Chapter Three
The Taste of Obsidian
3:14 AM.
Marcus had not taken a single note.
His recording device sat on the floor beside his crossed legs, its red light blinking uselessly. His phone was dead-battery, he assumed, though he had charged it before leaving Brooklyn. His notebook remained closed in his jacket pocket. He had asked three questions. She had answered none of them.
Instead, she had talked.
About the weather. About the weight of silk versus cashmere. About a vineyard she owned in Tuscany where the grapes were watered by spring snowmelt and the wine tasted like forgiveness. Her voice was a drug. Slow. Warm. Each word seemed to land directly on the part of his brain responsible for caution, and then dissolve it.
He was sitting on a cushion now. He did not remember being given a cushion.
She was still on the throne.
Her robe had not been retied.
"You're staring," she said.
"You're not wearing anything underneath."
"Observant. That's why I like you."
Marcus looked away-at the carvings on the wall, at the oil lamps, anywhere but the dark triangle of shadow between her thighs. His mouth was dry. His hands were not steady anymore.
"This is a trick," he said.
"Of course it is."
"Psychological manipulation. You're trying to destabilize me."
"Marcus." She said his name like a sigh. "If I wanted to destabilize you, you'd already be on your knees."
His head snapped back toward her.
She had not moved. Still lounging. Still exposed. Still smiling that slow, sharp smile. But her eyes were different now. The amber had deepened to something almost red. Something that reminded him of the wine in the bowl downstairs.
Don't drink, he thought. Don't taste. Don't-
"When was the last time you cried?" she asked.
The question landed like a punch.
"What?"
"After the miscarriage. After your wife packed her bags and told you that you loved your work more than you loved her. When was the last time you actually cried?"
He stood up. Too fast. His balance wavered.
"I'm leaving."
"You're not."
He walked toward the mirrored wall where the elevator had been. No seam. No door. Just his own reflection, pale and sweating, looking nothing like the fearless journalist who had entered this building three hours ago.
"The exit is through me," she said from the throne. "Or through me, depending on how you look at it."
Marcus turned.
She had not followed him. She did not need to. She was the center of the room, the center of the night, the center of every thought currently racing through his skull. He hated her for that. And he hated himself more for noticing the way the lamplight caught the wetness between her legs.
"You're not a journalist anymore tonight," she said softly. "You're just a man. A lonely, exhausted, untouched man who has been running from his own body for three years. Sit down, Marcus. Or kneel. I don't care which. Just stay."
He did not sit.
He did not kneel.
But he did not leave either.
Lilith uncrossed her legs fully. The robe fell open to her hips. She was bare, smooth, glistening in the amber light. And she was looking at him the way a starving woman looks at a feast.
"Come here," she said.
His feet moved before his brain consented.
---
He stopped three feet from the throne. Close enough to smell her. Honey. Smoke. A third scent he finally recognized: want. Not her want. His. His own body betraying him in a way it had not done in years.
"On your knees," she said.
"No."
"Marcus."
"I said no."
She laughed. Not cruelly. Almost fondly. Like a mother amused by a toddler's tantrum.
"You came to my tower at midnight. You drank nothing. You touched nothing. You asked your little questions and kept your distance. And yet here you are." She leaned forward, placed her hand on his chest, right over his heart. It was pounding. She could feel every frantic beat. "You could have left. The elevator opens if you say the word 'goodbye.' I never trap anyone, Marcus. I only invite."
He looked down at her hand. Small. Pale. Fingers long and elegant, nails unpainted but perfectly shaped.
"Why me?" he whispered.
"Because you're already starving. You just forgot." She slid her hand up to his throat. Not squeezing. Just resting. Claiming. "I don't break people who are full. I only feed on the empty ones. And you, Marcus Webb, are a desert."
His knees hit the floor.
He did not remember making the choice.
But suddenly he was kneeling between her bare thighs, looking up at her face framed by the obsidian throne, and she was looking down at him with something that might have been tenderness if tenderness and predation were not the same thing in her world.
"Good boy," she whispered.
Then she took his head in both hands and pulled his mouth to her.
---
The taste was not what he expected.
Not salt. Not musk. Something sweeter. Something that reminded him of honeycomb crushed between teeth, of the first breath after nearly drowning, of every dream he had ever had and then forgotten upon waking. Her thighs closed around his ears. Her fingers tangled in his hair. And her voice, that terrible, beautiful voice, wrapped around his skull:
That's it. That's it. Don't think. Just taste. Just serve.
He licked.
He licked because his body demanded it. He licked because three years of loneliness had been dammed behind a wall of work and whiskey and false pride, and now the wall was gone. He licked because she was wet and warm and alive in a way that made the rest of the world seem like a photograph.
He did not know how long he knelt there.
Time had stopped meaning anything.
At some point, she came against his tongue-once, twice, three times, each climax a small earthquake that made her thighs clamp around his head and her nails dig into his scalp. He did not stop. He could not stop. Her pleasure was his only purpose.
When she finally pushed his head back, his chin was wet. His lips were swollen. His eyes were glassy.
And Lilith was smiling.
Not the predator's smile this time. Something softer. Something almost human.
"Look at you," she murmured, cupping his face. "Already beautiful. Already mine."
Marcus opened his mouth to deny it.
But the word mine had already settled into his bones like a hook.
And hooks, once swallowed, do not come out easily.
---
End of Chapter Three