Slow Burn Novels & Stories

My reactions are slowing. I look at the spot he’s been watching for some time and freeze. The flesh around the wound on my thigh and stomach is burning. Yes, it’s me. I am dying. Again.

"You need to calm down a little. I know you're upset, but I can see the fire burning inside you. You look like you're going to combust, and I don't know what that level of Hellfire will do." I could hear him trying to soothe me, but it was like a small breath of wind in a raging storm. Not enough to blow out the flame, but just enough to spread the fire further. It went from the fire burning in me internally to the fire spreading all over my outer body. Its scorching flames licked my skin, making it crawl on my body, squeezing tight against my bones as it shrank in the heat.

Scarlett The moment my fingers brush the bark, the forest reacts. Not with a whisper or a sigh, but with a sharp blaze of heat that jumps straight up my arm like wildfire. Golden script curls and coils over my skin. My name, written in letters that glow like they’re forged from the sun itself. I jerk my hand back, eyes wide, heart hammering hard enough to drown out the sounds of the woods. The burn fades as fast as it flared, but the mark stays. Bright and impossible to ignore.

* Coolth wrapped her heart. The frantic race of her thoughts slowed. Not dulled. Clarified. She could feel movement without being yanked by all of it. She faced Fire. *You are in my rage,* she told it. *In my passion. In my desire to fix everything now. Walk with my purpose, not my impatience. Remind me that small, steady flames cook meals and warm dens. Not every problem needs a blaze.* Heat settled in her core. It hurt less. It burned *with* her, not at her.

Five cold showers and even more pain. “What the fuck..” Noah groaned as he fell next to Lola on the bed unstable. Despite Rosewood’s chilly weather at this time of the year plus the cold water shower treatment applied on his body barely twenty minutes ago, Noah started to feel his body get hotter and his lower member slowly rose once more. “Mmmm..” The girl on the bed moaned out from her sleep again and Noah’s eyebrows furrowed. Lola had been moaning out quite often and shifting on the bed too frequently in the past hour which was unusual of her.

The house became its winter self gradually and then completely. The eight-burner range justified itself in ways that could not have been anticipated in October — it was the center of the house in winter, the room that everything else organized itself around, the source of warmth and smell and the specific occupied quality of a kitchen that was doing real work. Dante cooked in the winter with a seriousness he hadn't had in summer, when the warmth made heavy food unnecessary. Winter food was a different system — slower, more committed, things that required hours and rewarded them.

A sharp, white-hot hiss escaped my teeth as the motion violently agitated my lower body. Underneath the damp, stained fabric of my dress, the skin across my thighs was screaming. The scalding tea Vanessa had engineered to spill had left behind an angry, blistering burn that pulsed with every heartbeat. Calder’s rare wintermint salve was back in my room; here, I had nothing but the cold air to soothe the fire melting my skin.

Annabelle could not hold back her chuckle as Jethro said gently, "It's the Curse, remember?" Curse... "Oh fuck," Raven mouthed before she turned over to the sink again and began to pour out everything she had possibly eaten yesterday. * It started with a throbbing pain. Just a common headache. Until he felt the main pain and began to scream into his pillow. His bones moved involuntarily into the wrong sections and through the blurry vision of his, he could see Kyle who still had his morning frown on his face as he said, "You waking me up with my— Fuck!"

“you had better not flatter yourself nor get ahead of yourself either. You won’t even be able to control yourself much more control any darn thing. And most especially not him, nobody controls Salvatore.” He didn’t like women with opinions. He liked silence. He liked obedience. He liked brainless porcelain. And Sapphire? Sapphire was fire. Sharp. Reckless. The kind of woman who’d slit your throat mid-kiss. She lowered her eyes. Played with the oversized rock on her finger like she needed something to do with her hands. The ring didn’t suit her. None of this did. She looked like a doll in the wrong box. A queen trapped in a cheap glass castle. And I really wish that she knew it.

It was funny how I'd been kept in the dark for five years, as I'd fallen for her claim of wanting to keep a low profile again and again. It wasn't that she didn't want to celebrate it. It was that I didn't deserve to be celebrated. With my eyelids drooping and my breathing growing faint, the paramedic started crying out of desperation. Seeing how bloody I was and how close I was to death, she borrowed an electric scooter from a kind stranger and rushed me out of the ambulance. We were so close to the venue that I even heard Brandon ask, "Babe, what's that thing on the scooter? It's gross…"