I lay on the pallet next to her, my hand on her belly, and under my palm the second heartbeat kept a schedule I had not set.

A heartbeat has a throat behind it.

I had built every calculation in this room around a sound. The chain’s length. The stand’s height. The wool I cut from the Tuesday shirt and stuffed into the ventilation grate. All of it engineering, all of it aimed at the same problem, which was keeping her audible only to me. The hum the stone absorbs, and the keen I answered with one word. Cats.

A child’s voice would not be mistaken for a cat’s . A child’s voice would bring Holst up out of the graveyard.

The cellar that I had called sanctuary was a trap, and the trap was not for her.

The trap was for the voice.

The word arrived at three in the morning. The word family. I had not used it since the farmer’s son became the novice became the priest. The word belonged to the before: the farm, the father, the mother testing the milk’s temperature on her wrist.

The word was lying beside me on a straw pallet with its belly full of a heartbeat I had helped create and its ruby eyes closed and its antlers resting against the wall and the word was family and the family was mine and the mine was the man underneath and the man underneath was —

Awake. For the first time in fourteen years, awake. Not the waking of the canonical hours. A man who slept inside a building woke up after the building collapsed, and the air turned cold.

The cellar could not hold them. The woods could.

Read more

Content note. This is dark fiction for adult readers. Red and Her Wolf does not look away: coerced sex, physical and sexual abuse, graphic violence, gore, body horror, captivity, and a curse that rewrites a body against its will. Tristan is twenty, and every character on the page is an adult. If those are your woods, come in.

Beyond the well was a cabin, made with wood on stone. Though the planks were dark with age, they were well maintained; mud and clay also reinforced the boards, and there were shutters closed over the windows. The woman marched up the stairs; the chain dragging behind her before she dropped it to open the door.

If his legs weren’t so useless, this would be a good time to run.

However, as that was not the case, he was a good boy, following behind her.

She slammed her left axe hand on the wooden rail of the porch, grunting as she lifted a leg and pressed her boot against it for leverage. The stump released from the steel glove with a wet plop and she scoffed, looking at the moldy bandages covering the limb. She turned her head to face him, as if waiting for a remark, “Come in.”

He glanced at the flared blade sticking out of the wood, noticing that the rail had multiple deep-set notches in it. He bowed his head and followed her inside, his eyes downcast.

“Strip.”

The door closed behind him and he tensed, hearing that command. Tristan gulped and nodded, taking off his tattered shirt before grunting as a ball of fur hit his chest. He stepped back, hissing as he pivoted on his left ankle.

Her eyes were to the side, gazing at the cast-iron fireplace, “Your clothes should be burned. Strip, then wrap yourself.”

“… I would get someone’s name before going nude.”

Her lips curled into a smirk again and she snorted, “In 30 days, I’m going to cut off your head. You don’t need to know my name.”

He flinched, noting that he would escape before that happens. Once he did, he would be better off forgetting this insane and stunning woman. He dragged off his pants, kicking them towards the door before he snuggled himself into the furs.

“Sit.”

She was treating him like a dog already with these one word commands.

Tristan glanced around before noticing her right hand extended out, pointing to one chair next to her. His hands pressing the furs closer to himself as he shuffled to the chair, the few feet he limped feeling like miles. He sat down and tensed up even more when she knelt in front of him, lifting his left leg and setting it on a stump nearby, “Can… Can I call you… something?”

She didn’t lift her head, looking at the vicious holes left from sharp fangs, “Do what you like.”

He pursed his lips, a flush on his cheeks as she studied him. The more he looked at her, the more entranced he became, “Red.”

She laughed, the rumbling deep and soothing. “Creative.”

He cracked the tiniest of smiles, “It suits you.”

She tilted her head with a slight grin, “You are infected.”

His heart dropped, and his smile vanished. Why did she have to be so blunt? “What?”

“The wolf bit you. You are infected.”

Wolf?

That monster was NO wolf.

His eyes went wide, and he stared at his ankle, “That-that thing… how… how can I be infected?! That creature was not a wolf! It was a monster!”

Her grin remained, and it was making him sick, “Yes, it was. It was a monster in the shape of a giant wolf.” She stood up, walking to a cabinet near the kitchen. A basket of bandages in hand, she walked back, “Thanks to you, I killed it.” Her left shoulder twitched, “After so long…”

“But why do you say I’m infected?! How could I be?!”

“It bit you.” She knelt back down before him, wrapping a long bandage around the gruesome bite, using her teeth to tighten it, “Its drool digs into the flesh and infects the blood, defiling it so it no longer is that of a man.” She spoke with authority, not mincing her words as they sent chills into his bones, “The plague lays dormant… until the full moon.”

The next full moon is in 30 days…

His jaw fell open, water leaking from his reddening eyes.

“In 30 days, you will die.”

Red and Her Wolf stays free. All fourteen chapters, forever, no rope across the door. It is the front hall, not the whole house. Behind the Speakeasy rope: Victoria and the rest of the novels chapter by chapter months before Kindle Unlimited, the character files, the art (the tasteful kind and the other kind), and the memes I only trust the regulars with. $6.66 a month or $69 a year. Patronage, with teeth. 🐺

Chapter Six, “Home,” lands next Saturday. He has thirty days and one idea: make her want to keep him.

If this got you, restack it or send it to the friend who likes their romance with teeth marks.

Content note. This is dark fiction for adult readers. Red and Her Wolf does not look away: coerced sex, physical and sexual abuse, graphic violence, gore, body horror, captivity, and a curse that rewrites a body against its will. Tristan is twenty, and every character on the page is an adult. If those are your woods, come in.

“Stop running.”

Though he had planned on ignoring that command, his ankle twisted against a root and he collapsed, crashing onto the ground. He panted heavily, sunken blue eyes gazing up past the canopy and towards the purple sky. He whined, seeing the orange edges creeping up the sky.

How long was he limping for?

He clenched his teeth, hissing as he turned onto his stomach, struggling to get back on his busted and bruised soles.

Freedom.

He must be close to it.

Nevermind that he had not been moving fast at all.

Nevermind that the crimson figure had been leisurely following him, a cougar following a wounded calf.

He needed to get… to freedom.

He… needed to stop fooling himself.

He turned his head, sapphire eyes dully looking at the grim reaper in scarlet. He chewed on his cheek, leaning against the tree trunk, heaving as he struggled to catch his breath, “Please… don’t… don’t kill me. Pl-please.”

They chuckled again, the hood tilting suddenly to the side. The pop from the being would’ve made him jump if not for how EXHAUSTED he was.

“You are bit. You’ll become a beast.” The chuckling stopped, a snarl in its place, “I KILL beasts.”

“But… but I’m not a beast. I don’t even… know what that THING was.” He looked over to the figure, realizing that the voice, while deep, was two octaves higher than his. The words were direct and blunt.

Yet the tone was distinctly feminine.

He was talking to a woman. A woman who scared him more than any man or monster, even the creature from before.

Humans, women, can be reasoned with. Though his mother was a despicable cretin, she, with the proper amount of blubbering and submissive posturing, could be reasoned with.

His mother was at the bottom of the barrel of humanity.

This woman, no matter how terrifying, could not be as bad.

“Please…” He slid down to the ground, knees hitting rough bark and mud, “I don’t want to become a beast. I don’t want to die. So please, let me live.” He crawled forward, his eyes glancing at the sharp edges of the axe head. He jerked his head away; any more time spent on that thing and he would run.

Either way, he was dead.

“I will do anything for you. There is nothing I won’t do. Please let me live, I’ll be your slave if it means I can live.”

This was true.

He would do anything.

Besides, Freedom could wait, if it meant he could be alive for one more day.

“I have no need for a slave.”

He whimpered, sitting back on his heels, tears clearing dirt and sweat from his cheeks. He bit his bottom lip as the axe head came closer. The edge was sharp, sharp enough that the slightest brush of it left a clean cut along his neck.

At least his death would be painless.

The flat of the blade hit his chin, and he was forced to tilt his head up. Blue eyes, filled with despair and fear, gazed into bright red depths.

Her eyes shone like blood diamonds, blinding his gaze and keeping him trapped.

The woman was silent, her expression and features hidden underneath the dark of the hood. She was deliberating his sentence, “… a month.”

His heart skipped a beat, “A… a month?”

“Until the next full moon. I will keep you alive.” The blade moved away from his neck and he sighed in relief, his shoulders relaxing.

However, he tensed as a chain was lassoed around his neck, the bloodied hook clamped into the link that hung shallow just below his Adam’s apple, “Wh-what?”

The red woman tugged on the silver leash, “I have no need for a slave. A dog makes for a better companion.”

A dog.

That’s what he had become.

A dog.

He thought back to the strays in the town; starved, ravenous mutts, beaten and kicked into alleys.

Honestly, that is not much different from his own experiences.

He silently followed the woman deeper and deeper into the woods. Though the sky had taken a light blue and pink hue of the morning, the canopies of the trees loomed wider. The full leafed fingers of the branches devoured the sky the deeper they went.

He shuddered, the sounds of life in the woods becoming duller. Sounds were being swallowed the longer they drifted into the abyss.

She kept the pace slow, though each time he dared stop, a sharp tug would bring him out of his stupor. She knew where they were going; this was a path she followed by muscle memory. He feared she was just leading him to a proper grave site when a well came into view.

She stopped by the well, wrapping the chain around a metal pole sticking out of the stone. With her right arm free, she pulled on a rope, tugging a full bucket of clear water. Setting it on the ledge, she lifted her hand and pulled off the hood. He wondered why she never used her left hand; surely lifting a bucket would be less cumbersome than holding an enormous axe one handed.

However, before he could contemplate further, she lifted the bucket over her head, finally using her left arm to steady the bucket, leading the boy to a chilling revelation.

The axe… WAS her left hand.

She turned the bucket over. A waterfall cascaded down her body, bringing old orange and brown mud and guts away to flood the ground. The woman grunted, sighing softly at the ice cold water, lifting her head as she looked up towards the treetops.

He never had laid eyes on anyone like her before.

It wasn’t just the bladed limb.

She was… beautiful.

Instead of a predatory killer, he saw an entrancing girl, with bright bold eyes and thick lips. The water made her red cloak and ivory, blood caked dress cling to her curves.

The women of the township, as vile as their husbands, could not hold a candle to such dangerous radiance.

Yes, the red woman was dangerous.

He could feel it as she pulled on the chain again, gazing at him with simmering embers in her eyes, “Are you thirsty?”

He swallowed, his throat scratchy and raw, giving a slow nod.

She tossed the bucket back into the well, her left axe-hand on the stone ledge as her right swirled the rope around. Tugging the rope tightly, she lifted the bucket from the well and placed it between them. She glanced at him once more, a slight smirk on her face, “Drink.”

He limped forward, cautiously lowering his head to the bucket, taking a slow sip.

His eyes fluttered, and he moaned. The clear, pure liquid soothed his throat, and he shivered in delight. His timid sips became full gulps, and he lapped up the liquid greedily.

“What is your name?”

He paused in his revelry, water and drool down his chin as he gazed at her, surprised, “My..my name?”

She raised an eyebrow, her lips splitting into that wide, pearly grin, “My dog has to have a name.”

“Even if… you’re going to kill me?”

“Not for a month. Do I have to name you myself?”

No.

No, she did not.

The only thing he had was his name.

She would not take that away from him.

“… Tristan… my name is Tristan.”

Red and Her Wolf stays free. All fourteen chapters, forever, no rope across the door. It is the front hall, not the whole house. Behind the Speakeasy rope: Victoria and the rest of the novels chapter by chapter months before Kindle Unlimited, the character files, the art (the tasteful kind and the other kind), and the memes I only trust the regulars with. $6.66 a month or $69 a year. Patronage, with teeth. 🐺

Chapter Five, “Red,” lands next Saturday. He is about to give her a name, and she is about to tell him what the bite means.

If this got you, restack it or send it to the friend who likes their romance with teeth marks.

Well, you’ve subbed to the right Mistress. I always deliver.

Today, I bring you an invite to a brand-new website packed with more stories than you will ever have time to read. Well, it will be. Soon. Probably. A crap ton of other authors and I are working to fill the shelves of this awesome website that one of my author friends created. It’s a work in progress.

What do you mean… New Realm=New serial platform?

Yes! That is exactly what I mean. And you should check it out.

Obey Here

You decide!

So, my first short story for Letters Between Sex and Violence 4, ‘Custodian’, is almost done! I have a docket of other stories that need cleanup, editing, and writing to add to the volume!

New Releases (YES, STILL WITH AN ‘S’!)

Exclusive Feature

He ruins everything he touches, and now he’s claimed her.

Sasha Rinah thought burning down her old life would set her free, but you can’t run from who you are.

Something ancient lives in the Dark Entry Forest, and now a creature made of shadow has followed her out.

His very presence drives everyone to madness and destruction. No one is spared.

Except Sasha.

Bodies are piling around her, but this monster stalking her has no intention of letting her go. Not when she’s the first person he can touch.

Can she stop ruin from spreading in his wake? Or will his ruin consume her?

You can’t escape, Dandelion.

This book is intended for adults who love spooky and spicy and is part of a standalone series that does not require you to read the other books to enjoy

Book Fair

Seriously, if you feel disappointed that I didn’t have a lot of life to update on, just know—yes, I do. It’s just too much.

Days are busier than I can handle right now. Might just be that time of year. Until next time, stay safe! Stay healthy! Stay happy!

Content note: this issue has uncut art and extended character material. The explicit art is at the very bottom, behind the wall, clearly marked. Skip whatever you need to skip.

Allo Allo!

Okay, so last week I told you there’s a line in chapter one where Victoria refuses to think about why she picked that jaw. That left eye and not that right one. She calls the question uncomfortable, then she calls it MEANINGLESS, which is so much worse, and then she goes upstairs and writes a letter to her son.

And then I said, and I quote, “next week I will.”

So here I am. Answering it. In public. Voluntarily.

One correction first, because I was sleepy and made a bit of an oopsie. I called Emile a three year old who’d been dead for one thousand and ninety five days. He wasn’t! He was never three. He was a potential never been reached. He was born still (which…is pretty close to personal for me) and the one thousand and ninety five days are counted from the day he didn’t come, and what she writes at the top of every letter is…

you would have been three by now.

(Ow)

She does the arithmetic every time she picks up the pen, and she gets it right every time, because nothing says grief like your own genius stabbing you in the tear duct and you refuse to let it win…

Again.

Two housekeeping things: Nothing here goes past chapter six, and where I’m hiding something you will know, and that includes hiding it from the people who pay me(because I’m fair like that).

The last section is explicit and it lives behind the subscriber wall, so if you’re not a member you simply won’t be shown it and nothing above it needs a warning.

What I can get past Meta

So did you see that

There’s a block here you’re not being shown!

Two generations I threw out and exactly why each one failed, plus the actual working file for the picture that did not give me nightmares. The prompt, the LoRA stack, the negative, the seed, the settings. Everything you’d need to go and make one yourself.

I give it away back here because I’m not precious about the method. $6.66/month or $69/year and it opens ;)

So…Why that jaw?

Right.

Her grief has a name and a shape before the Oratory, before the storm, before the entire…build a man situation.

The name is Emile who SHOULD have been born, alive, on a Tuesday in November. He was perfect, exactly how she knew he would be.

Just…much quieter then he should’ve been.

She held him for six hours and did not cry, and the nurses thought she was in shock. Victoria doesn’t do shock. She calculates; she examines, she studies, she searches for what went wrong then corrects it.

Just as she did at seven years old with her father’s pocket watch.

…This wasn’t a watch, a clock, a formula with a misplaced symbol in the wrong place.

This was not a problem to fix. It just didn’t work.

There was no error, no cause, nothing to fix, no one to be angry at.

What she lost was not a person she knew. What she was lost was potential, evidence.

She never fed him once, never got him wrong once, never had a single boring Tuesday with him. Somewhere in the third trimester she worked out that she would have been good at this.

That she could be a mother.

Then the demonstration got cancelled and the funding got withdrawn and she is left holding a hypothesis.

This is a woman who does not believe anything she cannot demonstrate. She has exactly one unfalsifiable belief about herself and that is the one.

Eighteen months later Henri died on a transit crossing nobody had inspected and now she lost the only person who believed that she could be warm.

Emile would’ve been proof. Henri was the WITNESS.

He was the only person alive who witnessed this precise, sharp, and formidable woman talk to an unborn child and cried at a broken music box in a market. He was the only one who knew that woman ever existed.

So she is left with no child, no experiment, no witness.

She tried to back to work after Emile. Three days of silence, of ‘shock’ and she told Henri “I need to go back to work.” He stood by her, he let her process, he let her work because he knew wife and knew that she needed to feel as outstanding as he knew she was. She was a fantastic, accomplished scientist, versed in Galvanic Biology, so getting back to work, getting back to her proven competence, began to help her heal.

Then Henri died.

And she had nothing left.

She went to grave robbing SECOND, as a last resort to getting SOMETHING back.

Okay. The jaw.

She’ll tell you she selected for tissue structure. Galvanic compatibility. Anatomical integrity. All three of those are in her notes and as an expert, all are reasonable.

She’s also full of shit.

She checked tissue structure, galvanic compatibility, anatomical integrity, and whether she could stand to look at it every day.

She was curating.

She has never once called it that. She has a doctorate, a basement, a corpse budget, and nobody left alive to say her name in a certain way.

And the hands are how you know.

She was more specific about the hands than about any other part. They came off a sculptor’s apprentice who died of a fever, clean, hands unmarked, and she got them ON PURPOSE.

In the letters she writes to Emile: you would have been an artist.

So he reaches for things with a delicate tenderness with no source. It’s the loveliest thing about him.

She bought those hands for her dead son.

He can’t know; he has no idea who Emile or Henri are. He only knows that she keeps looking at him and almost but never quite SEES him, and he eventually finds the word for it in one of Henri’s poetry books.

The word is palimpsest. Yes that was a new word for me too.

He is a surface to her. Underneath her handwriting is the text she’s actually trying to read. He does not tell her this for a very long time and when he does, it is not gentle.

Another block you’re not being shown.

A page out of the actual character file. All seven bodies he’s assembled from, what each one contributes, and what leaks through from each of them into a man who was technically ‘born yesterday’.

$6.66/month or $69/year.

Why Frankenstein? Was it because of Frankenstein 2025?

…Yes.

Fuck you.

…Just kidding! But seriously, go to hell.

Look, I had the idea of gender bending Victor into Victoria for a long time and the 2025 movie just pushed it to the top of mind.

Victor, in the movie, had an abusive father that informed how shitty of a dad Victor is to his creation before just up and abandoning him.

Victoria, colored by absolute grief and unexamined rage, does the opposite. She teaches him the alphabet in an afternoon and starts him on technical documentation. She does his sutures herself, and she keeps him below the smog line because above it the city would see him.

She doesn’t want to share the emotional price she paid for him. She doesn’t want anyone to see what she could’ve been. However, he also can’t see that either.

Victor abandoned his creature.

Victoria wants her creature for the wrong reasons and he has to live with that, contend with ghosts that his creator sees instead of the giant man she made.

Victor wanted to prove that he can be God.

Victoria just wanted what God denied her.

Neither look at the cost of what they made. Only the creature knows.

There’s a score, and this week broke my own rule

One track per chapter, and it lives on the chapters themselves now, so you press play at the top and read with it running underneath.

This week is chapter six with Track 06, City Below the Smog.

Thirty eight BPM, C minor, an industrial hiss that comes in early and never leaves, brass buried where you can hear. There is nothing above the mid-range in the entire mix cause nothing develops upward.

The smog line is a lid, and now it’s a lid you can hear.

Next week

Nobody Came Looking. A dark reverse harem, a narrator in a room somebody organised without her input but with her needs in mind. It should scare her and she knows it.

She just ignores it.

Away from grief, steampunk, and the ethics of necromancy. Still it’s own brand of romantic horror.

The door, since you got this far

Everything you just read is free and it stays free! I’d rather be read than paid, in that order, and it isn’t close.

What’s back there: Victoria and the rest of the novels chapter by chapter months before Kindle Unlimited gets them, the character files, the working prompt for every piece of art I make, and the art itself, the tasteful kind and the foul kind.

$6.66/month or $69/year. Patronage, with teeth 🐺

Victoria posts on Thursdays. Chapter one, The Cathedral of Grief, is free to anybody.

Love yas, lovelies!

The members version of this post keeps going past here. It’s the uncut art, and it’s the entire reason the cropped one at the top exists.

This is the other version. No crop, no drape, nothing shoved out of shot.

Explicit, all the way down. Everybody depicted is an adult. Nothing here goes past chapter four, so you’re safe on that front at least.

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Ethan asks me what I want to do today.

Nobody in this loft asks me things. Alex tells me to sit down and eat, and I…sit down and eat. Colt puts a hand somewhere on me, and I go where the hand goes. Ethan lies on his side at eleven in the morning with his head propped on one fist and asks me what I want to do today, like the day is a menu, like I’m the person who gets handed one.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

I don’t. What I have instead is a body keeping notes, and I lie there and read the entries while he waits.

Colt’s grip on my hips, where he meant to get his name into the bone.

Ethan’s fingers on my ribs, counting them like he was looking for the way in.

Alex’s palm at the small of my back, turning me onto my side the way you’d straighten something on a shelf.

The soreness between my legs keeps time, low and insistent, a second pulse. Three pairs of hands and one body that still answers to me.

The room smells like him, bergamot at the top of it and the salt of skin underneath, and the sheets are still damp in the place where I’ve been. His chest is warm against my back and his breath comes slow at the nape of my neck, the even rhythm of a man who has already decided he’s keeping me. His fingers found my freckles. Shoulders, collarbone, the bridge of my nose, each one pressed once, like he’s signing something.

Claiming.

“Morning, angel.”

His voice is still rough with sleep, gravel in it, and my stomach does that thing where it thinks it’s on a rollercoaster. He turns me onto my back, and the light transforms his hair to gold and his eyes to deep blue, just as it always does with him. The smudged cherry lipstick remained in the center of his lower lip as he didn’t care to remove it. He doesn’t smile. He looks at me the way you look at a page you have to get down before somebody takes the book away.

“You’re real.”

He lets out a laugh, low, and the sound goes through his chest into mine. “So are you.”

His thumb brushes the mole under my left eye, then the one below my lip. “Punctuation marks. On a love letter no one else will ever read.”

I should find that ridiculous. It is ridiculous. My throat goes dry anyway.

Read more

Her

The warm-place smells of him. Everything smells of him. The stone carries his feet-on-the-steps before the sound arrives. The earth gives the clay its smell, and the place smells of the earth before the stone walls, when wounds covered me; he found me, and his finding me was warm.

I know when he has hurt himself. The blood-smell comes through the stone. Its age is because of the stone keeping it for a period longer than my tenure. New, because the leather-thing opens him again.

In the before-place, opening was danger. Something with teeth. Nobody ever chose the opening. He chooses. He is the teeth and the skin both.

I do not understand. But I tend. The closing-warmth in my mouth is what I am. I tend to him because he is mine.

He does not know that he is mine.

He thinks the metal-circle on my ankle is the reason I am still here.

The metal-circle has a thin-place where the two ends meet. A seam with a gap in it, the width of my smallest claw. My claws are harder than the cold-grey.

I could open it the first night. I could open it now.

I stay because the warm-place smells of him; his smell is the warmest smell. He came instead of the ending. He smelled of old blood and yellow-fat-light and fear. I smelled of fear, too. The sameness was the bridge into mine.

His words are his hurt-sounds. I understand how they feel; The coldness of the words he says when his hands shake. The heat of my name-for-him. The cold is the above-place him, the one who wears the not-touching like a hide pulled over his actual skin. The heat is the below-place him, the one who kneels and feeds me and breathes.

I want the below-place him. I do not have the word humans put on this. The word is a shape in the body: the hum, the closing-warmth going into his wounds. I tend you because you are mine, and the tending is the keeping, and the keeping —

No. Before he lifted me, he had already completed the keeping in the leaves.

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Free forever, fourteen chapters, a new one every Saturday, and none of them ever locked. It is the fastest way to find out whether you are one of us. A Red Riding Hood retelling where the thing in the red hood carries an axe, the wolf is a beautiful ruined boy who ran the wrong way out of hell, and the countdown to his execution is thirty days long. Dark, bloody, tender in all the wrong places. Begin in the Deep Woods →

In My Books, Love is Torture!

The Story of Red and Her Wolf

Content note. This is dark fiction for adult readers. Red and Her Wolf opens on a young man escaping sexual exploitation, and it does not look away: coerced sex, physical and sexual abuse, graphic violence, gore, body horror, and a curse that rewrites a body against its will. Tristan is…

Read more

17 days ago · Coda Languez

Content note. This is dark fiction for adult readers. Red and Her Wolf opens on a young man escaping sexual exploitation, and it does not look away: coerced sex, physical and sexual abuse, graphic violence, gore, body horror, and a curse that rewrites a body against its will. Tristan is twenty, and every character on the page is an adult. If those are your woods, come in.

Everyone knows this fairytale. A red hood, a wolf, a road through the woods. They got it backwards.

In the Deep Woods the thing in red is the one doing the hunting, and the ruined, beautiful boy bleeding into her forest is the one thing she has not decided to kill yet. New chapter every Saturday. Nothing here will ever be locked.

Chapter One

The Deep Woods

NO ONE GOES into the Deep Woods.

Into the dark and rot.

Only whispers are heard in the Deep Woods.

The birds stop singing once in the Deep Woods.

The sun cannot shine through the canopy.

Any creature that enters never returns

Once they are in the Deep Woods.

Deer fleeing from hunters

And the hunters that chase become ghosts

Never to escape the Deep Woods.

Only a monster lives in the Deep Woods.

A monster shrouded in the crimson blood

Of all the others who dared enter

The home called the Deep Woods…

Chapter Two

The Boy

FREEDOM.

OR DEATH.

Those were the only choices he had.

Freedom.

Or death.

These were the only choices given to a paltry young man who only owned a name. He was only allowed a name. Everything else was taken either by the lodge keeper or his mother.

Including his body.

He inherited his mother’s beauty, and it was a curse.

It cursed him into a life of bruises on his hips, a walk hampered by a permanent limp, and sunken blue eyes surrounded by swollen red lumps, threatening to engulf his sight.

He wished his mother and his ‘clients’ would cut them out.

“Your eyes are the only thing worth something. They are blue gems, worthy of angels, yet stuck on your whorish body.”

His chuckle in response earned him a new cigar burn on his shoulder as he was forced head first onto the bed, his ass paying the price for his smart mouth.

So many nights spent in that god forsaken lodge, the rent paid with his mouth, ass or his dick. His mother trained him for this, once the townsmen tired of her haggard form and looked lasciviously onto his. Their wives, when feeling neglected and perhaps out of vengeance towards his whore mother, would also lust for his body, not giving him any respite.

Life was hell, and the townspeople were demons.

When he wasn’t locked in the room, he was out begging about town, staring longing into the baker’s shop, aching for his hands to be put into more use than hand jobs and the rare fingering. He’d daydream about the breads roughly kneaded and cakes lovingly adorned with frosting.

The head baker offered him an apprenticeship. All he had to do was give him and the missus use of his body.

The young man almost said yes… only to be dragged into an alley by the lodge-keeper and his mother, beaten until he couldn’t walk and his words became screaming, inhuman squeals.

Like a pig.

A pig on a spit with sapphire for eyes.

Freedom or Death.

Honestly?

He’d choose death.

Then he would be free.

His mouth served him well as he earned a wagon ride away from the hellish township. The bitter, vicious fluid and the pungent stench was a small price to pay, and at least it was by his choice. The full moon was the only time that wagon would leave at night, and this was the moment for his escape to come to fruition.

Though it was a tight fit and he was squished among the cargo of freshly skinned game, the fur strips kept him warm during the travel and muffled the jerking bumps of wooden wheels hitting gaps between cobblestones. The rancid stench made the contents of his stomach boil, but he could manage.

The smell was temporary. Much like the cum he had swallowed, it was at a minimal cost.

The boy remained curled in tight fetal positions, his shoulders hunched and arms tensed until the uneven cobblestone street softened into dirt. He let out a slow breath from his mouth, coughing as he gulped in meat-tasting air. He didn’t realize how long he had held his breath until he heard the splatter of mud underneath him.

He was out of that hell.

Finally.

The attack was a blessing.

It didn’t seem so at first, considering he was bleeding out in the misty forest, a horrid end to his plan towards this elusive freedom.

Yet he soon realized how much of a boon the attack turned out to be when he ran through the mist, between the blackened trees of the Deep Woods.

“We made it out of town, just like you requested, boy.”

He groaned inwardly; How ‘boy’ slithered off the wagoner’s tongue caused the skin on the back of his neck to crawl. The voice was thick and gravelly, like tar sticking to pebbles. Yet whatever the man planned for him was another tiny price. He was sure that he could outlast the balding fool, taking a mule and some furs with him. Until then, he needed to behave and bide his time. When the cargo doors open, he buried his disgust deep into his stomach, ignoring it much like he ignored the stench that surrounded him.

He slowly crawled forward, a lazy smile across his lips. It was a practiced smile of obedient compliance, the smile a disgruntled, lonely trader would enjoy. When he felt those ragged, calloused hands cup his chin, his well-trained lips parted, welcoming the sloven kiss that covered his entire mouth and sucked away his air, replacing it with the sulfuric stank of decay. His brow furrowed as his tongue, unwillingly, tasted the moldy holes along the driver’s teeth and he breathed hard through his nose.

God, he almost preferred the curdled taste of smegma to this.

He lifted his hands and pressed them carefully against the desperate man’s shoulders, about to urge him back before a sound interrupted his motions.

The sound of a butcher slicing through meat with a dulled knife. A slick tearing sound followed by the squelch and gurgling thuds of beef and pork hitting the ground.

Except it wasn’t beef or pork.

No longer did he taste decay and saliva. His mouth was filled with thick, slick liquid tasting of rusted iron and copper. He gasped and used his feet to kick the man away, hacking and vomiting blood that most definitely was not his.

He quickly wiped his mouth, his breath coming out white in the darkness. His stomach churned, and he wanted to expel every thing he had ever eaten. He covered his mouth, trying to muffle the noise and that urge as the tearing noise continued, accompanied by heaving chomps and greedy, snarling swallows.

Oh god.

Oh god oh god oh god.

Death is going to snatch him away from freedom.

Chapter Three

A Wolf

He trembled and turned his head towards where the wagoner’s body fell, bile and foreign blood aching to spew out from his throat. Tears and cold, sticky sweat cascaded down his cheeks as he took sight of a monstrous shadow on top of the driver, ripping into the fat and flesh of the corpse. The boy heaved forward, his mouth still covered by his hand as vomit dribbled between his fingers, praying that the monstrous shade was far too enamored with its meal to notice him. He gulped, swallowing the acidic contents and crouching closer to the side of the wagon.

Hands over his mouth to muffle the sound, he kicked against the side wall, hearing the wood creak and groan. The rips and tears from the monstrous shadow’s feast encouraged him to kick again, and again. Each kick was more urgent than the last. The wood splintered, then cracked. He panted against his filth soaked palms, cold sweat soaking his thin shirt as he reared his leg back and slammed the sole of his foot against the boards.

His eyes widened as he felt the cool air on his leg, relief flooding through him. He clenched his teeth, his hands moving from his mouth to take hold of the closest furs near him.

He had to run.

Limping or not, he had to try!

He took one deep breath and shuffled forward towards the light streaming from the broken boards. Before he froze.

The light was stolen from him, replaced with large yellow eyes staring at him.

He twisted his body from his back to his stomach, crawling on his forearms to reach the main exit before he screeched in agony. Teeth tore into his left foot and he was being dragged backwards towards the ravenous shadow. His greatest chance for escape turned into his tomb.

If he wasn’t filled with pain and terror, he would laugh. His miserable life will end; his body torn apart and used to satisfy the hunger of others. Tears, burning hot tears streamed from his face as he screamed, his nails tearing at the wood, strands of fur and splinters digging and burrowing into his fingers.

Freedom.

Or Death?

There was no choice left for him.

He was going to die.

“I found you.”

His throat burned raw from his screams. His ankle, flesh shredded, was released, and he curled it back towards him. He scampered towards the edge of the wagon, watching through the hole as the creature clawed at its back.

Sticking out of it was a hook, connected to a chain. The chain grew taut, and the beast was whipped back from the wagon.

The boy recalled the voice that rippled through the air. A deep alto that ended in a chuckle. His chest heaved, his breaths coming out in hard puffs as he stared transfixed on the jagged opening between the rotted boards.

The swoosh of the chain sliced through the air and the shadow screeched, its howl distorted and knocking the breath out of the boy. He watched his would be devourer launch out of view, towards its opponent before he yelped and covered his eyes with his forearms as the wagon shook with a sudden impact.

His hands moved to cover his ears, the screeching and snarling continuing, the wagon shaking at random intervals. Every time he thought about crawling towards the exit, his leg would scream at him, reminding him of his mortality. Whoever, or whatever, was outside, fighting off the beast only added to his terror.

It didn’t matter if he was alive because of their arrival.

The fact remained that his would-be-killer was scrambling away from it.

A flash of bright red, illuminated by the moonlight, darted past the hole and the creature screeched again. No longer did it seem like a fight. The thuds against the wagon decreased, and the creature sounded distant.

It was trying to run.

“I won’t let you.”

A growl underlined that voice. It rumbled and vibrated into the boy’s ears and sat heavy like a boulder. Even though it wasn’t addressing him, he felt what the meat and furs surrounding him felt like.

Prey.

This… this crimson thing hunted the monster. No, not hunting. Playing with it, like a feral cat would play with a mouse between its claws.

A whoosh sliced through the air, and the familiar distorted, high-pitched howl returned. He heard whimpers of an animal desperate to cling on life. The sound of dirt and rock being scraped from the ground reminded the boy of his torn fingertips and he closed his eyes tightly.

The creature almost ate him.

So why did he feel… sorry for it?

Loud THWACKS hacked through the air, like a woodsman chopping down a tree. However, instead of the hard thuds of wood, it was the splatter and squelches of flesh and bone punctuated each swing. The screeches and howls turned into squeals and gurgles.

Then silence.

The smashing of tenderized meat echoed the outside of the wagon.

He blinked, gasping in air. Sweat had soaked his shirt, and he was ashamed to realize that his pants were wet and stank of ammonia. He gulped heavily and shuffled to the side, whimpering as he dragged himself out of the accursed wagon. He grunted and cursed himself as he fell onto the ground, ignoring that he landed on top of the wagoner’s torn open torso.

The boy felt his stomach churn and his throat suddenly felt full of acid. He swallowed and gripped a wheel, straining to pull himself up to his feet. His left ankle screamed and his toes curled against the cold dirt, but he had to move.

He had to get out of there.

He looked up at the sky, clouds covering the moon. Good, that meant he had shadow to shield him. The problem was that he had absolutely no idea where he was.

The boy gazed at his surroundings, not noticing that the thwacking had stopped. Someone was watching him; dark rust staining the crimson shroud over their form. The ruby figure shook, a chuckle floating in the air.

A chuckle that made the boy freeze, his head slowly turning. Once he took a glance at that gleaming, pearly smile glowing underneath the hood, he took off. As fast as his poor legs could take him.

Which was not quick.

He ducked into the woods. He prayed to use the dark to his advantage.

The red shape chortled, snorting softly as he scampered away.

“You are not getting very far.”

They swung their left limb, blood coating the trunks of the tree. The light returned, illuminating the flared bearded axe head, shining silver under the moon.

“My hunt is not done.”

Red and Her Wolf stays free. All fourteen chapters, forever, no rope across the door. It is the front hall, not the whole house. Behind the Speakeasy rope: Victoria and the rest of the novels chapter by chapter months before Kindle Unlimited, the character files, the art (the tasteful kind and the other kind), and the memes I only trust the regulars with. $6.66 a month or $69 a year. Patronage, with teeth. 🐺

Chapter Four, “The Hunter,” lands next Saturday. She has already told him what she does to beasts.

If this got you, restack it or send it to the friend who likes their romance with teeth marks. That is the whole marketing budget.

Okay so I have a rule for Maleus that I wrote down around chapter eight and I’ve been obeying it ever since like it came down off a mountain.

Maleus is not allowed to say he loves her.

Love is forbidden knowledge.

He doesn’t have the word. I’ve never let him borrow one either, and the entire back half of this book is him losing that argument one noun at a time.

This is the one where I show you the nasty inner workings and misbehaving machinery.

Two quick things first; You’re on chapter four and I know it, so nothing here goes past it, and where I had to hide something you’ll see me hide it.

What art Instagram got, and what it actually is

Here’s some Instagram ready art to really show what my poor sleeping beauty will be going through…without getting me banned of course!

There’s a block here you’re not being shown!

It’s got the two generations I threw out and why each one failed, plus the actual working file for the picture up there. The prompt, the LoRA stack, the negative, the seed, the settings. Everything you’d need to go make one yourself.

I give that away back here because I’m not precious about the method. $6.66/month or $69/year and it opens ;)

What Maleus does with the waiting

Everybody writes the villain’s centuries. The long patience! The eternity of it! Very grand.

Maleus doesn’t get centuries. He gets one childhood.

A pixie broke into his land and stole his flower, the flower healed a dying queen, he turned up at the christening to collect, and what he took was a claim on a baby. And then he had to wait for her to grow. It’s such an unglamorous spot for a villain to be in and I love it. He thinks entirely in ledgers! And he’s been handed an asset that won’t mature on a schedule he controls. He can’t hurry her, he can’t spend her early, all he can do is sit there and let the debt accrue.

So he thinks about her the way you’d think about a property you’re paying taxes on. That framing is his, by the way. I just write it down.

Which brings me to the table.

This is the actual reference sheet I keep open while I’m writing his chapters. What he feels, then what he’s actually allowed to say instead:

• Pull, fascination → coffer, claim, an anomaly worth keeping

• Jealousy → stolen use, debt, no permission was given

• Fear of losing her → an insult to permanence, maintenance

• ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉ → ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉

• ▉▉▉▉▉ → ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉

There’s two more of those! You’re on chapter four and they would ruin something, so they stay blacked out until you get there. Paying me doesn’t unlock them. Nothing unlocks them except chapter twenty. And yes I know this is worse than not showing you the list at all…that’s the point ;)

Ask him about any of the ones you CAN see and he’ll tell you it’s a debt. And he means it!

One thing that changes what you’ve already read.

Go back to chapter one. Somebody breaks into his land and steals from him.

I built the opening that way on purpose and I’ve never taken it back. He’s the wronged party in chapter one and he doesn’t stop being the wronged party just because everything he does about it is monstrous. The debt is real! He IS owed. He’s also going to collect it off a child. Both of those stay true for the entire book.

That’s why he’s so hard to just dismiss. If he was only appetite you could put him down. He’s got a grievance, and it’s real.

Why this fairy tale out of all of them

Sleeping Beauty is a story where every decision that matters gets made over a crib.

A king makes a bargain, a fairy gives a gift, another fairy curses the baby, and a prince turns up a century late to kiss a stranger. She’s there for all of it and part of none of it, then she’s asleep, then she’s married (in the Disney version. The real version…err…well…hmm).

The plot happens exclusively TO her!

So I took that literally. What is a person, once you accept that every important thing about her life got settled before she could talk?

The claim was made over her cradle. The name she got given, the lies she got raised on, the boy she wasn’t supposed to meet. She spends the entire novel trying to be the author of one single thing, and when she finally manages it she does it without a sword and without a spell.

I’m not telling you more than that!

It happens late, it’s very quiet, and she goes through hell before the story gets there.

The sleep is real by the way. She’s not secretly awake and watching. The sleeping happens, and chapter four is her memory from inside it.

Yeah, technically her sleep is the protection the fairies give her. The ignorance, the pretending…

The fairies are the second antagonist.

Eirlys loves her! Eirlys also drew a border around her entire life and built her a childhood out of arranged truth. Every lie in it was a kindness. She meant every single one.

In the original the fairies are the good guys.

In mine they built a nicer cage, out of love, at enormous personal cost, and it’s still a cage, and Lynneae still has to break it to become a person. Maleus is honest about what he is. Eirlys sang lullabies to her.

…Maleus is still a total shit stain tho’. Don’t get it THAT twisted.

He’s just an HONEST shitstain.

Next week

We’re on Victoria, which is a completely different kinda torture.

There’s a line in her first chapter where she refuses to think about why she picked that jaw, or that left eye instead of that right one.

She calls the question uncomfortable.

She goes upstairs and writes a letter to a dead infant. Like a normal person.

She never answers the letter, btw.

I will.

The door, since you got this far

Everything you just read is free and it stays free! I’d rather be read than paid, in that order, and it isn’t close.

What’s back there: Victoria and the rest of the novels chapter by chapter months before Kindle Unlimited gets them, the character files, the working prompt for every piece of art I make, and the art itself, the tasteful kind and the other kind.

$6.66/month or $69/year. Patronage, with teeth 🐺

Taming Malice posts on Fairytale Fridays. The prologue and chapter one, Thief, are free to anybody.

This is the other version. No crop, no drape, nothing shoved out of shot.

Explicit, all the way down. Everybody depicted is an adult. Nothing here goes past chapter four, so you’re safe on that front at least.

Read more

She buttoned him into a coat that wasn’t Henri’s.

Black wool, cut for the weather. The tailor built it to be rained on, because that was its purpose. His silver seams sat under the collar, visible only to someone who knew where to look.

She put them there.

The mismatched eyes she could do nothing about, so it was pointless to try. He stood in the Oratory’s stone passage and let her work the buttons, patient as a man being dressed for a funeral he hadn’t chosen.

“Where?”

“Out.”

He waited for the rest of it. She finished the collar instead and herded him through the cold-chain dark the way she always went alone, past the stench of preservation, past the galvanic hum in the walls, up the grate stairs into an alley already breathing coal.

The sub-district closed over them: visibility down to four feet in still air, lamps that worked and others that only made the gesture, iron without gilt, channels underfoot for runoff and worse, and over all of it the copper-and-old-breath she reduced to logistics years ago and was tasting again tonight because he was taking it with his whole face.

He stopped three steps past the grate and turned a full circle, slow enough that she almost told him to keep moving.

She braced for wonder. He took the Oratory that way in the first weeks, and the townhouse, and Henri’s coat on the hook, and her own face when she thought he wasn’t looking: everything received at full attention, nothing ranked, the flat total gravity of something that not yet learned to be selective.

What she got was an assessment, item by item. Failing lamp, unpolished iron, the grate he’d come up through, the cart woman whose face Victoria never once read and who still didn’t lift her eyes.

Legible, she thought.

Failures with addresses on them, continuation without ornament, a city that stopped pretending several decades before he arrived.

She set her pace and didn’t look back to see whether he’d take it.

“With me.”

She walked it at the speed she always used down here, the one that said she had business at the other end of the alley and had been through it before. Both were true. Three years of it: Marc’s people, the unmarked doors, the back rooms where the cold chain lived. The sub-district was her supply line. It was also the underside of the world, and she had stopped seeing it as anything except a route between errands a long time ago.

He hadn’t stopped seeing anything.

A gas fixture hissed and failed above them. His head tilted up and stayed up half a second longer than the sound accounted for. Two lamps down, another one flickered and held. Rendered fat cut through the copper from a doorway the smog eaten, and a mechanical cart rattled a street they hadn’t reached yet, and he took delivery of all of it, ranking none of it, and she taught him that. She did not cost out what it would be like to have the looking turned on a city she’d spent three years walking without seeing.

They passed the cart woman again from a different angle. Her eyes stayed down. He watched her anyway, the way you watch a door that might still open.

She didn’t explain the markets. She showed him the grates that opened onto stairs going down. She let him stand in a channel where the air pressed darker and thicker, and she didn’t apologize for it. This was where the cold chain lived. This was where Marc’s people moved parts the Upper City preferred not to name out loud. None of it had ever needed to be beautiful in order to work.

He stopped walking. When she turned, his head was back and his chin was up, and he was looking at the ceiling.

The permanent low one. Grey-yellow on its underside, sitting at the fourth floor of everything, decades of the city’s own exhaust held down by still air and a municipal decision never to examine it. Crossing it left grit on anything light-colored and a taste at the back of the throat that stayed for an hour. He had never been above it. He had only ever been below.

He read it the way he read everything she handed him.

“What’s above it?”

“The Upper City.”

He turned that over. “Are we going there?”

“Not today.”

Read more

I wake up clean.

That’s the wrong first thing to notice.

Three men fucked a drugged woman for hours in a stranger’s apartment; she should notice pain. Or fear. Or the sick lurch of waking up in a place she doesn’t recognize, reaching for a phone that should have been ringing all night.

I noticed the soap.

Lavender. Salt. The scent clinging to my skin like a second layer. Someone washed me. As the water clouded with everything done to me, someone held a cloth to my face. I remember half of it. The grey eyes. The washcloth on my jaw. The owner of the low “I’ve got you,” while I sank into water exactly the right temperature.

My body reports in next.

The pain arrives late, the way a bill comes after the service. My jaw hinges wrong—pried open, left that way. My neck wears a collar of bruises, each one the shape of a different man’s teeth. Metal clamps and the rush of blood returning after their removal left my nipples raw under cotton. Between my legs, the map of last night: the delta where Ethan bottomed out, the trench Colt carved with his fingers, the shallow bay where Alex came.

I shift and a sound escapes; small, involuntary, the kind you swallow before it becomes a scream. My inner thighs burn like the inside of a matchbox after the match has gone out.

I lie still, letting the body finish its inventory.

I’ve always been good at cataloguing; annotating margins, filing observations into categories that let me survive without feeling.

My skin is a page written in someone else’s handwriting; I’m covered in bruises and bite marks. Muscles I have never worked before ache as if I had put them through a brutal obstacle course.

I should flinch when I remember the wand. The strangers. The way my body accepted its role like it had been waiting for an assignment. Like it finally found its purpose amidst the void’s denial.

I don’t.

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I tried to rebuild.

Four days after Cornelius departed, I knelt before the crucifix, clasped my hands in the original configuration, and prayed.

The words were ash.

Our Father.

The Father, the Heaven, the fourteen years of scaffolding under both, all rubble, but I prayed, because praying was the first brick. A man laying one brick is a man who intends a building. I laid it yet did not look up to see whether anything held.

I ate breakfast in the rectory, not on the blanket she had folded against the wall. I opened the Summa to a page I had not read. I made a marginal note about Aquinas on repentance, whether a man who has fallen can return to grace by repeating the disciplines that preceded the ruin. Can a man raise again the house he pulled down, laying the same bricks in the same order? Aquinas says yes. The prodigal walked the same road home.

I went to the cabinet.

The scourge hung on its hook, the leather tongues stiff from disuse, the knotted ends dark with oxidized blood. The smell was iron and tallow and the sour tang of old discipline, and the smell was familiar, and the familiar was the first comfort I had felt in four days that was not her.

I removed my robe. My back was a topography of fourteen years: channels, welts, scar tissue layered on scar tissue, the map of a man’s war against his own wanting. No one had updated the map for weeks.

I raised the scourge and swung.

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I finished the website. codalanguez.com is done enough to be proud of, and the opening chapters of all four serials are free at the door.

No paywall.

Pick the room you'd be afraid to fall asleep in:

I don't only write monsters. I build them.

MONKII just shipped: a local, private LLM studio for Ollama. Projects, Claude-style skills, and live file knowledge, with nothing ever leaving your machine. Free, MIT licensed, and mildly judgmental about the cloud. → Take the tour:

Code: https://github.com/codalanguez/Monkii

The front door's the free part now.

Forward this to the one person you know who'd fall for the worst of them.

New Releases

While I have had a nice variety of new releases recently, I have had to slow down writing this week due to working on my website. I will get back on track next week.

Exclusive Feature

This thriller received a Romantic Times nomination for best erotic book.

Pampered princess and daughter of a drug lord, Isabel Ramirez, is on her way to grabbing the brass ring in the legitimate world of academia when her boss gets in the way. Isabel’s take no prisoners approach ensures the department chair will never expose her deceptions.

Graduate assistant and guy-on-the-side, Sean Richards wants Isabel to leave her sleazy husband. He’s convinced he can bring out the better woman beneath that tough sex siren exterior. He will do anything for his voracious lover—except commit murder.

As a nosy colleague follows a trail of clues that lead to her door, Isabel is forced to make a choice. Will she kill her friend to stay out of jail? Or will she redeem herself and become the extraordinary woman she sees in Sean’s loving eyes?

Book Fairs

There has been so much going on, all I can do is try to do what I want my followers to do… Stay safe! Stay healthy! Stay happy!

I hear confessions on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The sins are: theft, vanity, sloth, envy, wrath. And lust. Lust most frequently, because lust is the appetite that fills whatever space is available. The farmer who looked too long at the miller’s wife. The widow who touches herself at night. The young couple whose haystack testimony carries the bright shame of people who have discovered that the body and theology occupy different countries.

I absolve. Ego te absolvo. The sin walks out, and the sinner walks out lighter; the weight redistributed from the soul to the priest who absorbed it through the screen.

I carry the weight home. I descended the stairs. Ruby eyes, fawn ears, the spotted skin in the lamplight. The parish’s wanting added to my own.

I am fucking her with the village’s sins in my body.

The farmer’s looking becomes my looking. The widow’s touching becomes my touching. The sins I absolve upstairs become the sins I commit downstairs. The priest as a gutter. The rain flowing through me into the ground.

She receives everything.

Read more

~Maleus~

“Well, isn’t this a surprise...”

The domain of darkness and nightmares. Where nothing but the most unnatural and twisted of fauna and flora grow. Where the day was grey, the sun burning muted ivory, and the night was black with only the acidic neon glow of insects and the magenta eldritch flowers bloom. A land of shadow and fog that was ruled over the most powerful of Fae.

Me.

Yet dangling in my clutches, hanging upside down, was a lesser fairy of spring. Their eyes were large and their fear permeated through the tree of thorns and sharp blades off grass. Surely they knew the risks of trespassing my lands, much less the punishment for the crime of theft.

“Lo-Lord Maleus...forgive me, I should’ve announced myself.” Their pink hair paled just like their face, their eyes beginning to sunken under the toxic fog. Indeed, if they had sent a most humble request, they would’ve been able to enter my land without being eaten inside out of my fog. However, the tiny shimmering blossom they held in their hands would cancel that mercy out.

“That is the lesser of your crime, little pixie.” I sniffed as my tendrils lifted up the pathetic imp, it’s four transparent wing flapping with anxiety. It’s body vibrated, fingers fidgeting, it’s lips chattering as sweat like nectar dripping from it’s temples, ears, nose, and eyes.

The wretched was terrified, yet instead of dropping the one thing that would grant it mercy, the pixie held my treasure close to it’s chest, “My-My Lord, please...this flower is the only thing that ma-may help the good queen.”

“The ‘good queen’? I have met many queens and I suppose you lesser fairies may call some ‘good’. The actual question is...what gave you the right to take my flower?”

Any hint of pink from the pixie dissipated into an amusing shade of sickly ivory, “Please, please forgive me! I only mean to save the Queen and her-her baby. This flower, the last gift of Selene, is-is the last cu-cure.”

I glanced down at the little blossom glowing as if i was a fallen piece of the moon. A smirk danced on the edge of my lips, “A little superstition over my flower. You would steal for a fleeting taste of hope?”

The pixie, who lost all color in my grasp, shaking with a terror so palpable it tingled on my tongue, looked up at me, crimson irises glaring up at me with such misguided ferocity, I had to fight the urge to pluck them out, “For the goodly queen and her babe, y-yes.”

My tendrils lunged out, black daggers stopping millimeters from those oversized orbs, tempted to see if the insides would gush a liquid matching the iris. The imp flinches, eyes closing tightly, yet it did not dare drop my flower. Nor did it’s tiny fingers tightened it’s grip. A faint whimper escaped from it’s mouth, sharp teeth clenched. It would be so easy to just end it’s life and return Selene’s final gift to it’s solitary plot.

Yet for a moment, when gazing at the blossom in the squirming thief’s hand, I was blinded. In my domain of darkness, the flower was the only pure light; a flicker of life that didn’t belong in my darkness.

I scoffed, tilting my head, studying each petal and the pearlescent veins pulsing with life within each piece. It glowed with a light that lesser creatures might even call ‘Holy’. That kingdom of light and hope had inched closer and closer to the abyss, it’s greedy grasp encroaching into the void of which I ruled.

Trespassing, like this insignificant pixie. Coveting what rightfully belonged to me. The only light in my darkness could in fact be the impossible cure for that mortal queen.

Just like Selene, planting a seed of the celestial in the center of the void, an idea bore fruit. I allowed a single chuckle and the needlepoint tendrils slithered back into my forearms. I plopped the pixie onto my palm, it’s shivering pastel body immediately kneeling, head bowed low, “All you had to do, little imp, was ask.”

It’s head shot up in surprise, wide eyes glistening, “Lord Ma-Maleus, you would let this one take the blossom?” It’s teeth chattered before taking a quick breath, “Please?”

“The ‘goodly’ king can borrrow my flower to...attempt to save his ‘goodly’ queen.” I turned my palm over, the tiny fairy flapping it’s wings to avoid the snapping black fog prowling along the ground.

“Th-Thank you, thank you! This generousity will not be forgotten, your Emminence.” The little dimwit seemed to smile.

So did I. My lips curled into a smirk as I waved it away, the glow of the flower in it’s careful grasp fading.

Foolish tiny thing. Foolish mortals.

Words should be taken at face value.

She started him on the technical documentation because nouns do not lie.

Conductor.

Coupling.

Galvanic differential.

The word, the diagram, and the thing in the world that the word fastened.

Victoria figured out the method that same hour, standing in the study with a hand on the maintenance schematics shelf.

She ignored novels.

Novels had imprecise narratives; a speaker, a listener, and a gap between them where meaning could rot.

A schematic only said what it was.

He learned the alphabet in an afternoon.

That evening, she documented this as retention, aligning with previous observations, and omitted recording her hand’s actions while he replicated the letter forms.

It moved halfway to the crown of his bent head, then came back down on its own.

There was nothing to record.

A hand is not a finding.

By the second week, he had already used up all the schematics. He could read a transfer diagram aloud in that slow, assembling voice, each word set down like an instrument returned to its tray, and there was nothing left on her wall that could teach him what a sentence did when it ran longer than its function.

The lessons required sentences.

The study had two libraries.

She stood in front of the north wall for some time. She would not have been able to say how long, which was unusual.

She did not examine it.

Inventory decision.

The technical library had run out of stock. She selected the treatise on bridge aesthetics, pale green spine, because it was the closest thing that wall had to a technical text. If some part of her selected it because it was the furthest thing from a love letter, that part did not submit its reasoning for review.

The northern window admitted afternoon light with its usual lack of conviction. He sat where she put him, in the reading chair that was too small for him the way every chair in the house was too small for him. He took the book from her, and the first wrong note sounded before he had read a word.

He opened the cover with a specific, respectful pressure, thumb flat along the hinge of the spine so the binding would not crack.

Nobody had taught him that. She had certainly not taught him that. She made a note of it, and where the hands originated, and filed both notes with the other provenance she managed by pre-decision.

“From the top of the page.”

He read.

“A bridge is an argument conducted between two banks that have never met. The engineer does not resolve the argument. The engineer only holds it still long enough for people to cross.”

The room went wrong.

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The bathroom tile was cold under his bare feet because he had left his shoes in the bedroom.

He ran the water and tested it with his wrist, not his elbow. His mother had always used her wrist. Warm but not hot, because a drugged body regulates temperature poorly and crashing blood pressure would be dangerous. Gap year as a nursing assistant. His brain was producing every piece of caretaking data he’d ever accumulated in a precise cascade, and the data was not an alibi.

Alibis were for men who didn’t know what they were doing. The data was how you did it right.

Competence was the product. Competence was what she would remember. Not the sex. Not the sound of the headboard. The bath. The temperature. The salt. The cloth on her face. The steady, unhurried, impossibly attentive hands of a man who knew how to take care of a body, and who would always know.

Epsom salt. Lavender oil. Ethan kept a bottle on the counter. Of course he did.

He adjusted, tested, then turned the tap off. He looked in the mirror above the sink.

A man in an unbuttoned dress shirt with his sleeves rolled. A red mark on his collarbone where she had gripped him. Hair slightly disheveled. A face that looked—

Fine.

His face looked like a man who had gone grocery shopping, dealt with a household issue, and was running a bath for a houseguest. There was nothing on his face to suggest what had happened in the next room.

Alex stared at his reflection for four seconds and felt the load settle. A wall accepting the weight it carried.

I look normal.

I look like the responsible one.

Because I am.

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