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[thunderfaucet]

𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐝 𝐁𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐥'𝐬 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐞 𝐇𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬

𝐏𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 | Remmick x Fem!Reader

𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 | You had been taught from a young age that your body was a vessel for sin. You pray. You obey. You repent for desires you've never acted on. Until one night, something old and unholy walks out of the swamp. Remmick doesn’t ask for your obedience. He simply asks for you.

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 | 12,353 (I'm incapable of writing short fics anymore stg)

𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 | Mature Content-Explicit Descriptions Of Sex | Religious trauma, Shame-based upbringing, Mentions of blood, Vampire themes, Slight power imbalance (handled with care), Typical historical sexism, Horror themes, Smut: PIV sex, Loss of virginity, Period sex, Biting/marking, Worship kink, Oral(fem!receiving), Fingering, Begging/dirty talk, Dom/sub themes, Blood kink.

𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐞 | This is the freakiest shit I've ever written and I love it. I may have gotten a bit carried away, but I was a vampire slut as a teenager so this was like going back to my roots! It might seem a little drawn out, but I promise you it's worth it.

masterlist

“LORD, IF THERE BE ANY WICKED THOUGHT IN ME, CAST IT OUT.”

Knees sunk into warped pine, you knelt before the pulpit. Rigid spine drawn upwards like penance carved into posture. The chapel groaned with age beneath you, floorboards moaning like the ribs of something half-dead. Still, you didn’t move. Not when your knees screamed. Not when sweat slicked down your back. 

Pain, after all, was a righteous offering. 

Beyond clouded glass windows, Mississippi’s summer pressed its damp mouth to the world. Cicadas shrieked into the thick air—bold and blatant. As if even God’s smallest creatures knew no shame. 

But you did. You’d learned it young. 

At thirteen, the blood had come for the first time. Bright and damning, soaking through linen drawers like spilled sin. Your mama had wept into her handkerchief, Bible clenched to her chest.

Your daddy made you sleep in the shed out back that night. 

“You’re unclean now,” Mama had said. Her voice gentle as cattails blowing in the wind, but no less firm. “The devil speaks through blood like that.”

Since then, your body had become something separate from your soul. Something threatening to it. Something to be managed.

And so, you managed it. 

You scrubbed every corner of yourself with lye and scalding water, rubbed lavender oil behind your ears and under your arms to keep the scent of you polite. You covered your chest tight beneath your high-necked dresses and crossed your ankles even in sleep. You swallowed down every tremble, every heat that rose under your skin when you caught sight of a man’s hands. Thick-knuckled and dirty from work, veins like roots. 

When the wicked thoughts came—as they always did, uninvited and slow—you banished them with prayer. Over and over until your throat went hoarse and your vision blurred. 

Lord, make me clean. Lord, make me still. 

You learned to live inside the rhythm of denial. Every dish was washed with precision. Every verse memorized and recited without fault. Every smile measured, every word weighed. Even your silence was studied. Measured like sugar for a pie crust. 

Your daddy called you his “God-fearing girl.”

The town called you sweet. Gentle. A lamb.

But none of them heard the screaming behind your ribs. Still, you stayed soft, obedient. 

You turned your eyes away from boys who looked too long. You flinched when your daddy’s voice turned thundering at the pulpit, screaming about Jezebels and harlots and fire licking at the feet of women who let their hips sway too loose. 

Sometimes you wake in the middle of the night, thighs damp and heart racing, some dream fleeing your memory like smoke. The shame that followed was near biblical. You would kneel in front of your window and pray ‘til sunrise, whisper to the floorboards so Mama and Daddy wouldn’t hear. 

Still, deep in the belly of you, a wanting took root. Not loud, not crude, just hungry. Starved from being ignored so long.

That hunger frightened you more than Hell.

The sun had just begun to sink when you uncurled from the floor, joints stiff, knees aching with the kind of pain that settles deep and stays. Your dress clung damp to your back. The chapel had been empty when you arrived, and now as you left, it remained the same. The air still, dust dancing lazily in halos through fogged glass. 

Stepping outside felt like surfacing from deep water. The humidity met you like breath on your skin. Thick, and warm, and a little too familiar. Your shoes pressed down the dirt path in soft grinds on the pebbles, the hem of your dress sweeping across your ankles. 

Home was only a half mile away. Past a narrow field, and through the grove of pines your daddy always said was cursed. “Too quiet,” he’d muttered once. “Ain’t right when the trees don’t even sing.”

You never asked him what he meant. You were taught not to question the wisdom of men like him. 

The cicadas faded as you reached the edge of the trees. The air shifted, cooler now, like something had drawn the heat out of it. There was no wind. No hooting owls, no coyotes yipping, no chirping of crickets. The absence of all nighttime sounds. 

You paused.  

The setting light had gone strange, pale silver-washed, as though the sun had dipped too fast beneath the horizon. The shadows stretched longer here. Almost deliberate in their reach. 

It was then that you saw him. 

He stood beneath a drooping cypress, half swallowed by the gloaming. At first you thought he might’ve been carved from the tree itself—so still and rooted. But then he moved. Not like just any man, not exactly. Not with effort or weight in his steps. He simply shifted. Like water finding the shape of a new vessel.

Your breath caught in your throat. 

His eyes, too pale to be safe, met yours across the thinning distance. He looked like some creature out of folklore. The kind from tales whispered between women who’d seen too much and men who drank too late. Broad, sharp-jawed, dressed in a white and blue striped button-down with a pair of suspenders hitched over his shoulders. His sleeves were rolled, revealing forearms etched with faint old scars, and the collar of his shirt hung open—loose, like he’d never worn a buttoned thing in his life. 

He had no hat, no weapon, not even a smile. 

You should’ve run, but your feet stayed cemented to the gravel, fists tight in your skirt.

He didn’t speak right away. He just looked at you like he knew the trance you were under. A muscle feathered in his jaw. Not with tension, but curiosity. Amusement, even. And when he did speak, his voice came low and smooth, like creekwater over stone. 

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, mouth curving up in the sort of smirk Mama warned you about. “Didn’t think anyone’d be out here.”

Your lips parted and then sealed shut again. You took a half step back, careful not to trip over the hem of your dress. 

“I didn’t mean to disturb—” you began, but his head tilted just a fraction. 

“You’re the preacher’s girl, right?” he asked, eyes narrowing with delighted focus. 

You nodded, barely. “Yes, sir.”

He huffed a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “No need for ‘sir’; I’m not that respectable.”

Silence stretched between you. Even though you’d been raised on the belief that it wasn’t polite for girls to talk too much, you wanted to fill the quiet. Spill your voice into the cracks. Your pulse throbbed in your throat before you rounded up the courage. 

“You shouldn’t be out here this time of night.”

“Neither should you, preacher’s daughter,” he drawled, a flicker of something dark and knowing curling the corner of his lips. “But here we are.”

He didn’t look like anyone from town and certainly didn’t talk like one. None of the townsfolk would’ve spoken to you the way he did. Unguarded and heedless of who you were. No, he wasn’t from around here at all. And yet…nothing about him seemed inherently strange. Just out of place. Like he belonged to a different world that had nudged its shoulder against yours for a moment, just long enough to make the air odd. 

He rocked back on the heels of his feet, like he was settling into the moment, not at all eager to leave it. “Didn’t catch your name.”

Giving out your name to strangers never seemed like a good idea to you. It felt wrong just to hand it out, especially not to spooky men alone in the woods. 

“Don’t think you need it, mister.” Your words are nearly swallowed by the blood rushing in your ears. 

That smirk returned, subtle and crooked and ruinous. “Suit yourself.”

His voice curled around the words like telling you he’d figure out your name anyway. Whether you gave it to him or not. And maybe he would; in a town as small as this, everybody knew everyone. 

He took a step forward. Not as a threat, not even boldly. 

The breath in your chest locked up tight anyway. Your ribs caging something suddenly wild and very much awake. Heat pricked at your cheeks, and shame rose in your belly like smoke curling from a chimney. You didn’t know this man, but the shape of him, the sound of him, felt like something your body recognized before your mind could catch up. 

You were both terrified and enchanted by him. 

“You always walk this way alone?” He asked.

You glanced away from his thralling eyes, throat going bone dry. “Ain’t usually anyone else out here.”

“You’re a peculiar thing,” he chuckled, pointing a wagging finger at you. 

You stiffened. “Why d’you say that?”

He shrugged, hands tucked lazily in his pockets. “I’ve been ‘round town awhile. Seen enough to know who stares down their nose and who just keeps their eyes down.” He fixed you with those keen eyes, turning up his nose almost like he was sniffing. “But you look like you’re tryin’ not to see at all.”

You sucked in a breath. You could feel your heart banging around inside you, like it wanted out.

This was wrong. 

Not just him, but the way the trees leaned in like they were listening, the way your skin felt charged under your dress. You could hear it echoing in your skull, how your name would sound rolling off his tongue if you’d chosen to give it to him. 

You didn’t even realize you’d taken a step back until your heel slid slightly on gravel.  

“I should get goin’,” you said quickly, the words tumbling out like water breaking through a dam.

He didn’t stop you as you danced around him. 

“Sure,” was all he said, amusement bending his voice. “Don’t let the woods eat ya on the way home.”

Your pace started out slow, but you could feel him behind you. Something made you look back. 

He’d moved back to where you first saw him, there under the swaying cypress tree half devoured by dusk and shadow. He stood just as still, only now his head was tilted the slightest bit. Like he was listening to something distant or savoring something close. 

When he caught you glancing at, him he grinned. Wickedly. Like he knew something you didn’t. Like he’d caught a glimpse of the crack in your pious little shell and was toying with the thought of prying it open.

The moonlight caught his eyes, or maybe it wasn’t the light at all. For just a moment, they flashed red. Not bright. Not like fire. But like crimson blood. It was just a glint, sharp as wet teeth in the dark. 

Your breath hitched as you took a step back, your eyes still on him. Then another until your pace quickens into something just shy of a run. 

He watched you leave, that grin widening as you stumbled through the brush, skirts snagging on twigs, heart pounding like a hymn sung too fast. He didn’t chase after you, but he drank in your fear like it was fine whiskey. 

You could almost hear that smile taunting you. Ain’t you lucky I let you go?

YOU DIDN’T WALK HOME NEAR THE GROVE ANYMORE.

You took the long road instead, through rows of dry fields and along the ridge where wild blackberries grew. 

But no matter how hard you tried to avoid it, you still saw him. 

Not fully at first, just a shape in your periphery. Standing motionless at the edge of things. Watching the horizon as though he had all the time in the world to wait for you to come to him.

You never stopped when you saw him; never spoke to him. You kept your eyes forward and your mouth shut. But your palms went damp against the cotton of your skirt, and your heart slammed into your ribs. 

You hadn’t slept that first night. 

You stayed curled under your quilt, ears straining at every creak in the house. You told yourself it was just wind on the windows, just the groan of old nails in old wood. But deep down, you knew better. 

Because the next evening, he was there again—this time down by the riverbed. 

You’d gone to fetch water just as the dark came on, trying to outpace the setting sun, but when you reached the bank, he was already there. Sitting on a fallen log like it was a church pew, skipping stones across the slow-moving current with easy, idle flicks of his wrist. 

He didn’t speak, but he didn’t really need to. 

You could feel his gaze on your back the whole time you filled the pail, like fingers dragging down the slope of your spine without ever touching skin. When you turned around, he was gone. 

You blinked once, twice; nothing but empty woods and water rippling in dusky light. The pail trembled in your hands the whole way home. 

By the third night, you started to wonder if you were going mad. 

You didn’t tell Mama or Daddy. You couldn’t. What would you even say? That some pale-eyed stranger was haunting the dirt roads and riverbeds. Staring like he could see every wicked little thought you’d tried so hard to drown.

No. 

That would only earn you a slap and a verse from Leviticus. 

So you stayed silent, but you didn’t feel safe. 

Especially not the fourth night when you saw him outside your bedroom window. 

It was just past midnight; the house had gone dead quiet hours ago. The air was heavy with heat and thunder-stillness. You’d risen from bed to press your forehead to the glass, the way you always did when your dreams left you flushed and frightened. The nighttime sounds had gone silent again. 

And then he was just there. 

Standing at the tree line just beyond the garden fence. Unmoving and unblinking. Lit only by the moon in the same striped shirt, the same loose collar, his hands in his pockets like this was nothing unusual. Like he belonged right there. 

You didn’t scream or dash away from the window. You just stared because a part of you had been expecting this. Dreading it and needing it in the same capacity.

His head tilted again, same as before. Curious. Amused. That slow, knowing smirk unspooling like thread across his mouth with those razor-sharp teeth as the needle.

 A chill slid down your spine like the slow crawl of a water moccasin, cold and coiling. Your heart jittered wild in your chest, beating like a grasshopper’s wings. Part of you screamed to look away, but some buried piece of you—that part the prayers never reached—couldn’t drag your eyes from him. 

You hoped he wouldn't see the internal tremor of your bones, but you knew he did.

He just watched you, like he was trying to decide whether to devour you or let you rot sweetly on the vine. The air felt thick with something unholy. Then from the darkness, a sound soft and low and syrup-slick. 

A laugh straight from the depths of Hell. 

He moved then, pushed himself from the fence post like it cost him nothing, the slow drag of his boots through the grass loud enough through the closed window. The garden seemed to hush around him; even the insects ceased their chattering. 

The moonlight reached for him as he stepped forward, bent toward him like it knew him. Like it’d been waiting to kiss his skin. 

You’d heard plenty of stories in church warning folks about demons who walked only in the dark and wore man’s skin like a borrowed coat. You’d never put much stock in them. 

But now?

Now he was standing in your garden, eyes burning like embers and teeth too sharp, framed by a mouth that smiled like it knew the taste of brimstone. 

He was beautiful in the way demons often were depicted hunting for mortal souls. Terrible and magnetic and full of ruin. 

And every bit of him seemed to say just one thing.

Come closer, little lamb. The door’s already open.

You didn’t remember unlatching the window. Just that your fingers were already there, trembling against the iron hook.

It groaned softly as it opened, just enough to let the air in. Enough to let him near.

He was closer now, no longer by the fence but halfway through the garden, where your mama’s tomato vines curled up splintering stakes. His boots were sunk into the dew-dark earth, but he moved like something that didn’t need to touch the ground to get where it was going. 

When he made it to the window, you gripped the sill to steady yourself. 

“Why you tormenting yourself like this?” His voice was whisper quiet, but it slithered right under your skin like smoke through a crack in the floorboards. You flinched but couldn’t bring yourself to move away. 

“What d’you mean?” Your voice sounded so small in this moment. 

He stepped closer still, until he was just beneath the window. His hands stayed in his pockets, body loose with an ease you’ve never seen another person possess. But his gaze was the only restless thing about him. It was fixed on you shining bloody, sharp, and starving.

“Lookin’ at me like that,” he murmured. “Pretending I’m the one you’re still scared of.”

Your throat worked around the thickness gathering there. 

“I don’t—I was just—” You broke off. Words slipped through your fingers like running water.

He tilted his head in that slow, animal way. “Oh, darlin’” And then with a quick click of his tongue, he frowned at you, like it saddened him that you couldn’t see the way he did. “You ain’t really afraid of me.”

The thought made your stomach twist. “I am,” you said too fast. 

“No, darlin’. You’re afraid of what you feel when I’m close. That heat in your belly. That little pulse in your throat. You were raised to call that fear.” He leaned forward just a hair, voice going lower. “But it ain’t.”

Your eyes stung as you blinked the emotion away. “You don’t know me.”

“I know enough.” 

He looked at you like something half-ripened and trembling on the vine. A peach not yet plucked, but splitting at the seam just the same. 

You turned your face slightly, ashamed of how badly you wanted to hear what he might say next. The window creaked as you pushed it open a little more. Not to get closer to him, but to let in some more air. That’s what you told yourself.

His eyes followed the movement. “You ever ask yourself why I keep comin’ back here?” He asked. 

You couldn’t find an answer. 

“You think I hang around ‘cause I like the scenery? The garden?” His mouth carved, those fangs of his poking out. “It ain’t the tomatoes bringin’ me, sweetheart.”

You pressed a hand to your chest, as if you could calm the racing in it with sheer will. “What are you?” you whispered. 

He smiled wider but didn’t answer. “Why’d you open the window tonight?” He asked instead. 

That struck something deep in you. A place none of your daddy’s sermons had ever managed to reach. You just stood there, bare feet on old wooden floor, moonlight kissing your cheekbone, your heart loud enough you were sure he could hear it. 

Then, with his eyes fully shining crimson and his voice softer than breath, he spoke with a flicker of something ancient. “Come outside.”

The words hit you low in the belly. And for a split second, you almost did. Almost pulled yourself over the sill without a second thought, like a girl in a folk tale about to be taken by the monsters lurking in the woods. 

But you didn’t. Something made you stay where you were, clinging to the windowsill like it was the edge of the world. Or the edge of your sanity. 

“I can’t,” you whispered. 

He watched you a moment longer, the red glow fading from those unnatural eyes. He nodded just once, like he expected that response from you. His grin lingered as he turned away. 

“That’s alright,” he said. “You will, or either I’ll hang ‘round long enough for you to invite me in.”

He seemed to blink out of existence then. There one minute and gone the next. With his presence no longer holding you in thrall, you stepped back from the window like it had burned you. Heart hammering all the way up your throat as you slammed the window shut. You dropped to your knees without thinking, palms slapping the floorboards, breath coming entirely too fast. 

You prayed, but not out of devotion; out of desperation. 

But no amount of prayer could vanish the image from your mind. 

His face in the moonlight. 

That devilish grin. 

The way his preternatural eyes seemed to strip you bare without even trying.

It was demeaning how intense the thought of him felt, how vivid it was. How warm. He’d crawled under your skin like a fever and made home there. Uninvited and relentless. 

And worse, it was disgusting to want like this. To fantasize in such a way about a man you’d only spoken to twice. One who you knew nothing about. A man who might not be a man at all. 

Because what you’d seen…the flash of red in his eyes, the fang-like teeth, the way the light didn’t touch him, the stillness that came with him that felt wrong in a world always rustling. 

You were certain he wasn't human. 

And still, he’d become the subject of every dark corner of your mind. 

Your nightmares, yes—those came first. Dreams of him dragging you into the woods, tearing into you with those monstrous canines.

But the fantasies came after.

Sinful ones that had your fingers curling in your sheets. Your thighs pressed tightly beneath your nightgown. The shame bloomed fresh each time when you saw the sunrise and realized your soul hadn’t been struck down for the things you let yourself imagine.

You hated it. 

You hated him.

You hated yourself most of all.

And yet, even as your knees ached and your lips whispered psalms too fast to understand, a single, damning truth settled at the base of your spine like a stone.

You weren’t praying for him or even the thoughts to go away. Because in the most blasphemous parts of yourself, you enjoyed this.

The night after he visited the window, you dreamt of him. 

He came not through the door, but through the trees. Born of shadows and honeysuckle, and grinning beneath the weight of the moon. His presence pulled the night close, like even the dark bent towards him in reverence. 

The grove bloomed around you, but it was wrong. Cyprus roots split the ground like vines. The air was thick with humidity and the heavy, heady scent of sweet rot. Moonlight filtered through the branches, pale as spilled milk, and everything was silent, as if the world held its breath. 

You stood barefoot in the middle of it all, nightgown clinging to your thighs, the hem damp. The trees whispered in a language your bones seemed to know. There was no wind. 

Then he appeared—just was, suddenly—behind you. Closer than your shadow. 

One hand came to rest on your hip, the other brushing your hair aside, fingers cold but careful, like he was unwrapping a relic.

“You ain’t a saint. Not a sinner neither.” He breathed, voice like molasses poured slow. “Just a…sweet-blooded thing.”

You couldn’t speak. You wanted to, but no words made it free before they died in your throat. Your body pulsed with some kind of rhythm not taught by sermons, but by earth, bone, and blood. His hands roamed without urgency, touching you like something holy, as he hummed low with his sinner’s breath. 

Your knees gave out when his hands wandered too close to between your legs. He caught you holding your weight up with one arm. He lowered his mouth to your throat, inhaled, and sighed like he’d come home. 

And then—

Then the woods split with light, hot and blinding, and his eyes—pale as salt, rimmed in red like dying coals—met yours for a single, damning moment.

You woke with a sharp gasp violent enough to cut through the air. You shot up in bed, heart galloping and skin clammy. The dream clung to you like moss, heavy and damp. 

You felt it before you even looked. 

The wet heat between your thighs and the ache low in your belly. The blood smeared across the sheets like rust on Sunday white. 

You didn’t scream.

You just wept. 

Curled into yourself on the stained bedding, rocking like you had done as a child during storms, when thunder shook the windowpanes and Mama told you to hush. That the rumbling was just God. 

You buried your face in your hands and whispered like a sinner at the feet of the Lord. 

“I didn’t ask for this.”

But somewhere, somehow, you knew you had.

THE NEXT MORNING BROUGHT YOU NO MERCY. You woke in a fever of shame, the sheets damp and streaked rust-red. 

You’d barely stripped them from the bed and gotten them to the basin when your mama walked in, face already drawn with suspicion. She stopped short when she saw the washboard and the clear water turning pink.

Her mouth flattened. “You ain’t due,” she said simply, but it wasn’t a question. 

You kept your eyes on the suds, hands starting to shake as you scrubbed harder. 

“You been temptin’ something,” she murmured, voice gone cool and critical, like a snake easing through garden grass. “Lord sees everything, and so does a mother.”

You didn’t answer; you didn’t need to. Nothing you said would’ve made a difference. 

By noon your daddy knew. She’d told him in hushed tones over the breakfast table, her words laced with worry and faithful dread, her hands trembling around her coffee mug. 

The blood was a warning, she said. A sign that the devil was whispering, and her daughter was startin’ to listen.

The preacher’s face went hard as wood. There was no screaming, no belt. Just that look, and that was always worse. 

He sent you to the chapel before lunch, said it was time you remembered what it meant to be clean. Pure. God’s own daughter, not some wild thing led by flesh and fever. 

So you knelt all day.

Until your knees throbbed and your spine locked straight, until the air inside the church went stale and sweet from summer heat, and your throat was hoarse from whispered pleas.

You weren’t allowed water or allowed to sit. 

Just kneel, pray, repent. 

By the time evening came, your whole body ached. But the ache inside was louder. A low, relentless pulse that no prayer could silence.

When your daddy finally opened the chapel doors and sent you home, you walked like a ghost through the dusk, eyes empty.

You didn’t try to sleep that night. You knew it would be no use. So, you sat on your bed and waited. Waited because you knew he’d be out there. 

And when the animals fell quiet, when the breeze turned cool and still, and the moonlight poured soft and white through your curtain like cream in a glass, you knew. 

He’d come back. 

He wasn’t at the window, though. He’d gone to the tree.

The old white oak out front, the one your great-granddaddy planted with his own two hands nearly a century ago. Mama always called it the family’s spine. Said its roots ran so deep it could hold back Hell itself. Said it shaded the porch like a preacher’s hand. Protective and watching.

But tonight, it didn’t feel holy. Tonight it felt like it was aiding him, and he was anything but holy. 

You went out the front door before you could change your mind. Quiet as a fallen soul slipping out of confession, you opened it. The screen groaned on its hinges and snapped shut behind you.

The air outside was thick with the scent of honeysuckle and something faintly coppery, like blood in well water.

He leaned lazily against the oak’s trunk like he’d grown from it. Like he owned it. His sleeves were rolled, and his shirt rumpled. Shadows seemed to tuck themselves around his boots like hounds curling at their master’s feet. 

Once again, he let the silence simmer between you for a moment. If he was surprised you came out, he didn’t show it. 

You looked right back at him, jaw locked with some emotion that wasn’t quite courage. 

“I oughta tell you to leave,” you said, voice stifled but firm. 

He didn’t move. “Why don’t you?”

Your fingers knotted in the fabric of your nightdress. “Cause you won’t listen.”

That made him grin. “You’re smarter than you let on, preacher’s daughter.”

The night air wrapped tight around the both of you. The oak branches swayed without wind.

You stepped off the porch, slow like stepping into a grave you’d dug yourself. Dry leaves crunched beneath your feet as you got close enough to see his eyes already glinting that wrong shade. Like moonlight kissing iron.

He didn’t look monstrous tonight. Just wrong, like words spoken in reverse. 

You’d meant to confront him, to tell him to leave you alone. To make him. But now you stood before him, your voice softened like wax near flame. 

“Are you the devil?” It came out thin, breathy.

He let that sit in the air for a moment. A beat, then two. 

Then finally, “Would it matter if I was?” The words slithered straight down your spine.

You stared at him, heart thudding, lips parted, but no response seemed good enough. No verse, no warning, not even a whispered prayer. Because a part of you already knew. 

The devil in the pulpit wore rage and brimstone. 

The devil in the garden wore moonlight and a smile that made your knees weak. 

He pushed off the tree like he was just stretching his back, Like he hadn’t shattered your whole world view with those words.

You stood there like a deer caught by a hunter, bare feet in the loamy dark. The grass kissed your ankles, damp from the dew. The moonlight carved both of you into something unreal. Him all shadow and sharpened grin. You soft and lit from within like a lantern half-extinguished.

“You shouldn’t be here,” you whispered, but it came out too fragile. It didn’t sound like a protest; it sounded like longing dressed up in your Sunday best.

He stepped leisurely but with a certain deliberateness as the night seemed to part for him. “I ain’t the one who came knockin’, lamb,” he murmured. 

“I didn’t knock on nothin’,” you refuted. 

He looked at you through those searing eyes. “You came out the door, though.”

He reached you, then stood right in front of you. Close enough that you could smell the faint hints of aged cedar wood and burnt ashes and the unmistakable stench of blood. One of his hands lifted, slowly, to hover by your cheek. Not touching you yet, like he wanted you to touch him first.

“Tell me no,” he insisted.

Oh God, you should’ve. It was right there on your tongue, but you couldn’t get your voice to work. Not even as you felt a bead of sweat roll down your temple. From the heat, or fear, or something else you didn’t rightly know. 

Instead, you leaned forward like a sinner falling from the clouds of Heaven straight to the pits of Hell. It was just enough to let the tip of your nose brush his. Your breath caught in your throat, and you felt his exhale ghost across your lips like a curse. 

His fingers slid into your hair at the base of your skull and gripped. Not too tightly, but firm enough, as if testing whether or not you’d pull away. 

“Tell me no,” he provoked again, letting the sharp points of his teeth bare beneath a grin. “Go on, fight me.”

You did nothing. You said nothing. 

He chuckled. “Thought so.”

Then, before you could blink, he seized your shoulder with a grip like iron and spun you, swift and brutal as a summer storm. Your back hit his chest with a thud that knocked the breath from you, his body a wall of heat and muscle. 

One arm banded tight around your waist, the other clamped low on your hips, unyielding and possessive. Like he meant to etch his touch into your skin, make sure no part of you ever forgot it. 

You gasped, a soft, startled sound that was half swallowed by the night.

His breath dusted along your cheekbone, slow and scalding, as his hand slid up—up—to your throat. Not squeezing, just resting there. As if to remind you how easily he could. 

He leaned in, lips brushing the shell of your ear. 

“That noise?” he hummed, voice with a growl like thick honey. “Ain’t even half of what I’m gonna have you singin’ for me.”

Then his mouth was on yours.

It was rough, yes, but there was an underlying horrible delight in it. Like he was savoring a ripe apple from the Garden of Eden itself. 

He kissed you like he was committing sacrilege. It wasn’t tender or kind; it was sin made flesh and pressed to your mouth. Heated like he wanted to scorch your skin, ruin your body and soul alike. 

You whimpered into it before you could stop yourself, shame and want bleeding into each other. Becoming something you couldn’t tell apart from the other. His other hand came to rest at your waist, splayed over your hip like it belonged there. Like he’d known the shape of you long before you’d met, long before you were even born.

You were shaking, not from fear, but from the weight of everything you’d been told you must never want. 

He kissed you like he already owned your hunger. And maybe he did. 

Because when his lips left yours and trailed down the edge of your jaw, you tilted your head like you’d done it a hundred times. Like your body recognized him, even if your soul still hadn’t caught up. 

“You feel that?” He whispered against your neck. “That ache in your belly?”

You nodded before you realized you were moving. 

“It ain’t shame, sugar. That’s you wakin’ up.”

His tongue brushed your skin, and you whined, the sound catching on the back of your throat. You should’ve slapped him. Should’ve fled. 

But instead your fingers reached up to curl into his hair. 

You were dizzy. Drunk on the darkness and whatever he was made of. Your thighs pressed together as if they could cage the heat rising between them. As if they could quiet the throb that started the moment he touched you. 

“You know I can smell it, right?” He said, drawing back just enough to look you in the eye. “The blood dripping outta that pretty cunt.” His thumb swiped the corner of your mouth. 

A ragged gasp ripped out of you, loud and trembling, like it’d been wrenched from the bottom of your lungs. Heat flooded your cheeks—hotter than Hellfire, hotter than a July sun. You tried to turn, wide-eyed, unsure if you’d even heard him right. But his hand stayed steady at your throat, a quiet pressure that kept you still. Anchored in place like a lamb frozen before the slaughter. 

Your breath hitched again, this time rougher, rougher than the words he’d just spoken.

No one had ever spoken of your body like that. As if it weren’t sacred in the way of being a temple of God’s creation, but sacred in the way of what being his would feel like. What being hungered for felt like. What being known felt like.

Your whole life had been Bible verses and closed doors and whispered warnings. And now here was this…creature, saying the unsayable, grinning like he’s torn a veil straight off Heaven and made you look at what was behind it.

“You gonna let me taste?” His voice sang into your ear, raspy and filled with near giddy enthusiasm. 

“W-what?” The word barely made it out, brittle and panting, like it didn’t belong to you at all. Your head was spinning, thoughts colliding like thunderclouds. You weren’t sure if you’d imagined what he said, if the world was tilting, or you were simply losing your mind. Everything inside you recoiled and leaned in at the same time, like a moth drawn to flame. 

“Just a little taste. It’ll be good, I promise.”

His words slid across your skin like velvet and barbed wire. You felt them in your chest, in your belly, in the places of your body that remained unexplored. The world has gone too quiet around you. The branches, the air, your own breath. 

You froze in his arms. Not from fear, but from the nearness of the house just behind you, your parents asleep in their bedroom not twenty steps away. From the raw ache between your legs. From the heat twisting inside you and the shame curling around it like ivy. 

You wanted him. 

God help you; you wanted him.

But not here, not in the front yard. Not under your great-granddaddy’s tree. Not with the windows dark and your daddy dreaming just feet from where his hand gripped your waist like he had every right to.

Your hand left his hair to press against his chest. 

“I—” You swallowed hard. “No, I can’t.”

He went still. Real still. If you were a smarter girl, you’d be afraid right now. 

After a beat, he let out a low breath that sounded somewhere between a sigh and a chuckle.

“There she is,” he murmured, voice coaxing instead of mocking. “Little lamb has teeth after all.”

His hand dropped from your throat slowly, the other sliding away from your waist. He didn’t lurch back or scowl. He didn’t curse or shame you; he just let go.

“You ain’t angry?” You whispered.

He tilted his head, grin turning softer than what you’d seen before. “Nah, I’m not angry. ‘Cause you will say yes,” he said certainly. “One night soon.”

“Tomorrow,” you blurted out.

His brow lifted, one corner of his mouth ticking up. “Tomorrow?”he echoed, slow and teasing, like he wanted to roll the word across his tongue again just to savor the taste.

You nodded abashedly. “It’s Sunday. Mama and Daddy’ll be at evening service. I’ll stay home. Say I’m unwell.”

A smile bloomed across his face like the devil hearing a hymn warped just enough to suit him. “Well, now,” he drawled. “Ain’t you full of surprises?”

Your breath came fast, chest rising like the air had finally remembered how to move. 

“You’ll come?” You asked, quieter, like part of you still doubted he was real. That all this was just temptation stitched into a dream.

His eyes roved over you one last time. “You’ll be the one invitin’ me in.”

He took one more step back into the dark, the shadows seeming to reach out to surround him. He gave you a final crooked grin, then, like always, he was just gone.

The air sighed after him. The oak creaked softly, as if exhaling too. 

You stood in place for another moment, your heartbeat ringing like church bells in your ears.

Tomorrow.

 You’d spilled the word without thinking, without planning; now it hung in the shadows. Stitched into the air between the tree and porch. It felt inevitable, though. This moment, you, him. 

You turned toward the house, and the screen door groaned as you pushed it open. The hallway was still, lit only by the faint moonlight seeping through the kitchen lace. Your bare feet whispered across the floorboards, each one squeaking like they wanted to tattle.

When you entered your room, you didn’t go to the window. He wouldn’t be there, but he said he’d come back. And you believed he would. Not like a boy who was hungry and impulsive. But like something old and well practiced in the art of patience. 

As you lay in bed, quilt pulled to your chin, your knees ached from the chapel. But your lips were sore from his mouth. Somewhere beneath your ribs, a hunger had bloomed.

Because the devil in the garden hadn’t asked for your soul. Only your permission. And you’d given it.

MORNING CREPT IN SLOWLY AND SWOLLEN, HEAVY WITH THE SCENT OF RAIN AND YOUR DECISION. The sky outside hung pale and dull, as if the sun had second thoughts about rising. You stirred beneath your quilt, limbs stiff with ache, the ghost of his touch still clinging to your skin.

At the breakfast table, your movements were brittle, precise—a porcelain doll feigning breath. Spoon untouched. Biscuits going cold. You pressed a hand to your forehead, faking the flush of fever, and let your eyes linger unfocused on the woodgrain in the table like scripture too worn to read.

Your mama’s gaze was a blade behind her coffee cup. She eyed the tremble in your fingers, the pallor in your face. “You’re lookin’ a shade unwell,” she said at last, voice wrapped in thin linen concern, suspicion tucked neat beneath.

You didn’t look up. “Didn’t sleep good.”

The words rasped out like smoke from a chimney long gone cold.

You played the part through morning service, like a seasoned actress cast in her shining role. You wore your sickness like silk, light and convincing. Spoke only when spoken to. Let your eyes blur with imagined weariness. Folded your hands as if they weren’t stained with things that meant you’d burn in Hell. Sang the hymns like psalms of penance, though your mouth felt dry as ash.

When your daddy called for the wayward to rise, you stayed seated. When the prayer commenced, you bowed your head and kept your breath shallow. If they’d looked closer, they might’ve seen the lie curling beneath your lashes. 

But they believed you as easy as breathing. 

Easy as sin. 

By the time evening rolled around, you should’ve been in flames for how much you’d lied. But no lightning split the sky. No voice boomed from the heavens. Only the quiet nod of your father, the distracted sigh of your mother as she tied her shawl.

“A girl ain’t any good to the Lord if she’s too weak to stand,” your daddy said.

The words carried like a benediction, final and unquestioned. Your mama’s mouth twitched, tight as a drawstring purse, but she didn’t argue. Only adjusted her shawl and spared you a glance that lingered on your flushed cheeks. 

She left chicken broth simmering on the stove, the pot sweating like a guilty man in a prayer tent. “Don’t let it boil over,” she muttered, already halfway through the door.

You nodded, small and solemn as a lamb offered up on an altar.

The screen door clattered shut behind them, the sound sharp and thin in the warm hush of the house. A moment later, you heard the truck rumble to life, tires groaning down the gravel path like some beast being roused from its slumber. Then thick golden silence. 

The sun spilled sideways across the kitchen floor, the last light of it butter-yellow and dying. Shadows stretched long across the wood, and the house exhaled slow, as if even the walls knew what you were gonna invite in.

You sat at the edge of your bed with your hands folded tight in your lap. The lamplight fluttered beside you, casting the room in warmth and shadow. 

Your knees bounce once, twice, before you caught them with your palms. You swore you could hear the mantel clock ticking from the front room, but it could’ve been your ears ringing too. It grew louder with each passing second, like the calling of vultures as they circled a carcass. 

You shouldn’t have done this.

The thought passes through your mind as quickly as a hare. 

Any good girl would’ve known better. God-Fearing girls kept their windows closed at night and didn’t go out to have conversations with demons. They didn’t ache like this, in their bellies and bones.

Your window was closed, the front door too. He couldn’t come in unless you invited him. 

You could still stop it. You could still crawl into bed, hide beneath the hush of your parents’ God, and pray till your tongue went dry.

But the truth was, you didn’t want to pray no more. Not to a God who never answered you. Not to a god that was full of so much hatred and wrath.

You felt closer to the divine when he touched you. When he acknowledged the ache inside of you and didn’t shame you for it. When he decided your longing was his very own guitar string to pluck, then you ever felt when you cried out to God.

You wanted to know what it was like to be chosen. Not by God, but by the thing that watched you from the darkness like he wanted to devour you. You wanted his wickedness to ravage you. Let it seep into your soul and let you free.

But it still didn’t stop your fingers from shaking. Didn’t stop the thin sweat from blooming at your neck. 

The house had gone still. Too still. The kind of hush that settles on graveyards before storms. The kind you’d grown to recognize the last few nights. You could feel it building in your marrow. The pressure, the waiting. The dread that didn’t feel quite like dread. 

The clicking of the parlor clock bleeds through the walls, every second scraping against your skin like the bite of a distant insect. 

There was a knock.

Your breath caught, snagged in your throat like a fishhook. The room seemed to pulse with the sound. The wallpaper breathing. The floorboards holding their breath.

You rose like something called from a grave, unsure if it was your soul or your sin dragging you forward. Each step toward the door was heavy as a church bell. Your nightgown whispered against the wood floors, and every inch of you felt stretched—thin, lit from within like a lantern at the end of its oil.

You could feel the thrum of him through the wood as you reached the door. 

It looked the same as always—plain pine, white paint flaking at the edges, Mama’s lace curtain tucked in the window. But tonight, it felt like a boundary. A final veil between the life you were born into and the one you’d invited with your own trembling tongue.

You placed your hand on the knob.

“Lord forgive me,” you whispered, but you didn’t mean it. Not really. Because there was no salvation in what you were about to do.

Just surrender. 

The brass was cool under your palm, a mercy against the heat rising from your bones. You knew what stood on the other side. Knew he was waiting. 

You cracked it open slow like. The night spilled in like a secret, soft and damp and full of promise. 

He stood on the porch, the light catching on the edge of his smirk. He didn’t move, didn’t even shift his weight. 

He stood with the patience of something older than the air around you, something well-fed on the rituals of yearning girls and the sweet rot of their defiance.

The threshold hummed between you like a live wire. You could feel it. That old, bone-deep rule, the one no sermon ever spoke of, but every trembling child knew. Evil couldn’t cross unless you let it.

His eyes gleamed beneath the brim of night, catching what little moonlight the porch allowed. There was no white in them, no mercy, just a glint like storm-wet iron and the promise of undoing.

“Well,” he drawled, voice low and velvet-thick, “ain’t this a pretty picture?”

He took a breath, though he probably didn’t need to, and the porch boards beneath him groaned as if straining under the weight of something not entirely flesh. “I can’t come in,” he said, quiet, like the words were meant to be stitched into the air and left hanging there.

“I know,” you answered. All you needed to do was say the words. 

His lips parted, not quite a smile this time, but something softer, something that made your belly twist. “Then say it,” he said. “Say it proper, darlin’.”

A shiver ran up your spine, cold as baptismal water. You stared at him, at the way the shadows clung to his shoulders like a mantle, at the way the porch light dared not kiss his skin. You thought of all the stories your mama told, of blood and beasts and doors left ajar.

But you didn’t believe in fairy tales anymore.

You believed in what was right in front of you. 

So you parted your lips and let the words fall, soft as rain on a coffin lid. “You can come in.”

The moment you said it, the air seemed to shift. Like the house exhaled, or maybe it was you. Something unlatched inside, something old and hungry and no longer chained to the warnings of your father’s God.

He crossed the threshold without a sound. Not a step. Not a breath. He simply was there, inside. Closer than you thought he’d get.

Your lungs seized.

He smelled like blood still. You were beginning to think he always carried the scent with him. He leaned in close enough that your heartbeat stuttered.

“Thank you,” he whispered, voice all honey and hunger.

And then the door clicked shut behind him with the sound of something final. 

He didn’t jump on you right away, just looked around your home with seemingly curious eyes. His gaze moved through the house like a ghost tasting the air. Like he could see the prayers still stitched into the wood grain. Smell the repentance caught between wallpaper seams.

You watched him, chest tight, body wired with something above nervousness. He didn’t say anything else at first, didn’t need to. The hush between you was a thing with weight, heavier still for what was about to be broken.

His gaze found yours again, and in it was that same stillness he wore like a second skin—like he was made of waiting.

“Do you... want anything?” You asked, the words foolish, half-wilted on your tongue.

He stepped closer. Just one pace. But it was enough to draw the warmth from your skin and replace it with something cooler. “I already got what I came for.”

His voice slipped over your ears like dark silk. The space between you seemed to shrink, and you weren’t sure if it was his doing or your own. He raised a hand and touched the edge of your jaw. Just the pad of his thumb tracing the corner of your mouth, where your breath caught and held.

“Told myself I’d wait,” he murmured. “Let you lead.” His eyes dropped to your lips, then returned, gleaming. “But I’m a selfish thing sometimes.”

And before you could reply, before you could decide if you’d stop him, he bent forward and kissed you.

It was softer than you expected. So unlike the first time. There was no fire, no bloodlust. Just the aching press of mouth on mouth, as if he meant to read you by taste. Your hands curled at your sides, then rose of their own accord, fingers brushing the stiff cotton at his chest. His palm came to rest against the curve of your back, anchoring you in the middle of the storm you’d conjured.

You moaned against his lips, a sharp and involuntary sound, and he pulled back just enough to speak into your mouth, voice roughened with want. “Show me.” You didn’t ask what he meant. You already knew.

You stumbled backward down the hall, his mouth never far from yours, hands on your waist like a brand. He followed you with that inhuman stillness, that predator’s grace. Each step was made not of footsteps but of intent.

And when the bedroom door groaned shut behind you—

He turned you with fluid, startling ease, hands firm as iron as he swept you off your feet. You gasped, instinctively clinging to him, arms locking around his shoulders. Your legs, guided more by instinct than thought, wrapped around his waist as though your body already knew what to do. The world tipped, spun, and all you could feel was the press of him, his hands, and the dizzying pull of gravity undone. 

Lowering you down to the linen sheets of your bed, he moved like judgment falling slow from Heaven. His hands hiked the hem of your nightgown up your legs, bunching the fabric like offerings at the feet of an altar. The mattress beneath you was soft, rich with rot and temptation. 

He positioned himself between them, a serpent coiled in the garden, barring any retreat. One hand dropped to the inside of your thigh, fingers trailing higher like a creeping passion vine. You felt yourself relax into the sheets, widening the passage of your legs for him without even meaning to.

He watched you earnestly, like you were the only holy thing he put faith in. His hands reached for the soft cotton of your panties, like he was peeling back a church veil, uncovering something too sacred for daylight. When he pulled the fabric aside and leaned in, he let out a moan like he was breathing in sin straight from the source. 

A sound rumbled from his chest, low and devout. “Oh God almighty,” he near groaned, voice thick with awe and hunger. “Ain’t you a sight, darlin’.”

In a flash, your panties were off, and you were exposed to him, the night air, and God Himself. You knew you should've been embarrassed; the shame should’ve been eating you alive. But even with your bleeding center, raw and red as a dogwood bloom in spring, all you can do is look down at the demon between your legs. 

By the lord, he’s drooling. Thick spit glistening on his chin, dripping slowly like sap from tree bark. His eyes were lit with hunger that bordered on worship.

You’d been taught since the first time you bled that it was a curse. That it made you unclean. A doorway for devils, a mark of Eve’s sin carved fresh each month into your flesh. Mama said that blood like that was how the devil spoke. That it had to be washed out, silenced with scripture, buried beneath cotton drawers and long skirts and locked knees.

But here he was, salivating at the sight alone, eyes blown wide as if your body’s bleeding was the beginning of a gospel only he could read.

That’s why when he said, “You smell so sweet, darlin’. You gonna let me taste you?”

You nodded, “Yes.”

His mouth is on you in an instant. 

You nearly let out a scream, but your continued piousness stitched your lips shut. Your fingers twisted into the blankets instead, clenching around them until your bones hurt. He licks a stripe up your center, pressing harder against the top where something shoots hot white spikes down your spine.

Stars blink in and out of view behind your eyelids like fireflies caught in a mason jar. His mouth moves slowly, like easing into cold creekwater. He leaves little licks on that tender bud of nerves at the apex, drawing sounds from you like spirits from a grave, keening soft in the back of your throat. His mouth feels like the first warm rays of a new summer sun breaking through the clouds as his tongue glides up and then rolls over that button. He presses a sugary sweet kiss to your slit, hands prying open your legs as wide as they’d go. 

Turns out, that sweetness of his was just borrowed time—grace before the ruin.

He growled into you, like something pulled from the floorboards of the church, thick with rot. Then his wickedness grins, all teeth and no mercy. He grips your hips tight, nails sinking into your flesh like marks left by the devil making a covenant. His tongue works you over with near evil intent. He consumes you like it’s the only desire he’s ever had, gulping down every drop of your essence like it’s a sacrament. Like you’re the altar and he’s been starving for centuries. 

Your legs shake in his hold as the moans you’re holding back threaten to spill out, scattering like dandelion seeds caught in the wind. When he moves to suck on that delightful spot, again you can’t help but cry out, “Oh God!”

The snarl that tears from his throat thrums through your core, like a storm shaking the rafters. When you glance down, you’re met with eyes glowing the color of fresh blood spilled on altar steps. Feral and lit with something not of this world. A predator’s gaze.

“No name you should be sayin’ but mine,” he growls, voice rough as bark and twice as deep. “Remmick, sweetheart. That’s all you need.”

“Remmick,” you say breathlessly, testing how his name rolls from your tongue. Like the strike of a match just before it catches fire.

He hums low in his throat. “That’s right, baby,” he said before his face disappeared inside you once again. 

Something warm is coiling in your lower belly, winding you up like a pocket watch about to snap. Each swipe, each roll of his tongue, has that feeling growing tighter and tighter. Your voice pushes past your mouth in quiet cracks. 

It’s so wrong, downright wicked, what he’s doing to you. Wrong that you’re lettin’ him, wrong still that you don’t want to stop. Can’t even bring yourself to think about stopping, not when it feels like this. Like salvation dressed in silken sin. How can something born of such pleasure be damnable?

It surely doesn’t feel like Hell. It feels like Heaven’s front porch, and you’re laid bare beneath a man that knows every secret you swore to bury. If this is damnation, then maybe it’s always been stitched into your skin. Maybe Remmick’s touch ain’t dragging you down… maybe it’s just showing you where you already belong.

That thought should scare you senseless, but you can’t feel anything aside from him drinking from you so deeply, like he’s trying to crawl inside of you.

He speeds up his ministrations, his tongue raking across your core, licking all the way up to that sweet spot. You gasp as a fire begins to accompany the ringing coil in your belly. His mouth is so warm against you, laced with carnal motive. Everything sounds so soaked down where he works: the glide of his tongue, the quell of your blood, and the wetness from your arousal. 

He’s done being slow; he’s done teasing you to death. The unhurried air about him is gone as he devours everything your cunt gives him.

“Damn,” he groans against you, lips moving to kiss the inside of your thigh. “Never tasted anything quite like you.” Then, quicker than you can draw a shaky breath, there was a small sting. A sharp and sudden feeling, like the prickle of a thorn. You felt his fang split the sensitive skin, felt the warmth of your blood bloom from the cut. 

Remmick chuckled low, the sound curling around you like smoke. “My bad,” he drawled, voice thick with mock apology. “Sorry, darlin’.” But the glint in his eyes betrayed him; it hadn’t been an accident, and you both knew it. Before you could answer—not that you had the breath to—he dipped his head again, tongue darting out to lick the trail of blood. 

His eyes flash for a split moment, and a rumble of pure animalistic satisfaction comes from his chest. He redoubles his efforts once his mouth is back on your center. 

You're shaking all over now, barely able to conceal your growing cries. You slap one hand over your mouth, the other going to fist in his hair.

His tongue focuses on that bud, circling over it with obscene faithfulness. Your fingers in his hair pull without meaning to, making him shudder between your legs, moaning into you like he wants you to rip the strands from his scalp. 

Remmick moves his attention lower, to the entrance of your very being. His tongue delves into that passage, thrusting deep enough it had your back arching off the ground. His nose nudges your bundle of nerves in time with the press of his tongue. 

That coil in your lower belly threatens to give. Fireworks burst in your vision as his mouth stays locked in that position. Thrust, nudge, thrust, nudge. Even as your hips begin to rise up to meet him, he holds you still with his arms bolted around your thighs. 

You squeal behind your palm, tears pricking in your eyes as the feeling that’s been building burns through you. Like the holiest Hellfire merged together by your coupling. It races across your every nerve ending, Remmick groaning when he feels you clench around his tongue.

And he doesn’t stop, not when your thighs close around his head. Not when your hand in his hair tries to pull him up. Not when you whimper his name to get his attention. 

He keeps running his tongue over you, cleaning up every drop of blood, and your arousal. When he finally does move away, raising his face to look at you, he’s an absolute mess.

The silence that followed was a different kind of divine. 

The kind never heard in churches, but in the hush of a forest after a storm. Not peaceful, but the aching stillness of something changed. Something that was never coming back. 

You laid curled in the mess of it, linens beneath your back, the ghost of him still between your thighs. Shame and satisfaction bleed together in your bones. 

Your body was still trembling as Remmick leaned back on his heels. His hands smoothed up your thighs, calming the shaking even if he didn’t mean to. His eyes no longer glowed red, but they hadn’t dulled either. They watched you like a man who’d found God in a place no one else thought to look.

“Well now,” he said, voice lowly laced with honey. “Look at you.”

You flushed, turning your face into the crook of your arm, ashamed of the tears still clinging to your lashes and the heat still pooling between your legs even after everything. Your body felt unfamiliar, like you’d been rewritten. 

Remmick chuckled, soft and smug, but not unkind. “Didn’t think you’d come apart like that. Thought I’d have to work harder.”

You shot him a look then. Half glaring and half gawking at him. 

He grinned wider, teeth white but not sharp now. “Ah, don’t give me that face. You should be proud, sugar. That was a kind of worship, what you just gave me.”

He reached for you, slow as syrup spilling from a spoon, hands sliding over your hips. You flinched under his touch from sensitivity, your skin feeling fuzzy with little aftershocks. And your body, the traitorous thing it was, arched into his palms like a flower reaching for sun.

“We ain’t done,” he said, voice curling low in his chest. 

Your breath caught when he dipped to kiss your belly. Once. Then again. Moving higher as he went, his lethal canines scraping along your flesh. 

You glanced down to look at him, gasping when you see what’s now decorating your stomach. Bloody kiss marks are smeared across your skin. His messy face making you stained right along with him. 

Remmick smiled against you, eyes flickering up to meet your stunned expression. “Let me ruin you proper,” he whispered with soiled lips. 

He moaned into you, eyes still locked on yours as he slid a hand between your legs. One of his fingers pressed into that passage, same as his tongue had done moments ago. 

You gasped at the foreign feeling, head pressing back into the pillow.

“Nuh uh,” he scolded. “Look at me, sweetheart.”

You do without hesitation, eyes darting back down as if beguiled. His mouth continued to press kisses to your belly while his finger worked in and out of you. Your breath began to quicken again, sparks of that fire reigniting. He added a second finger, making you whine at the intrusion. But it wasn’t an awful feeling; it was strange but satisfying. 

“Remmick!” You cried out when he curled them upwards, pressing against something that brought tears to your eyes. He kept that movement up once, twice, and three times before you went to close your legs around him. A pathetic few tears spilling over. 

“Oh, darlin’.” He cooed, prying your legs back open. He moved then, body stretched over yours, chest brushing yours with each breath he didn’t need to take, his weight settling on top of you. 

You shivered as you sniffled, caught somewhere between the aftershocks and the ache for more. 

“Shh, sweetheart,” he murmured, brushing his nose against your cheek. “I know what you need. I know how to help.”

One of his hands slid into your hair, fingers gliding through the strands with a sweetness you hadn’t expected. He stroked along your scalp, petting you like something precious. Like you hadn’t just let him defile you beneath your daddy’s roof. Like you weren’t still marked by his mouth and your own undoing.

“You want me to help you?” He asked, a certain amount of smugness dripping into his tone. 

You gave a soft, half-broken nod. 

That was all it took for him to rip your nightgown over your head. You had no time to be concerned for your modesty, because he was already fumbling with his belt, unbuckling and unzipping in a haste that was almost reeling. He tore the suspenders from his shoulders, shoving his trousers down before working on his shirt. Before you could fully prepare yourself, he was back over you. Your naked bodies perfectly aligned with each other. 

“Ain’t no sense in drawin’ it out,” he spoke against your throat, voice thick and taut with something close to hunger. “Cunt’s already beggin’ f’me. 

His hips rocked forward, not yet inside but threatening, the hard press of him sliding along the heat of you. You gasped, legs twitching to close around him, but he growled—low and guttural—grabbing your thighs and spreading them wider, anchoring them with his own. 

“Promise it won’t hurt too bad,” he said, kissing the corner of your mouth, gentler than he had any right to be.

Your fingers clutched at his back, at his arms, nails catching skin, but he didn’t flinch. If anything, it made him press in harder, dragging the thick length of him through your slickness with a hiss through his teeth.

“God,” he muttered, head dropping to your shoulder. “You’re soaked for me. Didn’t think you could get sweeter, but damn.”

Then, with no further warning, he pushed inside.

The air left your lungs in one shattered breath, back arching off the bed as the stretch burned through you. He filled you in one steady thrust, rough but precise, like a man who knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t see the point in waiting.

“Remmick—” you whimpered, voice high and caught between a sob and a moan.

“I know, I know,” he rasped, pressing a kiss to your temple even as he drew back to surge forward again. “It’s hurting so good, ain’t it? But you can take it. You will take it.”

He set a hard rhythm, driving into you in a way that’d leave you sore later on. You swore you could feel his craving wrap around you with each thrust, tight and invisible, choking out everything else. Your hands had started fisted around the sheets, knuckles bone-white, but now they raked up his spine, wanting just to feel him. His muscles jumped beneath your touch, a tension coiled tighter than wire. 

With your hands occupied, your moans and cries were free to float through the air. Remmick’s hold on your hips allowed him to pull you into him. He did so roughly, as if to remind you where he was, what you’d let him do. 

An especially harsh snap of his hips had you sucking in a stuttering breath. It felt like you were being split apart, like a log sliced through with an axe, but it was the most divine thing you’d ever experienced. He made love to you deeply enough that it felt like he was caressing your soul.

Remmick is groaning and panting above you, seemingly losing his own composure right along with you. Cock pressing into you as one hand moves from your hips to between your bodies. His fingers find that bud again, pinching and teasing it until you were crying again. 

“Keep crying, sweetheart,” he moaned into your neck. “Y’tears are just as sweet.”

You shuddered at his words, tears still spilling, core clenching around his length. He grunted at the increased tightness, breathing deeply to steady himself as he drove inside of you with more urgency than before. His tongue darts out to lick up your throat before sucking a mark there. His fangs teasing their sharp edges over the sensitive skin. 

“Remmick, I…” Your damp eyes rolled back as a loud moan interrupted you. The incessant movement of his hips made it hard to form a coherent thought. Along with his fingers swirling your bud with faster and faster motions. Your body quivered as you felt that fire build up once more. 

“You gonna cum again so soon?” He chuckles, basking in the control he’s got over you. 

“Yes, please,” you can’t help but plead. 

His eyes flash that dangerous crimson, fangs bearing as he grins down at you. He picks up his pace, all but battering his cock into you. He still works his digits over your bud, overwhelming you with the onslaught of feelings. 

Your belly coils tighter and tighter like before. That warmth bubbling within you, begging to boil over. When it finally does, it’s the most violent thing you’ve experienced. It burns but in the most euphoric sensations, making you clamp down around him as you nearly scream his name. 

Remmick paws at you, movements faltering just a bit. He moves your legs higher up on his waist, letting himself sink deeper inside of you. Stars blink in and out of your vision; you whimper as you feel him invade every corner of your being.

His moans become more frequent, more loud. His hold on you becomes more bruising with each sharp thrust. Watching him lose even a piece of his control seems to draw out your release. You clench around him again, making an almost pained grunt leave his parted lips. 

“I need—” he mumbles barely audibly before he’s slicing a fang along your neck. That small, recognizable sting blooms across your skin again as he splits it open. Hot blood flows down your throat, but he’s licking it up before covering the cut with his mouth. 

He sucks your blood from the wound, still slamming into your center. It only takes a few more before he freezes, a deep moan reverberating against your skin. Warmth seeps into you as he finishes. 

You both remained still for a moment. The room smelling of sweat and sin, like a baptism gone wrong. Every shuddering breath you took felt like it snagged on something unseen, a seam torn open and left to bleed. 

Your body trembled beneath him, limbs slack, soul aching in the hollows where his name had carved itself. There was a warmth between your legs that wasn’t all yours and a dull sting at your throat that pulsed in time with your heartbeat. His mark. His claim. And you had let him do all that and more. 

Remmick collapsed beside you, not with the grace of shadow, but with the slow, satisfied sprawl of something fed full. One arm draped heavy across your waist, anchoring you in place like he feared you might float away.

Neither of you spoke for some time, only breathed each other in. The tip of his nose brushing against your temple as if he needed to memorize the scent of you post-ruin.

Then his voice came, low, rough-edged, and tender, like gravel soaked in molasses. “You alright, lamb?”

Your throat was too raw for speech, so you just nodded, once or twice, eyes fluttering closed.

He shifted, careful this time, easing the tangled linens higher to shield you. His fingers found your hair again, dragging through it in absent strokes. Not with lust now, but with reverence. Like you were a song he hadn’t heard in a long time.

“You’re shakin’,” he murmured.

“It’s a good shake,” you whispered back.

He grinned as he kissed your shoulder with blood stained lips.

You turned your face into his chest, where his heart didn’t beat but his warmth still lingered. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” you confessed.

He curled around you like the dark curling around a dying candle. “That’s alright,” he assured. “Reckon you never liked who you were before anyhow.”

You couldn’t think about how he was probably right. Couldn’t think about how at some point he’d have to leave. Maybe never come back. You didn’t want to think about going back to normal preacher’s girl life after this. After him. 

Even if it meant your soul was damned, you didn’t care much. You just wanted to be his, not saved, but his.

Outside, the cicadas sang like mourners, but in his arms, you knew salvation. Not the kind Heaven promised, but the kind that came with being held in the devil’s gentle hands.

﹙taglist﹚ @001-side

Listened to Ethel Cain on repeat while I wrote this.

[thunderfaucet]

Mercy Made Flesh

one-shot

Remmick x fem!reader

summary: In the heat-choked hush of the Mississippi Delta, you answer a knock you swore would never come. Remmick—unaging, unholy, unforgettable—returns to collect what was promised. What follows is not romance, but ritual. A slow, sensual surrender to a hunger older than the Trinity itself.

wc: 13.1k

a/n: Listen. I didn’t mean to simp for Vampire Jack O’Connell—but here we are. I make no apologies for letting Remmick bite first and ask questions never. Thank you to my bestie Nat (@kayharrisons) for beta reading and hyping me up, without her this fic wouldn't exist, everyone say thank you Nat!

warnings: vampirism, southern gothic erotica, blood drinking as intimacy, canon-typical violence, explicit sexual content, oral sex (f!receiving), first time, bloodplay, biting, marking, monsterfucking (soft edition), religious imagery, devotion as obsession, gothic horror vibes, worship kink, consent affirmed, begging, dirty talk, gentle ruin, haunting eroticism, power imbalance, slow seduction, soul-binding, immortal x mortal, he wants to keep her forever, she lets him, fem!reader, second person pov, 1930s mississippi delta, house that breathes, you will be fed upon emotionally & literally

tags: @xhoneymoonx134

likes, comments, and reblogs appreciated! please enjoy

Mississippi Delta, 1938

The heat hadn’t broken in days.

Not even after sunset, when the sky turned the color of old bruises and the crickets started singing like they were being paid to. It was the kind of heat that soaked into the floorboards, that crept beneath your thin cotton slip and clung to your back like sweat-slicked hands. The air was syrupy, heavy with magnolia and something murkier—soil, maybe. River water. Something that made you itch beneath your skin.

Your cottage sat just outside the edge of town, past the schoolhouse where you spent your days sorting through ledgers and lesson plans that no one but you ever really seemed to care about. It was modest—two rooms and a porch, set back behind a crumbling white-picket fence and swallowed by trees that whispered in the dark. A little sanctuary tucked into the Delta, surrounded by cornfields, creeks, and ghosts.

The kind of place a person could disappear if they wanted to. The kind of place someone could find you…if they were patient enough.

You stood in front of the sink, rinsing out a chipped enamel cup, your hands moving automatically. The oil lamp on the kitchen table flickered with each breath of wind slipping through the cracks in the warped window frame. A cicada screamed in the distance, then another, and then the whole world was humming in chorus.

And beneath it—beneath the cicadas, and the wind, and the nightbirds—you felt something shift.

A quiet. Too quiet.

You turned your head. Listened harder.

Nothing.

Not even the frogs.

Your hand paused in the dishwater. Fingers trembling just a little. It wasn’t like you to be spooked by the dark. You’d grown up in it. Learned to make friends with shadows. Learned not to flinch when things moved just out of sight.

But this?

This was different.

It was as if the night was holding its breath.

And then—

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Not loud. Not frantic. But final.

Your body went stiff. The cup slipped beneath the water and bumped the side of the basin with a hollow clink.

No one ever came this far out after sundown. No one but—

You shook your head, almost hard enough to rattle something loose.

No.

He was gone. That part of your life was buried.

You made sure of it.

Still, your bare feet moved toward the door like they weren’t yours. Soft against the creaky wood. Slow. You reached for the small revolver you kept in the drawer beside the door frame, thumbed the hammer back.

Your hand rested on the knob.

Another knock. This time, softer.

Almost...polite.

The porch light had been dead for weeks, so you couldn’t see who was waiting on the other side. But the air—something in the air—told you.

It was him.

You didn’t answer. Not right away.

You stood there with your palm flat against the rough wood, your forehead nearly touching it too—eyes shut, breath shallow. The air on the other side didn’t stir like it should’ve. No footfalls creaking the porch. No shuffle of boots on sun-bleached planks. Just stillness. Waiting.

And underneath your ribs, something began to ache. Something you hadn’t let yourself feel in years.

You didn’t know his name, not back then. You only knew his eyes—gold in the shadows. Red when caught in the light. Like a firelight in the dark. Like a blood red moon through stained-glass windows.

And his voice. Low. Dragging vowels like syrup. A Southern accent that didn’t come from any map you’d ever seen—older than towns, older than state lines. A voice that had told you, seven years ago, with impossible calm:

"You’ll know when it’s time."

You knew. Your hands trembled against your sides. But you didn’t back away. Some part of you knew how useless running would be.

The knob beneath your hand felt cold. Too cold for Mississippi in August.

You turned it.

The door opened slow, hinges whining like they were trying to warn you. You stepped back instinctively—just one step—and then he was there.

Remmick.

Still tall, still lean in that devastating way—like his body was carved from something hard and mean, but shaped to tempt. He wore a crisp white shirt rolled to the elbows, suspenders hanging loose from his hips, and trousers that looked far too clean for a man who walked through the dirt. His hair was messy in that intentional way, brown and swept back like he’d been running hands through it all night. Stubble lined his sharp jaw, catching the lamplight just so.

But it was his face that rooted you to the floor. That hollowed out your breath.

Still young. Still wrong.

Not a wrinkle, not a scar. Not a mark of time. He hadn’t aged a day.

And his eyes—oh, God, his eyes.

They caught the lamp behind you and lit up red, bright and glinting, like the embers of a dying fire. Not human. Not even pretending.

"Hello, dove."

His voice curled into your bones like cigarette smoke. You didn’t answer. You couldn’t.

You hated how your body reacted.

Hated that you could still feel it—like something old and molten stirring between your thighs, a flicker of the same heat you’d felt that night in the alley, back when you were too desperate to care what kind of creature answered your prayer.

He looked you over once. Not with hunger. With certainty. Like he already knew how this would end. Like he already owned you.

"You remember, don’t you?" he asked.

"I came to collect."

And your voice—when it finally came—was little more than a whisper.

"You can’t be real."

That smile. That slight twitch at the corner of his mouth. Wolfish. Slow.

"You promised."

You wanted to shut the door. Slam it. Deadbolt it. But your hand didn’t move.

Remmick didn’t step forward, not yet. He stood just outside the threshold, framed by night and cypress trees and the distant flicker of heat lightning beyond the fields. The air around him pulsed with something old—older than the land, older than you, older than anything you could name.

He tilted his head the way animals do, watching you, letting the silence thicken like molasses between you.

"Still living out here all on your own," he murmured, gaze drifting over your shoulders, into the small, tidy kitchen behind you. "Hung your laundry on the line this morning. Blue dress, lace hem. Favorite one, ain’t it?"

Your stomach clenched. That dress hadn’t seen a neighbor’s eye all week.

"You've been watching me," you said, your voice low, unsure if it was accusation or realization.

"I’ve been waiting," he said. "Not the same thing."

You swallowed hard. Your breath caught in your throat like a thorn. The wind shifted, and you caught the faintest trace of something—dried tobacco, smoke, rain-soaked dirt, and beneath it, the iron-sweet tinge of blood.

Not fresh. Not violent. Just…present. Like it lived in him.

"I paid my debt," you whispered.

"No, you survived it," he said, stepping up onto the first board of the porch. The wood didn’t creak beneath his weight. "And that’s only half the bargain."

He still hadn’t crossed the threshold.

The stories came back to you, the ones whispered by old women with trembling hands and ash crosses pressed to their doorways—vampires couldn’t enter unless invited. But you hadn’t invited him, not this time.

"You don’t have permission," you said.

He smiled, eyes flashing red again.

"You gave it, seven years ago."

Your breath hitched.

"I was a girl," you said.

"You were desperate," he corrected. "And honest. Desperation makes people honest in ways they can’t be twice. You knew what you were offering me, even if you didn’t understand it. Your promise had teeth."

The wind pushed against your back, as if urging you forward.

Remmick stepped closer, just enough for the shadows to kiss the line of his throat, the hollow of his collarbone. His voice dropped, intimate now—dragging across your skin like a fingertip behind the ear.

"You asked for a miracle. I gave it to you. And now I’m here for what’s mine."

Your heart thudded violently in your chest.

"I didn’t think you’d come."

"That’s the thing about monsters, dove." He leaned down, lips almost grazing the curve of your jaw. "We always do."

And then—

He stepped back.

The wind stopped.

The night fell quiet again, like the world had paused just to watch what you’d do next.

"I’ll wait out here till you’re ready," he said, turning toward the swing on your porch and settling into it like he had all the time in the world. "But don’t make me knock twice. Wouldn’t be polite."

The swing groaned beneath him as it rocked gently, back and forth.

You stood there frozen in the doorway, one bare foot still inside the house, the other brushing the edge of the porch.

You’d made a promise.

And he was here to keep it.

The door stayed open. Just enough for the night to reach inside.

You didn’t move.

Your body stood still but your mind wandered—back to that night in the alley, to the smell of blood and piss and riverwater, your knees soaked in your brother’s lifeblood as you screamed for help that never came. Except it did. It came in the shape of a man who didn’t breathe, didn’t blink, didn’t make promises the way mortals did.

It came in the shape of him.

You thought time would wash it away. That the years would smooth the edges of his voice in your memory, dull the sharpness of his presence. But now, with him just outside your door, it all returned like a fever dream—hot, all-consuming, too real to outrun.

You turned away from the threshold, slowly, carefully, as if the floor might cave in under you. Your hands trembled as you reached for the oil lamp on the table, adjusting the flame lower until it flickered like a dying heartbeat.

The silence behind you dragged, deep and waiting. He didn’t speak again. Didn’t call for you.

He didn’t have to.

You moved through the house in slow circles. Touching things. Straightening them. Folding a dishcloth. Setting a book back on the shelf, even though you’d already read it twice. You tried to pretend you weren’t thinking about the man on your porch. But the heat of him pressed against the back of your mind like a hand.

You could feel him out there. Not just physically—but in you, somehow. Like the air had shifted around his shape, and the longer he lingered, the more your body remembered what it had felt like to stand in front of something not quite human and still want.

You passed the mirror in the hallway and paused.

Your reflection looked undone. Not in the way your hair had fallen from its pin, or the flush across your cheeks, but deeper—like something inside you had been cracked open. You touched your own throat, right where you imagined his mouth might go.

No bite.

Not yet.

But you swore you could feel phantom teeth.

You went back to the door, holding your breath, and looked at him through the screen.

He hadn’t moved. He sat on the swing, one leg stretched out, the other bent lazily beneath him, arms slung across the backrest like he’d always belonged there. A cigarette burned between two fingers, the tip flaring orange as he dragged from it. The scent of it hit you—rich, earthy, and somehow foreign, like something imported from a place no longer on the map.

He didn’t look at you right away.

Then, slowly, he did.

Red eyes caught yours.

He smiled, small and slow, like he was reading a page of you he’d already memorized.

"Thought you’d shut the door by now," he said.

"I should have," you answered.

"But you didn’t."

His voice curled into the quiet.

You stepped out onto the porch, barefoot, the boards warm beneath your soles. He didn’t move to greet you. He didn’t rise. He just watched you walk toward him like he’d been watching in dreams you never remembered having.

The swing groaned as you sat down beside him, a careful space between you.

His shoulder brushed yours.

You stared straight ahead, out into the night. A mist was beginning to rise off the distant fields. The moon hung low and orange like a wound in the sky.

Somewhere in the bayou, a whippoorwill called, long and mournful.

"How long have you been watching me?" you asked.

"Since before you knew to look."

"Why now?"

He turned toward you. His voice was velvet-wrapped iron.

"Because now…you’re ripe for the pickin’.”

You didn’t remember falling asleep.

One moment you were on the porch beside him, listening to the slow groan of the swing and the way the crickets held their breath when he exhaled, the next you were waking in your bed, the sheets tangled around your legs like they were trying to hold you down.

The house was too quiet.

No birdsong. No creak of the windmill out back. No rustle of the sycamores that scraped against your bedroom window on stormy nights.

Just stillness.

And scent.

It clung to the cotton of your nightdress. Tobacco smoke, sweat, rain. Him.

You sat up slowly, pressing your hand to your chest. Your heart thudded like it was trying to remember who it belonged to. The lamp beside your bed had burned down to a stub. A trickle of wax curled like a vein down the side of the glass.

Your mouth tasted like smoke and guilt. Your thighs ached in that low, humming way—though you couldn’t say why. Nothing had happened. Not really.

But something had changed.

You felt it under your skin, in the place where blood meets breath.

The floor was cool under your feet as you moved. You didn’t dress. Just pulled a robe over your slip and stepped into the hallway. The house felt heavier than usual, thick with the ghost of his presence. Every corner held a whisper. Every shadow a shape.

You opened the front door.

The porch was empty.

The swing still rocked gently, as if someone had only just stood up from it.

A folded piece of paper lay on the top step, weighted down by a smooth river stone.

You picked it up with trembling hands.

Come.

That was all it said. One word. But it rang through your bones like gospel. Like a vow.

You looked out across the field. A narrow dirt road stretched beyond the tree line, overgrown but clear. You’d never dared follow it. That road didn’t belong to you.

It belonged to him.

And now…so did you.

You didn’t bring anything with you.

Not a suitcase. Not a shawl. Not a Bible tucked under your arm for comfort.

Just yourself.

And the road.

The hem of your slip was already damp by the time you reached the edge of the field. Dew clung to your ankles like cold fingers, and the earth was soft beneath your feet—fresh from last night’s storm, the kind that never really breaks the heat, only deepens it. The moon had gone down, but the sky was beginning to bruise with that blue-black ink that comes before sunrise. Everything smelled like wet grass, magnolia, and the faint rot of old wood.

The path curved, narrowing as it passed through trees that leaned in too close. Their branches kissed above you like they were whispering secrets into each other’s leaves. Spanish moss hung like veils from the oaks, dripping silver in the fading dark. It made the world feel smaller. Quieter. As if you were walking into something sacred—or something doomed.

A crow cawed once in the distance. Sharp. Hollow. You didn’t flinch.

There was no sound of wheels. No car waiting. Just the road and the fog and the promise you'd made.

And then you saw it.

The house.

Tucked deep in the grove, half-swallowed by vines and time, it rose like a memory from the earth. A decaying plantation, left to rot in the wet belly of the Delta. Its bones were still beautiful—white columns streaked with black mildew, a grand porch that sagged like a mouth missing teeth, shuttered windows with iron latches rusted shut. Ivy grew up the sides like it was trying to strangle the place. Or maybe protect it.

You stood there at the edge of the clearing, breath caught in your throat.

He’d brought you here.

Or maybe he’d always been here. Waiting. Dreaming of the moment you’d return to him without even knowing it.

A shape moved behind one of the upstairs curtains. Quick. Barely there.

You didn’t run.

Your bare foot found the first step.

It groaned like it recognized you.

The door was already open.

Not wide—just enough for you to know it had been waiting.

And you stepped inside.

The air inside was colder.

Not the kind of cold that came from breeze or shade—but from stillness, from the absence of sun and time. A hush so thick it felt like you were walking underwater. Like the house had held its breath for decades and only now began to exhale.

Dust spiraled in the faint light seeping through fractured windows, casting soft halos through the dark. The wooden floor beneath your feet was warped and groaning, but clean. Not in any natural sense—there was no broom that had touched these boards. No polish or soap.

But it had been kept.

The air didn’t smell like rot or mildew. It smelled like cedar. Like old leather. And deeper beneath that, like him.

He hadn’t lit any lamps.

Just the fireplace, burning low, glowing embers pulsing orange-red at the back of a cavernous hearth. The flame danced shadows across the faded wallpaper, peeling in long strips like dead skin. A high-backed chair faced the fire, velvet blackened from age, its silhouette looming like something alive.

You swallowed, lips dry, and stepped further in.

Your voice didn’t carry. It didn’t even try.

Remmick was nowhere in sight.

But he was here.

You could feel him in the walls, in the way the house seemed to lean closer with every step you took.

You passed through the parlor, past a dusty grand piano with one ivory key cracked down the middle. Past oil portraits too old to make out, their eyes blurred with time. Past a single vase of dried wildflowers, colorless now, but carefully arranged.

You paused in the doorway to the drawing room, your hand resting lightly on the frame.

A whisper of air moved behind you.

Then—

A hand.

Not grabbing. Not harsh. Just the light press of fingers against the small of your back, palm flat and warm through the thin cotton of your slip.

You froze.

He was behind you.

So close you could feel his breath at your neck. Not warm, not cold—just present. Like wind through a crack in the door. Like the memory of a touch before it lands.

His voice was low, close to your ear.

"You came."

You didn’t answer.

"You always would have."

You wanted to say no. Wanted to deny it. But you stood there trembling under his hand, your heartbeat so loud you were sure he could hear it.

Maybe that was why he smiled.

He stepped around you slowly, letting his fingers graze the side of your waist as he moved. His eyes glinted red in the firelight, catching on you like a flame drawn to dry kindling.

He looked at you like he was already undressing you.

Not your clothes—your will.

And it was already unraveling.

You’d suspected he wasn’t born of this soil.

Not just because of the way he moved—like he didn’t quite belong to gravity—but because of the way he spoke. Like time hadn’t worn the edges off his words the way it had with everyone else. His voice curled around vowels like smoke curling through keyholes. Rich and low, but laced with something older. Something foreign. Something that made the hair at the nape of your neck rise when he spoke too softly, too close.

He didn’t speak like a man from the Delta.

He spoke like something older than it.

Older than the country. Maybe older than God.

Remmick stopped in front of you, lit only by firelight.

His eyes had dulled from red to something deeper—like old garnet held to a candle. His shirt was open at the collar now, suspenders hanging slack, the buttons on his sleeves rolled to his elbows. His forearms were dusted with faint scars that looked like they had stories. His skin was pale in the glow, but not lifeless. He looked like marble warmed by touch.

He studied you for a long time.

You weren’t sure if it was your face he was reading, or something beneath it. Something you couldn’t hide.

"You look just like your mother," he said finally.

Your breath caught.

"You knew her?"

A soft smirk curled at the corner of his mouth.

"I’ve known a lot of people, dove. I just never forget the ones with your blood."

You didn’t ask what he meant. Not yet.

There was something heavy in his tone—something laced with memory that stretched back far further than it should. You had guessed, years ago, in the sleepless weeks after that alleyway miracle, that he was not new to this world. That his youth was a trick of the skin. A lie worn like a mask.

You’d read every folklore book you could get your hands on. Every whisper of vampire lore scratched into the margins of ledgers, stuffed between church hymnals, scribbled on the backs of newspapers.

Some said they aged. Slowly. Elegantly.

Others said they didn’t age at all. That they existed outside time. Beyond it.

You didn’t know how old Remmick was.

But something in your bones told you the truth.

Five hundred. Six hundred, maybe more.

A man who remembered empires. A man who had watched cities rise and burn. Who had danced in plague-slick ballrooms and kissed queens before they were beheaded. A man who had lived so long that names no longer mattered. Only debts. And blood.

And you’d given him both.

He stepped closer now, slow and deliberate.

"Yer heart’s gallopin’ like it thinks I’m here to take it."

You flinched. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right.

"You said you didn’t want my blood," you whispered.

"I don’t." He tilted his head. "Not yet."

"Then what do you want?"

His smile didn’t reach his eyes.

"You."

He said it like it was a simple thing. Like the rain wanting the river. Like the grave wanting the body.

You swallowed hard.

"Why me?"

His gaze dragged down your frame, unhurried, like a man admiring a painting he’d stolen once and hidden from the world.

"Because you belong to me. You gave yourself freely. No bargain’s ever tasted so sweet."

Your throat tightened.

"I didn’t know what I was agreeing to."

"You did," he said, softly now, stepping close enough that his chest nearly brushed yours. "You knew. Your soul knew. Even if your head didn’t catch up."

You opened your mouth to protest, to say something, anything that would push back this slow suffocation of certainty—

But his hand came up to your jaw. Fingers feather-light. Not forcing. Just holding. Just there.

"And you’ve been thinkin’ about me ever since," he said.

Not a question. A statement.

You didn’t answer.

He leaned in, his breath ghosting over your cheek, his voice a rasp against your ear.

"You dream of me, don’t you?"

Your hands trembled at your sides.

"I don’t—"

"You wake wet. Ache in your belly. You don’t know why. But I do."

You let your eyes fall shut, shame burning behind them like fire.

"Fuckin’ knew it," he murmured, almost reverent. "You smell like want, dove. You always have.”

His hand didn’t move. It just stayed there at your jaw, thumb ghosting slow along the hollow beneath your cheekbone. A touch so gentle it made your knees ache. Because it wasn’t the roughness that undid you—it was the restraint.

He could’ve taken.

He didn’t.

Not yet.

His gaze held yours, slow and unblinking, red still smoldering in the center of his irises like the dying core of a flame that refused to go out.

"Say it," he murmured.

Your lips parted, but nothing came.

"I can smell it," he said, voice low, rich as molasses. "Your shame. Your want. You’ve been livin’ like a nun with a beast inside her, and no one knows but me."

You hated how your breath stuttered. Hated more that your thighs pressed together when he said it.

"Why do you talk like that," you whispered, barely able to get the words out, "like you already know what I’m feeling?"

His fingers slid down, grazing the side of your neck, stopping just before the pulse thudding there.

"Because I do."

"That’s not fair."

He smiled, slow and crooked, nothing kind in it.

"No, dove. It ain’t."

You hated him.

You hated how beautiful he was in this light, sleeves rolled, veins prominent in his arms, shirt hanging open just enough to show the faint line of a scar that trailed beneath his collarbone. A body shaped by time, not by vanity. Not perfect. Just true. Like someone carved him for a purpose and let the flaws stay because they made him real.

He looked like sin and the sermon that came after.

Remmick moved closer. You didn’t retreat.

His hand flattened over your sternum now, right above your heartbeat, the warmth of him pressing through the cotton of your slip like it meant to seep in. He leaned down, mouth near yours, not kissing, just breathing.

"You gave yourself to me once," he said. "I’m only here to collect the rest."

"You saved my brother."

"I saved you. You just didn’t know it yet."

A shiver rippled down your spine.

His hand moved lower, skimming the curve of your ribs, hovering just at the soft flare of your waist. You could feel the heat rolling off him like smoke from a coalbed. His body didn’t radiate warmth the way a man’s should—but something older. Wilder. Like the earth’s own breath in summer. Like the hush of a storm right before it split the sky.

"And if I tell you no?" you asked, barely more than a breath.

His eyes flicked to yours, unreadable.

"I’ll wait."

You weren’t expecting that.

He smiled again, this time softer, almost cruel in its patience.

"I’ve waited centuries for sweeter things than you. But that don’t mean I won’t keep my hands on you ‘til you change your mind."

"You think I will?"

"You already have."

Your chest rose sharply, breath stung with heat.

"You think this is love?"

He laughed, low and dangerous, the sound curling around your ribs.

"No," he said. "This is hunger. Love comes later."

Then his mouth brushed your jaw—not a kiss, just the graze of lips against skin—and every nerve in your body arched to meet it.

Your knees buckled, barely.

He caught your waist in one hand, steadying you with maddening ease.

"I’m gonna ruin you," he whispered against your throat, his nose dragging lightly along your skin. "But I’ll be so gentle the first time you’ll beg me to do it again."

And God help you—

You wanted him to.

The house didn’t sleep.

Not the way houses were meant to.

It breathed.

The walls exhaled heat and memory, the floors creaked even when no one stepped, and somewhere in the rafters above your room, something paced slowly back and forth, back and forth, like a beast too restless to settle. The kind of place built with its own pulse.

You’d spent the rest of the night—if you could call it that—in a room that wasn’t yours, wearing nothing but a cotton shift and your silence. You hadn’t asked for anything. He hadn’t offered.

The room was spare but not cruel. A basin with a water pitcher. A four-poster bed draped in a netting veil to keep out the bugs—or the ghosts. The mattress was soft. The sheets smelled faintly of cedar, firewood, and something else you didn’t recognize.

Him.

You didn’t undress. You lay on top of the blanket, fingers threaded together over your belly, the thrum of your heartbeat like a second mouth behind your ribs.

Your door had no lock. Just a handle that squeaked if turned. And you hated how many times your eyes flicked toward it. Waiting. Wanting.

But he never came.

And somehow, that was worse.

Morning broke soft and gray through the slatted shutters. The sun didn’t quite reach the corners of the room, and the light that filtered in was the color of dust and river fog.

When you finally stepped out barefoot into the hall, the house was already awake.

There was a scent in the air—coffee. Burned sugar. The faintest curl of cinnamon. Something sizzling in a skillet somewhere.

You followed it.

The kitchen was enormous, all brick hearth and cast iron and a long scarred table in the center with mismatched chairs pushed in unevenly. A window hung open, letting in a breath of swamp air that rustled the lace curtain and kissed your ankles.

Remmick stood at the stove with his back to you, sleeves still rolled to the elbow, suspenders crossed low over his back. His shirt was half-unbuttoned and clung to his sides with the cling of heat and skin. He moved like he didn’t hear you enter.

You knew he had.

He reached for the pan with a towel over his palm and flipped something in the cast iron with a deft flick of the wrist.

"Hope you like sweet," he said, voice thick with morning. "Ain’t got much else."

You didn’t speak. Just stood there in the doorway like a ghost he’d conjured and forgotten about.

He turned.

God help you.

Even like this, barefoot, collar open, hair mussed from sleep or maybe just time—he looked unreal. Like a sin someone had tried to scrub out of scripture but couldn’t quite forget.

"Sleep alright?" he asked.

You gave a small nod.

He looked at you a moment longer. Then—

"Sit down, dove."

You moved toward the table.

His voice followed you, lazy but pointed.

"That’s the wrong chair."

You paused.

He nodded to one at the head of the table—old, high-backed, carved with curling vines and symbols you didn’t recognize.

"That one’s yours now."

You hesitated, then lowered yourself into it slowly. The wood groaned under your weight. The air in the kitchen felt thicker now, tighter.

He brought the plate to you himself.

Two slices of skillet cornbread, golden and glistening with syrup. A few wild strawberries sliced and sugared. A smear of butter melting slow at the center like a pulse.

He set the plate in front of you with a quiet care that felt almost obscene.

"You ain’t gotta eat," he said, leaning against the table beside your chair. "But I like watchin’ you do it."

You picked up the fork.

His eyes stayed on your mouth.

The cornbread was still warm.

Steam curled from it like breath from parted lips. The syrup pooled thick at the edges, dripping off the edge of your fork in slow, amber ribbons. It stuck to your fingers when you touched it. Sweet. Sticky. Sensual.

You brought the first bite to your mouth, slow.

Remmick didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His eyes tracked the motion like a starving man watching someone else’s feast.

The bite landed soft on your tongue—golden crisp on the outside, warm and tender in the middle, butter melting into every pore. It was perfect. Unreasonably so. And somehow you hated that even more. Because nothing about this should’ve tasted good. Not with him watching you like that. Not with your body still humming from the memory of his voice against your skin.

But you swallowed.

And he smiled.

"Good girl," he murmured.

You froze. The fork paused just above the plate.

"You don’t get to say things like that," you whispered.

"Why not?"

Your fingers tightened around the handle.

"Because it sounds like you earned it."

He chuckled, low and easy. A slow roll of thunder in his chest.

"Think I did. Think I earned every fuckin’ word after draggin’ you out that night and lettin’ you walk away without layin’ a hand on you."

You looked up sharply, heat crawling up your neck.

"You shouldn’t have touched me."

"I didn’t," he said. "But I wanted to. Still do."

Your breath caught.

His knuckles brushed the edge of your plate, slow, casual, like he had all the time in the world to make you squirm.

"And I know you want me to," he added, voice low enough that it coiled under your ribs and settled somewhere molten in your belly.

You pushed the plate away.

He didn’t flinch. Just reached forward and dragged it back in front of you like you hadn’t moved it at all.

"You eat," he said, gentler now. "You need it. House takes more from you than it gives."

You glanced around the kitchen, suddenly uneasy.

"You talk about it like it’s alive."

He gave a slow nod.

"It is. In a way."

"How?"

He looked down at your plate, then back at you.

"You’ll see."

You pushed another bite past your lips, slower this time, aware of the weight of his gaze with every chew, every swallow. You didn’t know why you obeyed. Maybe it was easier than defying him. Maybe it was because some part of you wanted him to keep watching.

When the plate was clean, he reached out and caught your wrist before you could stand.

Not hard. Not even firm. Just…inevitable.

"You full?" he asked, his voice all smoke and sin.

You nodded.

His eyes darkened.

"Then I’ll have my taste next."

Your breath lodged sharp in your throat.

He said it like it meant nothing. Like asking for your pulse was no more intimate than asking for your hand. But there was a glint in his eye—red barely flickering now, but still there—and it told you everything.

He was done pretending.

You didn’t move. Not right away.

His fingers were still wrapped around your wrist, light but unyielding, the pad of his thumb grazing the fragile skin where your pulse drummed loud and frantic. Like it wanted to leap out of your veins and spill into his mouth.

You swallowed hard.

"You said you didn’t want blood."

"I don’t."

"Then what do you want?"

"You."

You watched him now, trying to make sense of what you wanted.

And what terrified you was this—

You didn’t want to run.

You wanted to know how it would feel.

To give something he couldn’t take without permission.

To see if your body could handle the worship of a mouth like his.

Remmick’s other hand came up slow, brushing hair from your cheek, his knuckles rough and reverent.

"You said I smelled like want," you whispered.

"You do."

"What do you smell like?"

He leaned in, mouth near your throat again, his nose dragging along your skin, slow, as if he were drawing in the scent of your soul.

"Rot. Hunger. Regret," he said. "Old things that don’t die right."

You shivered.

"And still I want you," you breathed.

He pulled back just enough to look you in the eyes.

"That’s the worst part, ain’t it?"

You didn’t answer.

Because he was right.

His hand slid down to your elbow, then lower, tracing the curve of your waist through the thin fabric. His touch was warm now, or maybe your body had just given up trying to tell the difference between threat and thrill.

He guided you up from the chair.

Didn’t yank. Didn’t drag.

Just stood and took your hand like a dance was beginning.

"Come with me," he said.

"Where?"

"Somewhere I can kneel."

Your heart stuttered.

He led you through the house, down the long hallway past doorways that watched like eyes. The floor groaned underfoot, the air thickening around your shoulders as he brought you deeper into the home’s belly. You passed portraits whose paint had faded to shadows, velvet drapes drawn tight, mirrors that refused to hold your reflection quite right.

The door at the end of the hall was already open.

Inside, the room was dark.

Just one candle lit, flickering low in a glass jar, its light catching the edges of something silver beside the bed. An old bowl. A cloth. A pair of gloves, yellowed from time.

A ritual.

Not violent.

Intimate.

Remmick turned toward you, his face bare in the soft light. He looked younger. More human. And somehow more dangerous for it.

"Sit," he said.

You sat.

He knelt.

And then his hands found your knees.

His hands rested on your knees like they belonged there. Not demanding. Not prying. Just there. Anchored. Reverent.

The candlelight licked up his jaw, catching in the hollows of his cheeks, the deep shadow beneath his throat. He didn’t look like a man. He looked like a story told by firelight—half-worshipped, half-feared. A sinner in the shape of a saint. Or maybe the other way around.

His thumbs made a slow pass over the inside of your thighs, just above the knee. Barely pressure. Barely touch. The kind of contact that made your breath feel too loud in your chest.

"Yer too quiet," he murmured.

"I don’t know what to say," you whispered back.

His gaze lifted, locking with yours, and in that moment the whole room seemed to still.

"Ya ain’t gotta say a damn thing," he said. "You just need to stay right there and let me show ya what I mean when I say I don’t want yer blood."

Your lips parted, but no sound came.

He leaned in, slow as honey in the heat, until his mouth hovered just above your knee. Then lower. His breath ghosted over your skin, warm and maddening.

You didn’t realize you were holding your breath until he pressed a single kiss just above the bone.

Your lungs stuttered.

His lips trailed higher.

Another kiss.

Then another.

Each one higher than the last, until your legs opened on instinct, until you felt the hem of your slip being eased upward by hands that moved with worshipful patience. Like he wasn’t just undressing you—he was peeling back a veil. Unwrapping something sacred.

"You ever had someone kneel for ya?" he asked, voice rough now. Thicker.

You shook your head.

He smiled like he already knew the answer.

"Good. Let me be the first."

He kissed the inside of your thigh like it meant something. Like you meant something. Like your skin wasn’t just skin, but a prayer he intended to answer with his mouth.

The air was too hot. Your thoughts slid loose from the edges of your mind. All you could do was breathe and feel.

He looked up at you once more, red eyes burning low, and said—

"You gave yerself to me. Let me taste what I already own."

And then he bowed his head, mouth meeting the softest part of you, and the rest of the world disappeared.

His mouth touched you like he’d been dreaming of it for years. Like he’d earned it.

No rush. No hunger. Just that first velvet press of his lips against the tender center of you, reverent and slow, like a kiss to a wound or a confession. He moaned, low and guttural, into your skin—and the sound of it vibrated up through your spine.

He parted you with his thumbs, just enough to taste you deeper. His tongue slipped between folds already slick and aching, and he groaned again, this time with something like gratitude.

"Sweet as I fuckin’ knew you’d be," he rasped, voice hot against your core.

Your hands gripped the edge of the chair. Wood bit into your palms. Your head tipped back, eyes fluttering shut as your thighs trembled around his shoulders.

He didn’t stop.

He licked you with patience, with purpose, like he was reading scripture written between your legs—each flick of his tongue slow and deliberate, every pass perfectly placed, building pressure inside you with maddening precision.

And all the while, he watched you.

When your head dropped forward, you found him staring up at you. Red eyes glowing low, heavy-lidded, mouth glistening, jaw tense with restraint. He looked ruined by the taste of you.

"Look at me," he said. "Wanna see you fall apart on my tongue."

Your breath hitched, hips rocking forward on instinct, chasing his mouth. He growled low and deep in his chest, gripping your thighs tighter.

"That’s it, dove," he murmured. "Don’t run from it. Give it to me."

He flattened his tongue and dragged it slow, then circled the swollen peak of your clit with the tip, teasing you to the edge and pulling back just before it broke.

You whined. Desperate.

He smirked against your cunt.

"You want it?" he asked, voice thick. "Say it."

Your lips barely formed the word—"Please."

He hummed in approval.

Then he devoured you.

No more teasing. No more pacing. Just his mouth fully locked on you, tongue relentless now, lips sealing around your clit while two fingers slid into you with that obscene, perfect pressure that made your body jolt.

You cried out, gasping, your thighs tightening around his head as the world tipped sideways.

"That’s it," he groaned, curling his fingers just right. "Cum f’r me, girl. Let me taste what’s mine."

And when it hit—

It hit like a fever. Like lightning. Like your soul cracked in half and bled straight into his mouth.

You broke with a cry, hips bucking, your fingers tangled in his hair as wave after wave crashed through you.

He didn’t stop. Not until your thighs twitched and your breath came in ragged little sobs, not until your body went limp in his hands.

Then, finally—finally—he pulled back.

His lips were wet. His eyes were feral. And he looked at you like a man who’d just fed.

"You’re fuckin’ divine," he whispered. "And I ain’t even started ruinin’ you yet."

The room pulsed with quiet. The candle flickered low, flame swaying as if it too had held its breath through your unraveling.

Your body felt boneless. Glazed in sweat. Your pulse echoed everywhere—in your wrists, your throat, between your legs where he’d buried his mouth like a man sent to worship. You weren’t sure how long it had been since you’d spoken. Since you’d breathed without shaking.

Remmick still knelt.

His hands were on your thighs, thumbs drawing idle circles into your skin like he couldn’t bear to stop touching you. His head was bowed slightly, but his eyes were on you—watchful, reverent, hungry in a way that had nothing to do with the softness between your legs and everything to do with something older. Something darker.

He looked drunk on you.

You opened your mouth to speak, but your voice caught on the edge of a sigh.

He beat you to it.

"Reckon you know what’s comin’ next," he murmured.

You didn’t answer.

He rose from his knees in one slow, unhurried motion. There was a heaviness to him now, a tension rolling just beneath his skin, like a dam about to split. He reached up with one hand and wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of it—then licked the taste from his thumb like it was honey off the comb.

You watched, breath held tight in your chest.

He stepped closer. You stayed seated, knees still parted, your slip pushed up indecently high, but you didn’t fix it. Didn’t move at all. The heat between your legs hadn’t faded. If anything, it curled deeper now, thicker, laced with something close to fear but not quite.

He stopped in front of you.

Tilted his head slightly.

"How’s yer heart?"

You blinked.

"It’s…fast," you whispered.

He smiled slow. Not mocking. Not soft either.

"Good. I want it fast."

Your throat tightened.

"Why?"

He leaned in, hands bracing on either side of your chair, body boxing you in without touching.

"‘Cause I want yer blood screamin’ for me when I take it."

Your breath caught somewhere between your ribs.

He didn’t touch you yet—didn’t need to. The weight of his body, caging you in without a single finger laid, made your skin flush from your chest to your knees. Every inch of you throbbed with awareness. Of him. Of your own pulse. Of the air cooling the places he’d worshiped with his mouth not moments before.

You swallowed.

"You said you’d wait," you whispered.

He nodded once, slowly, his eyes never leaving yours.

"I did. And I have. But yer body’s already beggin’ for me. Ain’t it?"

You hated that he was right. That he could feel it somehow. Not just see the tremble in your thighs or the way your lips parted when he leaned closer—but that he could feel it in the air, like scent, like vibration.

You lifted your chin, barely.

"I’m not scared."

He chuckled low, and it rumbled through your bones.

"Good. But I don’t need ya scared, dove. I need ya open."

He raised one hand then, slow as scripture, and brushed his knuckles along the column of your throat. Just a whisper of contact, a ghost’s touch. Your head tilted for him without thinking, baring your neck.

"Right here," he murmured. "Right where it beats loudest. That’s where I wanna taste ya."

You shivered.

He bent down, mouth near your pulse. His breath was warm, slow, drawn in like he was savoring you already.

"I ain’t gonna hurt ya," he said. "Not unless you want it."

Your fingers twisted in your lap.

"Will it—" you started, but the question got tangled.

He smiled against your skin.

"Will it feel good?"

You said nothing.

"You already know."

You did.

Because everything with him did. Every word. Every look. Every touch. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t holy. But it was real. It lived under your skin like rot and root and ruin.

You nodded once.

"Then take it."

Remmick stilled.

And then his lips pressed to your throat. Not with hunger. With reverence. Like a blessing.

"That’s my girl," he breathed.

And then he bit.

It wasn’t pain.

It was pressure, first.

A deep, aching pull that bloomed just beneath the skin, right where his mouth latched onto you. His lips sealed tight around your throat, and then—sharpness. Two points sinking in like teeth through silk. Like sin through flesh.

You gasped.

Not from fear. Not even from the sting. But from the rush.

Heat burst behind your eyes, white and sudden and dizzying. Your hands flew to his shoulders, clinging, grounding, anchoring you to something real while your mind drifted into something else—something otherworldly.

The pull came next.

A steady rhythm, slow and patient, like he was sipping you instead of drinking. Like he had all the time in the world. You could feel it, the way your blood left you in waves, not violent, not greedy—just…intimate. Like giving. Like surrender.

He groaned low against your neck, the sound vibrating through your bones.

"Fuck, you taste like sunlight," he rasped against your skin, voice thick with hunger and awe. "Like everythin’ warm I thought I’d forgotten."

Your head tipped further, offering him more.

You didn’t know when your legs opened wider, or when your hips rocked forward just to feel more of him. But his body shifted instinctively, meeting yours with a growl, his hand gripping your thigh now, possessive and unrelenting.

Your pulse faltered. Not from weakness, but from pleasure. From the unbearable knowing that he was inside you now, in the most ancient way. That your body had opened to him, and your blood had welcomed him.

Your moan was breathless.

"Remmick—"

He shushed you, mouth never leaving your throat.

"Don’t speak, dove. Just feel."

And you did.

You felt every lick. Every pull. Every sacred claim. You felt his tongue soothe where his fangs pierced, his hand slide higher along your thigh, his knee pushing between your legs until your breath stuttered out of you in something like a sob.

It was too much. It was not enough.

And when he finally pulled back, slow and reluctant, your blood on his lips like a mark, like a vow, he stared at you like you were holy.

Like he hadn’t fed on you.

Like he’d prayed.

The room was quiet, but your body wasn’t.

You felt every beat of your heart echo in the hollow where his mouth had been. A slow, reverent throb that pulsed through your neck, your chest, your thighs. It was like something had been lit beneath your skin, and now it smoldered there—glowing, aching, changed.

Remmick’s breath was uneven. His lips were stained red, parted just slightly, his jaw slack with something like awe. The burn of your blood still shimmered in his eyes, brighter now. Alive.

He looked undone.

And yet his hands were steady as he reached up, cupped your jaw in both palms, and tilted your face toward him. His thumb swept across your cheekbone like you might vanish if he didn’t touch you just right.

"You alright?" he asked, voice quieter now, roughened at the edges like a match just struck.

You nodded, though your limbs still trembled.

"I feel…" you swallowed, the word too small for what bloomed in your chest, "…warm."

He laughed, soft and almost bitter, and leaned his forehead against yours.

"You should. You’re inside me now. Every drop of you."

The words rooted somewhere deep. You didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull away. You could still feel the heat of his mouth, the bite, the pleasure that followed. It wasn’t just lust. It wasn’t just surrender. It was something older. Something binding.

"Does it hurt?" you asked, your fingers brushing the side of his neck, the line of his collarbone slick with sweat.

He looked at you like you’d asked the wrong question.

"Hurt?" he echoed. "Dove, it’s ecstasy."

You stared at him.

"You mean for you?"

He shook his head once.

"For us."

Then he pulled back just enough to look at you—really look. His gaze swept your features like he was committing them to memory. As if this moment, this very breath, was something sacred. His fingers moved to your throat again, this time to the place just above the bite, and he pressed lightly.

"You’ll bruise here," he said. "Won’t fade for a while."

"Will it heal?"

"Eventually."

"Do you want it to?"

His mouth curved, slow and wicked.

"No," he said. "I want the world to see what’s mine."

And before you could reply—before the heat in your belly could cool or your mind could gather itself—he kissed you.

Not soft.

Not careful.

His mouth claimed you like he’d already been inside you a thousand times and wanted to do it a thousand more. He kissed you like a man starving. Like a creature who’d gone too long without flesh, and now that he had it, he wasn’t letting go.

You tasted your own blood on his tongue.

And it tasted like forever.

The house knew.

It breathed deeper now. Its wood swelled, its walls sighed, its floorboards creaked in time with your heartbeat—as though it had taken you in too, accepted your offering, and now it wanted to keep you just like he did. Not as a guest. Not as a lover.

As a belonging.

Remmick hadn’t let you go.

Not when the kiss ended. Not when your blood slowed in his mouth. Not when your knees gave and your body folded forward into him. His arms had caught you like he knew the shape of your collapse. Like he’d been waiting for it. Like he’d never let you fall anywhere but into him.

He carried you now, one arm beneath your legs, the other braced around your back, his chest solid against yours.

"Don’t reckon you’re walkin’ after all that," he muttered, gaze fixed ahead, voice gone syrup-slow and thick with something possessive.

You didn’t argue. You couldn’t.

Your head rested against the place where his heart should’ve beat. But it was quiet there. Not lifeless—just other.

He carried you past rooms you hadn’t seen. A library, long abandoned, lined with crooked books and a grandfather clock that had no hands. A parlor soaked in velvet and silence. A door nailed shut from the outside, something heavy breathing behind it.

You didn’t ask.

He didn’t explain.

The room he took you to was nothing like the others.

It wasn’t grand.

It was personal.

The windows here were narrow and high, soft light slanting through the dusty glass in thin gold ribbons. The bed was simple but large, the sheets dark, the frame iron-wrought and worn smooth by time. A single cross hung above the headboard—but it had been turned upside down.

He set you down like you were breakable. Sat you on the edge of the bed, knelt once more to remove the slip still clinging to your body, inch by inch, as if undressing you were a sacrament.

"Y’ever wonder why I picked you?" he asked, voice low as the hush between thunderclaps.

Your breath stilled.

"I thought it was the blood."

He shook his head, his hands pausing at your hips.

"Nah, dove. Blood’s blood. Yours sings, sure. But it ain’t why I chose."

He looked up then, red eyes gleaming in the half-light.

"You remind me of the last thing I ever loved before I died."

The words landed like a stone in still water.

They rippled outward. Slow. Wide. Deep.

You stared at him, breath shallow, your skin bare under his hands, your throat still warm from where he’d fed. The room held its silence like breath behind gritted teeth. Outside, somewhere beyond the high windows, something moved through the trees—branches bending, wind pushing low and humid across the land—but in here, it was only the two of you.

Only his voice.

Only your blood between his teeth.

"What…what was she like?" you asked.

His thumbs drew circles at your hips, but his eyes drifted, not unfocused—just distant. Remembering.

"She had a mouth like yours. Sharp. Didn’t know when to shut it. Always speakin’ when she should’ve stayed quiet." A smile ghosted across his lips. "God, I loved that. I loved that she ain’t feared me even when she should’ve."

He exhaled through his nose, slow.

"But she didn’t get to finish bein’ mine."

Your brows pulled.

"What happened to her?"

He looked back at you then, and the heat in his gaze returned—not hunger, not even desire, but something deeper. Possessive. Terrifying in its tenderness.

"They tore her from me. Burned her in a chapel. Said she was a witch on account’a what I’d given her."

Your heart dropped into your stomach.

"Remmick—"

"She didn’t scream," he said, voice rough. "Didn’t cry. Just looked at me like she knew I’d find her again. And I have."

You froze.

His hands slid higher, up your ribs, his palms reverent.

"I don’t believe in fate. Not really. But you—" he leaned in, lips brushing your jaw, voice low like a spell, "you make me wanna believe in things I ain’t allowed to have."

You whispered against the curl of his mouth.

"And what do you think I am?"

He kissed the hinge of your jaw.

"My penance," he said. "And my reward."

You shivered.

"You said you saved me."

He nodded.

"I did."

"Why?"

He pulled back just enough to meet your eyes, and his voice dropped to a near whisper.

"‘Cause I ain’t lettin’ another thing I love burn."

You didn’t realize you were crying until he touched your face.

Not with hunger, not with heat, but with the kind of softness that had no business living in a man like him. His thumb caught a tear on your cheek like he’d been waiting for it, like it meant something sacred.

"You ain’t her," he murmured. "But you feel like the same song in a different key."

His voice cracked a little at the edges, not enough to ruin the shape of it, just enough to prove that something in him still bled.

You reached up, fingers trembling, and cupped the side of his neck. The skin there was warmer now. Still inhuman, still not quite alive, but it held your heat like it didn’t want to give it back. You felt the ridges of old scars beneath your palm. The echo of stories not told.

"I don’t know what I’m becoming," you said.

He leaned into your hand, eyes half-lidded.

"You’re becomin’ mine."

Then he kissed you again—not like before. Not full of fire. But slow, like he had all the time in the world to learn the shape of your mouth. His lips moved over yours with a kind of tenderness that made your bones ache. A kind of reverence that said this is where I end and begin again.

When he pulled back, your breath followed him.

The room shifted.

You felt it. Like the house had exhaled too.

"Lie down," he said, voice softer than it had ever been. "Let me hold what I almost lost."

You obeyed.

You lay back against the sheets that smelled like him, like dust and dark and something unnameable. The iron bed creaked softly beneath you, and the candlelight trembled with the movement. He undressed with quiet purpose, shirt sliding from his shoulders, buttons undone by slow fingers, trousers falling away to bare the sharp planes of his body.

And when he climbed over you, it wasn’t to take.

It was to be taken.

Remmick hovered above you, breath warm at your lips, hands braced on either side of your head. He looked down at you like he was staring through time. Like you were something he'd pulled from the fire and decided to keep even if it burned him too.

You’re mine, he whispered, but didn’t say it aloud.

He didn’t have to.

His body said it.

His mouth said it.

And when he finally eased inside you, slow and steady, filling you inch by trembling inch—your soul said it too.

His body hovered just above yours, every inch of him trembling with a control you didn’t quite understand—until you looked into his eyes.

That red glow was dimmer now. No less powerful, but softened by something raw. Something reverent.

Not hunger.

Not lust.

Not even possession.

Devotion.

The kind that didn’t speak. The kind that buried itself in the bones and never left.

His hand slid down the side of your face, tracing the curve of your cheek, then the line of your jaw, calloused fingers lingering in the hollow of your throat where your heartbeat thudded wild and uneven.

"Still fast," he murmured, half to himself.

"You’re heavy," you whispered, not in protest, but in awe. Every breath you took was filled with him.

He smirked, the corner of his mouth twitching in that crooked, wicked way of his.

"Ain’t even layin’ on you yet."

You didn’t laugh. Couldn’t. Your body was stretched too tight, strung out with anticipation and need. Every inch of you burned.

He leaned down then, not to kiss you, but to breathe you in. His nose skimmed your cheek, the edge of your ear, the curve of your throat already marked by his bite. His hands traced your ribs, the sides of your waist, slow and steady, like he was trying to learn you by touch alone.

"You’re shakin'," he whispered, voice low, thick with something close to worship.

"So are you."

A pause.

Then softer—truthfully,

"Yeah."

He kissed the inside of your wrist, then the space between your breasts, then lower still—his lips reverent as they moved over your belly, your hipbone, the softest parts of you.

"You ever had someone take their time with you?" he asked, mouth against your skin.

You didn’t speak.

"Didn’t think so," he muttered. "Shame."

His hand slid between your thighs, spreading you again—not rushed, not greedy, just gentle. Like he knew he’d already had the taste of you and now he wanted the feel.

"Tell me if it’s too much," he said.

"It already is."

He looked up at you then, his face half-shadowed, half-lit, and something flickered in his eyes.

"Good."

His cock brushed against your entrance, hot and heavy, and you nearly arched off the bed at the first contact. Not even inside. Just there. Teasing. Pressed to the slick mess he'd made of you earlier with his mouth.

He groaned deep.

"Fuck, you feel like sin."

You reached for him, pulled him down by the back of his neck until your mouths were inches apart.

"Then sin with me."

He didn’t hesitate.

He began to press in—slow. Devastatingly slow. The head of his cock stretching you open with a care that felt like madness. His hands gripped your hips as if holding himself back took more strength than killing ever had.

He moved in inch by inch, his breath hitched, jaw tight, sweat beginning to bead at his temple.

"Shit—ya takin’ me so good, dove. Just like that."

You moaned. Your fingers dug into his back. You were full of him and not even halfway there.

"Remmick—"

"I gotcha," he whispered. "Ain’t gonna let you break."

But he was already breaking you. Gently. Thoroughly. Beautifully.

He filled you like he’d been made for the task.

No sharp thrusts. No hurried rhythm. Just the unbearable slowness of it. The stretch. The burn. The drag of his cock as he sank deeper, deeper, deeper into you until there was nothing left untouched. Until your body stopped bracing and started opening.

You clung to him—hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt that still clung to his back, damp with sweat. He hadn’t even undressed all the way. There was something obscene about it, something holy, too—the way he kept his shirt on like this wasn’t about bareness, it was about belonging.

"That’s it," he rasped against your throat. "There she is."

Your moan was caught between breath and prayer.

He buried himself to the hilt.

And still—he didn’t move.

His hips pressed flush to yours, his breath shaky against your skin as he held himself there, nestled so deep inside you it felt like you’d never known emptiness before now. Like everything that came before this moment had just been the ache of waiting to be filled.

"You feel that?" he whispered, voice thick, almost reverent. "Where I am inside ya?"

You nodded. Couldn’t find your voice.

His lips brushed the shell of your ear.

"Ain’t no leavin’ now. I’ll always be in ya. Even when I ain’t."

You whimpered.

Not from pain. From how true it felt.

He moved then—barely. Just a slow roll of his hips, a gentle retreat and return. It was enough to make your breath hitch, your body arch, your legs wrap tighter around him without thinking.

"That’s right, dove. Let me in. Let me have it."

You didn’t even know what it was anymore.

Your body?

Your blood?

Your soul?

You’d already given them all.

And still, he took more.

But not cruelly.

Like a man kissing the mouth of a well after years of thirst. Like a thief who knew how to make you feel grateful for the stealing.

He found a rhythm that made the air vanish from your lungs.

Slow. Deep. Measured. His hips grinding just right, dragging his cock against every place inside you that had never known such touch. Every stroke sang with heat. Every breath he took turned your name into something more than a sound.

"Fuck, I could stay in you forever," he groaned. "Like this. Warm. Tight. Mine."

You dug your nails into his shoulders, legs trembling.

"Please," you whispered, though you didn’t know what you were asking for.

He did.

"Beg me," he said, dragging his mouth down your neck, over the bite he’d left. "Beg me to make you come with my cock in you."

"Remmick—"

"Say it."

You were already gone. Already shaking. Already his.

"Make me come," you breathed. "Please—God, please—"

His smile was sinful.

And then he fucked you.

His rhythm shifted—no longer slow, no longer sacred.

It was worship in the way fire worships a forest. The kind that devours. The kind that remakes.

Remmick braced a hand behind your thigh, hitching your leg higher as he thrust harder, deeper, dragging guttural sounds from his chest that you felt before you heard. The bed groaned beneath you, iron frame clanging soft against the wall in time with his hips. But it was your body that made the noise that filled the room—the gasps, the breaking sighs, the high whimper of his name torn raw from your throat.

He kissed your jaw, your collarbone, your shoulder, not like he was trying to be sweet but like he needed to taste every inch he claimed.

"You feel me in your belly yet?" he growled, words hot against your skin.

You nodded frantically, tears pricking the corners of your eyes from the sheer force of sensation.

"Say it," he panted, each thrust brutal and beautiful.

"Yes—yes, I feel you, Remmick, I—"

"You gonna come f’r me like a good girl?"

"Yes."

"Say my fuckin’ name when you do."

His hand slid between your bodies, finding your clit like he’d owned it in another life, and the moment his fingers circled that aching bundle of nerves, your vision went white.

Your body seized around him.

The sound you made was raw, wrecked, something no one but him should ever hear.

He kept fucking you through it, hissing curses through his teeth, chasing his own high with the rhythm of a man who’d waited centuries for the perfect fit.

And then he broke.

With your name groaned low and reverent in your ear, he came deep inside you, hips stuttering, breath ragged, body shuddering with the force of it. You felt every throb of his cock inside you, every spill of heat, every ounce of him taking root.

For a long, suspended moment, he didn’t move.

Only the sound of your breaths tangled together.

Your sweat mixing.

Your bodies still joined.

"That’s it," he whispered hoarsely, pressing his forehead to yours. "That’s how I know you’re mine."

The house exhaled around you.

The candle sputtered in its jar, flame dancing low and crooked, like even it had been made breathless by what it had witnessed. Somewhere in the walls, the wood groaned—settling. Sighing. Accepting.

You didn’t move. Couldn’t.

Your body was a temple razed and rebuilt in a single night, still pulsing with the memory of his mouth, his weight, the stretch of him inside you like a secret only your bones would remember. Every nerve hummed low and soft beneath your skin, like your blood hadn’t figured out how to move without his rhythm guiding it.

Remmick stayed inside you.

His body was heavy atop yours, but not crushing. His head tucked into the curve of your neck, the same place he’d bitten, the same place he’d worshipped like it held some holy truth. His breath came slow and ragged, the rise and fall of his chest matching yours as if your lungs had struck the same pace without meaning to.

"Don’t move yet," he muttered, voice wrecked and hoarse. "Wanna stay here just a minute longer."

You let your hand drift through his hair, damp with sweat, curls sticking to his forehead. You carded through them lazily, mind blank, heart full.

He pressed a kiss to your throat. Then another, just above your collarbone.

"You still with me?" he asked, quieter now.

You nodded.

"Good," he murmured. "Didn’t mean to fuck the soul outta ya. Just…couldn’t help it."

You let out the softest laugh, and he smiled into your skin.

His hand slid down your side, tracing the curve of your waist, your hip, the spot where your thigh met his. His fingers moved slowly, not with lust, but with a kind of quiet awe.

"Y’know what you feel like?" he whispered.

"What?"

"Home."

The word struck something inside you. Something tender. Something deep.

He lifted his head then, just enough to look down at you. His eyes had faded from red to something darker, something richer—garnet in low light. The kind of color only seen in blood and wine and promises too old to be remembered by name.

"You still think this is just hunger?" he asked.

You blinked at him, dazed.

"It was never just hunger," he said. "Not with you."

The silence between you was warm now.

Not empty. Not tense. Just quiet, the kind that comes after thunder, when the storm’s rolled through and the trees are still deciding whether to stand or kneel.

You felt it in your limbs—heavy, humming, holy. The afterglow of something you didn’t have language for.

Remmick hadn’t moved far.

He still blanketed your body like a second skin, one arm braced beneath your shoulders, the other tracing idle shapes across your hip as if he were still mapping the terrain of you. His cock, softening but still nestled inside, pulsed faintly with the last of what he’d given you.

And he had given you something. Not just release. Not just blood. Something older. Something that whispered now in the place between your ribs.

You turned your head to look at him.

His gaze was already on you.

"What happens now?" you asked, barely above a whisper.

He didn’t answer right away.

Instead, he ran the back of his fingers along your cheekbone, down the side of your neck, pausing over the place where his mark had already begun to bruise.

"You askin’ what happens tonight," he murmured, "or what happens after?"

You blinked slowly. "Both."

He let out a breath through his nose, the sound tired but not cold.

"Tonight, I’ll hold you. Long as you’ll let me. Won’t leave this bed unless you beg me to. Might even make ya cry again, if you keep lookin’ at me like that."

You flushed, and he smiled.

"As for after…"

He looked past you then, toward the ceiling, like the truth was written in the beams.

"Ain’t never planned that far. Not with anyone. Just fed. Fucked. Moved on."

"But not with me."

His eyes snapped back to yours. Serious now.

"No, dove. Not with you."

You swallowed the knot rising in your throat.

"Why?"

His jaw flexed, tongue darting briefly across his lower lip before he answered.

"‘Cause I been alone too long. Lived too long. Thought I was too far gone to want anythin’ that didn’t bleed beneath me."

He leaned closer, forehead resting against yours, his next words no louder than a ghost’s sigh.

"But you—you made me want somethin’ tender. Somethin’ breakable."

"That doesn’t make sense."

"Don’t gotta. Nothin’ about you ever has. And yet here you are."

You let your eyes drift shut, just for a moment, and whispered into the stillness between your mouths.

"So I stay?"

He didn’t hesitate.

"You stay."

The candle had burned low.

Its glow flickered long shadows across the walls—your bodies painted in gold and blood-tinged bronze, limbs tangled in sheets that still clung with sweat and want. The house had quieted again, the way an animal settles when it knows its master is content. Outside, the wind threaded through the trees in soft moans, like the Delta herself was eavesdropping.

Neither of you spoke for a while. You didn’t need to.

Your fingers traced lazy patterns across Remmick’s chest—over his scars, the slope of muscle, the faint rise and fall beneath your palm. You still half-expected no heartbeat, but it was there, slow and stubborn, like he’d stolen it back just for you.

He watched you. One arm draped across your waist, his thumb stroking your bare back like you might fade if he stopped.

"You still ain’t askin’ the question you really wanna ask," he said, voice rough from silence and sleep.

You paused.

"What question is that?"

He tipped his head toward you, resting his chin on his knuckles.

"You wanna know if I turned you."

Your heart gave a traitorous flutter.

"And did you?"

He shook his head.

"Nah. Not yet."

"Why not?"

His fingers stilled. Then resumed.

"’Cause you ain’t asked me to."

You looked up at him sharply.

"Would you?"

A long beat passed. Then he nodded once.

"If it was you askin’. If it was real."

Your breath caught.

"And if I don’t?"

His gaze didn’t waver.

"Then I’ll stay with you. ‘Til you’re old. ‘Til your hands shake and your bones ache and your eyes stop lookin’ at me like I’m the only thing that ever made you feel alive."

Your throat tightened.

"That sounds awful."

He smiled, slow and aching.

"It sounds human."

You looked at him for a long time. At the man who had killed, who had bled you, who had tasted every part of you—body and soul—and still asked nothing unless you gave it.

"Would it hurt?"

His hand slid up, fingers curling beneath your jaw, tilting your face to his.

"It’d hurt," he said. "But not more than bein’ without you would."

The quiet stretched long and low.

His words hung in the space between your mouths like smoke—something sweet and terrible, something tasted before it was fully breathed in.

Your chest rose and fell against his slowly, and for a long time, you said nothing. You just listened. To the house settling around you. To the wind curling past the windows. To the steady thrum of blood still echoing faintly in your ears.

And beneath it all—

You heard memory.

It came soft at first. A shape, not a sound. The slick thud of your knees hitting the alley pavement. The scream you didn’t recognize as your own. Your brother’s blood, warm and fast, pumping between your fingers like water from a broken pipe. His mouth slack. His eyes wide.

You remembered screaming to the sky. Not to God.

Just up.

Because you knew He’d stopped listening.

And then—

He came.

Out of nothing. Out of dark.

You remembered the slow scrape of his boots on the gravel. The silhouette of him under the weak yellow glow of a flickering streetlamp. You remembered the quiet way he spoke.

"You want him to live?"

You didn’t answer with words. You just nodded, crying so hard you couldn’t breathe. And he’d knelt—right there in the blood—and laid his hand flat against your brother’s chest.

You never saw what he did. Only saw your brother’s eyes flutter. Only heard his breath return, sudden and wet.

And then he looked at you.

Not your brother.

Remmick.

He looked at you like he’d already taken something.

And he had.

Now, years later, lying in the hush of his house, your body still joined to his, you could still feel that moment thrumming beneath your skin. The moment when everything shifted. When your life became borrowed.

You looked up at him now, breathing steady, lips parted like a prayer just barely forming.

"I’ve already given you everything."

He shook his head.

"Not this."

He pressed two fingers to your chest, right over your heart.

"This is still yours."

"And you want it?"

He didn’t smile. Didn’t look away.

"I want it to keep beatin’. Forever. With mine."

You stared at him.

You thought about that alley. About your brother’s eyes opening again.

About how no one else came.

And you made your choice.

"Then take it."

Remmick stilled.

"Don’t say it unless you mean it, dove."

"I do."

His voice was barely more than a breath.

"You sure?"

You reached up, touched his face, fingers tracing the sharp line of his jaw.

"I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life."

His eyes shimmered—deep red now, alive with something wild and tender.

"Then I’ll make you eternal," he whispered. "And I’ll never let the world take you from me."

He didn’t rush.

Not now. Not with this.

Remmick looked at you like you were something rare—something holy—like he couldn’t believe you’d said it, even as your voice still echoed between the walls.

Then he moved.

Not with hunger. Not with heat.

With purpose.

He sat up, kneeling beside you on the bed, and pulled the sheet slowly down your body. His eyes drank you in again, but this time there was no heat in them. Just reverence. As if you were the altar, and he the sinner who’d finally been granted absolution.

"You sure you want this?" he asked one last time, voice soft, like the hush of water in a cathedral.

You nodded, throat tight.

"I want forever."

His jaw clenched. A tremble passed through him like he’d heard those words in another life and lost them before they were ever his.

He leaned down.

His hand cupped the back of your head, the other settled flat on your chest, palm over your heart.

"Close your eyes, dove."

You did.

And then—

You felt him.

His breath. His lips. The soft, cool press of his mouth against your neck. But he didn’t bite.

Not yet.

He kissed the mark he’d already left. Then higher. Then lower. Slow. Measured. Your body melted beneath him, your hands curling into the sheets.

And then—

A whisper against your skin.

"I’ll be gentle. But you’ll remember this forever."

And he sank his fangs in.

It wasn’t like the first time.

It wasn’t lust.

It wasn’t climax.

It was rebirth.

Pain bloomed sharp and bright—but only for a heartbeat. Then the warmth flooded in. Then the cold. Then the ache. Your pulse stuttered once, then surged. It was like drowning and being pulled to the surface at once. Like everything you’d ever been burned away and something older moved in to take its place.

He held you as it happened.

Cradled you like something delicate.

His mouth sealed over the wound, drinking slow, but not to feed. To anchor you. To tether you to him.

You felt yourself go limp. The world turned strange. Light and dark bled into each other. Your breath faded. Your heartbeat fluttered like wings against glass.

And then—

It stopped.

Silence.

Stillness.

And in the space where your heart had once beat…

You heard his.

Then—

Your eyes opened.

The world looked different.

Sharper.

Brighter.

Every shadow deeper. Every color richer. The candlelight burned gold-red and alive. The scent of the night air was so thick it choked you—smoke, soil, blood, him.

Remmick hovered above you, lips stained crimson, breathing hard like he’d just returned from war.

And when he looked at you—

You saw yourself reflected in his eyes.

He smiled.

"Welcome home, darlin’."

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Studying Tolstoy psychosis and crushing on sweet ghosts i dont deserve. Wondering why im alone. I want to get drunk and forget stupid potentials. I want to be smart without the obsessional rationalization and sad existentialism. I want my Dad to see me, I want to stop bringing everyone down with me. I want to be hugged without feeling like a tumor just hanging off of the other person. I don’t want to be afraid of love, i don’t want to be afraid of arguments, or criticism, or embarrassment. I want to be funny without holding my breath. I want to sleep early and get buff, i want to imagine other worlds. I want to finish my damn paper

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by bewiart Follow the link and give them some love.

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Fav actor rn

warmup - an alberto mielgo spin on cillian murphy

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Young Cillian x Cillian 2023

Edit: @supremequart

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Happy International Asexuality Day!!! 🖤🩶🤍💜

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hi uh i keep seeing this being debated on tiktok and as your resident adult with a history of infertility who knows just.. way too much about pregnancy and hcg tests: if you are capable of getting pregnant, you really REALLY need to understand how drugstore pregnancy tests work. if there is a line, no matter how faint, that test is POSITIVE. I’ve seen people test positive and get a negative or start their period a few days later and be like “it must have been a false positive”. actual false positives are extremely rare. what most likely happened is something called a ‘chemical pregnancy’ which is when an egg is fertilized but does not implant in the uterus so the pregnancy does not continue. that positive test was not faulty or false, it was just an early test.

if you think you might be pregnant, get your hands on a test. you don’t need the fancy digital ones. the ones you can buy at places like the dollar tree work just as well. buy a few and take one every day until your period comes on if you need to. if there is a FAINT line you aren’t sure about (sometimes tests have something called an indent that makes a shadow that can be mistaken as a very very faint line), test again the next day. as a general rule, morning is the best time to test for most people.

in a post-roe america, is it vitally necessary that you know and understand that because if you intend to terminate, your window is incredibly small in most states and by the time you’ve missed a period or begun to suspect you might be pregnant, there’s a decent chance you are past the cutoff. please please please educate yourselves on this because it could mean the difference between you having access to the healthcare that you need.

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Maybe they’re still partners somewhere out there

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The legacies people leave behind in you.

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.

How terrifying, how excruciatingly painful to acknowledge this. That I am a jigsaw puzzle of everyone I have briefly known and loved. I carry them on with me even if I don’t know it. How beautiful.

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do you ever laugh with your friends and think oh this is the point. this is the point of everything

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Made an arcane fan animation hehe

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