Moth to a flame, p.1
Moth to a Flame, page 1
Moth to a Flame
Eva Marks
Copyright © 2025 by Eva Marks
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact authorevamarks@gmail.com
The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
Cover design by Ever After Cover Design
Editing by:
Nice Girl Naughty Edits
The Blue Couch Edits
About the Book
I’ve always held back my darkness. But for her, I’ll unleash it. All of it…
I never lose control.
Just one moment of happiness might bring forth the evil that taints my blood. So, I stick to satisfying other people’s fantasies with my kink dating app.
That’s how I found her.
Regan Everglow is sweet. Deserving of all the beauty this life has to offer.
But she’s known darkness, too. Her control was stolen from her years ago. Now, she’s ready to take it back.
And I’m going to help.
I wish I could say my intentions were pure. But they’re not.
Truth is, I’m obsessed with her. I’d stalk her to the ends of the earth.
Because she draws out the beast I keep locked inside me, like a moth to a flame—and she has no idea how far that beast would go to protect her.
She’s about to find out, though.
So is any man who even thinks of touching my Regan again…
Contents
Dedication
A Note From The Author
Playlist
1. CHAPTER ONE
2. CHAPTER TWO
3. CHAPTER THREE
4. CHAPTER FOUR
5. CHAPTER FIVE
6. CHAPTER SIX
7. CHAPTER SEVEN
8. CHAPTER EIGHT
9. CHAPTER NINE
10. CHAPTER TEN
11. CHAPTER ELEVEN
12. CHAPTER TWELVE
13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
14. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
15. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
16. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
17. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
18. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
19. CHAPTER NINETEEN
20. CHAPTER TWENTY
21. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
22. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
23. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
24. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
25. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
26. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
27. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
28. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
29. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
30. CHAPTER THIRTY
31. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
32. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
33. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
34. EPILOGUE
Thank You!
About the Author
More Books from Eva Marks
Dedication
No, dark romance antiheroes can’t fix everything.
But they won’t stop until they get you the revenge you’re owed.
Every. Single. Time.
A Note From The Author
Moth to a Flame is a dark, steamy romance. It contains explicit, disturbing, and graphic scenes and kinks intended for mature audiences only.
Full List of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings and Kinks.
Stalking
Jealous possessive, obsessive and over the top MMC
He brings her other men’s eyeballs
And mutilates her rapist (before killing him)
Free use
Who did this to you?
Marking (both of them)
Drowning kink
CNC
Gun play
Biting
Squirting
Public sex
Chastity belt
Praise and degradation
Age gap (35 MMC/25 FMC)
Bondage
Somnophilia
Cockwarming
Spitting
Horror movies references
Kidnapping (of the FMC, not by the MMC)
The MMC’s mother ended her and his dad’s life
Important note!! Please read. The FMC was brutally assaulted, then was left for dead when she was 15. Due to the assault, she can no longer get pregnant. She has flashbacks and nightmares that can be triggering for some readers. Throughout the book she starts dreaming about the hero saving her before the attack can take place. But it’s there and she does tell the MMC about what happened to her on page.
There’s a dog and a book club.
There’s a HEA without children
No cheating, no sharing
This is a M/F romance
Playlist
Devil Eyes – Hippie Sabotage
Fly Away – Lola Blanc
Where Your Secrets Hide – Klergy, Katie Garfield
God Sent Me as Karma – Emlyn
Levitate – Fitch
CHAPTER ONE
Landon
“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
Charles Bukowski said that. I’m just the hateful asshole who repeats it.
Since I was twenty-one, these words have been playing in my head like a sick mantra. Over and over.
Fourteen years now.
Fourteen years that I’ve known this one. Simple. Truth.
The things you love will end up killing you.
Or worse.
You’ll be the one who ends up killing them.
Abstinence it is. That’s the best solution for a man like me.
I’ve gone and done better than that. I fill my life with things that piss me right the fuck off. All in the name of suffocating this love muscle.
Because it is a muscle.
The more you hate everything and everyone, the less you’re after the comforts life has to offer. The less you obsess over them.
The less dangerous you become.
My gaze lands on the window in front of me. The sound of the ocean reminds me it’s there, despite the dark of the night hiding the water lapping at the shore.
Hate the ocean. I truly do. Hence why I walk on the beach often. Wet my feet and despise the sand clinging to my toes and how the saltwater ruins the hem of my jeans.
But the darkness isn’t all I see out there.
My reflection stares back at me.
At six-foot-five, I’m taller than most people. My black eyes are as dark as the night outside. The color is unnatural.
Almost as unnatural as the color of my platinum-blond hair that I was born with.
The thick straight strands reach my shoulders and I hate it.
Sure, I could’ve cut it short, avoiding the unnecessary glares.
No.
It’s an agony to look in the mirror every day, knowing I’m a spitting image of my dead father.
I need it to be a burden. To be insufferable.
Like this place I call a home is. This mansion that means nothing to me. If I had it my way, I’d live in a loft downtown. Nothing fancy. Concrete floors and an industrial-looking apartment. I’d like that.
I won’t have that. Ever.
I have this. This estate with the white and gold marble floors. The fancy spiral staircase. I sleep in a giant room overlooking the ocean. There’s a chandelier in the dining room, for fuck’s sake.
Last but not least, what antagonizes me the most is my business. Moth to a Flame. I’ve made a fuckton of money off it. Money I don’t need from millions of subscribers from all over the world. Money that makes me feel like a rich bastard. Definitely not someone I’d want to hang out with.
But the money isn’t the worst of it.
Moth to a Flame is a constant reminder of how alone I am.
Running a dating and hookup service for kinksters when I don’t allow myself any of it…
Fucking torture.
Moreover, when my company does everything in its power so that our subscribers find their match.
Looking for pain? We’ll get you your spanker. Golden showers? Plenty of our users will gladly be at your service. Age play, role play, pet play—they’re all welcome on Moth to a Flame.
There’s beauty in that. Acceptance. Homecoming, if you will.
How easy it is for them.
How it’ll never happen to me.
I won’t have love. Or an active sex life. I just won’t.
I witnessed firsthand what love does to my family.
Doom. Bloodshed. Inevitable death.
No one else should be hurt because my gene pool is more like a cesspool.
Because obsession is a mild description of what consumed my mother until she couldn’t take it anymore. Until the day she lost it altogether and put a bullet through my father’s head and then through hers.
She reached her limit fourteen years ago.
I’ve been doing my fucking best to avoid relationships ever since.
Fourteen years of convincing myself I don’t need a woman in my life. Of resenting our subscribers for dating, fucking or falling in love. Got a few emails inviting me and my two VPs to their wedding—life’s clever way to laugh at my face.
It’s laughing harder now, I’m sure. Mocking me as it—what ever diving entity is out there—watches me lose what little sense of self-control I’ve had for years. As I give in to my obsession, as I stalk her.
This isn’t the first time I’ve done it, either.
This is the fourteenth time in fourteen days that I have taken a seat behind the desk in my den.
I can’t help it. I Fire up my laptop and hack into hers with my dick hard in my jeans.
I stalk her.
Regan Everglow.
One of our subscribers whose profile I stumbled upon two weeks ago.
Sometimes, I browse through our subscribers’ profiles, checking to see if anyone stands out. Anyone who could be a threat and abuse this, my, community. No one fucks with what’s mine.
It’s a clinical process. A necessary one.
Then her profile popped up. A new subscriber. A woman looking for a man to roleplay a consensual non-consent scene with. But it wasn’t her kink that made me forget the vow I’d made to myself.
Her face. Her gorgeous fucking face.
Round cheeks, thick, black lashes. A shy smile and those large brown eyes that stared into my soul.
We could be good together, her innocent picture whispered to me. You could be rough. You could be dirty. Belt me, cut me, pretend to rape me. I’ll take it. Everything would be okay if you just came for me. Come get me, Landon. Come for me.
I hate myself for falling for it. I loathe myself for being unable to stop it.
A minute.
That’s how long I manage to keep my cock in my jeans when her image comes up on the screen. Like every other night over the past two weeks, I take myself out and fuck my hand while watching her.
Doing it is a far cry from abstinence. Squeezing myself harder, having precum leak from the tip, that’s not it, either.
Groaning and biting my bottom lip, I make myself bleed and imagine it’s her I’m sinking my teeth into.
God, fuck, it feels good. In fact, nothing about sitting in my leather armchair and fixing my eyes on my laptop feels bad, wrong, or disastrous. I’m not going to reach in and strangle her just so that I could be the only man in her life.
I’m indulging myself. Because of her.
I’m so fucked.
We both are.
“You have no right. You have no right to be this beautiful. This gorgeous and innocent and perfect and not mine.”
Except she is mine. In the darkness of the night, I can admit it to myself.
Tomorrow, she won’t be.
Until then, there’s only one man in her world. Me.
My balls tighten as I watch her in her small living room in Brooklyn. The reminder that I dug into her personal information and found out where she lives sends another shot of electricity up my spine and, fuck, I’m close.
Fuck, she’s so naïve. Waiting for me there, sitting there on her dark blue loveseat, flipping pages in a book with her feet propped up. The woman crawls under my skin, poisons my blood.
Makes me want to spank her until she cries. Until she calls me her only one.
I am her only one.
“Look at you, Miss Everglow,” I whisper, my voice hoarse with lust.
Her dark brown hair rolls in waves down her back, her brown eyes mesmerized by the horror book she’s reading. The Necro and His Girl.
Like I give a fuck about the book. I care about her thick thighs and how I want my arms around her soft stomach while I hug her at night. While I sink into her as she sleeps and fuck her from behind.
“You’re safe. So safe, little lamb.” My hand squeezes tighter as I rub myself from root to tip. The friction hurts. Hurts so fucking good. “I’m not there to ruin you. Not there to bend you over that loveseat, shove your leggings down your legs, tear your panties in half. The things I’d do to you.”
She shifts, her pouty lips parting at what she reads.
“My fingers will be buried in your hips.” My chest heaves with every breath. My cock thickens, and I’m so close. “You’ll scream when I’ll go all the way in. One push and I’ll be deep inside your cunt, my legs pinned to your thighs. I’ll tilt your ass up for me, hold you in place, and rut into you. I’ll watch my cock going in and out of your pussy, watch you soak me.”
In the safety of her home, she flips through another page in the book. Her fingers are delicate, her nails painted black.
Just like mine. If this isn’t fate, I don’t know what is.
“Then I’ll reach my arm around you, slide my hand down your navel. I’ll worship every patch of your skin. Beat you with my cock while my fingers delve into that spot…” My grunt echoes in the empty den. “I’ll force five orgasms out of you. Five before I come deep inside that pussy. Before I mark you. Before I…”
Can’t say it. Won’t say it.
I do.
“Before I fuck babies into you.”
The idea of saying that to her pushes me over the edge. I never thought about having children. Don’t want to hurt them, which I inevitably will.
The words, though. The motherfucking words of owning her so completely.
White spurts of cum jut out of the tip of my cock and make a mess of my hand, of my abdomen.
I should be in her apartment, making a mess of her instead.
“No, you shouldn’t,” I tell myself.
One last glance over Regan, and I cut the feed. Wiping myself with the tissue I pluck from its box on the heavy wood coffee table, I curse myself for giving in to my obsession.
“You don’t want her anywhere near you. You know why?”
What kind of question is that? Of course you fucking know. My dead father’s voice thunders in my head. Why are you doing this to yourself? To her?
Haven’t heard from him in a while. Fourteen years, to be exact.
Fourteen years that I’ve kept my shit together.
Now that I’ve snapped, I don’t think I can go back to the way I was. I need her. Have to have her.
She shouldn’t be mine, but she is.
What the fuck is this? You calling her yours? Fantasizing about breeding her? You want to end up like your mother, is that it? You want Regan to end up like me?
“Shut up.” I wave my hand in front of my face, tuck myself in, zip up, and throw my black sweater on. Unable to stay seated, I start pacing the marble floors, convincing myself of the lie I’ve been chanting for the last two weeks. “I’m not her. I won’t kill Regan. I’m obsessed, not irrational.”
The chill of the end of the summer creeps into the house. Closed windows and brick walls don’t fully protect me from the elements. There’s a heating system, sure. It works, too. I’ll be comfortable if I switch it on.
I might grow attached to this place.
You are her son, after all.
“I’m yours too, fucker. Or do you have any doubts?”
Never.
He’s got that right. Axton Sterling knew as much as I do now that his wife, Abigail, would never cheat on him. She loved him too much.
That was the root of the problem, wasn’t it?
Her love.
Her obsession.
Ping, ping, ping.
The notification thrusts me back into my reality.
This isn’t just any other notification. I assigned this specific sound to alert me when someone messages her.
The second man I allowed to contact her. I messed with our interface two weeks ago, keeping her profile private.
Last week, I set her up with Clayton Sims. He looked at her profile for an hour according to my data, then blocked her. He must’ve jerked off to her before he ghosted her.
Jerked off to my Regan.
Not like they could’ve ever been together.
He ticked off the masochist box. She ticked off the rape fantasy and consent non-consent ones. They didn’t stand a chance.
But he did think she was good enough to jerk off to. Motherfucker.
Never mind.
Anyway, yesterday, I set her up with a new match. Another man she could never want.
I let Marshall Fuller find her.
His looks aren’t the issue. With his full brown hair, green eyes, and at five-four, he’s not ugly or handsome. He’s plain.
His kink?
He’s into reading the Ten Commandments to a woman before he gets to the sex part.
Which is also fine.
For another woman who isn’t Regan.
Stalling instead of taking her right then and there won’t do it for her. I can already tell.
