Chapter 9 To Be Consumed
Iris Beaumont
The bite tore through me like a lightning strike, splitting my existence into before and after.
Beneath him, my body arched violently, a silent scream of agony trapped within me. This feeling transcended pain; pain, a familiar companion, would have offered solace, a sensation my body could have understood and managed. This was something older, deeper, a violence that didn’t respect the boundaries of flesh or time. I had endured, for centuries, every permutation of agony that men and monsters could devise, and I had survived each by naming it, by mastering it, by knowing its source and calculating its end.
It wasn’t pain that he inflicted on me. Pleasure hid a destructive force, a razor’s edge of pure bliss, as every nerve was set ablaze and then painfully scraped. My intelligence, my self-assurance, my sophisticated apathy—the invisible framework that had supported me—shattered into blood, flailing limbs, and guttural sounds. I felt myself unravel beneath his touch, the familiar roles of dominance and submission dissolving until I was a stranger to myself.
This was annihilation. His teeth broke through—not just skin, but through the armor of centuries. The puncture shattered me. For millennia, I had been the predator, the one who drained, who consumed, who left bodies cooling in silk sheets. I had orchestrated every feeding like a symphony of submission, victims' pulses slowing beneath my lips like dying music.
But now—his savage mouth, tasting of blood, at my throat, reversed everything. His bite sparked a nuclear flash, burning every cell with its searing heat. My immortal body betraying me. Beyond the flesh, the sensation unearthed my buried, ancient memories of what it meant to be human and afraid. His bite penetrated beyond flesh, cracking through the marble tomb of my chest where my heart had long ago fallen silent, reaching into that emptiness wheren dust collected.
My fingers gripped his shoulders, nails tearing into his skin, and the blood that flowed between us looked like war paint. Against my throat, his breath was a scorching, ragged growl, a starving animal’s scent that vibrated deep within me. The war within him was evident; raw hunger fought with strict control, the animal and the person battling for dominance over me. His muscles tensed under my hands, a predator held in check, and that robust, frightening suppression broke something inside me that years of violence had never reached.
The room seemed to collapse around the pulse between us. The light dimmed, shadows twisted, and the scent of iron bloomed in the air like the opening of some forbidden flower. The hunger that lived in him poured through me, flooding the void where my heart had been silent for too long.
I had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be desired for more than the icy perfection of my beauty, or the concealed secrets of my knowledge, nor the advantage of my power. Those hungers were all about exchange: unspoken agreements, the thrill of the chase, the cautious movements of those sizing up the competition in disguise. Lost to the ages and moral decline was the ancient yearning to be desired, not as an object or opponent, but as a vital foundation.
That was what he awakened in me, what his teeth did as they punctured my marrow: they conjured the ghost of a girl who once believed herself worthy of love. It was beautiful, yes, but only in the way a drowning is exquisite; magnificence and terror, indistinguishable in the haze before dissolution. I had taught myself to expect nothing from this world but violence and negotiation. Yet here, in the bone-deep grip of his arms, every unexamined longing in my body rushed to the surface as if this night were my last.
The initial pull was gentle, a subtle whisper against her skin, like a secret shared between friends. Then the second pull came, harsher this time, its uncaring nature making me feel as if survival wasn’t even considered. My body spasmed against his, and I realized in that instant, a cold wave of detachment washing over me, that I was not in control, not of him nor of myself. The attack came without pause. The raw, visceral drive to consume or be consumed was all that mattered.
I clung tighter, desperate, as the rhythm of his feeding set up a feedback loop of sensation that was neither pain nor pleasure but some bastard synthesis of the two. It was a grammar of touch and need, spoken in a dialect I had not heard in centuries. My hands scrabbled at his shoulder blades, nails scoring tracks that filled with bright red, and my hips arched upward, looking for an anchor that no longer existed. The room collapsed until it was only us: his mouth at my Jugular, his hands pinning me in place as if I might evaporate, my legs wound around him in a futile, feral attempt at defense or surrender, or both.
Had he stopped, I might have found a way to stitch my pride back together, though it would never be the same. I could have spun a yarn about mutual respect, boundaries, even though it was a lie. He did not stop, though his lungs burned with exertion. My abject horror and awe grew as I accepted that I did not want him to. I craved the utter obliteration. I wanted to be consumed, though the instinct of self-preservation, honed over centuries, urged me to fight against it.
A fissure opened inside my chest, a crack spreading through the bedrock of my identity. Something old, something shrouded in the damp earth of prehistory, clawed its way up to meet him from within me. I had assumed that part of myself extinct, a fossilized relic, but it surged with a violence to match his. My body bucked and twisted, colliding with his, and I could feel his restraint fraying, his composure reduced to little more than animal logic. His teeth dug in deeper, as the cool rush of blood and memory flooded the empty spaces inside me. My vision stuttered, around the edges, and I heard myself make a sound that was a sob and a snarl.
This was not a submission. This was not a surrender. It was a metamorphosis, the destruction of the old self so something unimagined could emerge from the ruins. I despised the poetry of it, even as I was trapped by it, unable to flee or fight. With each surge of his draw, I became less Iris Laroque-Beaumont, Queen of the Night, and more the raw, unprotected nerve of a woman who had never, in truth, healed.
When the climax of the feeding finally broke, I was left with nothing but a gasping vacancy where my composure had once lived. I lay beneath him, shuddering, my senses deranged and my mind blank as a newborn’s. I did not know if I had survived, or if I even wanted to.
He raised his head, lips wet and face wild. I saw in his eyes the mirrored shock of what he had done to me. For the first time in centuries, I was alive enough to bleed.