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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

MERCY

I know I should be terrified. And part of me is, the fear twisting around in my belly at whatever it is Ambrose wants to reveal to me.

But he also feels so, so good .

I press my cheek into the pillow, tasting myself in the fabric of the panties, as Ambrose thrusts viciously into my pussy. He squeezes my hips, his fingers digging into me enough to cause some pain, but I don’t care. I?—

I like it, the sting of his nails and the steady metronome of his thrusts. My thighs are already slick with my arousal, and I have to swallow every moan and whimper. I know if I could wriggle my hips just right, I’d get the pressure on my clit I’m desperately craving, but I don’t.

I trust him to finish me—even if I’m not sure what else he’s going to do.

“You know the one thing that would make your cunt feel better?” Ambrose grunts, our flesh slapping together. “If my cock was covered in Reverend Gunner’s blood.”

The last thing I expect is for Ambrose to say his name, and the shock reverberates through me. But I don’t take out the panties. Because he didn’t just say his name, did he?

“Oh, that got your attention.” Ambrose chuckles and stops his thrusting, his cock buried fully inside me. “You’re wetter than you were a second ago.”

That can’t be true. I squeeze my eyes shut.

I don’t take out the panties.

Ambrose groans and starts up again, faster and harder than before. “Yes, Mercy, I want to kill Reverend Gunner. I want to kill every man who ever laid a finger on you. That’s why I killed Deacon Price, you know.”

I keen into the panties, and I’m not surprised when Ambrose slaps my ass again, the pain sharpening the pleasure of his cock. The images flash through my head—the blood, Deacon Price screaming?—

And I feel something ripple inside me. A jolt of pleasure.

Ambrose laughs. “Oh, fuck, humanita. I felt that.” He collapses on top of me, still grinding me down into the mattress, and kisses the back of my neck. “Would you want to watch me kill Gunner, sweet thing? Would you want to sit in the corner and touch your pretty little clit while I cut him limb from limb?”

I bite back a moan—out of shame, not fear of Ambrose’s punishment.

“You would,” he whispers.

“No!” I scream against the panties, but I don’t take them out because I don’t want this to stop.

I don’t want any of it to stop.

Ambrose growls like a hell beast, jerks himself back up, and changes his position in a particular way. Now, when he thrusts inside me, it hurts.

“You know what to do if you want me to stop,” he says, and his thrusts slow and feel good again, like hot melting sugar, and I don’t do it. I bite down on the panties so hard my jaw aches .

Ambrose makes a kind of startled noise and squeezes his hands into my thighs and says. “On your hands and knees, baby.”

He yanks me up, never taking his cock out of me, and then he begins to thrust into me in earnest, lightning-fast. Faster than should be possible. I squeeze my eyes shut and give myself over to it, gasping and panting around the panties.

“I wouldn’t just kill him,” Ambrose pants. “You need to know that. I’d take my time. Torture him. Cut off chunks of his thigh meat, fry it in some butter, eat it in front of him.”

This is terrible. Nightmarish. My thighs are drenched.

“I’d let you have a few bites, if you wanted.”

I collapse down on my elbows, squeezing the bedsheet up into my fists. Ambrose never slows, his thrusts so sharp and deep that my whole body shakes with them.

“But that’s not all I’d do,” he continues. “I’d peel the skin of his face away and expose all the nerves there. He’d be in absolute agony. And you, my pretty little human, you’d be getting off to it. I’d make sure he knows.”

I buck back against Ambrose, matching his thrusts with my own. Fire burns up through my core. I know I should stop this. I tell myself it’s not even true, what he’s saying—about me getting off to it. But I still don’t want to stop.

Maybe Ambrose isn’t the only devil here.

“I might break a few fingers,” he says. “Hold him underwater until he starts breathing it in. I don’t know. It would depend on my mood.”

The heat flushes even hotter. I know that if I were to snake my hand down between my legs and touch myself, I would unravel instantly for him.

Ambrose falls on top of me again, still rolling his hips up against me as he pushes away damp strands of my hair to kiss and lick at the back of my neck. “I told you I didn’t let Raul suffer,” he murmurs, “and I didn’t lie. His death was easy. Almost instantaneous.”

I whimper, tears brimming along my lashes. I don’t want to think about Raul dying, but these tears aren’t sorrow. They’re pleasure.

“Gunner’s won’t be.”

I groan around the panties, my body jolting. One touch to my clit. One touch and I would die in this all-consuming hellfire.

“None of them will have an easy death,” Ambrose says, slowing his strokes until they’re almost torturous. “Any man who touched you when you didn’t want it will beg for the release of death. Do you understand that, Mercy? Do you understand that’s what it means to stay with me?”

“Yes!” I scream around the panties, tears streaming down my cheeks. The pressure in my belly is unbearable, and I thrust my hips back against Ambrose, desperate for my own release. For my own death. Not death of body but death of spirit and soul.

Because I know that’s what I’m doing here. I’m selling my soul to the devil.

“You’re so fucking wet,” Ambrose whispers, kissing the top of my shoulders. “You’re so fucking wet from this. Do you know that, humanita?”

I sob around the panties and try to reach down between my belly and the bed. Ambrose grabs my wrist.

“Not yet,” he snarls into my ear. “You don’t get to come until I’ve tasted you.” He presses his mouth against my shoulder again. It’s not exactly a kiss. And instinctively, I know what he’s going to do. I know what he wants to taste. Because I know what kind of meat he keeps in his freezer.

“Last chance, baby,” he breathes, shoving my wrist away. His voice is ragged. “I’m going to take a big bite of your sweet flesh while I pump your womb full of my seed. This is your last chance to stop me.”

My heart feels like it’s going to explode out of my chest. Every nerve in my body is screaming for release. And all I do is tuck my hands underneath me, as far from the panties in my mouth as I can get them.

Ambrose lets out a dark, shuddery breath. Braces his hands on my waist. I squeeze my teary eyes shut.

My shoulder blooms with agony. I scream and buck up against him, but he’s too strong, and he pins me down against the bed, his teeth sinking deeper and deeper into my flesh. The pain is exquisite, as exquisite as the fire coursing between my legs,

Suddenly, all that tension tilts and spills. I didn’t need him to touch my clit. All I needed was for him to devour me.

I scream around the panties, bucking and jerking against the mattress, the orgasm searing through my body. I’m distantly aware that he’s still biting me, that he’s tearing and chewing and dragging my flesh away. Distantly aware that blood runs hot down my arm. But I don’t feel it anymore.

All I feel is pleasure. It feels like the end of the world. It feels like God.

I collapse face down on the pillow, pulses of heat still racing through my core. Ambrose licks my shoulder, his tongue warm and soft against the pain of the wound. “You’re delicious,” he pants between licks. “You’re sublime. I want to eat every fucking inch of you.”

Then he jerks me up so we’re both kneeling on the bed, my back pressed against his chest. I can’t move. I’m boneless, still quivering with aftershocks. Ambrose reaches around and gently pries the panties out of my mouth, and I suck down a lungful of air and slump back against him, staring first at the wall and then down at the bed, where my blood stains the sheets.

My shoulder howls with pain .

“It hurts,” I say softly. “Where you?—”

I turn toward him, and I’m not terribly surprised by what I see: Ambrose smiling gently down at me, his mouth smeared with my blood.

“I know, baby.” He pushes my hair out of my eyes, then runs his thumb over my cheek, following the tracks of my tears. “I can’t believe you didn’t stop me.”

I sway, woozy from what we did. From all his violent words, from the pain in my shoulder, from the lingering bursts of pleasure between my thighs.

“Do you really want to eat me?” I ask, my words slurred.

Ambrose smiles, my blood gleaming on his teeth. “Fuck, yes, I do. But I’d rather have you around, so I won’t.” He presses his forehead against mine. “But I had to show you all of me. I needed you to see it. If you don’t want to stay?—”

I kiss him.

I do it without thinking—it just feels like the right thing to do. Even if tasting my own blood startles me. Even if he pulls me roughly up against him, and it makes pain bloom in my shoulder. When I cry out, he deepens the kiss to silence me. For a moment, I wonder if he really will try to eat me someday.

But the thought doesn’t disgust me. It floods me with warmth, actually, that Ambrose would want me enough to pull me into him like that.

I break the kiss with a gasp, still tasting my blood. Ambrose smiles at me, looking as much like the devil as he ever has. “You really aren’t what I expected when I first met you in Gunner’s office.”

I blush and wipe the back of my hand across my mouth. It comes away bloody. My shoulder’s still burning, too.

“I need to dress that,” Ambrose says.

It takes a moment to realize he means the bite. I hadn’t looked at it yet, but I do now. It’s messy and violent, a jagged hunk of my flesh missing from the familiar curve of my shoulder. I can see the muscle tissue, impossibly red and shiny.

I feel dizzy. That part of me is inside him. Forever.

“I don’t want it to get infected.” Ambrose guides me down so I’m sitting on the bed, then kisses my temple. “Wait here.”

He ducks into the attached bathroom, and all I can do is sit and stare dazedly at the doorway, listening to him dig around in the cabinets. His vicious words circle through my head. All that talk about killing Reverend Gunner. Every man who touched you against your will.

There have only been three of them. Deacon Price, Reverend Gunner, Pastor Sullivan. And one of them is already dead.

Heat coils in me, strange and unfamiliar. Ambrose steps out of the bathroom holding the first aid supplies and comes and sits down next to me. His closeness is a comfort.

“This is going to scar,” he says, wiping the blood away with a soft towel. I suck air through my teeth. “Nothing I can do about that.”

“I don’t mind.”

Ambrose fixes me with his dark eyes. “You don’t really mean that.”

I look right back at him. “I do, actually. I could have stopped it but I didn’t.”

Ambrose is the first to break eye contact, dropping the towel on the bed and reaching for the antiseptic. “You’re full of surprises, humanita.”

“So are you.”

He grins. Squeezes a dollop of the antiseptic directly on the bite, which makes me cry out. “Yes, but I don’t imagine any of my surprises have been particularly pleasant.”

I don’t say anything, just bite down on my lip as he gently works the antiseptic into the wound. It hurts, but I can tell he’s trying to make it hurt less. And I imagine that’s not easy for him.

“I have a friend,” Ambrose says softly. “Sawyer. He’s like me. And he’s got a girl like you.”

I lift my gaze to his face. He’s not looking at me, though. “What do you mean?”

“She’s human. I mentioned her to you once. Told you she’s Charlotte’s friend. And she is.” He picks up a pad of gauze and presses it against the wound. “But she’s also Sawyer’s girl. And he bit her in the shoulder, left a scar a bit like this. Yours will be a lot worse, though.”

I frown, watching Ambrose work. I still can’t get over how gentle he is, especially compared with just a few moments ago. “Does that happen a lot?” I say. “For, um, people like you—” I almost said demons , “—to marry humans?”

“They’re not married.” Ambrose looks at me. “Don’t know if they ever will. But they’re together , and yeah, it happens. Not frequently, but it happens.”

He smooths the gauze tape over my skin, and I’m not sure what I’m feeling. Hope or disappointment or confusion or disgust or affection. Or all of them, all at once. Maybe that’s why I say what I say next.

“I always wanted to get married.” I pull away from him and run my hands over the wound dressing, the tape rough beneath my fingers. I keep my gaze fixed on it as I speak. “I thought—I thought it would make life a little more bearable, having a husband who loves me. But Reverend Gunner—” My voice catches. “He took that away from me.”

The mattress shifts and creaks. I moved away from Ambrose, but now he’s moving closer. Chasing me.

He grabs my chin, pulls my gaze toward him. And what I see there, in his expression?—

It terrifies me .

His eyes are flat. Empty. Undeniably cruel. But he still cups my cheek like a lover.

Like a husband.

“Everything I said about him,” Ambrose says in a dark, rough voice. “Earlier? While I was inside you?”

My body flares at that, like it wants to invite him inside again.

“I meant it.” His fingers tighten against my cheek, and I gasp in a soft breath. “I’ll do every goddamn thing I promised. Just say the word.”

Those promises flash through my head.

“You’d make him beg for death,” I whisper.

“I’d make all of them beg for death.” His eyes are as black and empty as Hell. “Give me their names, and I’ll slaughter every single one of them.”

Ambrose pulls me up to him, presses a bloody kiss against my forehead.

“And I’d do it all for you.”