Page 128 of A Summoned Husband

“Go right ahead, you crazy bitch!” I grabbed the hair on both sides of her head. “Kill me and say goodbye to the key.”

She yelped and I pulled her head toward me and sunk my teeth into her forehead. Was I proud of myself that I was resorting to biting? Not even a little bit. Her blood was sour in my mouth, not the bitter taste I was expecting. It poured over my tongue as I sunk my teeth in her flesh and refused to let go.

I channelled my inner beast and locked my jaw, shaking my head.

Her fists slammed into my sides before her nails stabbed at me. “Release me you worthless—”

The witch’s words faded away to nothing as my heartbeat thrummed loudly in my ears. I felt like I was a cup slowly being filled. My heart filled my chest. It was like a balloon being inflated that I could barely breathe around. It filled me with heat.

She finally wrestled her forehead free, blood pouring from the wound, and stared down at me.

“Do you really think you’ll win?”

“Yes.” There was confidence in my words now. As my chest continued to warm, for the first time since all this began, I finally felt like this was something I could win. I could destroy the witch atop me just as easily as I had beat Meagan Miller.

My hands slid down the sides of her face and I wrapped them around her throat. Something like deja vu moved through me as I tightened my grip and watched her eyes widen.

Pleasure poured into me and my core tightened as the sound of Asmodeus’ grunts filled my mind like music. The heat of his hands moved up my skin, making the delicate parts of me pulse as the pierce of his teeth caused a sting in the side of my neck. Heat surrounded his bite and surprise moved through me as I felt filled by it instead of empty even though I felt the pull of him suckling at my neck. Even though I knew he was tasting me, devouring blood he would later tell me was sweet and addictive.

The box was open and I stared down at it.

Bliss clouded my thoughts as a language I’d never heard of before but I somehow knew was his echoed through my mind.

A symphony of moans surrounded me but where I stood with the box was silent as I reached in and took his heart. It pulsed in my hand, each thrum sending waves of ecstasy through me. I lifted on my toes as I flexed my core, my eyes rolling back.

This was him. His sin. It leaked onto my hands and was absorbed by my flesh. Intoxicating me. Making me feel wonderful and right, and… safe.

I needed to keep it safe but more than that, I wanted to keep it with me.

Keep it. That thought had been so loud. Keep it with you, Eden.

I clutched it to my chest as I fell under the wave of euphoria. Flames devoured it, burning it to embers that speckled the bare flesh of my chest. It settled beneath my skin, finding a home beneath the key. I felt a merging as the sound of flesh against flesh rang through the air and Asmodeus growled against my skin.

Heat poured into me, filling me to bursting. My senses were torn as I pulsed, trying to keep him seated inside me. Torn between the endless pleasure that felt unbearably too good and the rightness in my chest of our merging. A pounding that began echoing the heavy beat of my own heart. Surrounding it. Encasing it.

The memory came to me so quickly I gasped.

I had hidden his heart… inside me!

That filling I felt was his power finding a home in the heart I had placed in my chest. His power. Waiting for me to use it. Waiting for me to finish what he started. It was a call from his heart to remember what it had wanted all that time ago, even locked in a box far out of Maledictia’s reach.

I would gladly oblige.

Cracks in her skin started from where my hands held, they created an almost beautiful path up her face, forcing the tattooed markings to light. They flickered from an eerie green to a burning red before smoke rose from each one.

“Stop,” she gasped.

No. I wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t.

They made me run through my friend’s fears and feel my grandmothers’ grief and sorrow. They had reached into my chest and wrapped their wretched hands around my heart, squeezing the life from it. I couldn’t just let them get away with it.

If I did, who would be next?

My hands tightened as blood dripped from the bitemark on her brow into my face.

I had to kill her. Not just for me, but for everyone she had touched with her greed and everyone she would reach for if I let her live. The guilt that should come with that thought never did as I tightened my hold, watching the cracks continue to spread.

‘Fight!’