📖Short Stories📖

🦇 "The Hunger Between Us" 🩸

Night always felt like a second skin to Liora—cold, quiet, and stitched with hunger. She’d learned long ago that the world was easier to watch from a distance. People lived brief lives. People disappeared. People bled.

She never meant to get close to any of them.

But Evan ruined that.

She found him again on the cliffs, long after sunset, sitting dangerously near the edge as if daring the darkness to come claim him. When she stepped from the shadows this time, she didn’t hide the crimson in her eyes.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” she said.

“Neither should you,” he murmured, his voice steady but low. “But here we are.”

His calm shook her more than fear ever could.

Liora moved closer—too close. She could hear the frantic thrum of his pulse beneath his skin, smell the warmth of him, feel the soft rise of the air between their bodies. The hunger inside her uncurled, purring with interest.

“You’re… trembling,” Evan whispered.

“I’m trying not to kill you,” she admitted.

He exhaled slowly, as though the night itself weighed on his chest. “You won’t.”

“You don’t know what I am.”

“I do now.” His eyes glinted, reflecting every shard of moonlight. “I’ve seen the way you look at me. If you wanted me dead, I wouldn’t be standing here.”

Liora’s breath hitched. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding his gaze—hungry, conflicted, wanting something she hadn’t dared want in decades.

Something warm.
Something human.

He stepped closer, close enough that his breath brushed her cheek. “Tell me what you want.”

Her throat tightened. “You.”

The word slipped out like an exposed vein.

Evan didn’t flinch. Instead, he lifted his hand slowly—so slowly she could have stopped him a hundred times—and brushed his fingers along her jaw. His touch was warm, painfully warm, searing her cold skin. She felt the pulse beneath his fingertips, the life she could steal in an instant.

“You’re not meant to touch me,” she whispered.

“Maybe not,” he said, voice dark and soft, “but you’re letting me.”

Liora closed her eyes, trying to quiet the violence of her desire—wanting his nearness, fighting the instinct to sink her teeth into the life beating beneath his skin. His heartbeat echoed in her skull like a drum she couldn’t ignore.

“You’re playing with something dangerous,” she breathed.

“So are you,” he murmured.

For a moment, the world held perfectly still—only the wind, the cliff, and the almost unbearable closeness between them.

“Evan,” she said, trembling with restraint, “if I lose control—”

“Then don’t.”
His forehead rested against hers, gentle and brave in a way that felt far too intimate. “Stay right here with me. Fight it. Want me without hurting me.”

She opened her eyes and saw no fear in his. Only trust. Madness. Desire of a different kind.

The hunger inside her snarled, starved and furious.

But Liora held him.

And in that darkness—cold, dangerous, trembling—she realized something terrifying:

She wanted his heart far more than his blood.

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