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Marked Up — II

Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Demons — Demon who is not interested in your soul, they just want to hear you beg

Content notices for: kink, dubious consent and stated intent to ignore limits, passing reference to self-harm, sadism

When she comes back — right to your door, a single peremptory knock — you burst into tears, and she scruffs you like a kitten, presses you between her body and the wall, face in her shoulder, enclosed. Almost like a hug.

Then she makes you admit to all the times you crawled to her friend, while she was gone, as desperate as she'd scornfully said you would be, the screaming pain of it. She knows everything already, breaks in with a stream of corrections and prompts for more detail, more. For you to crack yourself wider open and writhe, her cold claws sinking into your twitching, mortified internal workings. You've missed her. You've missed it. You've become astonishingly resensitised to the slightest press of her contempt, her threat, her telegraphed, premeditated cruelty, howling apart under pain and scrutiny like it's the first time.

"There are three types of people, baby bunny," she says, sparking a cheap lighter and tilting it, letting the flame run over the curve of the stamped metal heat shield, the self-harmer's branding iron. "Ones you can't explain the trick to, without it dissolving. Ones you can, and it makes no difference." She smiles at you, through the fire. "And then there's you, where the trick is self-flagellation as much as anything I do. And when I explain the trick to you, and it still works, you make it work harder."

She makes you hold out your arm. Flex. She strokes your bicep, bringing your skin to exquisite, shivering awareness, then fakes you out, tosses the lighter down, and bites instead: deep in the meat, skin-breaking, jaw-locking, agonising.

You sob and shake and babble, and she pins you to the floor like a malicious weighted blanket, breathing in your ear so you spasm, caught between tensing up and liquidly melting.

She picks a word out of the nonsense dripping out of your mouth.

"Soul?" She laughs into your neck, delighted, like a lover. "You're such a romantic. Hellfire brand this, soul that. I'm just going to break you until all you can do is beg me. Beg me for too much because you know I want you to suffer it, then beg me to stop when I give it to you. Knowing it's up to me when I let up. That I never will."

She nips at your ear; manhandles you, bruising, to a sitting position. Straddles your lap.

"Do you want," planting a light kiss on your mouth, "to," firmer, "get," open and wet and hands carding hotly through your hair; "off?"

She owns you. She owns you, and this is forever a trap, and she'll make you regret it, and — "Yes," because you did this to yourself and it's still the only truth. You wanted her. You want her. You want this.

She smiles against your lips.

"My friend will be so glad you haven't forgotten her, now I'm back," she says, hot and sweet, and licks your lip; "I'll drive you over there now, for her to take care of you."