Bound To A Demon King

Chapter Four

Those were the only words on the entire page.

My brows furrowed in confusion. *Was this just a romance novel?*

Intrigued, I flipped to the next page, but instead of standard English, my eyes met a string of foreign lettering. That said a lot, coming from me.

Father had ensured I was intensively schooled; I could speak over five major world languages and recognize the alphabets of countless global ethnicities. Yet, I had never come across anything like this. It looked entirely made up.

Frowning, I grabbed my phone and scanned the text. To my utter astonishment, the search engine returned zero results, as if these characters simply did not exist.

I knew it. It's just gibberish.

Disappointed, my frown deepened and I began to hastily flip through the pages. They were all the same—rows upon rows of the same incomprehensible script. But my frantic flipping came to a dead halt when the text suddenly gave way to a drawing.

My eyes widened, and I didn't know when I exclaimed out loud, “Wow.”

It was a close-up drawing of eyes. Only a pair of eyes with no face.

My hands moved to feel the paper.

The eyes looked like a nebula trapped beneath glass, streaked with amber, copper, and scattered points of starlight. As if someone had captured a burning galaxy and sealed it behind its gaze

I paused, entirely captivated. As an artist myself I knew how to appreciate perfection and this had to be it.

The ink artist had rendered the drawing with such hyper-realistic precision that they seemed to look right back through me.

They were beautiful, but in a non-human,

eerie way. There was just something dark and magnetic laced within the iris.

Merely staring into the ink felt dangerous, like a predatory gaze that could effortlessly reel you in and compel you to do things you shouldn't—things you would never normally dare to conceive.

I suddenly felt a reckless, irrational urge to surrender to whatever those eyes demanded of me, to let them strip away my free will entirely.

*Close the book,* a faint, logical voice whispered from the back of my mind. *Close it now.*

But I couldn't look away. My eyes were glued to those eyes, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs as a cold sweat suddenly broke out along my neck. I was drowning in a painted stare, entirely trapped by an entity made of ink and shadows.

As if an alarm went off in my head I suddenly snapped out of it. I blinked and shook my head.

What was wrong with me?

Spooked, I decided to look away from the image and quickly flipped past it before I changed my mind.

But what I saw on the next page made a sudden, fierce flush crawled up my cheeks. These weren't mere artistic sketches or a body part. It was an explicit, incredibly detailed illustration.

A low gasp escaped my lips.

The illustration was of a man, stark naked, towering and lean. His back was turned to the viewer, showcasing broad shoulders and defined biceps rendered in thick, dark ink. Long, midnight-black hair cascaded down his spine, framing intricate tattoos that swirled from his arms across his back, stopping just at his tapered waist.

The artist had drawn him with frightening realism and absolute skill just like the eyes. Did the eyes belong to him?

He looked alluring—perfect, in a tempting way. And this was just his back.

It triggered a rush of illicit thoughts I had never experienced before. I had never seen a man this breathtaking in real life; it made sense that he only existed on paper.

I swallowed hard, an unfamiliar, tight ache clenching deep in my belly.

*What does his face look like?* I wondered, my mind racing. *If his back is this seductive, what would his face do to me?*

As if acting on their own accord, my fingertips moved to trace the inked lines of his body.

Beneath the drawing, was a single word written in the same unrecognizable letters. But it has had been crossed out by a shaky line, and when I took a closer look I found a fading handwritten word under it; ‘Va-lak’

It was as if someone had done a translation.

“Va-lak” I tried to pronounce it aloud, the word sounding archaic in my tongue.

Was this his name?

I dragged my finger over his illustrated shoulders and slid it up his hair, idly wondering what it would feel like to run my hands through those thick strands while he—

I froze, violently snapping myself out of the trance. *What the hell am I thinking? He's an imaginary drawing! You have a boyfriend, for God's sake Rachel!

I had a bad feeling about the book. I knew I needed to drop it. But I just couldn't. I was too intoxicated with curiosity.

Clearing my dry throat, I forced myself to flip to the next page. But the moment the paper turned, the breath trapped itself squarely in my throat.

As if caught red-handed doing something wrong, I slammed the book shut, my fingers still wedged between the heavy parchment pages.

I was completely alone in my room, but a sudden wave of paranoia made me scan around before I slowly peeled the book open again.

On the parchment were explicit, scandalous scenes like I had never seen or experienced in my life—and the naked, faceless man was at the center of it all.

First, he was drawn kneeling between what I could clearly tell were a woman's legs, his face buried deep as if he were dutifully worshipping her.

While his physical features were rendered in agonizing detail, the woman, by contrast, only had her thighs outlined in single, faint ink strokes. Her upper body was entirely nonexistent, as though she were just an empty placeholder and this magnificent man was the sole focus.

A heavy, illicit heat pooled below my belly the longer I stared. This was the closest thing I had ever had to pornography, and it was awakening a hunger for a desire I never knew existed.

A tingling, restless itch began to bloom between my thighs. Before I realized what I was doing, my hand drifted to the hem of my towel, desperate to soothe the ache, while my eyes greedily ravaged another drawing.

This time, the woman was drawn up to her neck, stark naked, and the man was on top of her, their hips locked in a fierce, seamless friction. Again, only his back was shown.

Suddenly feeling scalding hot, I fanned a trembling hand over my face, but my focus never wavered. I couldn't look away. I took in the lewd images of the naked man making out with the faceless woman in different positions.

There was a raw, aggressive manhandling to the poses that would have the church immediately launching a global holy purging if they ever found out.

Greedily, I flipped the page, my eyes landing on a massive illustration where the two were tangled together in the very midst of a crowd.

Dozens of faceless, shadowed heads surrounded them to represent the onlookers. How could they be having s*x stark naked in public?

However, the utter obscenity of it made me yearn, with sudden desperation, to be in that woman's shoes. This fictional entity had just become the bane of all my wildest fantasies. Lost in the haze, my fingers slipped beneath the cotton towel.

I was slick, burning, and wet. I had never truly known the appeal of caressing my own body until now, all because of an imaginary ink drawing.

“Uhh…” A soft, breathless sound escaped my lips as I rubbed the sensitive folds. It felt incredible, but it wasn't good enough. I wanted more. My index finger slipped deeper—

*Knock! Knock!*

A harsh, loud pounding rattled my bedroom door, abruptly shattering the moment and snapping my bewitched senses back into reality. I was horrified with myself.

How could I do this? I wasn't that kind of girl!

*Knock! Knock!*

The pounding came again. I frantically yanked down my towel, jumping to my feet and scrambling to slam the book closed. But in my panic, the heavy volume slipped from my slick fingers. It crashed to the floor, sprawling wide open to the detailed drawing of the man’s muscular back.

“Damn it!” I winced, a sharp sting piercing my hand. In my desperate attempt to catch it, the razor-sharp edge of the parchment had sliced right across the pad of my index finger—the very same finger covered in my own arousal.

Blood began to pool rapidly from the cut. Before I could wipe it away, a heavy crimson drop trailed down my palm and splattered directly onto the open page, soaking into the dark ink of the man's tattooed spine.

Hissing in frustration, I abandoned trying to clean it and aggressively kicked the book beneath my bed, hiding it in the dark.

“Rachel! I know you are still awake! Don't ignore me, young lady!”

My heart stopped. That wasn't a maid. It was Father.

He was back. But how? He was supposed to be away on a business trip across the country for the next two days.

“Give me a minute!” I called out, forcing my voice to sound steady as I rushed to the bathroom, scrubbed the blood from my hands, and threw on a silk nightdress.

When I opened the door, Father’s massive, imposing build filled the frame, his salt-and-pepper hair nearly touching the top of the molding.

“Dad—”

Before I could speak, he pushed past me, striding into my bedroom with the heavy, determined steps of a tyrant bound to catch a criminal in the act.

I watched from the center of the room, holding my breath, praying with everything in me that his eyes wouldn't wander under the bed.

When he finally stopped his thorough inspection and turned his gaze to me, I released a shaky breath. But the relief was brutally short-lived.

“You went to visit your mother?”