A/N Warning - This chapter fully earns the M rating of this story and then some.

Chapter originally beta'd by Octoberland. It's undergone changes since then. Please forgive any errors or crimes against grammar. Special thanks to Ania and Popola.

**Lyrics (italicized below chapter title) from Temptation, by The Tea Party

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Prey for the Wicked

Chapter 2

Goddan

. . . . . .

Shaking as her sex takes hold

I've lost all control

. . . . . .

Under the flickering light of a failing streetlamp, Edward steps closer to the prize he covets. The offer to join her in her house frees him from any further need to pretend to be a simple mortal man gallantly seeing her home. He allows the mannerisms he adopted to lure her into a false sense of security slide away, like he's shedding skin. He knows his eyes are darkening.

"Isabella." Her full name leaves his lips like a prayer, though what Edward prays for is nothing God would ever think to grant. The second he speaks, he feels the rightness of that name, the shaping of the syllables pleasing to his senses. It suits her in every way that Bella does not.

She blinks in reaction, perhaps confused, her pupils dilating when he leans in closer, cupping his palm around the heat of her cheek. He's no longer able to resist the warmth she so temptingly and foolishly offers him.

"So lovely," he whispers, lulling her, lulling himself as he guides her steps backwards. He takes her hand at the stairs to her small white house, leads her up them and through a door with a lock that needs no key beneath his dexterous touch. One sharp twist and flick of his wrist makes it snap with barely a hint of sound, and they're over the threshold, past the point of no return.

"So perfectly lovely," he tells her again as he closes the door behind him. She takes a step back and then another. He senses no fear, only nervous energy. It increases her heart rate and the sound calls to his dark nature, an invitation to take what he wants. He aches for her.

"How do you know my full name?" She's breathless, uncertain, and something else it takes him a moment to define. Aroused. Dear God she's aroused.

"Bella is a common derivative." he replies with a tone meant to soothe while he stalks her through the slightly cluttered confines of her small living room, matching each step of retreat with one of advance. "It is short for Isabella, is it not?"

She pauses then seems to accept his explanation, though she continues to regard him warily. "Yes, it is."

All around him he can see signs of her life. Pictures with family members that love her, friends who adore her, knickknacks and mementos of a past, a present, and a future not yet realized. One he's about to steal from her.

"A drink," she says, placing a hand above her breasts, as though to calm the heart skittering in her chest with the pressure of her palm. "I was going to get you a drink." She grasps at straws and human pretences for comfort and normalcy. "What would you like? I have..."

Edward's had enough of human pretences. He closes the gap of space she put between them. Her dull human senses are incapable of perceiving the movement, only his new placement, as though he vanished and reappeared directly in front of her. Again he cups her face, tempering his strength as he leans close and draws her scent deep into his atrophied lungs.

"Oh, Isabella, my sweet, innocent little lamb." Her heart races faster, and his cool fingers move down her face to her neck, drawn like a magnet to the thick, heavy artery that pulses her gorgeous blood through her veins, velvet fluids offering him a drink more precious and pure than any he's ever known. He tries one last time to read her thoughts but isn't at all disappointed when he cannot. Her silent mind will be an extra gift to him when he takes her life. After all, he's grown so tired of the pleading, whining, lamenting thoughts of his meals, so very tired of the weight of guilt that comes at the cost of merely surviving. To drink her will be divine, but to do so in unbroken silence will be the very essence of divinity.

Overlapping his thirst, however, is a growing awareness of the feel of her skin, a sensation he can't ignore. Satin smooth heat draws his fingers lower to the hollow of a throat that seems sculpted of sun-bleached ivory. Past collarbones coated in fire-warmed porcelain. Over the soft swells that mark the beginning of lovely breasts begging to be caressed. Her nipples tighten beneath the thin cotton blouse she wears, and Edward suddenly wants to drape her in the finest cashmere and silks; such a contradiction to the thirst that screams to be sated until the only draping necessary will be that of her funeral shroud. A creature such as her deserves such finery, should be surrounded by it and have it lavished upon her daily.

If he was not a monster…

Isabella twitches in his arms, as though she too struggles with contradictory desires. He guesses she is out of her element. Likely not one to invite a stranger home. Caught in the moral dilemma so many human females trap themselves within. A small moan slips past her parted lips, bathing him in her warm breath and more of her scent, heightened as it is by her mixed emotions. Desire and nervousness feed fuel to their respective fires until she begins to tremble beneath the onslaught.

Edward smiles as his cool grasp encircles her waist, dips down to curving hips and thighs where muscle and tendon shudder minutely with the torturous indecision of flight or fight. She licks ripe lips with a pink tongue. His razor-sharp eyes catch the rush of blood that plumps them, mimicking what he is certain is happening between her sweet legs. He draws harder at the air, a starving creature being offered a buffet of immeasurable delights.

Warm vanilla flesh and floral skin. Ambrosial, sanguine blood. The perfect earthy musk of a woman in heat, aching to be consumed by her lover, by him. Layering over all of it is the bittersweet siren call of her anxious heart, tempting the beast inside of him from its lair.

She swallows uncertainly as he leans closer, drawing in more and more of her precious wares. "You don't want... a... a drink?" Her delightful stammers amuse him.

"Oh yes, Isabella. I very much desire a... drink." He cannot help the amused smile that curls his mouth as he lowers his head to hover his lips over hers. The taste of her breath ignites the flames that burn his dry, decimated throat, while her warm panting exhalations and the promise of the taste of her mouth hardens his cock. He feels alive with all these unfulfilled needs.

She inhales shakily. Still taking him literally, she says, "What... would you like?"

Laughing low in his throat, he skims his mouth over hers, capturing the teasing trace of her flavour and sipping it like a starving man. "I want you, Isabella. I want to drink you." The softest and neediest of whimpers spills into his mouth, flavoured with her growing lust, his honesty misinterpreted as he knew it would be. He doesn't want her to run. Not now. He licks the corners of her pretty pout, moulding her lithe body to his. Her heat permeates every layer of useless fabric between them.

Edward draws in more air. Quickly he sorts through the scents of her small home, isolating the smell of cheap cotton sheets and synthetic fill pillows that mingle with her perfume and the staler aromas of sleep. They easily direct him to her bedroom. He lifts her off her feet, and once again abandoning human constraints, he carries her there, placing her at the foot of her bed in a room where only weakly filtered moonlight keeps full dark at bay.

She's trembling; a tiny, delicate butterfly caught in a spider's web she has no hope of escaping. He drops his coat to the floor beneath him.

"Isabella," he groans into the kiss he hasn't fully broken, deepening it, stroking her mouth with his tongue and lips until her trembling turns needy. Any trace of her former uncertainty vanishes in the growing electricity sparking between them.

He is lost in the euphoria of her unlikely response.

She hasn't made her bed, and her scent lingers headily in the tangles of sheets and blankets as he lowers her onto them. Fingers nimble and quick feed buttons through holes, free hooks from their clasps, rasp a zipper down its rough ladder of metal teeth.

Soft pants and whimpers greet every brush of his fingers against her body while her sweat-dampened palms clench in his hair, fluttering restlessly to the nape of his neck, his shoulders. Shaking fingers reach for the buttons on his shirt, her moral ambiguity dissolving as her desire grows. Her hesitant yet needy movements make Edward groan as he drags his teeth over her succulent throat, jaws and teeth aching to bite, to consume. She arches the cradle of her hips and rubs against him, adding fuel to the fires ravaging his state of mind. The urge to drink her changes quickly to thoughts of earthier pleasures and roots there. He wants to taste her everywhere, fill his empty cavernous body with everything she has to give. Bury his dark, cold being in her lusciously vibrant heat.

He senses she is not a complete innocent. Not untouched or virginal, and yet he also recognizes this level of passion, this raw, fierce hunger, is as new to her as it is to him. She is rapidly enslaved by the feeling and by him.

"Edward..." Isabella breathes his name around a sigh. Her shaking hands have managed to partially bare his chest, and she spreads her fingers over his skin. The electric feel of her touch sears him, reaches his mind and envelops him in a new need, one just as equally potent. He wants her pleasure. He wants for one moment to forget that he is not a man, that he is not worthy of what he takes, that he is a dark creature who is only suited to give pain and reap death. He wants life and love, if only for now, if only for this second.

His selfishness knows no bounds, but he's long past caring.

Rolling to his back, he draws her fragile form over him, wanting to be draped in her delicious scent and warmth. Nothing in heaven or hell will stop him from consuming this woman whole, but he will give while he takes.

For now.

The remnants of her clothing slip through his fingers and fall to the floor beside the bed. Her body is sublime, all soft curves and subtle concaves, tender skin and fragrant delicacy. She kisses him with growing hunger, her hot damp mouth devouring him in greedy little nips and soft licks. He feels surrounded, the silence of her mind a haven as he learns to read her body the way a mortal man would—by touch and reaction and the reward of erotic female moans.

He rolls again, needing to explore her secret places and turn soft sighs into needy pleas. His cooler touch brings goosebumps to her skin, though she only pushes closer, gloriously oblivious to his oddness.

"Isabella," he groans loudly. "I want to consume you." The words are a growl, a threat, a dark, passion-laced promise, perhaps even a warning. "I am going to consume you."

"Yes, I want you to. Do it. Take me," she answers, panting, one of her hands fisting around the material of his shirt sleeve, twisting. She hardly needs to speak such words. If he sought permission, she's already given it in the way her hips arch upwards as his lips move down her neck to her chest.

Edward knows she doesn't understand what she asks for, but it's too late for regrets—hers or his. Her tender breasts fill his hands, rosebud nipples tightening beneath his fingertips as she gasps and shifts, pushing frantically closer. His mouth brushes each lovely tip, growling low in his throat at her perfect taste, her simple unwarranted trust. Beneath his mouth her heart pounds, the rush of blood through its chambers a whispering promise of more delights to come.

Isabella arches again, twisting upwards off the bed, legs moving restlessly. Edward sucks at her nipple, the taste of her blooming in his head as he flicks his tongue back and forth to increase her pleasure. He presses his thigh between hers, the denim fabric he wears rasping over her naked softness and pressing to her heat. She moans and bucks, and he slides his fingers over her hips, urging her to rock against him. The roughness seems to fuel her hunger until she's so wet he can feel it soaking through the material, slicking his skin. He wants more. He wants that dewy softness against his fingers, his palm. He wants to taste her and feel that sweet nectar coating the burn of his throat, the perfect prelude to the nectar of her blood. Surprisingly, even more than that, he wants to hear her cry out so that he knows he's pleasing her. It's become so important to please her.

Blunt, ineffectual nails dig into his arms as she suddenly convulses beneath him in climax. Her breath stutters in her throat and her legs shake as she comes, her scent growing stronger, a devastating combination of aroused female and ruby red nirvana.

He wants more.

Edward's hand replaces his thigh, sliding over her sex, his fingers delving inside where she's equally tight and welcoming. The need to possess her entirely grows with the internal spasms that clench his fingers greedily as she comes again, harder this time, coating his hand in more of that rapturous warmth.

Heat. So much exquisite, life-giving heat. He's forgotten how perfect and sublime heat can be, and she is a brimming well of remembrance.

He wants all of her. No part of her will be denied to him. She is his.

His incisors tingle and ache. He ignores them in the pursuit of more mortal pleasures.

His long fingers stroke insistently within her body before she can catch her breath. He braces himself above her, all the better to watch her beautiful reactions. His thumb finds the little swell of her clitoris. He strokes it in time with the fingers inside of her, faster, deeper, knowing just where to touch to make her so slippery she cries out at the feel of it spilling to gloss her inner thighs.

Oh, yes. His little innocent has never known this kind of desire. The kind that has no use for polite restraint and insecure worries. He wants her so soaked she'll drench the sheets, her delicate sensibilities lost to his demands, wanting only to please him and be pleased by him.

One of Isabella's hands releases its fisted hold of his shirt and drops to wrap around his wrist with a whimper meant to stop him.

"What...oh, what are you doing to me…?"

Edward smiles, darkly, curling fingers sensitive to every fluttering internal inch of her. Unerring in accuracy, he finds that place, that special sweet place packed with nerve endings ready and willing to flood her entire body with ecstasy.

She cries out, curving into his touch, shuddering so beautifully in her shock. "Edward, no, it's too much. Don't. I can't…"

Her protests die out on a moan. Her eyes dilate on an indrawn breath. Her body hovers on the edge of another orgasm as he strokes over that lovely spot. The wicked demand of his touch, his refusal to coddle her concerns, excites her nearly as much as the placement, he can tell.

Submissive little creature, begging to be owned, to be mastered...

"Liar," he growls lowering his mouth to hers. "Beautiful little liar. It's not too much. You want this, you know that you do. Your body is telling me yes, Isabella. You're ready to come, again. I can feel it."

She whimpers, shuddering and panting as he licks her mouth, moves his lips and teeth back to her neck, scrapes them roughly over that pulsing artery, burning with thirst and desire. "Ask me for it, Isabella. Beg me for it..."

"Oh, God, please...yes, yes..."

"No God, Isabella," he snarls, dragging his mouth from the temptation of her blood. "You belong to me now. Say it."

She doesn't resist, doesn't even try. "You," she pants. "I belong to you...please."

Her perfect submission excites him to the point of painful need. "Whatever I want, however I want," he tells her, breathing the words in her mouth, forcing his breath into her lungs as his fingers move faster, faster...

She gasps loudly, pleasure swamping her senses, owning her just as he does with each sinful, wicked, demanding stroke. She cries out, clenching around him so tightly, coming utterly undone, her release so intense she forgets to breathe. Before she's even finished, he rears back, tearing open his pants, freeing himself from its confining torture. His hands enclose her hips, biting into the soft flesh, bruising her, marking her, lifting her for his first thrust. He has to have her. He's never felt this level of arousal. He aches to be one with her.

The knowledge that he could shatter her pelvis, crack her hips and snap her spine is present, oddly exciting yet repellent. It's remarkably easy to guard against his strength, though one would hardly call him gentle. She's still coming; writhing against the burn of his stretching invasion as he drives forward, discomfort mingling with her pleasure, exciting her further. Edward drives her fragile body to the very limits of its tolerance and relishes every second of the way she melts, accepting everything he gives.

Her hips rise to meet his, and she tears at the remaining unfastened buttons of his shirt, snapping threads that fall around them so she can rake her nails down his chest. The sensation is powerful, awakening long dormant nerves and reminding him of the feeling of draining life while his victims weakly flailed against him.

This is better. Such decadence. He has never known such decadence.

"Yes," he hisses, wishing for an instant that she was stronger, that she was his equal so her nails could inflict injury even while her human fragility arouses him to a climax so all-consuming he roars with the sensation. His cock pulses deliciously inside her, the release wracking him in jolts. That his body can still act as a mortal man almost surprises him.

His mouth is at her throat again, and he drags it away, lifting her, pulling back until he's on his knees and she's straddling his lap. Her lovely skin is damp and slick, the hot clutch of her velvet sex still clamped around him.

More, he wants more.

Isabella's body is limp, weak. Her breathing is strained, but she moans hungrily when he takes her hips and drives upwards, stretching her, filling her. Fingers weakened by strain and fumbling with the pleasure that ripples through her clench in his hair. She tugs hard, and though it only feels like the caress of a breeze to him, he growls a warning she ignores as her hot little mouth finds his. Her kisses make him ache with the need to please her. He wants to feel her coming over him again, taste her climax on her lips one final time before he tastes it in her blood.

He arcs his hips, driving the smooth, slick head of his erection against the top of her firm inner walls. Stroking himself against that spot smoothly, again and again, driven on by her gasping cries that tell him how good it feels to her. Edward presses one hand on the small of her back, the other between their bodies, down to where they join, his thumb seeking the swell of her engorged little clit, stroking it in time with his thrusts, rewarded by small gasps of "yes, please, yes..."

Isabella's smooth thighs tremble against his. Deepening the kiss she began, Edward allows himself to take risks, sucking the tip of her sweet tongue so close to teeth capable of razor cuts. The tiniest nick, the barest hint of blood, and his tenuous hold snaps. As she begins to shudder and come apart, the hand he held at her back slides up, diving into her hair, tilting her neck back roughly. One last time his mouth finds the throbbing force of life within her just beneath her jaw. As it pulses in time with the deep contractions of her climax, his lips part, cool breath sliding over her sumptuously warm skin.

Oh, the smell of her. The feel of her flesh beneath his mouth, so tissue-thin...

"Edward." She sighs his name just as his jaw begins to clamp down. At the last second, he moves lower to the softer place beneath the carotid artery. Like a scalpel through warm butter his incisors slice through her ivory throat, and her fragrant blood fills his mouth with the sweetest taste he has ever known. The bliss erupts in his senses as she shudders against him, climaxing still, even as her blood leaves her body and enters his. He gulps greedily, tasting flowers and salt and earth buried metals, sweet musk and sun-drenched honey, fragrant and lush. A myriad of flavours the likes of which he has never known.

She is heaven and hell, life and death, sin and penitence, all in one.

His body ignites, filling with heat and stolen life and everything pure and good that has been denied him in his cursed existence. Her wet heat clenches around him, and he grows harder with each swallow. Her internal muscles flutter like her heartbeat, like the waves of ambrosial richness fluttering over his tongue, and his body caves to inevitable orgasm. The white-hot feel of coming inside her sends flashes of light through his mind in a kaleidoscope of colours so multi-hued they blind him. Waves of pleasure course over him, rocking him while he rocks her in his arms. Somehow he keeps his tempo controlled, in the suction on her throat and inside her body, milking the last of her climax as he milks the blood from her veins.

"Edward, please..."

He knows not what she pleads for. Perhaps her life, though he isn't certain she understands what's happening, lost as she still is in the throes of her orgasm and rapidly growing weakness. Regardless, it drags him from the world of light and heat and sensation, and he wrenches his mouth from her neck with a snarl. One minute longer and the next few greedy mouthfuls of her sweet blood would have been his last, leaving him pulling nothing but rapidly congealing dregs from her cooling corpse. As it is he's pushed past the limits of what her body could safely offer and weakened her. She will not recover quickly from this night, but she will recover. The thought gives him immense pleasure, even as his thirst roars with fury at its less than sated state.

All the more to enjoy later. No need to be greedy. No need to be hasty, he soothes his inner beast. She is a treat he means to savour. A decadent indulgence he will never again be denied.

She is his.

Her heartbeat is unsteady, fluttering like a baby bird's helpless wings as he lays her down on her tangled sheets and pillows. He laps the last few drops of blood from her skin, his needless breath panting in and out his lungs. One last lick to seal the edges of the wounds his bite has created. A useful tool for a vampire who wishes to save some for later.

"Mine," he growls low in her ear. "You are mine, Isabella. From now until death claims you, until I claim you." He lets his breath wash over her face, warm now as it slides past the blood-heated flesh of his mouth. Her eyelids flutter, her gaze unfocused, though he knows she hears him. "If any other man touches you, I will tear him limb from limb, piece by piece, without mercy. Remember this, my beautiful little lamb. Remember who you belong to."

"Edward."

He smiles as she sighs his name, barely conscious and yet so wonderfully obedient. He covers her with the sheets and blankets tangled at the end of the bed. Rising he slips out of the room and out of the house, giving himself the necessary space from temptation. From across the street, hidden in the shadows, he watches and listens to her breathing and her heartbeat that slowly steadies and begins once again to grow stronger. When the sky turns gray with the coming dawn, he vanishes into the last of the darkness, moving with purpose back to where his night began.

In a dark dank alley, he watches an impudent man-child shuffle wearily through a backdoor, the stench of beer and cigarettes and cheap perfume clinging to his clothes. His thoughts are full of the night passed and the girl who was a poor substitute for the mahogany-haired beauty he really wanted. The one he dared to harm, to bruise. An action that sealed his fate seconds after it occurred.

As his feet carry him toward the street at its end, Edward reaches out with one hand and snatches him from the growing light. The man's scream is short and abruptly cut off, the piercing sound echoing off walls that bear silent witness.

In a dark, rain dampened forest far from town it is only his first scream of many.