Stalked by Seduction and Shadows (Eternal Obsession Book 1), page 1
STALKED BY SEDUCTION AND SHADOWS
MAGGIE SUNSERI
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Stalked by Seduction and Shadows
Maggie Sunseri
https://maggiesunseri.com
Copyright © 2024 Maggie Sunseri
eBook Edition
Cover Design by Story Wrappers
This work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review or article.
CONTENTS
Content Warnings
1
Rune
2
Scarlett
3
Rune
4
Scarlett
5
Rune
6
Rune
7
Rune
8
Scarlett
9
Scarlett
10
Scarlett
11
Scarlett
12
Scarlett
13
Rune
14
Scarlett
15
Rune
16
Scarlett
17
Scarlett
18
Scarlett
19
Rune
20
Scarlett
21
Scarlett
22
Scarlett
23
Rune
24
Scarlett
25
Scarlett
26
Scarlett
27
Scarlett
28
Rune
29
Scarlett
30
Scarlett
31
Scarlett
32
Rune
33
Scarlett
34
Rune
35
Scarlett
36
Scarlett
37
Scarlett
38
Scarlett
39
Rune
40
Scarlett
41
Rune
42
Scarlett
43
Scarlett
44
Scarlett
45
Scarlett
46
Scarlett
47
Rune
48
Rune
49
Scarlett
50
Scarlett
51
Scarlett
52
Scarlett
53
Scarlett
54
Rune
55
Scarlett
56
Scarlett
57
Scarlett
58
Scarlett
59
Scarlett
60
Rune
61
Scarlett
62
Scarlett
63
Scarlett
64
Rune
65
Rune
66
Scarlett
67
Rune
68
Scarlett
Note from Maggie
Also by Maggie Sunseri
About Maggie Sunseri
CONTENT WARNINGS
For a list of content warnings please visit Maggie Sunseri’s website: maggiesunseri.com.
For soulmate love—however dark, powerful, & all-consuming.
1
RUNE
Past
The first time I watched the girl I called Little Flame, she was picking flowers in a grove on the outskirts of Crescent Haven. Her dark brown hair was wild and untamed, falling in waves that were nearly as long as she was tall. She was far too close to the vampire wards and the guard—the spells and hunters tasked with keeping big bad monsters like me far away from fragile mortals and their vulnerable, ephemeral hearts.
These safeguards generally held up. Against the average vampire anyway. Not against an unnaturally powerful one like myself.
I ran my tongue against my left canine and then my right, an unconscious tic normally, but one I was acutely aware of with a human child mere feet away. A pang of something buried surfaced from the abyss, as it often did when I returned to this sleepy mortal town.
Shame, maybe. Or the ghost of it, as the ability to conjure such emotions had left around the same time that my canines elongated and sharpened. In Crescent Haven, though, these phantom feelings were expected, welcomed even.
Mason might’ve been right about me being a mental masochist. And the irony was not lost on me.
The little girl crept ever closer to the most dangerous part of the land, as if she was drawn to darkness as an insect was to light. She didn’t seem to mind the nightmarish entity mere feet from her.
She couldn’t actually see me as I watched her, but any other human’s neck hairs would’ve prickled, visceral fear putting them on high alert. Especially a child, innately sensitive and attuned to changes in their energetic environment. She should’ve already run home to her family.
But not her, as if her fear receptors hadn’t been wired correctly. That would get her in trouble in this world. If she wasn’t able to sense my presence and get away as fast as her little legs would carry her, she was a dead creature walking.
I frowned from my place among the trees and shadows, peering around a tall jutting rock as the girl skipped from flower to flower. She gently plucked and handled them as if they were worth a thousand pieces of gold.
She was safe from me, but she shouldn’t have been able to intuit that. She should’ve only felt terror.
I rolled my neck from side to side, unclenching my jaw. When the child started to sing, my eyes snapped back to her.
Her tiny voice was perfectly pitched, lyrical and angelic, unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It was the hair on the back of my neck that prickled, my slow, immortal heart that pumped harder, terror in my veins that ran ice cold.
As the gentle morning sun trickled into the grove, bathing her in warmth, I had the answer to my question of what had brought me to the forest, to this exact stretch of land at this exact point in time.
She stumbled upon a rabbit ensnared in a hunter’s trap, and I watched her struggle and fail to pull the animal’s jerking body out of the iron clamps. It was then that the answer to the deeper, long-standing question wormed its way into my mind. The one Mason asked me each time I left the city, hushed and low so that no one else could hear us.
Why did I keep coming back to Crescent Haven, after all these years?
Tears ran down the girl’s cheeks as she held the panicked, wounded animal in her small arms, heaving with the bittersweetness of mortality. What beauty and what torment. What love and what utter devastation. This child felt it all.
For a fleeting moment, I felt it too, through her piercing blue eyes. I kept my distance, never letting her see me, as that question rattled and rattled, her sob knocking something loose.
When she finally left the poor creature behind with sunken shoulders, I walked quietly to the trap and released him. I said a prayer I hadn’t spoken in decades as he hobbled away, one my mother taught me. A prayer to the goddess of the sun and humanity, Helia, for healing. I wasn’t sure if she would answer a monster’s prayer, even if it was uttered for one of her creatures.
I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. I was not a man that deserved granted wishes nor acts of grace.
I was not a man at all.
Crescent Haven had always been a place of ghosts and specters, ever since my canines first tore open flesh. This was the first time it had been a place for the spark of life. Not a spark—that didn’t do justice to her feelings as deep as the sea and her voice as otherworldly as the gods themselves. She was a flame, the pure fire of mortality that kept humans striving, yearning, living in all of its messy, perilous splendor, seeking beauty even as they faced death.
I watched the watery crimson glide off my broad hands to the earth.
All these years and all these visits to my homeland, searching for something I couldn’t explain, and I’d finally found it.
I was not a man, but with rabbit blood and a child’s tears in my palms, I could remember what it felt like to be one.
2
SCARLETT
Iwove through the market stalls in the town square, breathing in the scent of fresh flowers, warm bread and sweet pastries, and witches’ herbs. Merchants from all over the island were here, even from Aristelle, the city of vampires.
“
I clenched my fist as I nodded, my smile quickly fading. I adjusted my basket of vegetables and cured meats as she looked me up and down.
“It’s too short,” she scolded.
I had to stop my fingers from reaching for the hem of my skirt and tugging. I didn’t say anything, which only infuriated her more. I’d learned that saying nothing enraged her, but the fire typically fizzled out as quickly as it was lit. Talking back would make her boil over, her ire dragging on and on and hollowing me from the inside out.
Isabella and I looked nothing alike. While my hair was dark and wavy, contrasting heavily with my light blue eyes, her hair was blonde and eyes a warm chestnut. She was tall, and I was shorter than average. She was naturally thin, while I had a layer of muscle tone and a curve to my breasts and ass, despite my petite stature.
“Did you even pay for it?” she spat. “Or did one of your gross old patrons give it to you as a reward for sitting in his lap?”
I recoiled. “I don’t—I wouldn’t—” Again, I clamped my mouth shut. It doesn’t matter what she says or what she thinks.
I repeated this thought over and over until I’d squashed the urge to defend myself. Even as she regarded me with such coldness, I yearned for her approval as if it was everything I’d ever wanted dangled just a touch out of reach.
Though I returned to silence, I couldn’t stop my face from falling.
She smirked, satisfied, before turning away from me. “Of course you wouldn’t.” She paused for a moment, glancing around before letting out a small sigh. “I’m sure you can handle the rest of the shopping. I’m going to find Phillip. Don’t forget the rice this time.”
While I continued gathering our essentials for the next few weeks, I let my frustration melt away, my previous mantra replaced with a new one.
I am leaving her.
Soon.
I was finally leaving Crescent Haven to explore all of Valentin, the autonomous island affiliated with, but not ruled by, the Kingdom of Ravenia. Valentin was composed of several self-governing mortal villages, towns, and small cities, and at the center of the island was Aristelle, the sprawling city of vampires. That was one place I was content never to explore.
I was a twenty-three-year-old woman. It was time I lived for me.
And I had a plan. I was going to leave enough of my savings with Isabella to make her comfortable for several months, even if she were to be fired from her job next week. Despite how I felt about the man, it was clear that Phillip had every intention of marrying her. She’d be taken care of. A family with Phillip was all she’d ever wanted. He was a wealthy merchant, somewhere here in the stalls selling fine weapons, preying off mortals’ fears of the city vampires.
I supposed it wasn’t an entirely unfounded fear. Vampires did occasionally slip through the cracks of mortal land, but it was nowhere near a daily occurrence. Especially not in Crescent Haven. Not even other mortals cared much to pay us a visit. Why would they? We weren’t on the coast, we didn’t have any lucrative businesses of our own, no spectacular views or historical or religious sites. The days and weeks and years blended together in Crescent Haven, different characters acting out the same tired stories.
A flutter of excitement erupted in my stomach at the thought of a new story, with new characters. Breathtaking scenery and intriguing plots; witches, shifters, and humans who wanted more from this life than a quiet rural existence; mortals who made art, crafted magick, and chose what they did and who they loved, rather than accepting what their village and parents had prescribed at birth.
I snapped out of my reverie with a familiar tingling sensation crawling over my skin. A few feet away, next to a produce booth, a man turned toward me. His gaze lingered on my thighs too long, glancing back up my autumnal red, long-sleeved dress to my eyes. He smiled, revealing rows of crooked, yellow teeth. I averted my gaze quickly and turned in a new direction.
As I moved along, a pang of guilt dug into my stomach. I saw a flash of Isabella in my mind, remembering her moments of tenderness and care after our parents’ deaths. When she stepped up and became a mother figure to me, keeping a roof above our heads at all costs, even when that cost was torn from my own flesh.
That was before she’d decided she didn’t like me anymore.
I love you, Scarlett. But I don’t have to like you, she’d tell me.
I couldn’t argue with that. I guessed that was just how families were sometimes.
Maybe she had never cared for me, and she had only in recent years decided I was old enough to take the full brunt of her disdain. At first, her hatred made me work extra hard to earn back her approval and comfort. Sometimes I still slipped back into that instinct. But mostly I felt numb, helpless to the turbulent waves of her moods and intermittent reinforcement. It was a game I could not win, so I’d decided to fold up the proverbial board and walk away.
Yet I still harbored just as much guilt as I did exhilaration.
I’d been raised to be frightened of the world outside our protection spells, where the village’s vampire hunters couldn’t protect me any longer. Even if the vampires mainly stuck to Aristelle, there were plenty of reasons for them to venture to the surrounding mortal land. For the thrill. The hunt. Because they could.
I’d been raised to fear. But I didn’t. Maybe that was my youth and naivety, or because the cruelty of vampires had yet to touch me or my loved ones. To me, vampires were just bogeymen, appearing occasionally to kill or steal an unsuspecting human, witch, or shifter in the night. I’d probably feel differently if it had been me they’d gutted in the forest only two months ago.
Well, I wouldn’t feel anything, I supposed. Because I’d be dead.
I grimaced, shaking away the thought. I stared into the distance, past the bustling stalls and the men who unabashedly stopped to stare at me. I gazed past all of them to the looming mountain beyond and the sun that was making its lazy descent.
Sometimes I felt dead inside, but really, I was alive—so fucking alive—and my life was out there. It hadn’t even started yet. The future was as rich and juicy as the peach in my palm, just waiting for my teeth to pierce its skin and let its aliveness dribble down my chin.
“Um, it’s on the house, miss,” the fruit merchant stuttered, looking down when I turned back to him, a shy smile on his lips.
He was handsome and close to my age, slightly older. I could read from him a goodness and purity that took me by surprise.
I cleared my throat, realizing I’d been grinning like a crazy person for no apparent reason as I fondled his fruit. “Thank you,” I said, my cheeks heating. I normally would’ve insisted on paying someone like him, but not anymore. Not now that I was saving up for my escape.
I’d never seen him here before. “Are you new to the market?”
His hazel eyes met mine, his floppy, honey blond hair falling to his forehead. He had that kindhearted, farmer look about him. I could see the future clearly before it even happened. He would drop to his knees and proposition me to have his babies, to live a quiet life on the farm where the emptiness inside of me would be left to fester and leak and grab and take him down with me.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
