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Reaching up to touch the useless tips with her finger, shocked she hadn’t noticed earlier, she balked. “They’re gone.”

The fervent stranger didn’t care. He took her hair and drew her mouth to his neck.

The smell she found there set her to salivating. The needle-like pain on her scalp from his overly enthusiastic grip forgotten as her tongue traced a pulsating vein.

The man moaned in a way Pearl had only ever heard when men were finished with her.

For once, she liked it.

She bit and gnawed, did everything she could to get that vein to burst open and spray her mouth with what was hidden inside.

Nothing worked.

Well, something was working. The man’s hand had delved into his trousers and between their tangled bodies he was pumping his fist.

Unfed hunger led to sharp frustration. Her teeth were too short to pierce, her jaw too weak to break salty skin. Everything she needed was right there, so close but unattainable.

But then the smell of blood filled her nose.

His warm, perfect blood.

Yet it was not coming from his neck.

She slunk to the floor without thought, hand around an organ that dripped rubies from an even more generously throbbing vein. When she tried to suck just from the side of that thing, strong hands repositioned her skull. It was put between her teeth, forced toward her throat until she gagged and had trouble swallowing the pooling blood.

All she wanted was a rich drink, annoyed with the man bobbing her head up and down.

Swallowing with that thick organ down her throat became necessary. Breath was forgotten, all that mattered was the struggle against what held her down and wasted blood she needed in her belly. Just as the vein closed and her meal was cut short, something salty sprayed against her tongue.

Made to swallow it in her quest for the final drops of perfection, Pearl retched.

Flailing, half drowning and unable to breathe, she felt the weight on her skull give in. Falling back in a graceless pile, sucking in air as if she’d been under water, Pearl saw the man, his trousers gaping, his mouth open and head thrown back.

It was then she realized just what she’d so ravenously drunk from.

His cock.

That part of a man they liked to stick like a brand into a woman—the thing that burned and brought pain.

That had been his game.

Something was running from the corner of her lips, a wasted drop both salty and sweet.

Darius caught it with his

thumb, pushed it back between her shocked lips before using the tip of his finger to close her gaping mouth. “Did you enjoy your dinner?”

There was no answer. The blood had been overly delicious, the things he’d been doing during her feast unrecognized. It couldn’t be normal, a woman’s mouth on a man’s body that way. Embarrassed, unsure if she could bring herself to stop cringing on the floor, Pearl muttered, “Why would you do that?”

Stroking her cheek, Darius smiled. “Swallow my come like a good girl. Taste it on your velvet tongue. Next I’ll leave it dripping from your tight cunt. After that, there is another place on your body I like to bury my seed. Play nicely, and I’ll fill your belly with another mouthful of what makes you swoon before I fuck your ass.”

Pearl looked back at the thing she’d just had down her throat, not at all eager for it to be back inside any part of her body. Just as she was no longer eager to pretend this was a pleasant dream.

He was still hard.

Usually, after they had pushed in, thrust about, and told her to stop screaming, those things got smaller.

Taking the meat of his cock in hand, the man crooned, “You still owe me a kiss. Press your lips here, and thank me for all I gave you.”