Chapter Thirty-Two

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A SECOND MISTAKE.

A second kiss.

Come on, be honest.

It wasn’t my second mistake where this damn girl was concerned. I’d been fucking up ever since she arrived.

But did it stop me?

Fuck no.

Dragging her into me, I yanked at her hair—the hair I couldn’t seem to stop fisting—and kissed her deeper. She didn’t retaliate or respond, too shocked by my pounce, too stunned to fight.

Piercing her lips with my tongue, I finally woke her up. Finally shattered her shock that she was being kissed. And thoroughly.

The strange taste of elixir on my tongue.

The smear of rebellion that she’d tried to spit out.

I didn’t know what my intention had been. To lick it off her chin and shove it into her mouth with my tongue? To feed it to her? To ensure she drank from me until she savoured every fucking drop?

But...it’d backfired.

I didn’t take my own medicinal creations purely for one reason. My system reacted too well. And fuck me, this latest version was strong.

Too strong.

I could see that now. Taste it. Feel it.

Fuck, I could feel it.

It soaked into my tongue, mingling orchid extraction, aphrodisiacs, hallucinogens, and a complex blend of chemicals with her own intoxicating, mind-numbing flavour. It saturated my blood. It shot around my veins. The tingling, fiery, snarling power branched off to attack my heart, my belly, my cock.

Potent.

Powerful.

It made every part of me a machine just for sex. To fuck until I couldn’t move. To consume everything about this girl until neither of us existed.

While my mind raced, doing its best to outrun the minor trace of elixir already hijacking my body, I ground my hips into Eleanor’s oil-smeared nudity.

She’d been sufficiently prepared.

She was ready to play.

Yet...here I was destroying her.

She fought a little, her head vying for space while my mouth continued to condemn hers. I kissed her wetly and hotly, desperate for everything all at once.

I wanted that perfect reward when she kissed me back in the bath. When she forgot herself just for a second and gave in.

I waited.

I kissed.

I thrust into her, unable to stop myself.

The elixir’s strength magnified, making me lose myself to lust. Pulling away, I panted as I held Eleanor’s cheeks and studied her.

Desire-wet lips. Glazed gaze. Pebbled nipples.

Her body had already undergone the insidious pull of elixir. Yet she fought it. Her face screwed up as she shook her head, denying the licking, whispering tugs of need.

She’d been able to fight the elixir in my office for a good six or seven minutes.

Today, it wouldn’t be that long.

The more you took it, the faster its effects.

I could be patient.

Fuck her.

Okay, so my patience had died the second I’d made the mistake of licking her.

She shuddered in my hold. The muscles in her belly contracted. Her legs pressed together. Her hands balled as her head fell forward, sending a cascade of hair over my suited arms.

“Don’t fight it. There’s no point.”

“There is. There is a point,” she snapped through gritted teeth.

“You can’t win.”

“That’s not the point!” Her grey gaze glowed with fury. “I hate you.”

“I don’t care.” Planting my mouth over hers again, I swallowed up her hate. I ate her fury. I drank every drop of loathing she could conjure.

And finally, fucking finally...the rigidity in her body turned to liquid invitation.

Her spine relaxed, her hips rocked, her mouth opened with a sigh of disbelief and disturbed passion.

I groaned.

She moaned.

We attacked each other.

A kiss was just a kiss...but this?

It was fucking explosive.

Her hands clutched at my lapels, dragging me into her. My fingers slid from her strands, dropping down her spine to knead the fullness of her ass. I hoisted and jerked her into me, aggressive and possessive, driving the rock-hardness of my throbbing cock into her.

I wanted to be inside her.

I’d never needed anything more.

Her tongue tangled with mine, sending another electrical storm through my belly and into my balls.

Fuuuucck, she could kiss.

Just as violent.

Just as messy.

Sliding and nipping, plunging and taking.

We were perfectly matched. Her height to my height. Her tenacious desire with my wrathful hunger.

She crawled up me, whimpering and squirming, rubbing her clit against my leg.

Splaying my hands on her hips, I rocked with her, encouraging her to smear my exceedingly expensive suit with her wetness.

Her head fell back as I dropped my fingers between her legs, spearing two deep inside her.

“Oh, God!” She went tense and floppy all at the same time. Bowing into my touch. Giving herself entirely to me.

She was no longer frigid. She was fully participating.

I bent to bite her nipples. To suck. To claim.

My thumb found her clit, pressing cruelly as my lips tracked quick and questing back to her mouth, finding her panting and delirious.

I kissed her brutally hard as I drove two fingers deep into her.

She cried out into my mouth. Opening wide for my tongue, she focused on my touch, allowing me to do whatever the hell I wanted.

She tried to climb me, coil around me like a snake, unashamedly using me for her own pleasure.

I fucking loved it.

I loved the feeling of having such a willing, demanding woman. A goddess who knew exactly what she wanted and wouldn’t waste time playing coy or bashful. She wanted to come. I smelled it on my fingers. I tasted it on my tongue. She wanted to come around my cock just as much as I wanted to come inside her.

Her fingers latched on to my belt, yanking at the strap and fumbling with the buckle. She got it undone.

I grunted.

She gasped.

My fingers thrust harder into her wet body in encouragement. My hips were possessed, arching and rolling, phantom fucking her even while apart.

“Ah, shit, Sinclair!”

The shout came from outside our drowning, damning world.

A whistle came after, piercing and sharp.

Ripping my mouth from Eleanor’s, I struggled to focus my gaze over my shoulder.

Calvin.

He stood with his hands spread as if he couldn’t explain my actions. His mouth set into a steely line. His face black with annoyance.

“Fuck off.” I snarled, my entire body quaking as Eleanor unzipped me and her small hand inched into my trousers.

I wanted to know what it would feel like to have her fist me. To have her touch me, hold me, suck me, fuck me.

“Markus is in the next room.” Cal crossed his arms as my eyes went cross-eyed. “He’s under the impression his goddess is ready for him.”

Everything screeched to a halt.

I snatched Jinx’s wrist, stopping her from grabbing my aching, excruciating erection.

If she touched me, I was done.

It would be impossible to stop.

She mewled and whimpered, trying to plaster herself against me, to use me for friction, licking her lips for more.

It took everything I had, but through some magical power of restraint, I stumbled backward, away from her, too far for her to follow thanks to the harness and wire trapping her.

Every molecule inside howled to return to her. To get as naked as her and hoist her into my arms. To slide home. To fuck guests and obligations. To ignore responsibilities and contracts. But with fresh air and a disapproving manservant, the small droplet of elixir I’d ingested lost its tenacious pull. Its claws weren’t as sharp. Its need not as influential.

I inhaled a shuddery breath.

I rearranged the pounding pain of my cock.

I raked a trembly hand through my hair as I turned and faced Calvin.

He scowled. “I know you’ve got a thing for that one but, mate...have some fucking respect.”

I pointed a finger in his face, my anger on a furious ledge. “Stop before you say something stupid.”

“How about you stop before you—”

“I stopped, didn’t I?” I smoothed my blazer, buckling my belt with as much decorum as I could.

“Another two seconds you would’ve been balls deep in that girl.” He looked behind me, seeing her naked for the second time since she’d arrived. I followed his stare, shocked at the change in her.

In a way, elixir stripped humanity and left just an animal behind. She didn’t have a tail or pointy ears or soft fur but from the sinuous way she moved, the way she bared her teeth, and the explicit roll of her hips, she was a creature in heat.

Nothing more.

Yet another reminder that humans were no more special than a dog or bird or dolphin. When it came to mating, we were all unhinged.

“Sully...God...please.” Her words slurred and thick with hunger. Her tongue struggling to talk when all it wanted to do was taste and lick.

“Leave, Sinclair. I’ll load the program.” Calvin pulled out his phone, logging into the extensive system I’d paid intelligent nerds to create from a concept I’d dreamed about.

A crazy, consuming dream that was the nucleus of how Euphoria had been born.

I held up my hand. “I’ll do it.”

“You sure?”

I gave him the finger and fished my phone from my pocket. It took a moment to log in, pull up the code I’d programmed this afternoon from Markus Grammer’s dossier, and hover my thumb over the load button.

I looked up, drinking in the sight of Eleanor, disgraced and trapped, starving for something that I wouldn’t be the one to give her.

Markus would.

He’d feed her his cock.

He’d drink down her cries of ecstasy.

Christ.

Could I do it?

Even now, this close to time, I didn’t know if I could go through with it.

But what choice did I have?

It was too late.

I’d committed.

The deal was done.

Without realising, I stepped toward her, drawn against my will, unable to differentiate if my feral attitude toward her came from the traces of elixir or whatever curse she’d put on me.

“Sully.” Her eyes flashed silver, drunk on desire. “Don’t give me to someone else.” Her hips moved. Her arms wrapped around herself, squeezing tight. “Give me to you.”

“You’ve had as much of me as you ever will.”

Otherwise, I’ll end up killing you.

She suffered a full-body quake. “But I want you. I’m...I’m losing myself. I need...I need you inside me. Please.” Frustrated tears fell down her cheeks. Already her skin had lost the golden hue from swimming in my sea and gone a concerning white. “I hate this. I hate feeling like this. I hate having no control. If I have to sleep with someone...let it be you. You made me this miserable. It’s your responsibility to help me.”

Help her?

I’d ruin her.

Just like she’d fucking ruined me.

“You’ll forget about me the moment I press this button.”

Her forehead bunched as her hands crept to her breasts, clutching both with tight fingers. “I won’t. I don’t want to be given to a guest. Please...” She moaned, her knees trembling and body swaying in the harness. “I don’t want to be like this. Make it stop. Please make it stop.”

My stomach pierced with mirroring pain.

I didn’t want to be like this either.

I didn’t want to feel things outside of my control. I didn’t want my mind transfixed on her or my body obsessed with hers.

I’d given her a drug to make her come undone.

All she’d done to make me unravel was fucking exist.

More tears splashed down her cheeks as she forcibly removed her hands from her breasts. She shook until her teeth chattered. She looked sick. Positively feverish and broken.

Shit.

Would her system handle another round with elixir? Would she cope being used, over and over, begging for something that could ultimately kill her?

Worry sprang sharp and nasty.

An emotion I wasn’t familiar with these days after I’d efficiently learned how to stop that heinous fear.

Empathy.

That was my weakness.

Too much empathy could kill a person. Not enough could kill someone else.

I’d learned to kill others, rather than myself.

And if Eleanor couldn’t cope. If her system shut down in Euphoria...well, that would release me from this curse, and I could hopefully forget about her.

It didn’t matter my heart lashed with pain.

It didn’t matter my stomach coiled against my wishes with worry.

This was business.

She was my possession.

I had a contract to fulfil.

With my thumb over the button, ready to send her far, far away, I walked into her embrace. I let her snake around me. I permitted her wet pussy to grind against my thigh. I cupped her cheek and kissed her sweetly on the forehead.

She moaned. “Please, keep me for yourself.”

“I can’t,” I breathed.

“Why not?” She tried to dig her way into my suit, her body blazing like wildfire, her skin damp with sweat and sensitivity-switching oil.

“Because I don’t trust myself around you.” I nuzzled her ear. “I don’t trust you.”

“Trust me. Take me.” She kissed my cheek feverishly.

Pika shot off the trolley, finally bored with his game of shredding cardboard and flipping lids, fluttering around our heads as if searching for a way to join.

I looked from the free bird, flying whichever way he wanted and back to the woman tethered in hell. And I whispered the truth that I’d tried to keep even from myself, “You’re dangerous, Eleanor Grace. You have the power to ruin me.”

“I don’t. I won’t. I’m yours. You made me yours.”

“Yes, I did. I made you mine.” I pulled away. “And that’s perhaps my biggest mistake of all.”

Stepping back, I pressed the upload button. My phone paused for a second, then the success screen showed.

For a moment, nothing changed.

Eleanor still stood in front of me. Beside herself with lust. Miserable and wet.

The next, her body jolted in the harness.

She went lax.

Her legs buckled.

She hung from the ceiling as if dead.

I knew it was just the initiating process. That in a couple of heartbeats, she’d be standing upright and breathing, but...I wouldn’t be there to see.

Markus would.

Markus would be the one she begged.

While I went fucking wild with regret.

“Goodbye, Eleanor.”

Turning, I forced dead legs and reluctant heart to leave her for my guest.