Soulless (Starcrossed Lovers Trilogy #2) - Jade West Page 0,3

side table. He loved this place.

Wow. Lucian Morelli loved something. That was quite a revelation.

He stepped through to the kitchen, and again it had a quaint little nothingness about it that I could relate to. My friend Jemma’s cheap apartment was my bolthole. My sanctuary so removed from my life that it was a welcome relief. This place had the same feel.

The coffee machine looked like the most expensive item in the building. He’d definitely paid out decent cash for that thing.

Weirdly, I liked it here – just like I did Jemma’s place. I could buy into his easiness in this space, even in the grip of the beast who’d be my demise.

“Are you going to finish me off tonight, then?” I asked him, pasting on my bravest face.

“I’ll finish you off whenever it suits me,” he told me, and he meant it.

I looked at him fresh in these new surroundings, as though I was seeing him for the very first time. His darkness was radiating. His strength was brilliant –– muscular and sculpted with biological precision. It was a strange thing, just how opposite our family lines were, in every sense of the word. Who knows, maybe in some alternate dimension the bloodlines would breed and produce something vaguely normal.

His hands were magicians whenever they moved, his fingers beautiful in their dances. His hair was perfect in his styling, even though he was still suited up as Terence Kingsley.

I guess it was the intensity of the surroundings, but Lucian Morelli looked even more of a god in this place. His opulence and class was obvious against the cheap backdrop.

I leant against the counter and watched him.

“You’re going to really make me suffer, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Yes, sweetheart,” he said with an evil smile. “I’m going to make you suffer. I’m going to enjoy every second of it. Morelli against Constantine in the most intimate of ways.”

Somehow, even through the dread and the fear churning inside me, intimacy with Lucian Morelli gave me a shudder of something different.

I expected him to fire up the coffee machine, but he didn’t. He crossed the room to the refrigerator and pulled out two mineral waters, pouring them into glasses from the shelf.

“Drink,” he ordered, and handed one over.

I did what he told me, but because I was thirsty, not because I was his meek little servant. Not yet, anyway.

He watched me while he sipped at his.

It was another clear light and dark between us both. Another polarity in our souls. He drank mineral water in life while I drank champagne. I’d never seen him touch a substance, let alone have a dependency on it.

Control.

He was all about control.

I was all about losing mine.

“I hope your ass is still hurting,” he said. “I’ve plenty of pain to be adding to it.”

I laughed. “It’s had worse. I’m not quite so virginal as you think I am. My life hasn’t been all that sheltered, asshole.”

That angered him. He straightened and stepped on over, bristling in his hate of me.

“You’ll be telling me all about who’s been pawing you, Elaine. By the time I take the last of you, I’ll know every one of your dirty little secrets.”

He was wrong.

I wouldn’t tell him anything I didn’t want to. He could tear me apart, and I’d still keep my mouth closed tight.

He tipped my face up to his. “I just know there are plenty of dirty little secrets behind those pretty blue eyes.”

He wasn’t wrong on that front. I had enough dirty little secrets to fill a bookshelf.

His fingers slid down my throat, squeezing just a little before slipping my coat from my shoulders and letting it drop to the floor. I didn’t fight him.

“Such a pretty little Constantine bitch,” he whispered.

I felt like a pretty little Constantine bitch. It was a beautiful darkness, to be wanted by such a demon.

My words were out of my throat before I even realized they were coming, nothing but a breath from my lips.

“Hurt me, monster. Show me what you really are.”

I couldn’t hold back a gasp as he raised his hand to my face. I was expecting pain, but I didn’t get it. No. I got anything but pain. With a slip of his fingers as he gripped my face, Lucian Morelli pushed his thumb inside my mouth.

It was the strangest thing to have the monster’s thumb so intimately between my lips, probing so gently. I’d been touched and groped and abused in the most intense of ways through my