Chapter 2: Lullaby to Ruin - The Cottage Claiming
The cold mud seeped through his jeans, a grounding, filthy reality. Max heaved, empty, his forehead pressed against the rough granite of a grave marker. The shame was a live wire in his gut, sizzling alongside the lingering, unwanted echoes of pleasure. Her taste—old earth and copper—was still on his tongue.
He fumbled his jeans up, the zipper loud in the quiet. The black candle in his jacket felt heavier.
A twig snapped.
He spun, heart hammering. “Dani?”
It wasn’t Dani. Sarah’s voice floated from the woods beyond the fence, not from the sky now. A lullaby. The same one she’d sung centuries ago. It wove through the trees, a silken thread pulling at the confusion in his head.
“Come little children, I’ll take thee away…”
It wasn’t a threat. It was a promise. A memory of warmth and safety that he knew was a lie, but his legs straightened anyway. The melody wrapped around his thoughts, smoothing the sharp edges of his fear. Her magic was in it, a psychic oil making everything slippery.
“Into a land of enchantment…”
He found himself walking, not running, toward the cemetery’s edge. His body moved like it was remembering a dream. The iron fence passed beside him. One step. Then another. His foot cleared the boundary, leaving the hallowed ground.
The air changed instantly. It grew warmer, thicker, smelling of fungi and sweet, rotting blossoms. The lullaby stopped.
“There’s a good boy,” Sarah whispered from the darkness just ahead.
She was leaning against an oak tree, looking solid and real. Her smile was gentle, sympathetic even. “You looked so cold and sad. I don’t like you sad, Maxie.”
“Where’s my sister?” His voice was rough, but the anger was blunted, wrapped in the cotton-wool fog of her spell.
“Safe. For now.” She pushed off the tree and took his hand. Her skin was cool, her grip surprisingly strong. “Come. We need to finish our conversation somewhere more private. Somewhere the stars can watch.”
She led him deeper into the woods. He followed, part of him screaming to wrench away, to run back to the graveyard. But the larger part was tired, and heavy, and oddly curious. The candle’s heat against his chest was a constant pulse, a second heartbeat syncing with his own.
The cottage appeared like a tumor growing from the forest floor. Jagged stone walls swallowed by veils of ivy, its crooked chimney black against the moon. The clearing before it was bathed in bone-white light. In the center sat a massive, cracked altar stone. On it, resting in a puddle of its own wax, was the twin of his black candle, its flame burning impossibly still.
“Home,” Sarah sighed, with a childish giggle that didn’t reach her eyes. They were fixed on him, calculating, hungry.
Inside, the air was stale and cold, smelling of dried herbs and dust. Shadows clung to the corners, thick as cobwebs. In the main room, draped with rotting tapestries, stood a vast four-poster bed. Its hangings were moth-eaten velvet, the mattress a sagging landscape of stains.
“Sit,” she said, not a request.
The edge of the mattress met the backs of his knees. He sat. The frame groaned.
She stood before him, her hips cocked. The moonlight from a grimy window slit her figure, painting one side in silver. Her fingers went to the laces of her bodice. They came undone with a single, practiced tug. The ragged dress slipped from her shoulders, pooling at her feet. She was naked beneath, pale as a grub from under a log. Her body was young, perfect, and utterly foreign. Centuries old. She stepped out of the cloth and moved toward him.
“Time to make a man of you, virgin boy,” she whispered, her voice dropping its singsong edge. It was flat. Hungry.
Her cold hands landed on his shoulders, pushing him back until his spine hit the thin mattress. He didn’t fight. The fog was too dense. She knelt on the floor between his spread legs, her breath ghosting over the denim covering his crotch. Her fingers made quick work of his button, his zipper. She yanked his jeans and boxers down to his thighs.
The cold air hit his exposed skin. He was already half-hard, just from her proximity, from the relentless thrum of the candle’s magic. It felt inevitable.
“See?” she murmured, wrapping her long, cool fingers around his shaft. “He remembers me. He wants to play.”
She lowered her head. Her tongue, flat and wet, licked a long, slow stripe from the base of his cock to the tip. He jerked, a gasp torn from him. She took him into her mouth without preamble, sinking down until his head hit the back of her throat. She gagged lightly, then swallowed, the vibration rippling through him.
“Oh, fuck,” he breathed, his hands fisting in the rough blanket.
She began to move, a ruthless, expert rhythm. Her head bobbed, her lips stretched tight around his girth. She used her tongue, her throat, every part of her mouth to milk him. It was nothing like the phantom handjob. This was wet, and messy, and devastatingly real. Spit dripped down his balls. The sounds were obscene—wet slurps and guttural gulps. She looked up at him, her blue eyes wide and innocent even as she deep-throated him, even as a string of saliva connected her lips to his cock when she pulled off with a pop.
“You taste like fear and want,” she panted, stroking him with her slick hand. “I like it.”
She rose then, climbing onto the bed, one knee on either side of his hips. She loomed over him, her blonde hair a curtain around their faces. Her cunt was positioned directly over his aching cock. He could see the slickness glistening on her folds in the moonlight.
“This is the second thread, Max,” she said, no longer pretending. Her voice was stark. “You give me this. You come inside me. And you are mine a little more.”
She reached down, guiding him. The broad head of his cock pressed against her opening. She was impossibly tight, a hot, silken ring of resistance.
She sank down.
It was a slow, inexorable invasion. A wet, burning sheath that swallowed him inch by torturous inch. Her internal muscles fluttered around him, adjusting, gripping. She let out a shaking, ragged gasp that was neither pleasure nor pain, but pure consumption. When she was fully impaled, she went still, her body trembling above him.
“Mine,” she choked out.
Then she began to ride him.
Her movements were not gentle, not loving. They were frantic and deep, a piston driving him into the mattress. Each downward slam took the breath from his lungs. Her tits bounced, her head thrown back, neck tendons standing in sharp relief. The bed slammed against the stone wall with a rhythmic, punishing crack.
“Yes—fuck—yes, give it—give it all to me, you little virgin,” she snarled, the words guttural and raw. Her nails dug into his chest, scraping through his shirt. “You feel so good inside me. So hot. I’m going to drink every drop.”
He was losing himself. The shame, the terror, the logic—all of it was being pounded into slurry by the raw, physical reality of her. Her cunt was a vice, a perfect, wet fist milking him toward an edge he couldn’t avoid. His hips began to meet her thrusts, a treacherous, eager rhythm of his own. He was fucking her back.
“That’s it,” she moaned, riding him harder, faster. “Give it to me. Fill me up. I need it!”
Her inner walls began to clench and spasm around him. Her climax wasn’t a cry of pleasure, but a low, shuddering wail that sounded like grief. It triggered his own.
With a broken shout, he came. It tore through him, a blinding, volcanic rupture. He pumped his release deep into her, pulse after helpless pulse, as she ground down on him, milking him with violent squeezes of her pelvis.
She collapsed on top of him, a dead weight of cold skin and heaving breath. He was pinned, spent, trapped inside her. The scent of sex and her rotten-magic filled his nostrils.
After a long moment, she pushed herself up. She slid off him with a wet, sticky sound and stood beside the bed, looking down. His seed dripped down her inner thigh. She smiled, a true, wide, empty smile.
She walked to the window, to the moonlight. She dipped two fingers into herself, gathered his come, and brought them to her lips. She sucked them clean.
“Yummy,” she said, turning back to him. Her eyes were brighter. More solid. “Two threads tied, brave virgin. The binding holds. You have until sunrise to give me the third. The final one.”
She gestured to the window. The sky was still black, but in the east, the faintest smudge of grey hinted at the horizon.
“The last one hurts a bit more,” she said, almost apologetically. “But you’ll want to give it. For your sister. You’ll beg to give it.”
Max could only stare, hollowed out, as she hummed her lullaby and began to dress. The candle on the altar outside flickered, and its flame burned a little higher, a little greener, painting the room in a sickly, knowing light.