but i would kill for you
summary: adam would kill for you. you beg him not to. he obeys and asks for one thing in return; you.
pairing: the creature (adam frankenstein) x reader
word count: 8,783 words
themes: dub-con, non-con (if you squint), this is a dark!adam fic, gore, violence, near-murder, manipulation, coercion, MDNI (18+ ONLY, morally grey reader and adam, both are a little delusional, overall it’s kinda like the blind leading the blind
author’s note: this gave me the tingles
The forest started singing before the trouble came.
Not with birds or crickets or anything living, but with wood.
The trees creaked against one another in the wind like old bones shifting in a shallow grave, and every now and then something further in would crack. Distant and sharp, cutting through the night in a way that made you pause in your small, warm cottage.
You stood at your worktable, herbs spread out before you in neat, brittle little piles. The cottage smelled of thyme and smoke and a hint of something metallic that hadn’t quite left yet, no matter how long you kept the windows cracked.
You told yourself that smell was your imagination.
You’d lit a lamp and set it by the door, the way you always did when you were alone at the edge of the woods. It cast a small, warm pool over the threshold, reaching a little way onto the packed earth outside and then stopping, defeated, at the teeth of the dark.
Sometimes he stood just past that line.
You’d see the glint of an eye, reflective in the half–light like a cat’s, catching the lamplight and throwing it back at you. The first time, you’d yelped and dropped the basket of drying lavender in your hands, causing the stalks to go everywhere as your heart hammered.
He had vanished between one blink and the next.
After that, you started leaving things.
A crust of bread on the stump. A scrap of wool you’d knitted into a clumsy square. A small cloth pouch of dried yarrow wrapped with twine. Each time, the gifts disappeared by morning, but you always found something in return near the edge of the trees.
A feather, oil–slick black with a strange blue sheen. A stone worn almost perfectly smooth but for a single vein of gleaming white running through it. Once, a wooden figure roughly carved into the shape of a woman with a bundle in her arms the resembled your lavender.
You didn’t see him take anything, but you knew it was him who always did.
The third time you saw him, his one eye shining from the shadows, you’d been gathering fallen kindling.
“You can come closer,” you’d said, pulse beating fast in your throat. “If you want.”
The trees had held their breath and the wind stilled.
He’d stepped half out of the dark then, like it hurt, like the light was a knife. You’d seen the outline of him: much too tall, shoulders too broad, proportions all wrong and yet…not. Not entirely.
Stitched.
That was the word that came to mind. As if someone had sewn a person together from parts that weren’t meant to belong to the same body and then left the seams showing.
“Do you have a name?” you’d asked, because it felt cruel not to.
He’d stared at you, at your mouth, then your eyes. His chest had risen and fallen too fast and too uneven. Then one huge hand had lifted, slow and hesitant, fingertips tapping his own sternum twice.
“Adam,” he’d said. The word came out wrong, thick, like his tongue didn’t quite know where it was meant to go.
Your heart had stuttered. “Adam,” you’d repeated.
His eye, the one caught in the light, had flared. Then he’d stepped back into the dark and vanished.
That was all. No more words.
Just gifts and glances and the feeling of being watched without malice.
Until that afternoon.
The man from the village had arrived just as the sky was turning the colour of old bruises. He’d knocked too hard and smiled too wide before asking after herbs for sleep, for aches, and for “lonely nights, you know how it is.”
You’d seen him before and you didn’t like him.
You gave him what you could spare, careful, polite. He didn’t offer coin. When you asked for it, he laughed and reached past you to take a little more from the shelf.
You didn’t see his hand until it was closing around your wrist.
“Pretty little lonely thing,” he’d murmured, fingers digging in just enough to hurt. “Out here all by yourself with all these… potions. Seems unwise.”
You’d yanked your arm back, eyes stinging. “Let go.”
He’d squeezed harder.
“Make me.”
Someone had moved at the treeline then. You’d seen the flash of that reflective eye in the dark and had never been so relieved in your life.
The man hadn’t seen it, he’d been too busy dragging you closer, leaning in, breath sour on your cheek.
“If you screamed,” he’d said, “no one would hear.” Before grinning sickly sweet that made your stomach churn.
Later, you’d sit by the cold hearth and remember the way the shadows had shifted outside. The way the air had changed and how you’d felt suddenly less alone and more in danger all at once.
You had wriggled free finally, shoving him back, telling him to get out, that he wasn’t welcome back here. He’d gone, muttering and eyes mean.
He’d stolen three bundles of dried herbs on his way.
You had seen Adam move then, far back between the trees. He’d taken a step forward, shoulders coiling tight, hands flexing like he was barely holding himself in place.
You’d shaken your head at him, just once.
“Don’t,” you’d mouthed.
His jaw had clenched so hard you’d heard it from the doorway, a crack like a bone breaking.
He’d turned and followed the man instead of coming to you.
You should have known that wouldn’t be the end of it.
Now the scream had torn through the woods, wrong and twisting and filled with a fear that made your blood run cold. You dropped the your knitting and grabbed your lantern.
The path to the clearing felt longer than it ever had. Every step was heavier, every breath sharper. The sound of someone begging bled through the trees in fragments — words mangled by panic.
“Please—please, I didn’t—I swear, I didn’t mean—”
Another voice cut across it. Low and ragged and barely human.
“You hurt her.”
Your heart lurched.
You nearly dropped the lantern, knuckles going white around the handle as you stumbled the last few paces and shoved through the undergrowth.
You saw the blood first.
It was everywhere. Splashed up the trunks of trees, spattered over ferns, soaking dark into the leaf–litter. It was fresh and bright and thick and terrifying. It glistened wetly in the lamplight, sticky, and too real.
The man lay on his back in the centre of it, mouth bleeding, teeth pink with it. His nose was broken, mashed off to one side in a way that made your stomach lurch. One eye was already swelling closed while his one arm was bent wrong between wrist and elbow.
Adam had one massive hand around his throat.
He could have snapped it like a twig.
He might have already been in the process of doing it.
The man kicked weakly, heels scraping burrows in the mud. His fingers clawed at Adam’s wrist, nails tearing at skin that didn’t break the way human skin would.
“Please,” he gasped, voice a wet rattle. “Please…I’ll go, I’ll leave her alone, I’ll—”
Adam was breathing hard. Harder than you’d ever seen. Each inhale sounded like it took effort, huge chest rising and falling, shoulders bunched up around his ears like he was holding back some tidal wave inside himself.
You’d never seen his face like this. His features were always a bit wrong, the lines not quite where you expected them to be, scars pulling in directions that looked painful. But now his expression twisted them into something else entirely.
Something terrifying.
His lips peeled back too far, more snarl than anything. His eyes were wide, the whites stark in the darkness, but the pupils blown huge, devouring the light. Every muscle in his forearms stood out starkly against the light of your lantern.
He lifted the man a few inches off the ground by his throat alone.
You heard cartilage pop.
“Adam,” you said.
It came out too quiet.
Your lungs forgot how to work for a second. The lantern wobbled in your hand, sending wild shadows over the three of you.
Blood had sprayed over Adam’s chest and arms. It soaked into his shirt, trickled down the seams of his stitched skin in small rivers. There were flecks of it on his jaw, on his neck, in his hair.
Your insides knotted.
“Adam,” you said again, louder this time, the word catching at the end. “Stop.”
His head whipped towards you.
One eye caught the lamplight full on and flashed, animal–bright. For a heartbeat, he looked like something out of a story used to frighten children into staying in bed at night.
He saw you.
Everything in his face changed.
The snarl faltered and instead, confusion flickered, then dread, then something like shame. His grip on the man’s throat loosened just enough for the man to suck in a rough, rasping breath that sounded like tearing cloth.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Adam said. The words came rough and slow, like they had to fight to get out. “You shouldn’t…see this.”
Your hand tightened on the lantern. Your other hand hung uselessly at your side, fingers shaking.
“You followed him,” you said. “From my cottage.”
Adam’s gaze darted briefly toward your wrist—to the darkening bruise blooming where the man had grabbed you earlier. Something ugly flared in his eyes.
“He hurt you,” he said. Each word was a stone dropped from a great height. “He took from you. He touched you. He laughed.”
He turned back to the man.
“You don’t get to do that.”
He lifted him higher, fingers tightening again.
The man’s legs kicked and a strangled sound forced its way out of his crushed throat.
“Adam, no.”
The word tore itself from your chest before you could think.
You stepped forward, shoes squelching in blood–wet mud. The smell of iron hit you hard, filling your nose, thick at the back of your throat. You wanted to gag.
“Let go of him. Please.”
Adam’s breathing sped up again. His eyes flicked between you and the man, wild.
“I told him not to come,” he said, voice breaking. “I told him I would be here. Watching. I told him not to touch you. He didn’t listen.”
His fingers flexed and the man made a choking, gurgling sound that made bile rise in your throat.
“You can’t kill him,” you said.
He stared at you like you’d spoken in a language he’d never heard before.
“He deserves it.”
“Maybe,” you said, voice shaking, “but if you do this…If you kill him…They will all say they were right about you. That you’re a monster. That you belong in the dark.”
The hand not gripping the man curled into a fist by Adam’s side.
“This is how I protect you,” he said. “This is how I make sure no one hurts you again.”
“Yes, but not like this,” you said. Your heart was pounding so hard you felt it everywhere. “Not for me. Not if it means losing what you are trying to be. I don’t want you to kill for me.”
He flinched like you’d struck him.
The man wheezed, eyes rolling, half–conscious.
“Adam…please.” You swallowed. “I want you to protect me. I do. But not like this. Not…by becoming the thing they all think you are.”
He stared at you.
You could see it—the war. Rage shuddered through him, something old and hot and feral. But layered over it, wrapped around it, was something softer and far more dangerous.
Devotion.
His jaw clenched.
Slowly, grudgingly, he let the man drop.
The man collapsed to the ground in a wet heap, gasping and coughing, clutching at his throat. His broken arm hung crooked by his side.
Adam wasn’t finished.
He grabbed him again, this time by the front of his coat, dragging him up until they were nearly nose to nose.
“You breathe because she asked,” he said, voice low and shaking. “Not because you deserve it.”
The man whimpered.
Adam shook him once, hard, fingers knotting in the fabric.
“You will go back to the village,” he said. “You will say you fell. You will say you were clumsy. You will not say her name.”
The man nodded frantically, or tried to, his head flopping more than anything.
Adam hauled him a little higher.
“And before you go,” he added, voice dropping further, “you will thank her for your life.”
He turned the man’s head roughly toward you.
The man’s eyes were bloodshot, one nearly swollen shut, his mouth red and wet. He swallowed painfully.
“Th…thank you,” he rasped. “For…for my life.”
You didn’t answer.
Adam stared at you while you stared at the man. Something unreadable flickered behind his gaze.
“Run,” Adam told him again.
He let go.
The man fell to the ground with a grunt, scrabbled for his life, then lurched to his feet and stumbled into the trees, half–falling, half–running. His footsteps crashed through the undergrowth until they faded.
The clearing fell very, very quiet.
The lantern flame jittered.
Adam stayed where he was for a moment, shoulders rising and falling like each breath hurt. Blood was drying tacky on his skin now, darkening where it soaked into the fabric of his clothes.
His hands still shook.
Then, slowly, he turned to you.
The expression on his face undid you.
Raw. Frightened. Hopeful. Terrifying.
“I didn’t kill him,” he said, like a child reciting something he wanted to be proud of. “You asked, and I…I stopped.”
The trembling in your hands spread to the rest of you. Your knees threatened to give.
You looked at him—at his hands, at his arms, at the smear of someone else’s life across his chest—and your entire body flooded with one cold, hard fact.
He could have killed him easily.
He could kill anyone who tried to hurt you. Anyone at all. You, even. He could end them, break them, tear them apart. And now he’d proven he would.
If not for your voice, your request, your thin thread of control, he would have done it.
He had chosen you over his rage.
That was almost scarier than the blood.
You swayed.
Adam moved so fast you barely saw it. One second he was across the clearing and the next, his hands were on your arms, keeping you upright.
“Careful,” he said. “You are shaking.”
His grip was strong, too strong. Even holding back, you felt the promise of force there. He could crush bone without thinking.
You forced your eyes to stay on his face. “You’re covered in blood.”
He glanced down, as if noticing for the first time.
“Oh.”
He sounded genuinely…puzzled. Almost embarrassed.
“It is not yours,” he said, quickly. “I didn’t let him touch me. He doesn’t get that. He doesn’t—”
He cut himself off, jaw tightening.
You pulled in a shaky breath. “We can’t leave it. If anyone sees you like this…”
You didn’t finish.
He understood.
You bent, grabbed a handful of dirt, and reached for his forearm.
He flinched when your fingers touched him, more in surprise than discomfort.
“Hold still,” you said, voice quieter.
You rubbed the damp earth into the splatters of drying blood, working it into the grooves of his skin, over the raised edges of seams and scars. The grit caught on the dried patches and began to lift them, the redness dulling as mud and blood mixed.
It was messy, slow work. Each sweep of your hand revealed more of him beneath—more of the strange, stitched–together skin, pale in places, darker in others. You kept your breathing steady, but your heart wouldn’t slow.
He watched you the entire time.
When you risked a glance up, his eye caught the lamplight again, reflective and bright. It made him look almost unreal, like some night creature you’d summoned instead of someone standing right in front of you.
“You should not touch me when I am like this,” he said, rough. “You might…change your mind.”
“About what?” you asked, even though you weren’t sure you wanted to hear the answer.
He was quiet for a beat.
“About whether I deserve to be near you,” he said finally.
Your throat tightened.
You moved to his other arm. More dirt. More careful, circling pressure. It felt wrong to be this gentle with someone who had just bent bone like it was kindling. It felt inevitable at the same time. You didn’t know what that said about you.
“How did you know?” you asked quietly. “Back at the cottage. When he took the herbs. When he grabbed me.”
Adam’s jaw flexed.
“I watch,” he said simply.
You swallowed. “Always?”
His gaze flicked to your face, searching. “Yes. Always.”
The thought made your skin prickle. You weren’t sure if it was comfort or violation. Maybe both.
You worked the dirt higher, over his shoulder, where a long smear of blood had dried.
Your knuckles brushed his throat as you reached.
He inhaled sharply.
You froze, fingers half–curled.
His voice came out thick. “If you are done, we should go. Before someone comes.”
You lowered your hand.
“Come home,” you said, because it felt strange to call it anything else when he’d been circling its edges for so long.
You turned. His footsteps followed.
He didn’t walk behind you like a protector. He walked very close, beside you, matching your pace easily, his hand hovering near the small of your back as if he wanted to touch but didn’t trust himself to do it gently twice in one night.
By the time the cottage came into view, your muscles ached from tension. The lamp by the door still burned, attracting a halo of moths.
Inside, everything looked too normal.
The overturned chair you hadn’t had time to pick up earlier. The herbs scattered where the man had rummaged. A dent in the table where his fist had landed when you’d told him to leave.
You lit another lamp, brighter, and set it on the table. The cottage filled with a warm glow that felt at odds with the night you’d just lived.
Adam ducked under the doorframe and stood there, enormous and entirely out of place in such a small room.
He looked around like he was half–afraid everything would disappear if he moved.
“You can sit,” you said.
He did so awkwardly, the chair creaking under his weight. You grabbed a bowl, filled it with water from the bucket, and found a clean cloth.
“Give me your hands,” you said.
He offered them without hesitation.
In the better light, you saw there were flecks of bone mixed with the blood under his nails. Your stomach rolled, but you pressed the cloth to his skin anyway, wiping slow, steady circles, rinsing frequently when the water turned pink.
He watched your face, not his hands.
“You asked me not to be a monster,” he said suddenly. “So I tried.”
You swallowed. “You were still…frightening.”
“I am always frightening,” he said. “That does not change. But I did not kill him.”
The words hung between you like something he was begging you to acknowledge.
“You didn’t,” you said quietly. “Because I asked you not to.”
His breath hitched.
“You asked,” he repeated, like the word itself was a marvel. “You ask, and I…stop. Even when everything in me wants…” He trailed off, shaking his head.
You didn’t ask what he wanted. You weren’t sure you wanted it put into words.
You moved from his hands to his forearms, washing away the remaining streaks of red. The skin there felt strange under the cloth—not quite right, thicker in some places, almost waxen in others. Patchwork.
He flinched once when your thumb accidentally pressed harder over a seam, not in pain, but like the idea of you feeling it bothered him.
“You do not have to do this,” he said. “You could tell me to wash in the river.”
“I don’t want them seeing the water stained,” you said. “Home is safer.”
“You do not want them to know what I did,” he murmured.
“I don’t want them coming here,” you said. “For you or for me.”
His eyes brightened at the second part. “You are…protecting me.”
You almost laughed and it came out strangled.
“I’m trying to keep us both from being dragged into the square and burned,” you said. “Take it how you like.”
His gaze flicked to your face, lingering.
“I like that you said us,” he said.
You cleared your throat and stepped back. “Take your shirt off. There’s still blood on your chest.”
He hesitated only a second before obeying, fingers fumbling a little at the torn fabric.
You’d seen his shape in glimpses before, but never fully. Now, as the shirt came away, you saw how many pieces he was made of. How many different colours of skin patched together. How many scars crisscrossed and overlapped.
And under all of it, the sheer, impossible strength of him.
Your mouth went dry.
You focused on the task.
The cloth moved over his chest in careful strokes. There was a dark smear over his heart that took longer to erase. You had to lean closer, bracing your free hand lightly against his shoulder for balance.
His breath stuttered.
“Does it hurt?” you asked, without looking at his face.
“Yes,” he said.
You frowned, glancing up.
His eyes were on you, not the cloth. Dark, wide, pupils swallowing nearly everything.
“Where?” you asked, genuinely confused for a second.
He lifted a hand and tapped two fingers against his chest, just below where your cloth worked.
“Here.”
You swallowed.
Your fingers tightened around the fabric. You kept wiping, though your hand had started to shake again.
His skin was colder than yours, but not dead. There was a heat under it now, like banked coals. Like something waking up.
“I let him live,” he said. “Because you asked. Because you do not want me to prove them right. About what I am.”
“I know,” you said softly.
“You saved him,” Adam went on. “You saved him from me. And you saved me from myself.”
The words landed somewhere deep and dangerous.
Your hand stilled.
“In return,” he said, voice dropping, “I want something.”
Your heart lurched and you lifted your head.
He was closer than you’d realized. You hadn’t seen him move, but suddenly you were standing between his knees, his height bringing you nearly level as he sat. The room felt smaller, the walls closer.
“What?” you asked, though part of you already knew.
His hand lifted, slow, shaking, and touched your wrist again—the bruised one. His fingers circled it gently, thumb brushing the tender skin.
“I want you,” he said.
The words were simple. Raw. Stripped of any pretty attempt at disguise.
Your stomach knotted.
“Adam,” you said carefully, “you’re upset. Tonight was—”
“I was upset before,” he said. “When I watched him take from you. When I saw you flinch. When I saw him put his hands where they did not belong.” His fingers tightened faintly around your wrist. “I did nothing then. I watched. I thought it was not my place.”
His gaze slid up your arm, to your shoulder, to your throat.
“I will not do nothing again,” he said. “Not when it comes to you.”
A tremor ran through you that had nothing to do with the cold.
“I don’t know if I want that,” you said, honestly.
His eyes flicked back to your face.
“But you do not say no,” he whispered.
He wasn’t wrong.
The fear was thick, yes. But under it, tangled hopelessly with it, was something else. The memory of his eye shining in the dark. The gifts on the stump. The way he’d knelt in blood and still looked at you like you were the only thing that mattered.
You didn’t say no.
His fingers slid from your wrist up to your elbow, then higher, tracing the line of your arm as if he were learning it by touch alone. When he reached your shoulder, he hesitated.
“Tell me to stop,” he said. “Say it. If you say it, I will.”
You opened your mouth.
Nothing sensible came out.
Your silence was an answer.
He heard it.
Something in his face crumpled and then reformed even harder. The gentleness stayed, but it sharpened. Devotion twisted into something possessive.
His other hand came up to cradle the side of your neck. His palm nearly covered it entirely, thumb pressing lightly just below your jaw. Your pulse fluttered against his skin.
“You are shaking,” he murmured. “With fear. With…something else.”
He leaned in, slowly, breath brushing your lips. You could have stepped back. You didn’t. Your feet might as well have been rooted to the floor.
“I will not be gentle if I think you are lying to me,” he said softly. “If you say you do not want this and I still feel you reaching.”
“I’m not reaching,” you whispered, even as your fingers curled into the fabric of the washcloth that was at his shoulders.
He gave you a look that said he didn’t believe you.
He closed the last inch.
His mouth met yours.
It wasn’t soft, not really. It started soft, the way he always tried to be with anything that mattered to you, but there was too much behind it. Too much fear, too much relief, too much wanting. His lips were cool and clumsy and shaking, pressing against yours like he was terrified you’d vanish if he didn’t hold you there.
You made a sound in your throat that you didn’t recognize.
His grip on your neck tightened just enough to keep you from pulling away too quickly, but not enough to hurt. His other hand slid around your waist, fingers splaying against your back, pulling you closer so there was no space left at all.
Your mind shouted that this was wrong, that you shouldn’t be here, that you’d just watched him almost kill a man. Your body overruled it with the simple, undeniable fact that you’d been lonely for a very long time and here was something huge and terrible and utterly devoted pressing against you like you were the centre of its universe.
He deepened the kiss. Not with any skill, but with sheer force of feeling, tilting his head, breathing against your mouth with small, broken sounds that sounded suspiciously like relief.
When he finally pulled back, it was only far enough to rest his forehead against yours, breath harsh and uneven.
“I should not,” he said, voice hoarse. “I know I should not. But when you touched me in the clearing, when you cleaned me, when you stood in my way and told me what to be…”
His hand shifted on your back, sliding up, spanning your ribs.
“I felt like I belonged to you,” he said. “And I wanted you to belong to me.”
He didn’t give you time to answer.
He surged up, rising from the chair in one smooth, towering motion, lifting you as if you weighed nothing. Your feet left the ground with a startled gasp. Your hands flew to his shoulders, clinging without meaning to as the rag dropped to the floor where it lay, covered in another man’s blood.
He turned and pressed you back against the wall beside the bed. The wood was cold against your spine and Adam was cold against your front.
He pinned you there with his body, not crushing, but inescapable. One hand braced beside your head. The other dragged down your side, fingers curling at your hip, holding you in place.
His mouth found your throat this time.
It wasn’t a bite, not quite. His lips pressed to the skin below your jaw, then lower, then lower still, leaving a trail of chilled heat in their wake. He breathed you in like it was the first clean air he’d ever taken.
You turned your head to the side without thinking, giving him more space.
He made a sound at that. A low, rough noise that vibrated against your neck. You felt his hand tighten at your hip, fingers digging in just enough to remind you what he could do if he stopped holding back.
“You smell like fear,” he said against your skin. “And like wanting. Like herbs and smoke and something that is just you.”
His nose brushed up along your throat, to the underside of your chin.
“You do not push me away,” he said. “Even though you could try.”
Your fingers flexed in his hair, caught there. You weren’t sure when they’d moved.
“I don’t know what I want,” you said, barely audible.
“I do,” he said. “I have had nothing but time to know.”
His hand left the wall and came back to your face, thumb stroking your lower lip, smearing a little of the dampness there.
“I want to take,” he said. “What no one else gets to have. What he tried to take and failed. I want to erase him. I want you to only think of me when you think of hands on you. Of mouths. Of teeth.”
A shiver ran through you so hard he felt it, causing his eyes to darken further.
“You are scared,” he said. “Good. You should be. I do not know how to do this softly for long.”
He kissed you again.
If the first kiss had been a question, this was an answer.
He pressed you more firmly into the wall, bodies flush, one leg nudging between yours without subtlety. His hand cupped the back of your head so you couldn’t hit it against the wood, thumb stroking your hairline in a small, almost absent comfort that made the contrast worse.
You didn’t say yes, but didn’t say no.
You let him.
That was all the permission he seemed to need.
He took what he wanted in the only way he knew how—with overwhelming presence, with all–consuming focus, with the kind of intent that stripped you bare without ever undressing you. His mouth moved from your lips to your jaw to that spot below your ear that made your knees go weak. His hand at your hip dragged you closer against him, aligning you with a slow, unthinking possessiveness that left no doubt he was feeling every inch of you.
When your breath caught, his did too.
“Mine,” he whispered against your skin. The word shivered through you. “You asked me not to kill. You asked me not to be the monster. I listened. Now I am asking you for this, and you are not saying no.”
It sounded like logic to him. To you, it sounded like a trap.
He eased you sideways then, away from the wall, lifting you effortlessly and setting you on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under his weight as he followed, one knee sinking into it, caging you there with his arms braced to either side of your body.
He hovered above you for a moment, looking down, his expression a mess of awe and terror and hunger.
“You are shaking,” he said again.
“So are you,” you managed.
He let out a short, breathless sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t sounded so close to a sob.
“I do not know how to want less,” he admitted. “I only know all or nothing. When you leave gifts, I think about them until the next one comes. When you look at me, I remember the exact way your eyes were for days. When you say my name…”
He swallowed hard.
“Say it,” he said. “Please.”
“Adam,” you whispered.
His eyes closed like it hurt and healed him at the same time.
When they opened again, something had fallen away. The last thin layer of restraint, maybe. The thing that had kept him lingering at the edges of the woods instead of crossing your threshold months ago.
He lowered himself until his weight settled, careful but undeniable, around you. His head dipped. His mouth found yours again, more demanding, more sure.
You felt very small and very seen and very trapped.
You didn’t pull away.
His hand slid along your side, up your ribs, fingers splaying against your back to anchor you as he kissed you like he was starving and you were the only thing that had ever filled him.
When he finally broke the kiss, he stayed close, breathing hard, eyes flicking over your face like he was trying to memorize it.
“I let him live,” he said, voice rough and low. “I did what you asked. I will not always. But this—”
He brushed his thumb over your lower lip once more, swollen and sensitive from his mouth.
“This I will not give back,” he whispered. “Not to him. Not to anyone. Not even to you, if you wake tomorrow and decide you were afraid of the wrong thing.”
The room felt too small for the size of what he was promising.
You lay there beneath him, heart pounding, caught between the urge to shove him away and the urge to drag him closer and knowing that either way, something in you had already been claimed.
He lowered himself until his weight settled around you—careful, but not careful enough to hide how badly he wanted to stop holding back. His breath trembled against your cheek as he hovered there, waiting for something you weren’t sure you could give but couldn’t quite take back either.
“Say something,” he murmured, voice low and frayed. “Anything. Just do not turn away.”
You didn’t turn away.
That was all he needed.
Adam leaned in slowly, like a storm lowering itself, tension in every line of his body. His lips brushed yours once—light enough to be mistaken for hesitation.
It wasn’t hesitation.
It was restraint snapping thread by thread.
The second kiss wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t asking. It wasn’t even searching. It was Adam taking a mouth he’d been imagining longer than you realized, a kiss that wasn’t smooth or practiced but overwhelming in its sincerity, its hunger, its confusion about where to put all the wanting without breaking something.
His hand slid up your side, fingers splayed wide as if mapping the shape of you. He paused halfway, breath hitching when your ribcage expanded under his palm with a trembling inhale.
Then he moved again—slow, claiming, tracing the line of your waist like he was memorizing the difference between touching and devouring.
You gasped softly.
His head snapped up at the sound, eyes wild, confused, hopeful all at once.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked.
“No,” you breathed.
The smallest exhale of relief left him, and he went still for a moment—like he needed to anchor himself in that word.
Then something inside him buckled.
His hand tightened gently at your waist before sliding around, pulling your hips closer into the cradle of his body. You could feel the tension in him—raw, unfamiliar, and pressed hard and heavy against your hip—like he didn’t know what to do with it except press closer, closer, closer.
Your hands—traitorous, shaking—lifted toward his shoulders. You didn’t mean to touch him. You weren’t even sure you wanted to. But fear and longing scrambled inside you until your fingers curled in the rough seam where one piece of him had been stitched to another.
He made a sound.
Not quite a growl, not quite a groan—just a deep, guttural noise that vibrated through him and into you.
He lowered his forehead to your collarbone, breath dragging ragged through his chest. His hips worked against yours and your traitorous body responded. His mouth brushed your skin lightly, testing, tasting the heat of you. You felt the faintest scrape of his teeth—not biting, but there.
Your pulse hammered wildly under his lips.
He followed it.
His mouth moved along the path of your heartbeat, up your neck, slow and trembling, until his nose brushed the underside of your jaw. He inhaled sharply there, like scent alone was enough to unravel whatever fragile restraint he had left.
“You smell like you want something,” he murmured, voice breaking against your throat.
His hand slid to your thigh, squeezing firm enough that the breath caught in your chest. He squeezed again, a quiet, desperate question.
You didn’t answer with words.
Your body tightened under his touch and your breath stuttered.
He felt everything.
His lips parted at your ear, breath hot and uneven. “If you wanted me gone, you would push me. You would run. You would scream. You do not.”
You shook your head.
“That is not no,” he whispered.
His mouth traced a slow line down your neck—not lingering long enough to mark, but deep enough to make your fingers tighten around his shoulders involuntarily.
He shuddered.
“Oh gods,” he breathed, pulling back just enough to look at you, pupils swallowing nearly the entire iris. “Do that again.”
You hadn’t meant to do anything.
But he took the shiver of your touch, the hitch in your breath, the widening of your eyes—he took every small involuntary reaction as proof, as permission, as something to claim.
He took the scent of your slick arousal as permission.
His hand slid beneath you, curling at the small of your back, pulling you up into him with a strength that made you gasp—made him gasp back, like the sound alone was something he could drown in.
“Tell me you do not want this,” he said, voice shaking, raw, almost angry with need. “Tell me now, and I’ll stop.”
He looked at you like stopping would kill him. You felt the truth of it.
You parted your lips.
But nothing came out.
His eyes darkened, throat bobbing with a harsh swallow.
“That is enough,” he whispered.
His hand slid from your back to your hip, fingers pressing, guiding, pulling you into the shape of him like he finally let himself move the way he’d wanted to in the clearing.
You made a sound into his mouth, something helpless and confused and wanting, and Adam’s entire body reacted like he’d been struck—your spine arching, breath breaking, his hand gripping your waist with a low, unsteady moan that slipped out before he could stop it.
He dropped his forehead to yours, shaking.
“If you knew what that did to me…” he whispered, voice shaking violently, “…you would run.”
His thumb brushed your lower lip, trembling.
Then he pressed you gently down against the bed.
Not forcing, not holding you down.
But settling over you like gravity itself—inevitable, vast, unyielding—eyes searching your face for something he couldn’t name, couldn’t ask for, couldn’t stop wanting.
“Please,” he breathed, the word almost a sob. “Please do not take this away from me.”
You couldn’t answer.
He didn’t wait.
He took your silence the way he’d taken everything else tonight—full, total, desperate—and leaned in until the world narrowed to nothing but his mouth, his hands, his breath, the weight of him above you as he kissed you like he had every intention of learning you inch by inch, breath by breath, until nothing else existed.
His thumb brushed your lower lip again, slower this time, like he was trying to memorize the feel of it. His other hand slipped from your hip to the side of your waist, fingers curling in your shirt, bunching the fabric in his fist.
“You are going to change your mind about me,” he murmured, “when you realize how much I want.”
He pulled you closer, and the fabric of your clothing strained. You heard a faint, protesting sound of thread being tested past its limit.
You barely had time to register it before he kissed you again.
This one broke something.
He didn’t ease into it. He fit his mouth to yours with all the pent–up desperation of months of watching you from the trees, months of gifts left on stumps and nights spent just outside your door listening to you breathe.
His hand fisted tighter in your clothes.
You felt the tug first—then the rip.
The seam at your side gave out with a soft, awful sound. The shirt didn’t fall away, but the fabric tore open just enough for cool air to lick at a strip of newly exposed skin.
Adam froze mid–kiss.
His eyes flew open, widening as he felt the tear under his fingers. He pulled back just far enough to look, chest heaving, hand still gripping the ruined cloth.
“I…” His voice cracked. “I did not mean to break it.”
You should have shoved him away. There was a warning in your chest, clear and bright and urgent: he doesn’t know his own strength, and he has stopped trying to pretend he isn’t dangerous.
But you didn’t move.
His gaze bled from the torn fabric up to your face. Whatever apology had been forming died on his tongue when he saw you hadn’t bolted, hadn’t screamed, hadn’t slapped his hand away.
The look that replaced it was worse than any snarl.
Want. Pure, undiluted, absolutely fixated.
His fingers loosened, but only so he could flatten his hand over the rip he’d made, palm cold against your newly bared skin through the torn edge of fabric. His breath hitched as he felt you shiver beneath his touch.
“That is what I am afraid of,” he whispered, thumb brushing the edge of the tear, so close to your skin it burned. “That if I stop pretending to be careful, I will ruin everything you give me.”
His hand slid up, still over the fabric, smoothing it like he could undo the damage—and in the same motion, pushing the cloth aside just enough to feel the heat of you more directly.
Then, he pushed the fabric. Exposing your skin to his as he watched the goosebumps form. You were bare and exposed and you didn’t hate it.
Your breath stuttered.
He felt it.
His fingers tightened again, possessive, almost shaking.
“I should not tear what belongs to you,” he murmured, voice rough in your ear, “but I cannot stand that he put his hands on you and I did not. That he tried to take and I stood in the trees and watched.”
His forehead pressed to yours, your noses barely brushing, his hand still splayed firm over the rip he’d made.
“Let me have this,” he said, almost hoarse. “I let him live because you asked. Let me have this because you do not say no.”
The world settles slowly.
He kisses you again—your jaw, then your cheekbone, then just beneath your eye. His lips are cool, trembling. It feels wrong that something so monstrous can kiss with such aching tenderness.
You barely have time to register what he’s doing. How your body reacts to his fingers against the most intimate parts of you. To the way you tip your head back and moan when he takes what he’s been wanting for far too long.
“It will never be like this with them,” he says softly. “Any of them. Any mortal man.”
Your breath catches as he stills inside of you. Deep and full and shaking.
“They do not hear you the way I do,” he continues, voice lowering, warming, weaving itself into you like a spell. “They do not watch over you at night. They do not stand between you and whatever would hurt you. They do not fight for you. They do not bleed for you.”
He lifts his head enough to look down at you. His eyes shine in the low lamplight—reflective, uncanny, holy in the wrong way.
“But I do,” he whispers.
You don’t argue, you can’t, not when his hips move against yours. The friction of it causing your fingers to tighten their grip on his hair and shoulders and anywhere else you can reach.
You can still feel the echo of every moment just minutes ago, your pulse still skittering wildly beneath your skin.
His thumb brushes your cheek.
“You feel safe under me,” he says quietly. “Do you not?”
You hesitate.
Your hesitation is its own confession.
Adam shudders.
His lips ghost over your temple, then lower to your cheek in slow, reverent kisses, each one a vow. He doesn’t stop his movements, edging you closer to your own peak.
“I can protect you better than any man you have ever known,” he murmurs. “I can learn what you need. I can become whatever keeps you safe.”
You exhale shakily, teeth biting into your lips. He kisses the edge of your jaw.
“I will do anything,” he whispers. “Anything you ask. Anything you do not ask. For you.”
You close your eyes as a warmth—unnatural, forbidden, terrifying—unfurls in your chest down to the deepest parts of your abdomen as you become undone. It shouldn’t feel good. Nothing about this night should feel good.
But it does. And you scream into his shoulder as he holds you. Your name falling from his lips like it’s his the only word he’s ever meant to say. He falls with you.
And when he feels your breath soften, he pulls you closer—one arm sliding under your back, the other cupping the back of your head with impossible tenderness. He lifts you into him, holding you tightly to his chest.
Only then do the first tears gather in your eyes.
He feels your breath hitch and his grip tightens protectively.
“Do not cry,” he murmurs, kissing your cheek as the first tear escapes. “Do not cry. You are safe with me. You are safe.”
His mouth touches each falling tear, slow and desperate, like he can kiss them away before they can mean anything.
“I am the only one who can keep you safe,” he says, voice trembling. “No one else. No one else will love you the way I will. No one else can.”
Your tears spill faster—some from fear, some from something far more dangerous.
He presses another kiss beneath your eye, then another to your temple, then trails his lips along your cheek until you gasp.
“You do not hate this,” he whispers, voice breaking. “You do not hate me.”
Your fingers curl into his shirt.
You don’t know when you started clinging to him.
But you are.
His breath trembles against your mouth as he leans in, forehead touching yours, noses brushing.
“You want someone to protect you,” he says softly. “You always have. And I can. I will. I already did.”
You swallow hard.
“This isn’t right,” you whisper.
His lips graze yours without kissing.
“I know,” he murmurs. “But you still held me.”
Your breath shudders out.
He kisses the corner of your mouth again—gentler this time, almost pleading.
“You are mine to protect,” he whispers. “Let me do it. Let me keep you. Let me love you in the only way I know how.”
A sob slips free.
It doesn’t sound like fear.
He gathers you even closer, burying his face in your throat, kissing your skin in slow, shaking presses—each one a prayer, a promise, a possession he doesn’t fully understand but clings to with everything he is.
“I will not lose you,” he whispers between kisses. “Say you will stay.”
You don’t say it.
But you don’t pull away.
And that—God help you both—is enough for him.
He holds you as you cry, kissing your tears, kissing your cheeks, kissing the hollow beneath your throat, whispering promise after promise until you’re clinging to him like he’s the only thing keeping you upright.
Because some dark, truthful part of you knows:
You don’t hate how he made you feel.
You don’t hate the thought of belonging to something that would tear the world apart to protect you.
You don’t hate the idea of being his.
Even though it’s an act against God, against reason, against everything you were taught to fear.
You cling to him anyway.
And Adam—trembling, breathless, worshipful—clings back.
His lips have just brushed your cheek again, a trembling kiss meant to soothe the shaking he caused, when your hand lifts slowly, shakily, to his jaw.
He stills.
Completely.
Like your touch is the only force in existence that can halt him mid-breath.
“Adam…” you whisper.
His eyes snap open instantly, pupils huge, breath caught. “Yes. Anything. Say it.”
You swallow, the words scraping up your throat like they’re made of shards.
“You can’t kill anyone,” you whisper.
His whole body goes rigid.
You feel the shift—a ripple through every tense muscle pressed against you—like the idea alone hurts him. His hands tighten around your waist before he forces himself to loosen them, remembering how easily he could bruise you.
His voice cracks.
“You want me weak,” he says quietly.
“No,” you breathe, shaking your head, gripping his jaw tighter so he has to look at you. “I want you here. With me. Not hunted. Not feared. Not dragged through the village on a rope because you lost control.”
His chest rises sharply. His brows pull together in confusion, hurt, devotion, need.
“You think I care what they do to me?” he whispers.
“I care,” you say, and the moment the words leave you, something inside him breaks open.
He presses his forehead against yours, breath trembling.
“Say it again.”
“I care,” you repeat softly.
A wounded, worshipful sound leaves him.
His arms wind around you tighter, one cradling your back, the other sliding into your hair as if he can pull your voice into his bones.
You inhale shakily.
“But you have to promise me,” you whisper against his cheek, “you won’t kill anyone.”
He sucks in a sharp breath like the air is suddenly too cold.
You feel him nearly flinch.
“Promise me, Adam.”
His lips part, and he struggles, truly struggles, with the weight of the words you’re asking for. You can see him battle himself in real time: instinct, rage, devotion, fear of losing you.
Finally, his voice emerges—quiet, low, trembling.
“I will not kill…” he whispers, teeth clenched, “if you tell me not to.”
It’s not enough.
Your fingers curl into his hair, tugging just enough to force his eyes to you.
“No, Adam. Say it right.”
His breath stutters. He looks almost sick, as if the promise itself will destroy him, as if the world he built around protecting you is cracking under your demand.
“As much as you let me,” he says instead.
“Promise,” you whisper.
He bows his head into your neck, kisses your skin once—not gentle, not harsh, just claiming—then forces the words out like dragging confession through bone.
“I promise I will only hurt them as much as you allow.”
A shiver ripples through you.
It’s not holy.
It’s not safe.
It’s not sane.
It’s devotion sharpened into something feral.
His breath skates over your throat.
“If you tell me to break an arm, I will break it.” A kiss to your jaw.
“If you tell me to stop, I will stop.” His hand cups your cheek.
“If you tell me they walk away breathing…” He swallows “They will.”
Your tears return—not from fear, not entirely.
Some part of you, the part you’ve been ignoring, the part that warmed when his hands first closed around your waist, the part that leaned into his kisses—recognizes this for what it is.
Power. Over him. Over something that should terrify you.
His thumb wipes the tear away instantly, desperate, frantic, like he caused it and must remove the evidence.
“Do not cry,” he whispers. “Please. I gave you what you asked. I will give you anything.”
You exhale shakily, fingers curling tighter into his shirt.
“But you have to keep your promise,” you whisper, voice barely holding together.
He nods against your skin.
“You said you wanted me to learn,” he murmurs. “Then teach me. Teach me how much pain others deserve for touching what is mine.”
You gasp softly.
His arms tighten.
“And I will do exactly that. No more. No less.”
Your heartbeat stutters.
He hears it and kisses you again—soft, reverent, shaking.
“I protect you,” he whispers. “I obey you.” His forehead presses to yours. “I will not kill unless you say the word.”
A pause.
“And I know you never will.”
Your breath trembles, and you rest your head against his chest—not because you choose to, not entirely, but because some strange gravity is pulling you into him.
He cradles you like you’re breakable.
And in a soft, devastating murmur that makes your spine go cold and warm all at once, he whispers:
“You are mine to save. And I am yours to command.”
