Page 23 of Devil’s Night (The Shadows of Darkness Universe #3)

His cock slides through the slick mess inside me with ease, buried to the hilt in one violent thrust that punches the air out of my lungs.

I scream, forehead pressing to the floor as he begins to move with brutal, punishing thrusts that shake my entire body forward, my tits bouncing with every impact, my thighs sticky, spread and trembling.

He fucks me like he hates me. Like he needs to break something.

His grip bruises my hips. His pace is merciless, tearing moan after moan from my throat, loud, feral, shameless.

Every time I gasp for air, he fucks it right back out of me.

The room is filled with the wet slap of our bodies, the disgusting, beautiful sound of my cunt being destroyed for the second time, slick from his cum and my own slick, pouring out of me like I’m nothing but a vessel for him to ruin.

“You like this,” he snarls, yanking my hair back so he can hiss into my ear. “You need to be fucked like this. Used like the little hole you are.”

“Y-Yes...fuck...please-”

“You’re going to keep it in this time. I’m going to fill you again, and you’re going to hold it like a good little cumdump.”

I scream as he slams into me deeper, harder, faster.

My body breaks apart beneath him, my arms collapsing, my head hitting the floor again, drooling, crying, cumming on him without even realizing it.

My body betrays me, clenching, milking his cock like it’s desperate for every drop.

I want it. I need it. I want to feel him empty again inside me, feel it spill, feel it stay.

And he knows.

With a broken, vicious groan, he slams in one final time, cock pulsing so violently I feel it with every twitch.

He unloads inside me, deep, messy, choking on his own moans as he forces his cum in so far it burns.

His hands never leave me, gripping my ass, spreading me open, watching every second of it leak back out.

But this time… he doesn’t pull out.

He stays.

Buried inside.

His cock softening inside me like he wants to keep it there until I forget what it’s like to be empty.

“This pussy,” he breathes, barely human anymore, voice cracked and animalistic, “was made to be my fuckhole.”

And I nod, forehead to the floor, cum dripping from my thighs, throat raw and a smile on my lips.

Because he’s right.

And I’ll let him do it again.

He stays inside me, buried deep, our bodies locked together in sweat and arousal, in something far too dark to be called intimacy, but it is.

His breath slows against the back of my neck, hot and heavy, chest rising and falling with a quiet, satisfied violence.

The scent of sex coats everything. The air.

The sheets. My ruined cunt, still dripping around his softening cock.

I don’t move.

I can’t.

And he doesn’t let me.

One of his hands snakes around my waist, pulling my limp body upright, forcing me to sit on his lap, his cock still inside me. My head lolls back against his shoulder, my body trembling, exhausted, used. A mess of spit, sweat, blood, and cum.

But he holds me there.

Not gently.

Possessively.

“Good girl,” he murmurs, dragging his tongue along my jaw like he’s tasting the sweat there, like he’s cleaning me with his mouth. “So fucking perfect like this. Stuffed full of me. Broken open.”

His fingers trail down to my thighs, where his cum has started to leak again. He growls low in his throat, as if the sight alone offends him.

“No,” he breathes. “You don’t get to leak without permission.”

He shifts under me, lifts me just slightly, just enough for his cum to slide forward, and shoves two fingers back inside my cunt, pushing it all the way back in. My body jolts. A strangled sound claws from my throat, but I don’t resist.

I thank him.

“I’ll keep it in,” I whisper, voice raw and wrecked. “Please let me keep it-”

“You will,” he snaps, pressing his palm to my lower belly, hard. “I’ll make sure of it. You don’t get to waste a single drop of what I gave you.”

He lifts me fully now, only to drag me back into his arms, pressing my naked, ruined body against his chest as he carries me, limp, wet, still spread open, out of the room. I don’t ask where he’s taking me. I don’t need to know.

Because wherever it is, I belong there.

He lowers me into the tub, still clothed from the waist up, still entirely in control. The water is already warm, he must have turned it on before he fucked me raw, and now, he washes me. But not like a man tending to wounds.

Like a man reclaiming territory.

His fingers glide over every bruise he left, every bite mark, every sticky trace of his release. He doesn’t wipe it away in shame.

He rubs it in.

Massage. Branding. A reminder.

His cum still oozes from me in lazy trails beneath the water’s surface, and he watches it with reverence, like he’s watching paint peel from his favorite canvas.

“You’ll never be clean again,” he says quietly, brushing his lips along my shoulder. “Not after tonight.”

I nod, cheeks flushed, body aching, throat raw, and I don’t cry.

I smile.

Because I don’t want to be clean.

Not if it means losing this.

When he dries me off, it’s not gentle, it’s thorough.

He kneels in front of me like he’s worshiping, but I know better.

He’s checking me. Reaffirming his mark. Claiming every inch all over again.

When he finishes, he puts a plain black collar around my neck, soft leather, unmarked except for a single ring in the front.

No padlock.

Not yet.

But the promise is there.

“You’re going to sleep with me now,” he says, voice like smoke curling in the dark. “In my bed. With my cum still inside you. With my scent all over your skin.”

“Yes, Echo,” I breathe. “Please.” I whisper, letting him guide me under his sheets .

He climbs in behind me, pulling me into his chest, one arm locking around my waist.

“If you leak onto my sheets,” he growls, dragging his teeth across my earlobe, “I’ll wake you up just to fuck it back in.”

My fingertips trail lazily down his back, nails dragging over the bruises and claw marks I left behind, some still fresh, angry, red. Others faded into permanent ghosts on his skin. He barely flinches.

But I notice it.

That tiny hitch in his breath.

The way his body tenses just long enough to betray a memory he wasn’t ready to revisit.

“What is it?” I whisper, legs still shaking, the ache between them a dull throb I’ve grown addicted to.

His hand slides along my thigh, slow and warm. A silent distraction.

“You should rest,” he murmurs, voice low, like he’s trying to tuck the moment away, smooth it down with gentleness he doesn’t know how to hold for long.

But I don’t let him.

“Tell me something,” I plead, lifting my face toward his jaw. “Not about me. About you. Please.”

There’s hesitation. I feel it in the quiet stillness of his chest, in the way his fingers pause for half a second before moving again.

Then, with no warning, he scoops me up, lifts me like I weigh nothing and pulls my legs around his waist. His hands anchor beneath my thighs as he begins walking, slow and aimless, like his body needs movement to keep from unraveling.

Is he holding me? Or clinging to something I can’t see?

“When I was thirteen,” he begins, voice barely a whisper, “my mother died of an overdose. Needle still in her arm. Blue lips. Eyes open.”

The words land like broken glass, shards that somehow cut through both of us at once.

He keeps walking.

“When I was fifteen, my father drove drunk into a telephone pole. Killed himself. Killed the woman in the passenger seat. He was never supposed to be driving. He was never supposed to be a father.”

His grip tightens on my thighs, and suddenly I realize how close I am, how he’s holding me like I might be the last real thing in the world.

“After that,” he continues, quieter, “I got passed around. Drunken uncle. Timid aunt. He used to say hitting me was ‘building character.’ That pain would ‘make me a man.’ It’s good for you, Everett, he used to say. You’re too soft, Everett.”

Everett.

The name hits like a bullet.

I don’t speak. I don’t move. I just breathe against his shoulder, my body clinging tighter around his waist as the weight of it all hangs in the air between us.

“I knew what pain was before I ever understood what love felt like,” he says. “So when I turned eighteen, I signed the first papers I could. The military took me. Took the name too. Everett didn’t survive basic. Echo came out the other side.”

He stops walking.

We’re in front of the mirror now.

He doesn’t look at it, but I do.

His back to the glass, the massive black tree spanning across his shoulders and spine, roots digging into flesh like veins.

And now that I see it up close, I can make out the tiny details I missed in the dark.

Each leaf is shaded by hand. The bark, textured in black and gray.

The grooves of his back move with it, like it’s alive. Like it’s growing out of him.

My nail marks are everywhere. Bright red slashes across the branches. Along the trunk. A storm carved into something sacred.

“In Iraq, Roman and I found a local doing tattoos,” he says. “Cheap. Barely sterile. All by hand. Roman got his vines. I got this. It was the only thing I remembered about her.”

“Your mom?” I ask.

“She loved trees. Reading under them. Watching the seasons change. She said they reminded her that even the worst parts of life had to make room for something new.”

My chest twists. I reach for his cheek, drag my fingers along his jawline, and tilt his face toward mine.

“And that?” I whisper, nodding toward the scar settled on his cheek. A jagged cut just below his left eye.

He smirks, but there’s no humor in it.

“Last piece of my father,” he mutters. “Sharp. Crooked. Always too close to the fucking throat.”

My breath catches. There’s something unspoken between us now, raw, vulnerable, and terrifying in how quietly it bleeds through the room. Something that’s more than pain. More than lust.

It’s recognition.

I press my forehead to his. I don’t say I’m sorry. I don’t say anything at all.

Because Echo doesn’t need pity. He needs silence.

My head drops to his shoulder as he carries me toward the bed, his bed, and I let myself sink into the heat of his skin, still flushed from everything he just did to me.

I stare at the mattress, at the cool sheets, at the place I know he sleeps alone every night.

And I ask the only question that matters.

“I can really stay here tonight?”

His arms tighten around me, just enough to make it feel like he’d rather bleed than let me go.

A beat of silence.

Then a soft exhale against my temple.

“I didn’t put a nightlight in here for me,” he whispers.

And in that moment, an unsettling reality clouds my mind.

I’m sleeping in my cage.

And I’ve never felt safer.