The manuscript grew like a living thing, a dark twin to our passion. It lived in a heavy, black leather binder on the great oak table in Karlo's cliff house. Its title, stamped in silver, was a cold, elegant warning: THE LAST BURA.
It was a novel of possession and prose. The demon in his tale was not a cloven-hoofed beast, but an ancient, whispering intelligence that rode the wind—the very soul of the luda bura. It found its vessel in a reclusive writer living in a cliffside house. This writer, named Luka in the story, didn't just document horror; he transcribed it. The demon whispered the details of impending violence into his mind—the snap of a cervical vertebra, the specific pattern of arterial spray on whitewashed stone, the last, gurgling plea of a victim—and Luka, in a trance-like state, would type them out, crafting them into chilling, beautiful prose. He believed he was writing fiction. But with each finished chapter, the wind would howl, and the events would manifest in the village below. He was not a prophet. He was a conduit. A stenographer for a demonic force that fed on human suffering and the exquisite terror of art made real.
It was, I told him one night, curled in the window seat with a glass of wine as the last light bled from the sky, "Brilliant. Gruesome, but brilliant."
He was standing by the fireplace, a silhouette against the growing dark. "Gruesome is easy. The butcher's bill. The brilliance is in the why. Why does the demon use art? Why not just cause the chaos directly?"
"Why do you think?" I asked, taking a sip, playing my part in our perpetual intellectual game.
He came over, took the glass from my hand, and set it aside. He knelt before me, his hands on my knees. "Because art means," he said, his voice low and intense. "A random murder is a statistic. A murder foreshadowed in a beautiful sentence, then executed with that same terrible precision… that is a message. It implies a creator. An intelligence. It turns terror into theology. That is what truly breaks people. Not the blood, but the belief that the blood was written."
He leaned in, his lips brushing the inside of my knee. I shivered. "You have a terrifying mind, Karlo Vidaković."
"It's not my mind," he murmured, his mouth moving higher, his hands pushing my dress up my thighs. "It's the demon's. I'm just the scribe." He looked up, his eyes black in the gloom. "Do you want to hear the latest chapter? The demon is growing impatient. It wants a crescendo."
I knew what this was. Our most potent ritual. The fusion of his two arts—the narrative and the physical. My body tightened with anticipation. "Read it to me."
He didn't fetch the binder. He had it memorized. He stood, pulling me to my feet and turning me to face the window, my back to his chest. The first stars were pricking through the deep blue over the sea. His arms wrapped around me, his hands sliding up to cup my breasts through the silk of my dress. He nuzzled my hair aside, his lips finding the sensitive spot just below my ear.
"The wind had a new voice tonight," he began, his voice a soft, rhythmic rasp against my skin. His thumbs circled my nipples, making them peak instantly against the fabric. "It wasn't a scream, but a sibilant chant. A list of names. Luka heard them as he stood at his own window, his forehead pressed to the cold glass. Each name was a key turning in a lock deep in the machinery of the world."
His hands left my breasts, traveling down my sides, over my hips. He gathered the skirt of my dress, pulling it up slowly. The cool evening air kissed my bare legs. His fingers traced the lace edge of my underwear.
"The first name was an old man. A fisherman who mended his nets with fingers knotted by arthritis and time. The demon described the net itself—the smell of tar and rotten seaweed—becoming his shroud. The rough hemp fibres, pulled taut by a force not his own, biting into the papery skin of his throat…"
As he whispered the horrifying, poetic description of the murder, his fingers slipped beneath the lace. He found me wet and ready, and let out a soft, satisfied sigh against my neck. "…the sound," he continued, his voice hitching slightly as he began a slow, torturous circular motion with his fingers, "was not a snap, but a rasp. Like a rope settling into an old pulley. The life left him not with a gasp, but with a slow exhalation, a sigh of surrender to the inevitable knot."
I gasped, my head falling back against his shoulder. The juxtaposition was insane, electric—the gruesome imagery flooding my mind while his skilled touch stoked a fire in my belly. Horror and arousal fused into a single, overwhelming current. I was listening, rapt, to a tale of death, while my body sang a hymn to life and sensation.
"Luka typed it all," Karlo murmured, his mouth now on my neck, his teeth grazing as his fingers delved deeper, one, then two, sliding inside me with an exquisite fullness. I moaned, my hands gripping his forearms where they wrapped around me. "He typed until his fingers ached, the keys imprinting the death onto the page, and by some infernal osmosis, onto the fabric of reality. He was the crucible. The translator. And when he finished…"
He paused, his fingers stilling, buried deep within me. I whimpered at the cessation.
"When he finished," he whispered, his own breath ragged now, "he looked at his hands. They were clean. But he felt the grit of the hemp, the chill of the old man's final breath. The demon's gift was empathy. The most terrible empathy imaginable."
He began to move his fingers again, a slow, in-and-out cadence that matched the rhythm of his storytelling. "The second name," he breathed, "was a woman. A waitress who served coffee with a smile that never reached her eyes. The demon was… inventive. It focused on the tools of her trade. The sharp, polished edge of a coffee spoon…"
He described it. In lurid, unbearable detail. The mundane made monstrous. The clinical coldness of the metal, the surprising resistance of human tissue, the hot spill of coffee mixing with something else on the checkered floor. As he narrated, his free hand moved up, undoing the buttons of my dress, baring my breasts to the cool glass of the window. He palmed one, his thumb flicking over the peak, while his other hand continued its devastating work below.
I was panting, suspended between two worlds—the vividly imagined horror of the village below and the very real, mounting pleasure in the cliff house above. My mind was a battleground, and both sides were winning. I was ashamed. I was aroused. I was terrified. I was desperate for him to never stop.
"Luka wrote that one feverishly," Karlo groaned, his own control fraying. His erection pressed insistently against my backside. "He vomited twice into the wastebasket beside his desk. But his fingers kept moving. The demon wouldn't let him stop. It was perfecting its craft. The prose was leaner. More efficient. A killing blow in iambic pentameter."
He turned me then, roughly, pushing me back against the window. The glass was cold through my thin dress. His mouth crashed down on mine, swallowing my cries. He fumbled with his trousers, freed himself, and lifted me, my legs wrapping around his waist of their own volition.
"The third name," he said against my lips, as he positioned himself and in one sharp, deep thrust, filled me completely. We both cried out. "…is the most important. It's not a victim. It's a witness. Someone who sees the pattern. Someone who comes too close to the source of the story."
He began to move, each drive punctuating a sentence. "She is curious. Intelligent." Thrust. "She is drawn to the dark heart of the tale, like a moth to a flame." Thrust. "She thinks she is collaborating." Thrust. "She thinks she is in control." Thrust.
His pace quickened, becoming less measured, more frantic. The narrative fractured, blending with his gasps and my choked sobs of pleasure. "But she is just another character!" he growled, his forehead pressed to mine, his eyes blazing. "Her fear… her desire… it's all just texture! Fuel for the engine! The demon doesn't want her dead… it wants her aware. It wants her to know that every kiss, every touch, every whispered secret was just research for the final, terrible chapter!"
His words should have chilled me to the bone. They should have made me shove him away, run screaming into the night. But in the fever-dream of our coupling, with my body hurtling toward its peak, they were just another layer of the fantasy, the darkest, most forbidden turn in our plot. They were the ultimate taboo: the suspicion that this was all a lie, spoken in the midst of the most profound physical truth I'd ever known.
"Karlo…" I chanted, a plea and an accusation.
"She comes to him," he whispered, his thrusts becoming shallow, urgent, "even as she suspects. Because the story is too good. Because the demon's voice… is also the voice of her own deepest, most hidden wanting."
That was it. The final, devastating insight that broke me. My climax ripped through me, violent and silent at first, then erupting into a series of sharp, broken cries. I convulsed around him, my fingers digging into the muscles of his back, my vision whiting out.
It triggered his own release. He buried his face in my shoulder with a sound that was half-roar, half-anguished sob, pouring himself into me as if exorcising the very demon he wrote about.
We slumped against the window, a tangled, sweating, trembling mess. The cold glass steamed from our heat. For long minutes, the only sound was our ragged breathing slowly syncing, slowing.
He was the first to speak, his voice hoarse and stripped raw. "That," he panted, "was Chapter Nine."
I couldn't form words. I was liquefied, my mind and body shattered and remade. The fictional horror and the real passion were now inseparable in my memory. I would forever see the old fisherman's net when I came. It was horrifying. It was transcendent.
Eventually, he carried me to the battered leather sofa, wrapping us both in a heavy blanket. He fetched two glasses of water. We drank in silence.
"You see," he said finally, staring into the empty fireplace. "The brilliance—the true horror—isn't the murder. It's the collaboration. The demon needs the writer. The writer, in his pride and loneliness, needs the demon. It's a symbiotic nightmare. And the witness… she's the reader. She's us. Complicit. Turning the page even as our stomachs turn."
I looked at him, this beautiful, dark man who had just fucked me senseless while narrating a double homicide. The man who saw my deepest self and reflected it back in a funhouse mirror of terror and desire.
"Is that what we are?" I asked, my voice small. "A symbiotic nightmare?"
He turned his head, his eyes meeting mine. In the soft gloom, they were unreadable. "We're the research," he said softly. "The lived experience that makes the fiction breathe. Without this…" he gestured between our bodies, still humming with aftermath, "…the novel is just a clever idea. With it… it becomes a haunting."
He reached out, tucking a sweat-damp strand of hair behind my ear. "You give it authenticity, Lea. Your gasps, your whispers, the way you cling to me in the dark—it all goes in. You're not just my muse. You're my forensic consultant on the human heart."
I should have been furious. I should have felt used. And part of me, a small, cold part, did. But the larger part, the part that was addicted to the intensity, to the feeling of being the most important page in a dark, thrilling book, only leaned into his touch.
"And the witness in the story?" I asked. "The one who comes too close. What happens to her?"
A slow smile touched his lips, but it didn't reach his eyes. "That," he said, pulling me closer, "is for the final act. And we're not there yet."
He kissed me then, a kiss that was tender, almost apologetic. But as I kissed him back, tasting the ghost of his terrifying story on his lips, I knew. The line was gone. I was no longer just collaborating on a novel. I was living inside it. And the most frightening thing wasn't the demon in his story.
It was the part of me that, upon hearing the gruesome tale, had only gasped, listened, and wanted more.