Devoured a dark monster.., p.4
Devoured: A Dark Monster Romance Novella (Pythonissam Filia), page 4
“Stop...it’s too hot...you’re hurting me…”
I paused as she whimpered. No, not my venom, but a nightmare. I gazed at the wound on her shoulder. Even after I had shown her my true form, it was her old tormentor who haunted her dreams.
Indifference warred with something I refused to name. I had walked alone for so long that the concept of sharing my existence seemed as foreign as those Roman roads that scarred the landscape. To hope for change, for something beyond the endless cycle of hunt and wait and feed—something beyond this curse that held me stagnant—would be to invite disappointment as keen as any blade.
Better to observe, see what she proved herself to be.
Yet as I settled myself in the web’s center to wait, my multiple eyes fixed on her sleeping form, I could not entirely suppress the thought that she might wake as something genuinely new. Not merely prey marked for consumption, not another sacrifice to sustain my immortal appetite, but something…more.
The web trembled as she twitched in sleep, and my silk responded to her as if she were already part of my domain, already transforming into something that might—if I permitted such foolish speculation—stand beside me rather than cower beneath me.
I watched her dream. When she woke, we would see what manner of creature emerged from this chrysalis of venom and inherited power.
And perhaps—though I guarded this thought—perhaps the long solitude that had been my existence since my curse was placed upon me might finally find interruption.
But I was careful not to hope. Hope, after all, was a luxury that monsters like myself could rarely afford.
Chapter 6
Flavia
As my consciousness returned, everything focused down into the intense tingling in my limbs.
The sensation spread through my hands, racing up my arms with a peculiar mixture of numbness and hypersensitivity that made me wonder if I still possessed flesh at all. My fingertips felt swollen, as if a thousand needles danced across their surface.
I tried to flex them, failing miserably.
My eyes snapped open to a world washed in shadows. I hung suspended in his web. The silk cradled my body, supporting my weight while binding me as surely as iron chains.
Every breath sent tremors through the web’s geometry, and I felt the vibrations echo across the grove. The threads pressed against my skin, and when I struggled against them, they seemed to tighten in response to my movement.
Panic clawed at my throat as I tested my bonds more urgently. My left arm was caught at an awkward angle, wrapped in silk from wrist to shoulder. My legs were equally contained, ankles bound together. When I twisted my torso, trying to find leverage, the web rocked gently, stretching without releasing its grip.
The tingling in my fingers intensified, spreading to my toes, my lips, the sensitive skin of my neck. It felt like awakening from deep sleep, but magnified tenfold—as if every nerve in my body had been dormant and was now stirring to painful, vibrant life.
“Ah,” came a voice from the darkness beyond the web’s luminous aura. “So you have awakened.”
I stopped struggling, turning toward the sound. Ysu emerged from the shadows. He appeared human again, his additional spider-like arms concealed beneath his dark robe. Only his eyes betrayed his true nature, all eight tracking my every movement.
“Let me down.” My voice came out rough, scraped raw by whatever poison he’d pumped into my veins.
“In time.” He circled the web slowly, studying me the way I’m sure he studied any other prey in his clutches. “First, we must establish certain... understandings.”
The silk pressed against my skin like dozens of gentle fingers, a horrible mockery of a lover’s embrace—not that I would know what that felt like—and I fought the urge to struggle again. Instead, I met his gaze directly, drawing on reserves of defiance bolstered by the fact that he hadn’t decided to kill me after all.
“You claimed you would be my bride,” he continued, his tone conversational. “That bargain comes with obligations. Duties.”
Without ceremony, one of his concealed limbs sliced through the strands holding me aloft. I dropped to the forest floor in an ungraceful heap, silk threads clinging to me, whispering against my skin as they floated on the night’s cool breeze. Before I could fully regain my footing, his human hand grasped my arm and pulled me upright.
“Come,” he said, already moving deeper into the grove. “There is a spring not far from here where you will bathe me, as befits a bride attending her husband.”
I planted my feet, resisting his tug. It was a small force, one he could have easily overcome. Instead, he stopped and turned back to me, all of his dark eyes focused on me.
“Has my venom caused you to forget our bargain, little human?” His other human hand traced up my neck until he grasped my chin in his thumb and forefinger. “You are mine. You will obey.” His thumb traced over my lower lip, tugging on it slightly. “Or do you no longer desire your revenge?”
I did not flinch. I would not flinch. “I desire it.”
“Then obey.” He flicked his thumb away and his sharp nail cut my lip. I did not wince. I only extended my tongue to lap up the hot bubble of metallic blood that welled up. All eight of his eyes followed the movement with an intensity I could practically feel. I nodded.
He turned away, confident that I would follow him without any more resistance. I hesitated only a moment longer before trailing after him, out of his grove of horrors.
The forest beyond his web was unlike anything that existed in the daylight world. Ancient trees leaned inward, their branches interwoven in patterns that spoke of centuries of patient growth guided by inhuman intelligence. Moss grew in spirals up their trunks, and where my bare feet touched the earth, I felt a thrumming beneath the surface—as if the land itself pulsed with some vast, sleeping heartbeat.
Ysu moved ahead of me, his robe billowing behind him despite the absence of any wind. The fabric drank in the moonlight, creating the illusion that he was a part of the darkness itself. Occasionally, I caught glimpses of movement beneath the cloth—the subtle shift of his concealed limbs, inhuman joints bending in unnatural directions.
The tingling in my fingers spread throughout my body now, a constant whisper that made every sensation more acute. It must have been a lingering effect of his venom. The rough bark of trees my feet brushed against felt sharper than shattered glass. The cool night air caressed me until every inch of my skin felt raw and exposed.
But it wasn’t just my skin. The fragrance of night-blooming flowers carried undertones of sweetness I had never noticed before. It felt misplaced in this place of death. I heard the soft call of animals much farther into the forest than I thought possible.
We walked a quarter mile through this twilight realm before the sound reached us—water moving over stone. The spring emerged from the forest, a natural pool ten feet across, fed by water that seeped between moss-covered rocks.
The water glowed. Not with reflected moonlight, but with its own inner radiance, as if each drop carried a fragment of a captured star. Steam rose from its surface into the cool night air, and where the water met the pool’s edges, small flowers bloomed in impossible colors—blues that verged on silver, purples that edged toward black. Vines crawled up the surrounding trees, with huge trumpet-like white flowers that opened under the moonlight. I had never seen anything like this before, likely only able to survive because of the pool’s warmth.
Ysu stopped at the pool’s rim and turned to face me, his multiple eyes reflecting the water’s ethereal light. He turned back to the spring, and without ceremony or modesty, he unfastened whatever hidden clasps held his robe in place. The fabric fell away, revealing the full plane of his bare back. The additional arms that emerged from along his spine midway down his back entranced me, the chitin there slowly morphing into black skin. As he moved, I could see the power of each of his muscles. Despite his monstrous appetite, he wasn’t soft like many of the Roman centurions. Every inch of him was carved like the statues in the villa foyer, but he was so much larger. Like each of his victims was absorbed directly to supplement his strength.
I was so entranced by the shape of him, I hardly noticed as he loosened the cloth at his waist, letting it sag. A gasp nearly escaped me as the full, naked expanse of his muscular ass was revealed, just as sculpted as the rest of him. Male nudity had, up until this point, only caused me fear, knowing the consequences it brought. But seeing him, something so beyond human while still being so perfectly formed sent a foreign sensation building in my low belly. It felt like a serpent curled up below my skin, hungry and waiting.
He stepped into the pool, the glowing water accepting him as if this place was carved from the earth specifically for his use. The spring reached his waist, and steam rose around him like incense offered to a forgotten god.
When he settled himself against the far side of the pool, he raised a human hand and beckoned me forward by crooking one finger, a gesture that managed to be both invitation and command.
“Come,” he said simply. “Join me.”
Chapter 7
Flavia
His four spider arms spread along the bank of the spring—unmoving, almost blending in with the rocks and detritus of the forest floor. But I had long ago learned what a predator lying in wait looked like.
“Little human…” The warning in his voice was clear. I scrambled over and knelt just behind him on the edge. It likely wasn’t what he intended, but it was a skill that had always served me well distracting Tiberius’ men. I placed my hands on the flesh of his massive shoulders.
“What are you—” he started, but then I pressed my thumbs into the crevasse where his muscles met, and he stilled.
He was tight, but I felt his muscles relax just like a man’s would under my ministrations. I don’t know what I expected from a demon, but his anatomy wasn’t so different from the other men, just larger. At least near his neck and human arms. I pressed my thumbs into the column of muscle and tendons that ran up the back of his neck, then spread my nails over the skin underneath his dark hair.
He let out a low, reverberating chuckle. “Are you trying to distract me?”
“Does this not please you?”
“Clever little thing,” he murmured, his voice carrying amusement and something darker. “You think to disarm me with touch?”
“It worked on lesser predators.” I dug my thumbs deeper into the knots of tension, feeling the way his breathing shifted. I traced my hands down closer to where his inhuman arms emerged. The skin there was rougher than leather armor, shifting into something closer to black iron where his segmented arms emerged. It should have disturbed me, his monstrous anatomy. Instead, I gently scrapped my nails over the rough texture in fascination. “Though perhaps you're more resilient than Roman dogs.”
“How flattering. Comparing me to your former tormentors.” His tone remained irreverent, but I caught the edge beneath it. “Tell me, did they purr like house-cats when you touched them this way?”
My hands stilled. “No. They took what they wanted. I merely survived.”
“Survived,” he repeated slowly. “Such an interesting word choice. Not submitted. Not surrendered.” One of his additional eyes swiveled to watch my face, looking for a reaction. I gave him none. His overly wide mouth dipped into a frown.
The rough, shell-like texture of one of his arms wrap around my waist and in the next moment I was drowning in heat. Hot water surrounded me and I was back in that villa, my body pressed against those heated floors. Floors far too warm for comfort, as knives and heat pokers tore apart my skin over and over again.
I burst up out of the water, heaving as I coughed water out of my lungs. I coughed again and shook my head, water streaming from my hair as I scrambled backward toward the spring's edge, my torn stola clinging to my body like a second skin. I clung to the rocks at the edge, but was shaking too badly to pull myself out.
“No, no, no,” I gasped, the words tumbling out between ragged breaths. The heat—it was everywhere, seeping through my clothes, into my pores, reminding me of those terrible nights when they would drag me down to the basement where the floors burned like the fires of Dis itself.
Ysu remained perfectly still in the water, his multiple eyes fixed on me with an expression I couldn't read. The steam rose around him, but he made no move to approach, no gesture of comfort or threat. He simply... observed.
“Curious,” he said finally, his voice carrying that irritatingly detached interest. “You showed no such reaction to my form, to my venom, to the prospect of death itself. Yet heated water reduces you to this?”
I managed to stand, and wrapped my arms around myself, shivering violently despite the warmth submerging me.
“I have endured much,” I managed, trying to regain some semblance of composure. “But heat... heat brings back things I would rather forget.”
His head tilted slightly, a gesture that would have been almost human if not for the way his additional eyes moved independently, studying me from multiple angles simultaneously. “Ah. The Romans and their love of heated baths and floors. How they wish to drive away the cold that defines these lands.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway.
“Fascinating. Warmth—something most of your kind finds comforting—sends you into panic.”
“Perhaps I’m broken,” I said bitterly.
“Too demanding to be broken,” he said, with a hint of amusement, “perhaps you just see the honesty in the cold and darkness.”
No response came to me, so I simply bit my lip, looking anywhere but those eight, lingering eyes.
“Show me,” he said suddenly, his voice carrying new authority. “Disrobe. I would see the full extent of what they have done to you.”
I stiffened. “I will not—”
“You will.” His tone brokered no argument, though he still made no move to approach me. “You are my bride now, bound to me by bargain and venom. I have claimed you, and I would know exactly what condition my prize is in.”
The word ‘prize’ stung, but I forced myself to meet his gaze. “You wish to catalog my damage like some merchant examining livestock?”
“Livestock?” His laugh was dark, genuinely amused. “Little human, livestock is raised for slaughter. You, I intend to keep.”
The possessiveness in his voice did not affect me as Tiberius’ had, even as I bristled at his presumption. Tiberius had thought me a possession, his amusing toy. Something in Ysu’s unnatural stare told me a different story. “And if I refuse?”
“Then you refuse.” He shrugged, the gesture oddly casual for a creature of his size. “I am patient, and I have time. Perhaps an eternity of it. But you are the one whose heart burns with a desire for revenge. How much time do you have?”
No time at all. I wanted them all dead, and I wanted it now. I could not stand the thought of them enjoying another day, unburdened by the pain they caused. I was gone, but another would take my place. They may have already found my replacement.
His expression gave away nothing, just the same appraising stare.
“If you uphold our bargain, make no mistake—I will see all of you eventually. The question is how quickly you wish to succumb to me,” he said, and his neutral face broke into a maddening grin.
“How gracious of you to give me the illusion of control.” I crossed my arms over my chest, as if that would hide me from him.
“Illusion?” His smile widened past that point where he looked human, his fangs flashing in the moonlight. Faster than I could see, one of his spider arms lashed out. I felt it pass over my arm and prepared for pain.
There was none.
Instead, one sleeve of my poor, tortured stola fell away, sliced cleanly without any damage to my arm.
I observed it floating in the pool for a moment, before returning to his gaze. The message was clear.
“My dear bride, if I wanted you naked, you would be naked. If I wanted you spread beneath me, you would be trembling and begging for more. The fact that you’re still clothed and defiant should tell you something about the nature of control here.”
Heat flushed through me at his words—not the painful heat of memory, but something else entirely. “You’re quite confident for a creature who’s been alone in these woods for three centuries.”
“Three centuries of hunting, little human. Three centuries of learning exactly how the human body works.” His smile grew even more wicked, if that was possible. “Testing exactly what will make you scream.”
The shiver that ran down my spine wasn’t from fear, and he knew it.
“I wish to understand what manner of creature I have bound myself to,” he replied with that same maddening calm. “Your scars tell stories. They speak of endurance, of survival, of a will that would not break despite every effort to shatter it. These are not shameful marks.”
His words caught me off guard. In all my years of torment, no one had ever suggested that my survival was anything other than cowardice, that my scars were anything other than proof of my weakness. Tiberius had marked my entire body, but he had always kept my face unmarred. He still wanted to show me off when the centurions came through for visits. His golden barbarian wife that they could all covet. Then he would reveal my true nature to them and they would sneer with disgust as they fucked me.
Ysu would do the same.
Perhaps my thoughts showed through on my face, because I swore I saw his gaze soften, though it might have been a trick of the light emerging from the pool. “Little human, I am a creature born of curse and shadow, transformed by ancient magic into something that hunts in the darkness. Do you truly think the marks left by mortal cruelty would disturb me?”
“No,” I said slowly, realization dawning. “You’d probably find them... useful. Like a map to every weakness.”
“So distrustful, my bride.” His approval was evident, though it carried a dangerous edge. “I suspect your weaknesses are not where your scars lie. Those marks represent places where you refused to break. Your true vulnerabilities…” His gaze traveled over me assessingly. “Those likely have been…untouched.”
