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Here’s chapter one to get you started, but be warned: the following content is 18+. The first chapter contains sex, violence, gore, allusions to trafficking/SA, and general badassery (yes, there’s profanity). Read at your own risk. Always protect your mental health first.
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© Jinapher J Hoffman. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter 1: Pretty Moans
Rayze
Great seduction can be found in a kill. A shift of my hips. A swipe of my tongue.
“There. Like that,” a snake moans.
Black, inked scales gleam across her naked body, toned muscle wet with tiny rivers of red. My knife makes shallow cuts against her thighs, her ribs, her neck—and her hips jut with a ragged exhale.
I smile, curl a finger into tight, aching heat, and let my knife clang to the floor.
Her hair slides across black pillows, her wrists jerking against the bed’s permanent restraints. Pained screams erupt on the other side of the brothel wall, and her cunt squeezes my knuckles.
I’ll enjoy this one.
I tilt my head and listen to the never-ending roar of the storm outside. Lights stutter and flash through the city streets of Synlon, neon glaring through rain and bending through hole-riddled black lace tacked across the window. Damning silver glints throughout the small room. Shackles and chains. Scalpels and a blood-rusted gurney.
Then the soft white of bone, the trafficked remains of a small body left to rot.
I match the thrust of my hand to the city’s constant, buzzing pulse, rage stinging beneath my skin, and grit my teeth.
There’s stabbing a man. Then there’s stabbing a man when he comes. One leaves him wanting. The latter leaves him satisfied until his bitter end. Not that I care about the bastard being satisfied, but a woman ought to use every tool in her arsenal.
Make him come, and he’s simple to snare. Easier to kill. His secrets—mine.
A woman, on the other hand, is different.
I let my prey flutter and writhe. Edge her. Dissatisfy her. Frustrate her. If I make her come too soon, I’ll lose my advantage. But toying with her?
Fanged snakes mark her loyalty to The Serpent, their forked tongues tatted around her breasts. She moans and lightning arcs from her teeth to the barbells cinched through her nipples. Glowing veins reach down between her legs to shock her pierced hood.
Volt.
Blue rings pulse in her eyes, the drug crackling in syringes on the bedside table.
“Please,” she begs. “More.”
“Please,” I screamed. “Stop.”
It’s a delicate balance. Seduction and death.
I thrashed.
Bending a mortal’s pleasure to my will.
I kicked.
Trying to appease an endless rage.
Rough hands and—
My power claws awake. Iridescent strings brighten across the brothel’s tattered wallpaper, the stained sheets, her swollen lips.
Blood. Hot and dripping down my fourteen-year-old face.
The Threads of Fate twist and fold around her, clinging to the essence of all she is. Those bound to her orgasm thrum like a heartbeat, desperate to be sated.
Caged beneath, thicker plaits flash between the shadowed caverns of her skull. Memories and cognitive functions just waiting to be played with.
“When?” I whisper, the word needling from my lips to her mind. “When will The Serpent Yield?”
Her mouth cranes, wide and soundless, caught on the edge of her release.
My magic latches to a mess of threads. I knot them. Tug.
But Volt strikes.
The drug burns through the imprint of my magic, slow then searing. It corrodes my command, blackening knots until they flake to ash.
Fuck.
My prey seizes. Her eyes snap wide.
I grit my teeth, blood stinging my nose, and work her pleasure—faster, harder—battling the drug for dominance.
“You were worth every coin,” she groans, hands flexing along her restraints.
“Tell me, snake.” I pry her thighs wider, gaze flicking to her discarded chrome armor. It rattles on the bed with each timed thrust. “You’re high enough in his ranks to know.”
I cinch hundreds of strings like a barricade, and Volt beats against it. Dark spots line my vision, my head buzzing.
“What are you doing to me?” she gasps. Neon blue bleeds from her eyes.
“Your Boss will Yield to his Heir.” My magic cracks between us. “When?”
She shakes her head, her eyes slanting with a hard glare.
I scowl and wrench back, leaving her empty. Wanting.
“Tomorrow,” she chokes out. “Tomorrow night.”
“Good. More.” I ram inside. Pound knuckle deep.
She spasms. Her pupils dilate.
“Where?” I spit, power slicing from my tongue.
Sharp zaps of electricity flare across her cheeks. Her lust cracks, the vibrant threads of her Fate crisping black.
I take the risk and suck her clit between my teeth.
She screams.
“Where will the Yield take place?” Volt attacks, stabbing from the silver stud of her hood to the hoop through my bottom lip. My shoulders convulse, but I suck harder, a wave of pain crashing through me. I can’t lose this lead. I won’t.
Her chest caves. Her thighs squeeze. “You,” she sneers. “You’re her.”
“WHERE.” The command explodes from my gut.
Volt jolts between us, charging her synthetic strength and bruising the living shard of Fate’s magic buried inside me. I jerk back, spine snapping taut.
Drool seeps from her wobbling smile, cum shining between her thighs. “Let me guess. You were sold to the Skin Trade or your family was.”
I dig my nails into her thighs with a snarl. “Shut up.”
“The Serpent will fuck you limp,” she laughs. “Just as he did to them. It’s a shame. You could’ve made us a pretty profit.”
The bed sheets blur.
“Stealing from him. Killing his cronies and guards.” She yanks against her restraints, Volt strengthening her pull. The leather gives with a sharp crack, and she snatches her Serpent blade from her discarded armor.
She whips its tip below my chin, and I level my glare with hers.
“I wonder how much you’ll make me when I turn you in.” Her tongue flicks over her lips, eyes sparkling with greed as she takes in my naked body. “Or should I sell you at the Night Market, limb by—”
I slam around her blade and slap a hand to her mouth, thrusting her against the pillow with a growl. “I said: Shut. Up.”
She shouts into my palm and swings toward my ribs.
But I catch her wrist and twist.
Bones crack. The blade drops.
She thrashes.
“Come,” I snarl, and my magic tunnels toward my trench coat on the floor. An arrow slings from black leather and flies across the room, cold steel smacking into my palm.
She kicks.
I twirl the shaft—the arrow humming with my power. I study the cuts I made with my knife earlier. An enchanting map waiting to be punctured.
“Here?” I whisper and tap its tip to the wound at her thigh as I straddle and pin her hips.
She shakes her head, bucking against me.
I pout. “Fine. How about here?” I graze the cuts over her ribs, and she bites at my callouses.
I sigh and touch my arrow to the sliver of cut flesh at her neck. “Mmm. Here, then? That’s where you want me? The same place you put collars on children?”
Her fists beat against me.
Thunder growls outside. Rain drums against the roof.
I drop to her ear. “Bruises won’t stop me, Serpent,” I whisper, nails digging into the hollows of her cheeks. “Just like they’ve never stopped you.”
She pleads so beautifully.
But I wasn’t raised to let go of the past. I was taught to take it to bed.
Then to slaughter it.
I rip my arrow through delicate tendons and flesh. Her shriek wets my fingers, blood spewing from her neck to my skin, hot and dripping.
Down my cheeks. Between my breasts.
Fourteen. Twenty-seven. Doesn’t seem to matter my age. I can’t escape this endless fucking cycle.
A pretty profit, she dared.
Her threads unravel like frayed yarn yanked from its spool, and the Volt ringing her eyes chases a final high. The drug surges from her corpse, tangles up the shaft of my arrow, and spikes into my bare palm.
I choke.
My magic sputters and spits. My limbs twitch. The web of external threads clinging to the room vanish, my vision forced from Fate’s veil and into the plane of mortality.
I force a steadying breath.
The ends of my dark hair scratch along my jaw as I pry my arrow free. Blood seeps from my nose, my temples pounding, but I grin.
He’ll fuck you limp, she laughed.
Now look at her.
Fate’s poetic fucking justice.
I chuck my bloody arrow to the side and climb off the bed, grabbing my clothes from the floor and shoving into my leather pants and top. Weapons clink as I fasten my boots and step to the floor-length mirror in the corner, shrugging on my black trench coat.
Arrows line its interior, a mount for my bow anchored to its back. It’s hardly discreet, but I’m far from the only woman armed in Mirror, let alone any of the realm’s shithole cities like Synlon. If anything, it only adds to my draw.
Gods, do snakes love to fuck a hunter—and fuck them over, I will.
“Clean,” I command.
The mirror ripples. A portal shadows its surface, and dark, vaporous tendrils unspool. They whorl toward the bed, forming a thick curtain. White pricks of light peek through, thousands of stars blinking awake. Black weaves beneath my prey.
Then her body sinks past blood-soaked sheets, pillows caving in, and a void swallows her whole.
“Tomorrow,” I say and wrench open the bedroom door, glancing at the mirror.
Tomorrow, Shard Daughters return, the voices of Fate’s chosen colliding before they fade, stars blinking out along the mirror and replaced by the sharp spire of a lethal, iron crown.
Born to sacrifice, my queen whispers through my skull.
Dark resolution settles across my shoulders, and I slam the door shut, fists tight. “Greater than pain,” I growl and skim my fingers over my arrows.
It’s time.
Always,
Jinapher J. Hoffman is the Author of Wrathos Books, a dark fantasy multiverse of feminine rage; the Creator/Host of Dark Mode Books, home of the Stuff Your Kindle With Dark Fiction event; and the Host of Under Revision, a podcast focusing on her writing journey, mental health, and dreaming big. To support her, you can find all her socials and additional links here.