Sweet Romance17 min read
He Came From Hell — The Green-Eyed Snake
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I moved to a mountain town after quitting everything that used to be my life.
"It will be quieter here," I told myself as I unpacked the last box.
The town was a living picture of rain and moss—stone paths and dark trees, the kind of place where a painter goes to get lost and then finds a subject. I went to the market for vegetables and asked a vendor, "Where can I see snakes?"
"You want to buy one?" Old Buck chuckled, wiping his hands. "West Street, kid. Wild snakes. People cook them, make tonic soups. You paying cash?"
"No." I laughed, nervous. "Just looking."
"You'll be sick," he warned, then leaned closer. "If you want the real thing, bring an iron stomach."
I told him I did, because I needed a model. I told myself that many times.
Inside the crowded stalls the smell was so strong I almost vomited. Cages clicked and hissed. A man with practiced motions sliced a snake's head off behind me, and when the blood hit the table I had to step away.
"That one," I said finally, pointing at a thin black snake sleeping like a ribbon. "Keep that one alive."
"Alive?" Buck grinned a rotten grin. "You sure? Wild ones don't like to be kept."
"I want it alive," I insisted. "I'll take it."
I carried the tiny snake home in a woven cage as if it were a secret I should be ashamed of. It seemed to sleep forever, a small coal of a thing, glossy and quiet. I fed it chicken. I drew it in my sketchbook and imagined it enormous—coiled on an ancient tree, scales black as spilled ink, fangs full of venom. I wanted that feeling on paper: not the gold, not the glory, but the dark and dangerous.
Two weeks later I took the snake up the mountain to set it free.
"I can't keep you in the apartment," I told it. "This is your place, not mine."
It crawled out of the basket without urgency and vanished into the underbrush. I walked down the mountain with wet gravel under my boots. Thunder held its breath overhead. The rain came hard and sharp, and I got lost.
"Hey! Wait!" I shouted, trying to make out the path. Black branches stitched the sky. I started to run, then slipped on a wet stone. My ankle screamed, and I almost fell. When I looked up someone was standing in the trees.
"Are you all right?" a man's voice asked, closer than I expected.
I couldn't see him well at first—only the flash of a jaw, the outline of shoulders. The figure moved without making a sound.
"I—I'm lost," I admitted.
"Then hold on," he said. "I'll carry you."
Before I could protest, a strong hand was under my knees and my arms around his neck. He was light but muscular, fast as a thought. He ran down the slope like the path was paved with easy steps. Rain streaked him, and the water seemed to bead off him. He smelled like the mountain—green and wet—but something else too, an under-scent that made my skin prickle.
At my little place I turned on the light and saw his face properly for the first time.
He could have been a model: high cheekbones, narrow nose, lips thin and precise. His skin was pale, his hair dark, curling at the nape. But his eyes—those eyes were the thing that stopped me.
They were the color of old moss, the kind of green that held shadows. They caught the lamp light and seemed to live under it. "You looked like you needed help," he said, smiling a fraction.
"Thank you," I said like an idiot.
"You should dry off," he said. "You caught a cold walking in the rain."
"I'm Imogen," I added, because apparently I was introducing myself to strangers who had just rescued me.
He hesitated. "Names are powerful," he said. "But you can call me Greyson."
"Greyson?" I repeated, realizing it suited him in a way I couldn't explain.
"Greyson Dickinson," he offered finally. "But you don't need the full name."
"Please," I said. "Sit. You must be freezing."
He laughed softly and let me bring him a towel. He gave me a strange, careful smile as if my clumsy concern amused him, and then the conversation went sideways.
"Don't tell strangers your name," he said suddenly, glancing at me narrowly.
"I—" I began.
"As an exchange," he added smoothly, "my name is Greyson. You can call me Greyson."
He looked better in that towel than I looked in my paint-streaked sweater. When he wrapped the towel round his hips and walked into my small bathroom, I found myself thinking of the painting again—how his shoulders would look in shadow, how that green of his eyes would glint.
The first time he ate at my table, he did it without chewing. "Why do you not chew?" I asked, fork halfway to my mouth.
He glanced at me like I had asked something private. "I like to swallow," he said calmly. "It saves the taste for the stomach."
"You can't—" I took the egg back and chewed for both of us. He watched, then swallowed the rest like a small ritual. I felt absurdly intimate.
"What's your name?" he asked later, tapping the table with a finger.
"Imogen Omar," I replied.
"Imogen," he said. "You look like 'Imogen' suits you."
"Thank you," I smiled, and then the laughter stopped me with its odd edge.
"Don't tell your name to strangers," he said again. "Names have weight."
The more time I spent with Greyson, the more I discovered he was not ordinary. He carried himself with a dangerous silence. He corrected the scale of a snake on my canvas with a few precise gestures. "This species," he said once, pointing, "should have three ridges across its scales. You made it soft."
"You know snakes?" I asked, amazed.
"I am of them," he said, with a small chill under the words.
That night I dreamt he was a snake. He coiled around my leg like a black ribbon. I woke sweating, my throat tight as if his fangs had touched it. I told myself it was a dream.
"You're awake," Greyson said quietly. He was at the foot of my bed, awake long after I had been terrified.
I shivered. "Did you—"
"I wanted you to sleep," he said. "The mountain storms take people when they are alone."
"You saved me," I said, half-dazed.
He smiled thinly. "I did. But you threw away the small snake you saved."
"I set it free."
"He was not just a snake."
His words crooked into a warning and a confession at once. "Not a snake?"
"He is my little brother," Greyson said softly. "Or part of what I am. But you did the right thing. You always do: care for things."
He leaned over my painting, inspected it, and then tapped a ridge on the dragon-turned-snake's scale with a long finger. "You're very observant," he said. "You paint what you love."
I told him about the city job, the crash that burned my last life down, how I came here to breathe. He sat there and listened like no one had listened in years. When I looked at him he looked back as if he had been waiting.
"Why are you here?" I finally asked.
He did not answer for a long time. "For a long time I have been in between," he said at last. "We watch. We grow. We do what we must."
There were things he did not say. There were things I did not want to ask. We fit into an odd domestic thread—the man from the mountain and me, the painter who loved snakes. He slept in my spare room sometimes. He cooked as if he had done it his whole life. He ate oddly but left the dishes clean.
I told myself I was careful, but care is not the same as restraint. I painted him. He watched, flinched only a little when I put his eyes on canvas. Those green eyes were a sun for me; I painted them over and over.
"Don't tell anyone about me," Greyson said the first day I took my new portfolio into S City.
"I promise," I said. "But the city has its own gravity."
My drawings went online. The image of the black coiled snake and the green-eyed man leaked into the network like a pulse. People loved the danger and the beauty. "Is there a model?" strangers asked. "Does he exist?"
When a big publisher offered me a contract because of the piece, I moved to S City with a blend of relief and dread. I told myself being back would mean forgetting the mountain storms. Instead Gray—Greyson—followed me into the bright towers of commerce like a dark tide.
One evening I bumped into him in a convenience store, and that was how it started to twist like a thread through my life. He was holding a box of salmon. He had a ring on his finger: an odd, glinting thing that caught light. He smiled when our eyes met.
"You again." I said, embarrassed.
"Imogen," he said easily. "You bought a lot of snacks earlier."
"You didn't need to follow me."
"I didn't," he responded, then added, "But I'm glad I did."
No one knew that the quiet man who made the offer to my publisher and the stranger who saved me on the mountain were the same thing. I didn't either at first. Even when I met him in a boardroom and he sat behind a nameplate—Greyson Dickinson, CEO—I did not make the connection immediately.
"Your work has potential," he said to me in the high-rise office, tapping the table with elegant long fingers. "We want to publish your feature."
"Thank you," I said, as if I could breathe.
"You will need to work with me directly," he added, and that sentence carried a different meaning depending on how you looked at it.
He watched me like an animal watching tide. When his fingers brushed my arm to steady me, they felt like cold iron. "Your arm..." he examined the long scar on my forearm as if counting something on a map.
"Old wound," I said. "Surgery. It still hurts when it rains."
His fingers were ice. "You will be compensated."
He was my boss now. The city was a glass labyrinth. I learned to meet his eyes across meetings and call him Greyson in private. The more time I spent with him the more the edges of our relationship blurred. He invited himself to my apartment; he loomed at my door when the nights were bad. He saved me when a neighbor, a man who had given me a welcome gift of snake teeth, tried to claim I belonged to him.
"You took my snake gift," the neighbor snarled in my doorway late one night. "All gifts must be honored."
"This is my house," I said, backing away.
"You will be my bride," he croaked.
I thought he was drunk. Then his eyes went yellow. Scales rose across his wrists. He became a snake—the thing of red breath and hissing, because the town I had left had been carved with old bargains. He slithered up my leg until his head snarled inches from my face.
Something moved in the room like a shadow. Greyson was there—no one else had come. He moved with an economy that made my nails dig into my palms.
"Back off," he said.
"Who are you?" the snake-man hissed. "He is mine."
Greyson's face did not change. He reached out and in one clean motion cut the snake's head free. The room filled with the hot iron smell of blood.
"Why did you do that?" I whispered, cold.
"Because I do not like people who harm what's mine," he said simply. Then he turned to me, very close. "Give me the snake teeth," he demanded.
I handed them over like an offering. He crushed them with his hand until they were dust. He cleaned his fingers with a napkin, then put the napkin in the trash with a deliberate gentleness that made me want to kiss his hand.
There are things you do not forget: the way an audience gasps, the knife of a public eye. But what I did not know then was that this was only one of many faces of danger. There were people making a trade with wild snakes, selling parts and spreading sickness. They had been careless with venom and greed.
When my painting made the mountain famous and tourists clawed at the town, the old snake market burst into scandal. People began to wonder whether the spate of mysterious illnesses—fevers and rashes—were not ordinary disease but a poisoning tied to the snake trade.
Greyson's involvement changed how the town looked at those men.
"They sold infected parts," he told me, quietly but with a public voice. "They preyed on wild animals and on people. They deserve exposure."
"It was them?" I asked, remembering the cage, the blood. "People will blame them?"
"They will," Greyson said. "But blame is not enough."
When the village leadership called a gathering in the square, the whole town turned up. It was a storm-dark evening, and the square's single lamp swung like a pendulum. I stood in the crowd with Greyson beside me, and Buck Wong sat not far away, face slick with rain.
"The snake sellers," the mayor said into the borrowed microphone, "have been accused of causing a sickness among our people."
"Who accuses them?" Buck demanded. "They are the ones who keep us warm, make our soups!"
"People died," a woman said, voice trembling. "My brother got burned with fever."
"Who is responsible?" a farmer bawled. "Who feeds on our children?"
I watched a man named Jun—he had been a quiet buyer—step forward shaking. "They took blood from the snakes and sold it," he said. "They mixed it into tonics and called it cure. Half the town is sick."
"That is a lie!" hissed the lead snake seller, his jaws tight. "We sell goods like anyone. If people get sick, it's because of their own luck."
Greyson moved forward then. He spoke with a steel I had not seen before. "You sold what you could not control," he said. "You turned a living thing into a commodity, and now you have made disease traffic."
"You're a city man with a fancy suit," Buck snapped. "You think you can come here and point fingers?"
"Watch me," Greyson said. He raised his hand, and sudden light from his palm fell on the man's hands.
The sellers collapsed like paper things. Their faces turned first to anger—livid with outrage—and then to something rawer: fear.
"This is what you did," Greyson said slowly, naming details the men had sworn would never go public. "You bought snakes caught pregnant. You pulled the venom out and sold it as charm. You infected the tonic batches to make people think it worked. You turned life into a powder and then a lie."
The crowd hissed. "Shame!" "You monster!"
"Public answer," Greyson said finally. "You will reckon."
The first punishment started with exposure. Greyson hired a team to gather records, to collect testimonies. He forced the sellers into the open and made them confess under the dull light of a projector during the market day. Their names were called. The video showed jars labeled "herbal wonder" whose contents gleamed suspiciously. A doctor confirmed traces of experimental compounds.
"You thought you were protected," Greyson said, and the man who had sold snake head tonic made a wet noise in the throat. "You thought the town had no memory."
"I needed to feed my family!" the man croaked, voice small now. "It was business! It wasn't supposed to—"
"It was someone's mother," a villager cried. "Someone's child!"
They were stripped of their market stalls and licenses in public, forced to watch as their goods were contaminated—safely and under supervision—destroyed down to the last jar. They were made to stand on a low platform while the whole square peered. Phones shone like stars. The camera took every angle.
"You sold sickness," said a woman I had seen at the hospital, hand trembling. "You made my brother lie down and not wake."
The biggest of them, a man who had laughed at the early warnings, went mute as recognition slid across his face. He had been arrogant, and now he was gone soft as bread. I heard him beg for mercy.
"Please," he said, voice cracking. "Please, I'll do anything. Don't—"
"No," Greyson said. "You will face what you did."
Then came punishment two: a symbolic reckoning designed to sting the greedy where they had once felt power. They were required to prepare relief—clean tonic, proper antidote—under supervision and deliver it for free to those they had hurt. They were made to listen as victims described their nights of fever and the smell of their own sickness. The watchers photographed every expression: the men looking small, the women crying out the names of lost children, the old ones folding their hands together. People jeered at the sellers' attempts to apologize. "This is for your gain," a woman spat. "Your apology is lip service."
The sellers' faces went through stages: denial, anger, bargaining, collapse. Some tried to blame the villagers for superstition. Others pleaded that they'd been under pressure to provide. A few fell to their knees and begged.
"Do you feel anything?" someone yelled. "Do you know what love is?"
"Yes," said a voice I recognized—it was me and also not me. "Healed is love. You robbed people of healing for greed."
They were forced into restitution: their money was seized under the town council's judgment. The vendors were sent to work with the health teams they had scammed—teaching hygiene, cooking for the sick, standing in clinics while guardians told their stories. Each humiliation was different. One man was publicly shunned, another had to return to his family and explain on the courthouse steps. Someone recorded it and the video trended; people copied it over and over. They could not find sympathy this time.
Watching it all, I felt ugly and elated in the same breath. People clapped at the accountability like they had clapped at a play. The snake sellers were not reduced to monsters—things are rarely that simple—but they were unmasked. They could no longer hide behind custom. Onlookers took pictures. Someone threw rotten fruit. Men whose hands had blood on them stood and shivered.
"Do you see?" Greyson asked me later, quietly, once the crowd had dispersed.
"I saw," I said. "You made them answer."
"I could have killed them," Greyson said. "But I wanted them to remember, not to be erased."
He had many faces: the ruthless avenger and the careful protector. I learned to love both.
Then, as things shifted, the old bargains that chained lesser snakes and their keepers came undone. The snake market collapsed and a shrine rose on the hillside—a place people went to leave flowers and apologize. It smelled of incense and wet earth. The village slowly became lighter.
Weeks passed. Greyson and I settled into rhythms that made my ribs ache with a new kind of hunger. He would bring me eggs and hot ginger tea on mornings when the rain bit at the glass. He would notice the smallest of aches and remove my jacket without asking. "You get cold," he said once, removing my sleeves. "You should not shiver."
"You're changing me," I told him, surprised at how soft the truth sounded.
"You always were this," he corrected. "I only taught you to see yourself."
One night I woke to the feel of something cold and wet curling at my ankle. A tail, black and warm, threaded between my calves. "Greyson?" I whispered, half-laughing.
"You shouldn't play with sleeping things," he murmured, voice far away.
"I like being wrapped," I said, absurd and needy.
He leaned over and kissed my forehead. "You are mine to keep," he said. "But I must warn you, things will come to ask for more."
Sometimes I hated him for that honesty—so grim and simple. Sometimes I feared the way he loved me: total, possessive, like an animal claiming its den.
"Do you love me?" I asked him the night the incense smoke made the room thick and the rain tapped staccato at the window.
He looked at me like someone weighing a sacrifice and then said, "Yes."
It was not a soft "yes." It was not a careful one. It landed with the sound of a stone dropping into deep water. My chest opened like a gate. I answered in all the ways I could, through kisses and small acts—cutting ginger, laying out his towel—and the world tightened around us like a coil.
We moved back to the mountain sometimes. We would sit in the shrine he had built and talk, or not talk; those silences were full. He told me stories of an earlier being, of storms that had shaped him. He told me how a strange little snake I had set free had been part of him, a seed that had sought a match and found me.
"Why me?" I asked on one of those nights when moonlight cut through the pines.
"Because you are the kind who saves things," he answered. "You are the kind who remembers."
"We're not getting married," I said, and felt both foolish and true.
"We will not be ordinary," he replied with softness. "But I want you."
Time is a strange thing when you're involved with what is not entirely human. Seasons folded in on one another. My career took off. I painted a lot and sold more. People wrote about the green-eyed man in the mountain and about how my art was born from something dangerous. Fans left messages and flowers at my door. They asked for glimpses of him, but I kept him like a secret.
Then the worst thing that could happen did.
"I have to do something," Greyson said one night, his face set in a way that made my heart drop.
"What?" I asked.
"The world is moving," he said. "They want to use a toxin I found. They will turn it into an experiment to hurt far more than this town."
"You mean the lab?" I asked, confused.
He reached for me and cupped my face. For a heartbeat his touch was all flame. "I will stop them," he said, "even if it costs me everything."
He meant it. He meant everything. When the men who had sold disease tried to smuggle their modified venom, Greyson found them. He stood in the middle of the lab and declared their designs to the gathered investigators. He did not kill them. He made sure they could never move their plans forward again.
But even the kinds of punishments that echo through crowds cannot always quiet the more private cruelties. The snake-demon bargains had consequences. There were people who wanted power, who would dig up old pacts to force things back into sorrow. They demanded a sacrifice.
"They want me to pay a price," Greyson said one night with a laugh that had no humor in it.
"What price?" I whispered.
"Your safety," he said. "You are the one they ask for. To bind me fully, they need what you carry."
"What do I carry?"
He did not answer directly. He touched my belly, as if checking for the pulse of an unborn thing. I did not understand then. Later I did.
There was a night when I became more than human in a way I had not predicted. There were rituals borne of old religion and newer science. They sought to swallow the wrongness and reforge it into an army. I agreed to a desperate, burning plan: to take a poison into my blood and let the snake within me burn the pathogen. The idea was that one life would be risked to save many.
"Are you sure?" Greyson asked, holding the needle like a small star.
"I am sure," I said, because there was no reasonable choice I could see.
He watched me as the injection slid into my skin. "You will be all right," he promised, but his voice trembled.
The next thing I knew was a dizzy absence and a bright, white place where a judge looked at both of us with tired eyes. I learned later that I had died—for a while. The snake-demon world had a ledger and they had written my name in it. Greyson came to me at the edge, a figure shredded and bloody, and he carried me like a sacrament into whatever place there was between life and death. He crushed a thing called the "snake-dan"—a talisman that had controlled my fate—and in the same motion broke the contract that might have bound us. The world looked at him with horror as he did it.
Time stopped and the ledger spun. I woke to find myself with nothing and everything: my child in my belly and Greyson at my side. We had crossed thresholds and returned. The snake-dan was gone. He had taken the pain into himself to save me.
After that everything was different. We moved back to the mountain. A shrine stood where the market had been. People apologized and left offerings. The snake sellers were exiled or worked honestly. The town learned, slowly, how to be careful.
There were quiet moments where I could kiss a palm and call it home. There were terrible moments where he yanked himself apart and made bargains with hell to keep us safe. There were merciful ones in which he taught our child to count and to be gentle.
We had a son who grew like a sprout into something bright and fast. Everett Winter—his name was heavy with snowfall and a beginning. "Everett," Greyson said the day he held the baby like he might never let him go. "A fresh morning."
We became a family in the way one builds with splinters and care. I would watch Greyson with Everett and think of the mountain where I first let a little black snake go. That small act had unspooled into everything.
He would whisper in my ear sometimes, ticklish and low, "You cannot leave me."
"Try to make me," I would reply, pretending that we were not carved of the same need.
People watched us, and they watched how he loved. He was possessive and fierce and terribly gentle. He would bristle for our son's safety and soften for my hand in his.
But the road to peace was never straight. There came times when memory fought back and old bargains tried to twist the world. Greyson went into the deep places to make sure no old pacts could rebind us. He came back with scars like a map.
One afternoon in the market when Everett was small, a woman called out, "Look! It's the green-eyed man!"
My cheeks warmed with the oddness of fame again. Greyson took Everett into his arms and lifted him high. The boy squealed and I felt the flood of small, human joy—sudden and unedited. People smiled. No one thought of bargains anymore. For once, our life felt like it could be ordinary.
"Stay with me," Greyson murmured as he watched Everett, fingers curled around our son's wrist. "Stay."
"I am staying," I told him. "I chose you."
He smiled then, not like a predator but like something that had learned to be a man. He kissed my forehead, that small, peculiar place he adored, and I knew then that even if the world came with teeth and venom, some things—some people—are worth giving everything for.
In the end it was not violence that sealed us, and it wasn't entirely the trials that made our story. It was the way a man once called Greyson, with eyes like the damp of a mountain, learned to open his hands without taking. It was the way I learned that my small acts—feeding a snake, painting a scale—could pull a creature out of the dark.
"Home," Greyson said to me one night, looking at the mountain silhouette. "This is home."
I leaned my head on his shoulder. "Mine too."
And sometimes, when the house was quiet and the rain feathered the air, I would make ginger tea and boil a single egg. I would set it on the table just so, and the three of us—man, woman, and child—would sip the tea and listen to the rain, the safe sound of water on roof tiles. There were scars, and there were debts, and there were things we could not forget. But there was also warmth.
"Don't go," Greyson would murmur if I thought of leaving.
"I won't," I'd answer, and mean it.
We were an odd family: the painter who once saved a small black snake, the man who had come from somewhere that smelled like hell, and the boy who loved sugar on a stick. We had weathered punishment and praise, storms and crowd's judgment. We had retribution for those who sold lives as tonic and redemption for those who learned.
Once, when the moon was high and the mountain breathed like an old beast, Greyson stood on the threshold and looked back at me.
"Do you remember the first night?" he asked.
"When you carried me?" I smiled.
"When you let the little snake go."
"Yes."
"You made me human," he said, with a voice that was hardly a voice. "Not because I needed you to change, but because you taught me to want."
I touched his cheek with the pads of my fingers and saw my reflection in the wet green of his eye. "You taught me what it is to be taken care of," I whispered.
Outside, the temple bell went soft as people prayed. I held the egg in my palm, still warm from the tea, and the memory of the first time a snake curled onto my leg in a dream shimmered like a small current. I laughed, a quiet thing, and he laughed too.
"Forever is a big word," he said, and kissed the curve of my wrist.
"Then say it smaller," I told him.
He put his lips to my knuckles and whispered one word in the dark, a promise and a claim: "Stay."
The End
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