Page 29 of Creeping Lily

LILY

T he window is open.

Again.

Not just unlatched—yawning, like a mouth waiting to swallow me whole. The cold outside drags its claws across my skin, pulling me toward the darkness inside the room instead of pushing me away.

And then it hits me.

That smell.

Not cologne. Not anything you can buy. This is masculine—sandalwood saturated in darkness, something ancient, provocative, seeping into bone. It doesn’t just hang in the air. It owns it.

I flick the light on.

It doesn’t matter.

Because shadows aren’t absence here—they’re life .

I feel him before I see him. A shift in the air pressure. A low hum in my bones, like some part of me recognizes the predator before my brain does. My stomach drops. My pulse spikes. And still… I don’t run.

It feels like I’ve been waiting .

He steps forward, peeling himself out of the dark like the night is giving birth to something it should have kept in its womb.

“Hello, Lily.”

My name is a slow drag of teeth against skin. It’s not affection—it’s claiming.

He moves without hurry. Predators don’t need to rush. I keep my chin tucked, but my eyes track him as he crosses the room.

A sound slips out of me—broken, caught between a gasp and a whimper. He stops instantly, as if the noise summoned him closer but he’s toying with the delay, testing. Every pause, every inch of space, is deliberate.

“You’re colder tonight,” he says softly, like he’s reading my blood temperature through my skin. “But you’re warmer here.”

His hand moves toward my chest but doesn’t touch. The air between us burns anyway.

“You’ve been… touched.” The word is venom. “By someone who is not me.”

“He’s not my boy…” I start, but he cuts me off.

“I don’t care what you call him.” His tone sharpens, edges cutting into me. “You smell of him. And I will carve him out of you. Every trace. Every molecule. Until nothing remains but me.”

The heat that floods my body is instant and treacherous.

“Are you afraid of me, Lily?”

“No.”

“Liar,” he says, almost fondly. “Fear tastes like iron. And you fucking reek of it.”

His breath touches my neck before his fingers do—sliding my hair over my shoulder, baring my throat. One finger traces a line down my skin like he’s imagining the cut it would take to find my pulse.

“My Lily,” he murmurs, and now it sounds like a prayer said at the altar of something wicked .

Then his hand is lower, cupping me through my jeans. My breath hitches—half from shock, half from the obscene heat that sparks at the contact.

“Who are you?” I ask. My voice shakes. I don’t want him to answer and yet I need him to.

His answer is fabric—something soft winding around my head. A blindfold. The knot pulls tight.

“Eyes are liars,” he says, his voice low enough to live in my bones. “I want you to know me without sight. The way prey knows the breath in its throat.”

He turns me by the shoulders, slow, until we’re face to face. Or we would be, if I could see him.

And then his mouth is on mine.

It’s not a kiss. It’s an intrusion, claiming, devouring. His tongue slides into my mouth like it owns the right to be there, moving with a rhythm that makes my knees go weak.

The instant I begin to surrender to it—tilting forward, letting the heat between us pull me under—he’s gone.

His mouth tears from mine, leaving the ghost of his touch burning on my lips.

It’s deliberate. Calculated. A cruel game of give and take where he gives me just enough to set my veins on fire, only to rip it away before I can drown in it.

The air between us crackles, thick with everything he’s denying me, and I’m left breathless, aching, and desperate for the rest.

“You’ll have a visitor soon,” he says, the words curling around me like sin. “Send him away. And stay out of the Walkers’ business. I only ask once.”

“Why—”

“Shhh.” His fingertip presses against my lips. “Stay.”

And then he’s gone.

The blindfold falls away. The window is still open, the night gaping wide, but the only thing left of him is the echo in my blood and the scent that says he’ll come back to finish what he started.

I don’t move after he’s gone.

The silence feels heavier than the air—thick, suffocating, pressing in from all sides. The blindfold hangs limp around my neck, the knot still warm from where it gripped my skin. I should rip it off, throw it away, scrub him from every inch of this place.

But I don’t.

The room reeks of him—sandalwood and something electric, something sharp enough to cut—and I can’t bring myself to hate the way it skates over my skin.

I want it here. I want him here. I want the scent to cling to the curtains and the carpet and to me, so that when I wake up at three in the morning, I can breathe him in and remember exactly how it felt when the world narrowed to nothing but his voice in my ear.

I should be terrified. I should be dialing the police, reporting a break-in, a threat, a man who touched me without my permission. But my phone sits silent in the other room.

Because what would I even say? That I wanted him to keep going? That I leaned into his hand when it closed over me? That my knees went weak when he said he’d drown me in his scent?

No. Some things you don’t confess—not to them, and not to yourself.

But here in the quiet, I can’t ignore it. The truth is, I wanted him to kiss me harder. To pull the blindfold tighter. To press his mouth lower. I wanted the thing he promised without saying it aloud, the thing I know will break me.

And if that makes me weak, then maybe I’m done pretending to be strong .

The clock ticks on my dresser, a metronome to my ruin. I wrap the blindfold around my wrist, winding it until the fabric bites into my pulse. It looks like a mark. It feels like a claim.

He told me to send the visitor away. I don’t even know who this visitor is.

He told me to stop digging into the Walkers. I haven’t even started.

He told me he only asks nicely once. I don’t recall him asking - ever.

But the worst part?

I don’t want to do a damn thing he asked me to.

Because I want him to come back.

I want him to ruin me.

And I want him to finish what he started.