your blood. He stared down at you like a thing reborn in ruin, expression contorted with hunger, lust and need.

His tongue dragged over the cut on your neck in hot, wet and long strokes alternating with slow and filthy kisses that left your skin smeared in red. He moaned low into you with every lap, every taste, pressing groans into your jawline, into your temple, his breath coming heavier the more he drank from the surface.

You felt every ridge beneath his tattered shirt with your fingers, every tremble from where he tried not to tear you apart too soon. You reached lower until your hand cupped him through his pants.

The sound he made against your throat wasn’t human, fangs scraping again and his hips jolted forward instinctively, grinding hard against your palm as you squeezed. He kissed you messier, licking the corner of your mouth where blood had trickled.

Your fingers dragged at the buttons of his shirt, the other hand still wrapped around the thick outline of his cock, feeling the heat of its pulse under your grip.

You got the fabric undone only halfway before giving up and peeling it off his sturdy build and soon you were working his pants open next, frantic and clumsy, all while he didn’t stop kissing your throat even once. Every breath from him came with a hiss, a grunt, a moan, mouth leaving trails of blood over your neck, your collarbone, dragging sharp teeth over the thin layer of skin where your pulse throbbed.

A groan passed through his fangs when he felt fingers wrap around his shaft, hips jerking into your grip as his teeth snapped bare centimeters from your throat.

You stroked once and he twitched in your grip, cock hard and drooling at the tip while you squeezed at the base, thumb circling under the ridge of his head. His hips rolled into it, breath stuttering hard and he pressed his forehead into your collarbone, growling through grit teeth as you began working him slowly, deliberately, up and down.

“Y’gonna make me lose it—fuck, I’ll fuck ye so hard yer name won’t come back t’ye for hours—” His voice crack and immediately he seized your wrist and pulled it away.

The loss of contact made your breath stutter in your chest, but before you could protest he’d taken your other wrist too and pinned them both above your head.

He held your wrists in only one hand, inspecting with pride the one still slightly bruised he’d left days ago.

They were still mottled purple, violet rings blooming under the skin and his stare sharpened, mouth curled slowly and fangs glinting.

Y’looked good like that, all marked from him. So fragile and delicate, so many ways to ruin and have fun with.

He leaned down until his nose brushed the edge of your cheek and the growl that vibrated from his chest wasn’t human as his mouth descended on your shoulder, hot breath huffing against your skin before his tongue dragged across the shallow wound you’d given yourself earlier.

The blood there was fresh as he drank over your skin in slow, needy laps. He traced the blood, followed it down to where it gathered in the dip of your collarbone, then further, pushing his face against your chest, licking long, wet stripes across skin even where the blood had dried all while smearing the crimson down toward your abdomen.

You bucked once beneath him and he growled in delight, tearing your shirt open without hesitation, seams splitting beneath his hands, buttons skittering across the bed like broken teeth.

“I won’t lie t’ye,” he mumbled in a husky tone, breathing hot across your abdomen. “I thought of ravishin’ ye right then that night ye saved me t’ thank ye proper.”

He tore your pants down next, fabric splitting at the seams as your thighs were bared to the cold air and the burning weight of his mouth dragging down your chest again, sucking at the skin above your navel, teeth scraping enough to mark.

A large hand moved down and grabbed your right thigh, digging into the muscles and spreading your legs wider with inhuman strength. His mouth met your inner thigh with an open-mouthed kiss, fangs scraping faintly over the softest skin there, right beside your cock and make your whole body tense.

One sharp claw was pressed to your thigh and then dragged sideways, a clean cut that was deep enough to let blood trickle.

His lips covered it and kissed your thigh like your blood was the wine he’d waited centuries to drink. Tongue lapping the new wound, curling around the trail of blood as it slid down the curve of your leg and you felt him moan into it, the sound vibrating into your skin and his other hand gripped harder, holding your leg still so he could kiss the bleeding mark again.

His other hand moved between your legs as it reached down and slid his fingers to your hole, two fingers slick with blood that pressed in shallow, then deeper.

The stretch was sharp at first, but your body welcomed it from the overwhelming need and he watched everything while licking and kissing your thigh seconds before adding another finger, circling and scissoring as his fingers fucked you deeper.

The moment his fingers slipped from your body you felt the emptiness like a wound, ache stretching where his touch had been.

Your hands fell limply to the bed, the imprint of his grip still red across your skin. He crawled forward like a predator who knew there was no longer any point in rushing.

When he rose above your wrecked body, your legs moved automatically, wrapping around his hips like your body knew what was coming and refused to be denied.

The head of his cock, slick with precome, pressed tight against your stretched hole, pulsing thick and hot against the tender rim.

He looked down, eyes golden and wide, burning like hellfire, fangs bared in something too savage to be a smile.

“Ye ready for it now, darlin’?” he murmured, voice thick with promise, “Ready t’feel every inch of what ye opened yerself up for?”

Your answer was a broken moan as he pushed in, the fat tip breached you first, spreading your entrance around him as your body clenched instinctively, trying to take him in but barely able to.

Every inch forced deeper as you felt the way he filled you, the width dragging against every nerve inside you.

You moaned louder, back arching off the bed and his hands gripped your thighs, pushing them further apart as he sank in the last inch and bottomed out.

Your hole stretched wide and raw, the girth of him keeping your rim open around the base of his cock, heat blooming inside you with each shudder of his breath.

He held still, buried to the hilt, your body pulsing around him in rhythm with your heart before he moved.

The first thrust was brutal, dragging himself out almost all the way, letting you feel every ridge and vein to then slam back in hard. The sound it made, wet and loud, echoed off the walls like sin made physical.

You cried out and he laughed breathlessly into your shoulder as he proceeded to fuck you hard and deep. Long strokes, hips grinding to make sure you felt everything. Your cock twitched between your abdomens, pressed between your skin and his blood-slick chest, every rut of his hips sending a bolt of pleasure right through your spine.

As he picked up speed, the rhythm turned rough and relentless, hands dragging your hips down to meet every thrust, skin slapping against skin, the stretch of your hole now wet, noisy and so fucking full.

His voice broke into curses, moans and snarled bits of praise in that ruined Irish drawl of his. “Ye’re takin’ me so good—hnnnnfuck—”

Your cock was leaking while he kept wrecking you from the inside, the head smeared with your own precome and your thighs trembled around his waist.

The heat in your belly snapped tight and then broke as you came hard. A cry punched out of your chest as you spilled between you both, ropes of it streaking your chest and his abs. Your whole body spasmed around him, hole clenching down so tight he roared and slammed in once more.

His cock jerked inside you, twitching, thick and so far in you swore it pushed against your lungs as he filled you, thick spurts of hot seed pumping, warmth blooming inside your abdomen as he grunted, cursed and pressed in even deeper, grinding as he emptied himself into your stretched, aching hole.

Full weight of him collapsed onto you, head settling into the crook of your neck (his favorite spot), breath ragged against your skin and fangs brushing your collarbone.

You felt the heat of his mouth as he resumed licking in lazy, indulgent laps along the bloodied skin of your shoulder, savoring the aftermath

His cock, still inside you, twitched as it hardened again and a low, devilish chuckle rumbled from deep in his chest, vibrating into your body through the weight of him on top of you.

“Darlin’,” he murmured, voice low and ruined like honey over something burning. “The things ye do to me… You’re better than blood…”

He still wanted to enjoy you more, the night was young.

The bed creaked beneath him, wood groaning under the weight of his blood-soaked body as his hands found your back, massive palms seizing you, claws pricking already-tender skin and in one fluid, inhuman motion, he hauled you up.

Your legs clamped tighter around his hips on instinct as you were airborne again, back arching, head falling briefly to his shoulder as he turned.

When he sat back against the headboard, broad back pressing into the wood, you straddled him fully in his lap.

Your knees sank beside his hips, thighs trembling with exhaustion and overstimulation, your breath heaving as your hands braced against the wall of his chest and raised your head.

His eyes were fully red now, a deep, glinting crimson that swallowed the room’s light. His fangs had lengthened, almost too far to keep his lips closed around them, protruding wicked and sharp from his parted mouth.

Breath huffed out around them, steaming faintly where the last of your heat still clung to his face. Long, past finger-length claws that raked down your back, not to wound (yet), but to keep you held.

“Saved your pretty neck from those bastards, didn’t I? Now I think I deserve a little somethin’ back. A reward, aye?” Voice like gravel soaked in whiskey, vowels slurred from heat and hunger.

He was grinning, terrifying, wide and blood-slicked, eyes gleaming like stars seen from underground.

You leaned in, forehead pressing flush to his, hot breath ghosting between your mouths. You didn’t care about the claws, the blood or that look on his face that said he’d tear the world in half to keep you in it.

“Cut my neck for you,” Your fingers twitched against his shoulder, smearing fresh blood. “…sliced my shoulder without blinking. And now you want more?”

You laughed softly, tired and breathless.

“You keep takin’ like this, Remmick, and I’ll be out cold before you even get to the good part.”

His claws moved down from your back to your sides, then to your chest as they pressed.

A single line, then another. Small, deliberate cuts carved into your skin with terrifying care. Not meant to maim but to feed with the blood that welled fast, small rivers crawling down the slope of your sternum, over your stomach, glistening under your collarbones.

“Then I’ll just have t’make sure y’stay awake,” he purred, voice soaked in heat. ��Don’t want ye missin’ a single second.”

His mouth found your chest and he fed, kissing and dragging laps of his tongue across the small rivers he’d summoned.

Mouth smearing through the blood, warm and reverent, sucking gently around one of the deeper cuts before drawing back to lick the trail it left behind. His lips were already stained from your dried blood from earlier, now rehydrated by the fresh.

Your head tipped back and your hands gripped his shoulders tighter, but your strength was fading, pulse slowing and limbs weakening.

Remmick felt it.

You saw it in the way his eyes flicked up mid-lick,his tongue lingered on your skin like it was trying to remember you before you slipped too far.

He lifted you only an inch, enough to line himself up beneath you again.

His cock was hard, thick and furious beneath you, pulsing between your legs as he angled himself and pushed in. You gasped, your body opening slowly, trembling with effort.

He bottomed out deep and you forced your eyes open even through the haze.

Red eyes burning up at you, mouth soaked in crimson with fangs stained and hair a wild halo of blood-damp curls.

You kissed him fully, open-mouthed and tongue against his fangs, groaning into him when you began to move up and down.

Each bounce sent a jolt through your core, your knees buckling, but you kept going gripping his shoulders. His cock dragged deep, each thrust catching at the edge of your limit and forcing past it.

You slammed yourself down again and came hard, cock pulsing, spilling across his stomach, painting both your chests in streaks of heat as your body clenched down around him and he followed.

With a growl ripped from somewhere older than language, he buried himself to the hilt and came again, flooding you, thick spurts of heat pulsing inside your spent body.

You shuddered and fizzled in saturation, your nerves couldn’t take more, veins too empty. The air began to hum and your vision fluttered like moth wings.

He held you close, arms easing you back onto the ruined sheets. You felt the warmth of him as he leaned over your chest, his lips pressing lovingly and possessively to the bloody skin there.

The first thing you noticed was the heat from your own skin, bare against blood-wet sheets that dried and cracked with the faint stiffness of clot. Your body ached in places you couldn’t name. Your thighs burned, stomach tight and chest still throbbing where his mouth had marked you with red and bruises.

Golden noon slanted sharp across the bed and for a moment you thought your eyes would burn.

The realization that he wasn’t there hit you hard, blunt and hollow in the chest.

No breath on your neck, just your own body sprawled across the wreckage of last night’s ruin.

You looked down and found marks everywhere. Long, shallow cuts trailing across your ribs. Mouth-shaped bruises on your shoulder, your chest. Your thighs were a mess of dark splotches and ragged scabs, inner skin streaked with blood that had dried in the shape of his mouth.

You grinned, wincing.

‘Thank you, darlin’.’ The mockery of his voice in your own head was both obscene and affectionate. You threw on a shirt and some briefs on, each movement made you hiss through your teeth, muscles stiff and slow from everything he’d done to you.

You padded downstairs barefoot and there he was, sprawled on the floor of the parlor, back against a chair, legs crooked and banjo propped across his lap.

He was plucking strings idly, no real rhythm, just lazy unconscious flicks. The shirt he wore was still the same from last night, soaked and stained where the blood had dried in thick patches.

It clung to him unevenly, buttons half-undone and seams pulled out, the collar dark and rust-colored where blood had soaked through. One side of the shirt hung open completely, exposing his broad chest, sharp with muscle, the skin pale beneath streaks of dried crimson.

Droplets of blood, dried to rust, speckled his pectorals, some smudged into the edges of old scars, some dried in thin runnels down the line of his ribs. He hadn’t bothered to clean up, like he wanted to keep wearing the night.

“The fuck are you doin’ down here?” you snapped, instantly going for the nearest curtain. “You tryin’ to die for real this time?”

He didn’t flinch or even stop strumming, he just looked at you with a crooked grin, eyes still drowsy from the night before.

“Ah, listen t’ye soundin’ all fretful an’ sweet. Ye know I could eat y’whole just fer that tone alone, don’t ye?”

“Remmick,” you hissed, jerking a curtain closed with one sharp tug. “There are four open windows. I am not scraping what’s left of you off the goddamn floor just ‘cause you wanted to vibe with your creepy-ass instrument in direct sunlight.”

You were about to slam the last window closed when you heard him hum.

“Wait,” he said.

You turned and the grin widened.

“Take a peek outside, aye? Left y’a wee somethin’. Gift from me t’you, darlin’. Still smokin’, if y’re lucky.”

Your brows pulled together, wariness prickled your spine. Still, you stepped to the window, one hand lifting to shield your eyes from the last of the glare as you peeked between the slats.

There were two blackened bodies completely carbonized, twisted into unnatural shapes like they’d tried to escape the burn.

Those two men who came for your field and were about to take your life if you hadn’t already chosen your monster.

You turned back to him.

“All o’ it done for ye,” he whispered.

You barked a laugh and staggered once, shaking your head, still stunned by the casual and absolute violence while you took a seat on the floor right in front of him.

“You’re insane.”

He didn’t argue, just tilted his head, lips parted in that lazy, crooked curve like sin had decided to incarnate itself just for your benefit.

“Y’knew what I was when ye let me in.”

A melody was born as he began to play.

His eyes flicked up and stilled when he saw the edge of one of his bruises on your shoulder.

His pupils twitched, then elongated, irises burning inward as if lit from within. His lips glistened, mouth parting wider now, the edges of his fangs poking visible. Spit gathered in one corner as it trailed down his chin.

The banjo slid from his lap, the strings gave one last gasp of sound as they kissed the floorboards and he began crawling towards you.

His hands spread wide, palms dragging with cruel patience over the wood, knuckles brushing dried blood still left from last night’s aftermath.

He was over you completely now, arms braced on either side, knees pinning your thighs apart, hips hanging above yours, head tilted, that beautiful face twisted into something too close to devilish.

You reached up, one hand pressed to his jaw and you felt the inhuman twitch of muscle just beneath the surface as you kissed him.

His mouth opened against yours, fangs brushing your tongue, spit mixing with yours as he kissed you back and when he lowered you fully to the floor, his body covering yours, weight full and hands sinking to your waist, you didn’t resist.

In his head, he made a simple vow.

He would destroy anyone to protect you.

Anyone.

Except from himself.

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