A/N: I will totally start working on my thesis right after writing this just like I said I would. And by 'start' I mean hit 'post now' and proceeded to do absolutely nothing. Anyway, enjoy this masterpiece of procrastination. Have a nice and productive week (Cuz one of us should)
Warnings: Murder, smut, MDNI
Bughuul x OC l Ishtar's POV
The next child to be adopted was Milo. He stuttered when he spoke and was a tad timid but he could also sometimes be a brat. A sweet woman named Claire took him in. I wept again. She lasted two weeks. The news called it “a freak accident.” The house exploded, they said it was a gas leak, but I saw the video; a grainy security cam footage the police released later. Just before the explosion, there was something in the hallway. Something tall. Watching.
The night it happened, the moon was thin as a blade, there were no stars, just the silence of children sleeping down the hall and the sound of my blood in my ears, thrumming like a ritual drum. I knew he would come, so I didn’t light candles, didn’t wear white, instead, I undressed slowly as though each layer of cotton and silk peeled away a part of me that had still clung to innocence. I stood by the window in nothing but my skin letting the house look at me. Letting him see me. And then he was there; not with footsteps. Bughuul did not arrive in ways that could be heard, he filled the room like breath filled lungs, like dread in prayer. My body prickled, nipples hardening from the chill, or perhaps from the heat that pulsed beneath my skin. I turned, and he was there, towering over me. Still, his head tilted slightly, as if wondering what part of me he should begin with. “Why do you keep coming back?” I asked. His hand moved, just a fraction, just enough. He touched my face without ever laying a finger on me, I arched and gasped, pleasure bloomed low in my belly, dark and needy. His fingers, spectral, traced down the line of my throat, then my collarbone, before tangenting the curve of my breast. He didn’t breathe, but I did. Every inhale scraped through me like a velvet-lined razor, my knees buckled, and I fell to them, kneeling before him, naked, trembling. “Take me,” I whispered. “Or leave me be. I can’t live in-between anymore.” And then, something shifted, the air folded in on itself, and then I felt him. He entered me, not with flesh, but with presence. My back bowed, my fingers dug into the floorboards and a cry tore from my lips that didn’t sound human. My vision blurred; I was being filled, ruined, remade. He fucked like an eternity. No rhythm. No mercy. Just overwhelming pulsing waves of darkness, light, hunger and love; yes, love, though it came as pain. The house moaned with us. A shudder ran through the walls, the windows dripped with black condensation, and when I came, my body twisted, writhing, lips raw from sobbing. I felt him mark my soul, he didn’t say my name. He carved it across dimensions. Isha. And when it was over, I was no longer just a woman. I was his beloved. His altar.
After that night, I changed, but not in ways the world could see. I still tied shoes, folded laundry and taught the little ones how to write their names. But my reflection flickered when I passed mirrors and my shadow lingered just a little too long behind me. Sometimes, I’d wake up with his mouth on my thighs, invisible lips between my legs, or a pressure inside me that left bruises which later bloomed in the shape of hands. The other staff left. One by one. They said the children whispered to things that weren’t there. That a strange figure appeared in photographs, that they heard my voice singing lullabies in rooms I’d never entered. And always, always the adoptions. Each new placement ended in blood, and the bodies piled up. The headlines screamed, but the orphanage stayed open; and I knew why. He wouldn’t let them shut it down, because he needed it to quench his thirst, and he needed me here.
I tried once, just once to end it. Before the attic mirror, where the first murder took place, I stood with a knife and drew it across my skin, shallow, hesitant. Not out of cowardice but out of hope. Hope that maybe just maybe death could free me, and most importantly them. He appeared behind me and didn’t speak like always. But his anger was louder than thunder. The knife rusted in my hand before crumbling to crust, my blood vanished and my wound closed. I collapsed to my knees and begged him. “Let me go. Let them go.” He knelt behind me and for the first time, I wept in his arms. There was no comfort, just the terrible gentleness of a demon who loved me too much to leave me human.
We began to meet in dreams, or maybe it was hell. I wasn't sure. The landscape was somehow always different. Sometimes a blood-soaked field, sometimes a child’s bedroom frozen in time, sometimes halls that bled into each other where doorways led nowhere where a child’s laughter echoed; distorted, distant and wrong. And in those dreams, I would run to him, fall into his arms, and he would kiss and a plague would spread across every inch of me until I forgot who I had been.
He took me nightly. In every way. Mouth, fingers, shadows. He took me soft, and he took me brutal. Sometimes I woke up crying, now and then, moaning and sometimes both. His mark never left my skin, black fingerprints on my hips and ribs. One time, a word carved into my stomach backwards. “Mine.” Was that my punishment for trying to leave him?
The last child was lilly. Seven years old. A man came to adopt her. A good man, so very kind. I could feel it in his handshake and in the way he knelt to speak to Lilly instead of towering over her. And so, for a moment I thought. Please. Let this one live.
I begged Bughuul that night. On my knees, naked, praying with my whole body, offering myself again, wholly, deeper. “I’ll do anything,” I gasped, while he ravaged me across my bed. “Just let lilly live.” His response was, as per usual, not in words, but in a vision, a wedding; our wedding. The guests, children of the orphanage were all dead, the altar was a pyre. And lilly stood beside me, eyes empty, face slack. She was already gone.
I screamed when I awoke and I found the sheets soaking through. Not with blood but with shadow. He said no.
• Chapter I • Chapter II • Chapter IV • Chapter V • Chapter VI • Chapter VII

















