Primal

Copyright Copyright © 2023 by Eva Marks All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents are products of the author’s imagination and used in fictious manner. Any resemblance toactual people, places or events is purely coincidental or fictionalized. Cover by Eva Marks A Note From the Author A Note From the Author Primal is a dark, steamy novella, containing explicit, somewhat disturbing and graphic scenes and kinks intended for mature audiences only. Trigger and Content Warnings Some sort of a Hansel and Gretel dark retelling, stepsiblings, virgin heroine, primal, crimson-body-fluid play (the hero—who isn’t a vampire or any paranormal entity—likes it), sharp objects play, underwater *love*, some degradation, praise, breeding kink (no pregnancy/kids until the epilogue), something-that-rhymes-with-grape attempt (not by the hero), touch her and die (as in actual death. Again, lots of crimson in this short novella). Contents About the Book 1. PROLOGUE 2. CHAPTER ONE 3. CHAPTER TWO 4. CHAPTER THREE 5. CHAPTER FOUR 6. CHAPTER FIVE 7. CHAPTER SIX 8. CHAPTER SEVEN 9. CHAPTER EIGHT 10. CHAPTER NINE 11. CHAPTER TEN 12. CHAPTER ELEVEN 13. CHAPTER TWELVE 14. CHAPTER THIRTEEN 15. CHAPTER FOURTEEN 16. CHAPTER FIFTEEN 17. CHAPTER SIXTEEN 18. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 19. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 20. CHAPTER NINETEEN 21. CHAPTER TWENTY 22. EPILOGUE Thank You! More Books from Eva Marks About the Author About the Book The deep, dark woods are full of beasts—and she’s tempting the worst one of all. Run, little gazelle. Run… My father wanted my stepsister out of the way, so he banished her to the woods. Once upon a time, he did the same thing to my mother. She’s dead now. I will not let the same thing happen to Kendall. So, I’m going with her. It’ll take every primal instinct I have, but I’ll protect her from the wolves, from starvation, from the cold. What I can’t protect her from is me. Because I’m worse than anything we’ll encounter in the wild. I’m a monster who loves her, even though I’m her stepbrother. I know it’s forbidden. Taboo. But I can’t help it. Especially since she wants me, too. And as far as I’m concerned, what Kendall wants, Kendall gets… PROLOGUE Axel Ten months earlier It’s that damn scent again. I sit in my childhood room in my father’s house in Southeast Alaska, a twenty-four-year-old man who hasn’t found it in him to get up and leave. Who’s still torn from grief over his mother’s passing two months prior, who’s grown to hate anyone and everyone living in the house with him. Why do I stay, you ask? Because I must. It was my only way to collect evidence against my father, to incriminate him for what he’s done. Now I finally have it. I’m holding it in the palm of my hand, black letters on white crumpled paper, ready to be handed over to the sheriff’s office. But she just had to go and ruin it, didn’t she? Her sweet scent filters through the open door when she passes the hallway and glimpses into my room. It takes up the entire space, and I’m not fucking happy about it. It distracts me, this sweet fucking scent and how it blurs my vision and flips the truth on itself. That she’s evil, exactly like my old man. She doesn’t deserve my hard-on, isn’t worth a drop of my precum for the sins she took a part of. And yet I can’t ignore my physical reaction to her scent. She torments me with it time and again to the point some days I lose sight of my purpose. Dirty hues of need and carnal desire paint the fragrance of her cunt, and I want nothing more than to roll in it and jack off until I come a million times. I know I can’t, however. I fucking won’t. Even if she wasn’t my enemy, which she is, I would never in a million years sleep with my eighteen-year-old stepsister. Fuck this, I think, pulling on my boots. My blond shoulder-length hair covers my eyes as I do, guaranteeing I won’t see her in case she decides to walk by my room again. “Kendall!” My father’s shout tears me out of my wrath haze. Am I imagining it? Is he yelling at her? “Kendall, goddammit, come here already!” I’m not. Our house is small, three bedrooms and one living room in total, and there’s no mistaking he’s yelling at her, adding profanity to the mix. In all of the sixty days she’s lived here, I never once heard him raise his voice at her. He sure does now. Her footsteps drift past my room again, only this time her scent is different. It reeks of fear. My frequent trips to the woods with my late mother and the ones I took on my own heightened my senses. More than heightened, actually. They taught me to differentiate between scents, to be able to tell which footsteps are human and which are not, and how to act under an imminent threat. In short, they brought out the animal in me, the part I inherited from my mother, the part I’m never letting go of. “Yes, Ryker?” Kendall’s hesitancy matches her scent. “What’s this?” I can’t see them, but the contempt in his voice reaches right to my room. “It’s—uh…” “It’s—uh…” he mimics her. For the first time in the two months of her and her mother living here, my certainty of what she is begins to crack. He wouldn’t talk like that to someone he’d consider his accomplice, a girl who might rat on him. “This fucking pink yarn, what is it doing on my couch?” A thump follows, most probably the drop of the ball of yarn on the floor. No. She definitely has no idea what went down in this house. I’m