Page 30 of Sweet Venom

Ileaned back in my chair, the rhythmic click of the keys under my fingers a quiet symphony in the dim silence of my home office. The soft hum of the servers in the corner was the only sound, the room cloaked in a cold, almost sterile darkness. The glow of my screen was the only light, casting a cold, pale illumination on my face. But I didn’t mind it. I had always found comfort in the dark. It was where I belonged.

And that night, my thoughts—my obsessions—were focused on her.

Poe.

Like every fucking night.

Her name lingered in my mind, a sweet, forbidden thing. She was a secret I had hoarded for too long. I had watched her from the shadows for longer than I cared to admit. She didn’tknow I had followed her every move, traced her every breath. Everything about her, I knew. Everything. It was an obsession, and it was also fate. Maybe even a curse, one I never planned on breaking. My father once said that every man had at least one obsession. His obsession was and still was my mother. Mine? The girl with emerald eyes and blue hair, the girl who had injected herself into my veins and become a part of all my vital parts—body, mind, soul, and fuck, even the useless organ in my chest. She had taken it for herself.

I knew it was more than fascination. It was more than love. Love, I learned, wasn’t always soft. Sometimes, it was dark. Sometimes it was black. Sometimes it was possessive. And sometimes it was all three.

It was an obsessive need I couldn’t escape no matter how hard I tried, and fuck had I tried. I was done trying to escape her. My blue-haired, little fox had become an obsession that had kept me from drowning all those years. That was why I hadn’t been able to let her go. So, I had watched her from the shadows until it was time.

The time had come then.

I had built my empire with my own two bloody hands—through hacking, stealing, and manipulating the world from behind screens. My father had taught me all I knew about computers and business. I had learned everything I knew from him. He had taught me how to hack into systems, break barriers, and find things no one else could see. That was what I did. That was what had made me a billionaire before the age of twenty-one. I wasn’t some ‘nepo’baby like most fuckers I knew. I hadn’t taken my parents’ money when they offered it to help me start my first business. I had been grateful, but I had declined their offer. Not because I was ungrateful, because I wasn’t. All I had wanted from my parents was them. Not their money. Not their connections.

I’ve been living in darkness since the day I was born to an addict whore. And in that darkness, I’ve created something for myself. When you grow up stealing, lying, and doing all kinds of fucked-up shit, survival stops being a skill— it becomes second nature. I’ve been doing it since, and I’ll do it till the day the organ in my chest stops beating. So, I hacked shit, created shit, sold it for more money and made an empire out of it until I owned everything I set my mind to. And even though I have more money than I will ever need in three lifetimes, I still hack and acquire new businesses like the damn publishing house and bookstores all over the world.

Forher.

Because it’s her dream and to my inconvenience she is mine.

Two years ago, I hacked her email, and I saw it. The rejections. The sting of them was almost palpable, even through a screen. She had sent her manuscript to dozens of agents and publishing houses, hoping for someone to see the value in her and her words. But the fuckers turned her down. And that was the moment I knew. I bought the publishing house, ran the old one into the ground, and then resurrected it, made it mine, so that no one—fucking no one—could ever reject her and her dreams again. I also couldn’t let her leave everything and go backpacking the world with her college friend. Fuck, no.

So, I grabbed the chance to keep her here with me and make her dreams come true. I killed two birds with my gun.

She has published a few books independently under her mother’s last name, James, all because she was too stubborn to use her father’s connections to get ahead. Her father, Valentino Nicolasi is the enforcer for the Nicolasi family of Detroit. His name holds weight, but what no one knows is that he’s a bestselling author. I only know that detail because I hack shit, and I made it my business to know everything there is to know about her.

I’ve watched her follow in her father’s footsteps, but I know she’s always wanted to carve her own path, to make her own way. She’s stubborn, but she’s brave too. That’s why she’s the only thing with a pulse aside from my family that I respect.

She’s like you…The thought pops up, but I quickly shut it down.

She’s not like me. She’s good and untouched by darkness, while I’m all kinds of fucked up.

As I continued coding, I noticed something. My gaze sharpened on the screen. She was online, and she was scrolling through my social media—my accounts. Her name lit up in the activity feed, and I felt a sharp tug in my chest. My heart didn’t beat for anyone. But for Poe, there was a strange warmth, a pull that I had never understood. It beat wildly when I saw her, and sometimes it beat strong and steady when I thought of her. At times, it was maddening.

I clicked on her apartment camera feed and paused, watching the screen intently. She was sitting on her sofa scrolling through my posts as if she was looking for something. Looking for me, perhaps. I knew she was curious. She had always been curious. I had caught her searching my name more than once, studying me from behind the safety of a screen, just as I had been watching her. She wasn’t as innocent as the people around her believed she was. Poe was drawn to the darkness, just like me. She was drawn to me.

I had always wondered what she’d think if she knew. If she knew the truth of what I had done, of how I had observed her every move, followed her every breath. She could never imagine what it was like to watch her, to know her so intimately without her even realizing it. It had become the best part of my day. Would she have felt repulsed if she found out? Then I thought of all the times I had caught her looking up my name online. Therewas no denying it. She was as obsessed with me as I was with her.

Yeah… my Little Fox loved the dark and all that hid in it. I had felt it in her words—words she wrote from her soul and not the ones she wrote to fit into what the industry preferred lately.

Contemporary romance and sweet shit.

I smirked as she paused over a photo from a gala, a picture of me with a blonde woman on my arm. To the world, we looked perfect, but they didn’t see what was beneath the surface. The only woman I wanted by my side had eyes that could start wars, and a body that could bring kingdoms to their knees. I had always known she had been watching me, studying me, and now I wondered if there was a flicker of jealousy in her, if she felt the same tug I did. I could almost see her eyes narrowing, her lips curling in that little sneer of disdain she always wore when she was pissed off at the world.

A slight smirk tugged at the corner of my lips. Were you jealous, Poetry?

I knew the truth. I knew what lay beneath her sweet exterior. Poe was darkness, too. Just like me. And I was her shadow.

I tracked her activity, just as I had always done. She stopped on a post about one of her books. My book. The one I had read. The one I had devoured in silence. She had no idea that I had cherished her words, her soul, her everything. I had imagined holding her in my world, pulling her from the shadows where she was safe, and making her mine.

She paused on an old picture of me—one from a charity event, where I was supposed to play the part. She zoomed in, like she was trying to decode me, to find the man behind the mask. I almost wanted to laugh. She had no idea.

I couldn’t help it. I reached for the keyboard and, with a few strokes, I sent her a private message—an anonymous note under a fake account.

“I have loved you with a dark madness of a thousand storms, each one more violent than the last, tearing through my broken soul, yet I would not cease, for to cease would be to let you slip from my grasp, and I could no more release you than I could tear the moon from the sky.”

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