Page 61 of Crescendo (Beautiful Monsters #1)

But it’s that mystery that makes me finally move, twisting around to flop onto my back.

I keep my eyes shut though. I wait until the anticipation practically boils me alive before I finally allow myself to look at him.

He’s holding a rag in one hand and a plastic case in the other.

A first aid kit? I don’t have long to guess before he sets it on the end of the mattress and braces one knee between my parted legs.

No. I make a noise somewhere between a protest and a whine. No . I want him to hit me with the cloth he’s brandishing in his free hand. Hit me with it . Hit me. Don’t...

He drags it along my hip, and my breath catches; he wet it.

“N-no,” I choke out when he starts to stroke across my belly. “You don’t... You don’t have to.”

The devil doesn’t give a damn about my protests.

He cleans me up with soap and water. He wipes his blood from the surface of my skin and grinds something else into me in the process.

I can’t stop the heat that floods the farther up my body he travels.

I can’t stop myself from watching him, and his eyes trace my skin the same way I’d observe my cello right before I played, imagining just where to place my fingers and how to arrange my bow for the best sound.

The devil plays me expertly. I gasp out in tune, and he draws out the melody, forcing me onto my stomach when he’s done with my front.

It’s harder for him to wipe away the sticky mess on my back with just the cloth.

He has to use his strength, rubbing my flesh raw in the process.

When he’s finished, he tosses the cloth aside, and I crane my neck to find him wrestling with the case.

He gets it open and pulls out a roll of white gauze.

“Give me your hand,” he says without looking at me.

Which one? I wonder. Then I flex my fingers and remember the wound he made.

I twist around, hold the injured limb out flat, and watch in shock as he proceeds to wrap a length of gauze around the cut.

It’s not much of a neat job considering that his bloody hands taint the ivory bandage.

He tries to rip it from the roll and winds up leaving darker splotches of red in the process .

“S-stop.” I lean over and flick my fingers through the objects in the case. They find a pair of scissors, and I manipulate them one-handed to snip at the gauze before he can do more damage to his hands.

I shouldn’t touch him. I should let the beast lick his wounds in peace—something tells me that that scenario wouldn’t be far from the truth.

I grasp the devil by his wrist instead, and I ease the gauze from his grip.

There are antiseptic wipes in the first aid kit, and I use all twelve on his open wounds.

It looks like he shoved his hands into a meat grinder, but he doesn’t even flinch when I dig into his scrapes to swipe away as much mud and grime as I do blood.

He only protests—a deep, low growl—when I aim for the ones on his face next, using a clean bit of gauze and some clear antibacterial gel I found in a tube.

Maybe, if he were any other demon, I’d let him win this one battle and cower from the danger promised in his gaze. It’s his fault I resist.

When I actually do try to wipe at the scratch on his chin, he bats my hand away and jerks out of reach. “Don’t.”

“You’re bleeding,” I counter. I don’t feel any ounce of fear when I lean forward, the gauze in my hand, and dab at his chin.

He clenches his jaw against me, and I know he doesn’t move only because he refuses to back down from the challenge.

“Hold still,” I add, my voice hoarse.

An insane comparison is back when Christoph would skin his knees while playing outside and Mam?e would bandage him up with antiseptic.

He’d scowl, trying his best to remain stoic while she cleansed his cuts, but she would always have to encourage him to sit still through the worst of it. You can do it, my big man .

Lucifer can only stomach the attention for a little over thirty seconds before he knocks my hand away again.

Then he snatches the gauze from me and starts bandaging his wounds himself, wrapping it lengthwise around the hand that’s worse off.

He bites the gauze off with his teeth and doesn’t bother to treat the other open areas.

He would rather bleed all over the bedspread than appear weak.

It’s a strange choice of action to take.

Vinny guarded his health almost jealously.

Every scrape or wound would have been seen to by a trusted doctor kept at his beck and call.

Once, he lost control beating a man half to death and bruised the knuckles of his right hand.

He wore a brace on it for a week afterward.

“To protect my investment,” he claimed. Violence and bloodshed were his cultivated traits, after all.

Every punch he threw himself was an investment into the foundation of his very kingdom.

I wonder what legacy a man like Lucifer might invest in with those hands. So far, he seemed indiscriminately reckless with the tools of his trade; he’s spilled more of his own blood than he’s drawn, a fact Vinny would scoff at.

Lucifer wasn’t as careful in cultivating his empire. He was a wayward wolf, striking down a kill out of necessity rather than for personal gain.

I don’t know which method I find harder to stomach.

Vinny never let me patch him up, not even partially.

It’s almost as if he knew I’d pray that infection would seep into every single scratch he would force me to bathe and bandage.

Gangrene, Sammy said—I’d have wished for that, for every limb to rot and fall off.

Confused, I stare down at my hands, and I watch my fingers flex, bandaged with gauze stained with the devil’s blood.

I should feel disgusted, I suppose. Instead, I don’t feel anything.

No pain. Just...hunger. It gnaws away at some place far beyond my stomach—and it’s a cruel ache that somehow knows that it will never be satisfied.

I don’t look up when the bed dips as Lucifer stands once again.

He snatches up the remains of the first aid kit and moves to place them in some distant corner of the room.

When he returns to the foot of the mattress, I expect him to issue some kind of command .

Sit up. Get up. Clean yourself up. Anything to reattach the invisible collar of captive and master.

The muscles in my legs tense, almost eager to obey.

I’ll roll over. Fetch. Beg. Anything to remember the need to survive above all else.

But he doesn’t say a damn thing. He watches me. Something sick and weak within me makes me look up and find his eyes boldly staring between my legs. They’re parted. I’m still throbbing. God...I’m on fire.

And Lucifer, the devil, doesn’t look away.

He doesn’t have the decency to even appear ashamed.

He boldly takes me in, his hand falling over my hip when I start to bring my knees together, branding his lust into my skin.

I should push him off the same way he did when I tried to cleanse his wounds.

He’s a bitter salve against lacerations that I didn’t even know are still open.

His heat sinks into my skin, his fingers mending the rent and ruined pieces.

When my head falls back, however, it’s the universal sign of surrender: a doe presenting its neck for the killing blow.

And he kills me, sinking to his knees with a guttural sound that rattles me inside and out.

He swipes a hand between my legs, making me part them myself rather than force them open.

It’s a chilling sense of helplessness. He sees into me, admiring the fire his very presence stokes—particularly the way the flames lurch against the harshness of his fingertips, aching to be fed.

He uses a thumb first, sinking it deep.. .

A whine tears from my throat. My back arches, my throat dry, my eyes squeezing shut. The devil doesn’t like that.

“Look at me,” he commands, his voice gruff.

I do, and then I drown in the blue of his gaze and the dark tumult of emotions swirling inside it.

He’s a confusing mixture of darkness and light, my Lucifer.

I can taste every bitter dose of rage and hatred he carries.

The other flavors are harder to decipher.

Lust...maybe. And something else, something more potent than the rest—the very thing that drives him to rear back onto his knees, his eyes finding mine and boring deep .

“Touch yourself...like before.” His voice is so gritty that a part of me chafes against it.

But, like a good puppet, my hand’s already twitching to obey.

He watches my trembling fingers creep down my belly.

He waits...and then he observes the way my fingers ease against the flesh dominated by his still penetrating thumb.

I’m not brave enough to join him there and expand the burning fullness.

I find that tender piece of me instead and I rub.

..swirl...twist. My body knows what it wants, and my hips arch violently, jarring my hand against his.

Whether as a result of the jolting contact or of his own volition, he’s pressing harder. Deeper.

“Fuck.” My teeth clip over the curse. It’s the language he taught me the same way Vinny forced me to learn English: through example. Maybe my pronunciation is off, because Lucifer’s eyes narrow further.

He jerks his wrist, increasing the pressure...

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

My own fingers are pathetic emulators. The things he does. The way he moves. You can’t learn that kind of predatory domination. He makes me try, however, and when my hand slows, he stops generating any friction.

“Touch,” he growls, and he doesn’t touch me again until I do.

It’s a slow, agonizing climb. Slow because he wants it to be.

Agonizing because it’s not my pleasure he’s after.

It’s merely his own curiosity he seeks to fulfill.

How far can he push the “little bitch” before her spine jerks against the bed and her hips twist, seeking out the brutal contact only his fingers can deliver?

How long before she starts to moan despite the way she attempts to seal her mouth shut by digging her teeth into her lower lip?

How long before she stops suffering his half-assed thrusting and makes him give it to her. ..

Hot, fierce, brutal, violent things. Everything.

He grits out something unintelligible, shoving another finger alongside his thumb, and thrusts them both so hard the motion pushes me toward the middle of the bed.

His knuckles pop when he twists them inside me and makes my vision flood with sparks of blue and white.

I go limp beneath the assault. I stop breathing. I stop thinking. I stop fighting.

My injured hand flies down to slam into his shoulder while my lips move of their own accord, issuing insane demands no woman in her right mind would ever ask of a beast.

“More... Mouth... M-more .”

His tongue shoots out, wetting his lips as they contort into something gruesome that might be a smile on a human man. On him, it’s the snarl of a wolf. That last savoring glance of a beast before it sinks its teeth into his prey and rips it apart.

There’s already a scream rising up my throat before he even breaks my grip over his wrist and lowers his head.

I feel heat. Wet. Fire. Pain. Friction. Need.

A million different sensations clash through my system, overloading my senses and crashing through what little defenses remained during Vinny’s cruel reign.

He fucks me harder with his mouth than he ever could with his cock.

This is his true weapon of choice: gnashing teeth and raking fingernails; the harsh, flat surface of his tongue; the pistoning force only broad shoulders and a thick neck can deliver.

I never stop crying out. Long after my voice breaks and my throat is rubbed raw, moans still trickle out of me, wrung out with every searching thrust and ravenous suck.

Eat out. I heard one of Vinny’s men use that phrase once when he described all the demeaning things he’d never do to please a woman.

“I won’t eat a bitch out,” he declared. It’s almost hilarious how that term comes to me now.

Lucifer devours me, swallowing down every last aching, desolate drop.

He takes me to that hazy, dark, quiet place where nothing else matters, and he holds me there, forcing a single malicious realization into my skin and ensuring that I feel the sting.

This is what true pleasure is: an after-bite of pain.

I won’t ever feel it again delivered by anyone else but him.

He makes sure I know it. Understand it. Admit it to myself.

He holds me down by my waist and forces eye contact from over the ridge of my heaving belly until I do.

Until the exact moment his name tears from my lips like the answer to the riddle even he isn’t hateful enough to ask out loud.

Who do you really belong to, Daniela?

Who fought for you?

Bled for you?

Say it. Fucking say it.

“Dan...Dante!”

Only then does he draw his lips back against his gums and let me fall.

The force of the release barrels into me and rips me to shreds.

I lose minutes, and when I can see again, he’s standing beside the mattress, stroking himself with the wadded-up rag he washed me with.

His eyes scan my swollen, throbbing flesh, satisfied by the ravaged ruins of me he left behind.

The sight finishes him off, and he comes again, grunting, into the washcloth.

I should feel degraded...I think as he drops the rag and shakes what little bit of his seed it didn’t catch from his fingers.

He’s a predator leaving his mark near the carcass of the meal he’s not quite finished consuming yet.

When he leaves, walking into the hallway, I glance down, my gaze drifting over my damp curls and spread legs, then down to the floor where his lust taints the carpet and sets the air on fire.

I stare. I can’t take my eyes off that pathetic piece of cloth. I can’t stop myself from running my tongue over my sore, cracked lips and tasting him.