Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
MERRI
The last thing my mates needed from me after that bombshell was to be forced to wait while I rushed out of the room to check on Luc. But every instinct I had screamed for me to do just that. He was close by but imprisoned. Out of my sight.
I’d thought the yearning was bad before, but now that he was close again? It was fucking brutal. Like an itch just out of reach. You know the one. In the middle of your back with no hope of relief. Except I could ease it right now if I just went to him.
Instead I was sat here with three of the four horsemen staring at me, waiting for some kind of explanation.
But I wasn’t sure where to start, so I stared right back, hoping for one of them to put me out of my misery.
It was the worst kind of Canadian standoff.
One where none of the parties were being polite so much as waiting for their executioner to pull the trigger.
So not a Canadian standoff at all, really.
“Merri, we need to talk,” Grim said, his voice uncharacteristically strained.
Everything about my stern plant daddy was off.
He was tense in a way I’d never witnessed before.
Caspian had mentioned pixie dust before all hell broke loose, something I hadn’t run into in person.
I’d always thought it was more of an aphrodisiac, but now I realized it was affecting Grim the same way Molly did humans.
He was high as a kite and trying so hard to stay grounded.
Probably not the best time to attempt a Very Serious Conversation.
Then again . . .
“You’re right. But honestly, I don’t know that you are going to like what I have to say.”
“Hellcat, I already despise what you said earlier. There’s not much more you could add to that particular disaster.” Malice’s eyes narrowed as he focused on me.
“Would it help if I said I didn’t mean for it to happen?”
“What?” Grim snarled, hands balling into fists as his shadow self manifested beside him.
“No, no, not like that.”
Thank God Chaos wasn’t here. If he’d have jumped to the same conclusion Grim just had, we’d be in a world of trouble. As if I had summoned him by thought alone, the door cracked open and Chaos slid inside.
“Book club?” he asked with a curious lift of his brow.
“Merri was just telling us how Lucifer became her newest mate,” Sin corrected, his arms crossed over his chest and his expression more guarded than usual.
“Hmph,” was all Chaos said. Just a grunt of . . . frustration maybe? I couldn’t get a read on him.
“It happened while my succubus was feeding. We hadn’t ever crossed the line and had sex before, but just like that time I went feral with you, the demon side took over as soon as we came out of that group dreamwalk.
” I gave a helpless shrug, my hands splayed in a “what can you do” gesture.
“And fate just sort of intervened, and in the middle of it all, the mate bond snapped into place.”
“He wasn’t lying. He really didn’t trick you into it, did he?” Chaos asked, surprising me.
I shook my head, equal parts surprised and not to learn he’d talked to Luc. “If anything, I think I might have tricked him.” I grimaced. “I was pretty aggressive.” Realizing these four probably didn’t want all the dirty details of how I’d fucked their sworn enemy, I faltered and blushed. “Sorry.”
“I hate this,” Sin admitted.
“It doesn’t change anything between us.” Crossing the room, I settled myself in his lap and wrapped my arms around him, holding him tight. “I love you just as much as I ever have.”
“She’s telling the truth,” Malice said, his shoulders relaxing as he rooted around in my unguarded mind. “All of it. He didn’t force her to do anything she didn’t want. He is destined to be hers, just as we are.”
He didn’t sound happy about it, and I couldn’t blame him. The five of us had only just sorted our shit out, and now we had to somehow add a sixth person to the mix? Lucifer, at that? Nothing about our new situation was going to be easy.
Grim looked like he wanted to say something, but he kept getting distracted by the velvet throw pillow he was caressing. I would have laughed if I weren’t so worried about his state of mind. Or was it the state of his heart I was worried about?
“So there’s no way to change this?” Sin asked.
“No more than it would be possible for her to cut one of us out of her heart,” Malice muttered. “We’re stuck with him.”
Sin’s soulful eyes found mine as he pulled back from me. “Why?”
My heart broke at the sadness in his voice. “I . . . It was fate.”
“No, kitten. Why did you keep this from us? Why not tell us as soon as we got you back?”
I opened and closed my mouth, surprised to learn this was the part he was most upset about. But maybe I shouldn’t have been. Out of all of them, Sin had always been the first to take my side and roll with the punches. He probably thought I was still punishing him for hurting me before.
Cupping his cheek in my palm, I rested my forehead against his.
“I didn’t know what to say. There was so much going on, and it had only just happened.
I was focused on getting you all back, and then on repairing things with Grim, and then after .
. . I guess I was afraid it would ruin everything all over again, maybe?
I never intended to keep it from you. I was just trying to wrap my head around it first.”
“If we don’t have honesty between us, what do we have?”
Sin was right. My gaze flicked to Grim, the one who’d kept the most from me over the course of our relationship. The one I’d been the least willing to forgive.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“From now on, even if we know it’s going to be a hard conversation, we all have to agree to be honest.”
Look at Sin, more emotionally mature than any of us.
He’d grown so much since I first met him.
They all had. I could never have imagined us having a conversation like this back in our penthouse days.
Somewhere along the way, my horsemen had started to soften.
No, that wasn’t quite right. It was more that they’d become more human and less these creatures of legend.
It suddenly struck me: the thing that had changed.
They’d learned how to love. An act they’d never had any need for prior to my arrival in their lives.
Pressing my forehead to Sin’s once more, I said, “I promise.” Then I kissed him, soft and tender, pouring the love I had for him into the gesture.
“We promise too,” Grim said, voice tight as he closed the distance between us and rested one hand on my shoulder. His fingers caressed me gently, demanding nothing other than physical touch.
“Yes. Nothing but truth between us,” Chaos added.
Malice sat down on the couch next to Sin, his fingers running along my spine before he pressed a kiss to my nape and murmured, “Forever.”
The second I appeared in one of Lilith’s personal rooms at Iniquity, I immediately realized what had happened.
Fucking dreamwalk. The question was, who was I here to see?
Auntie Lilith didn’t need to pull me into her dream in order to speak to me, but being at Iniquity instantly had me wondering if she had some secret to share.
The room wasn’t one I’d ever visited before, but the club I’d spent so much time inside held a signature air of magic. Leather and lust and something intrinsically Lilith.
I took a quick stock of my surroundings, my eyebrows inching up to my hairline with each piece of BDSM furniture I recognized.
Seriously, whose dream was this? None of my men were into the lifestyle as far as I knew, so what the hell was going on?
“My, my, crabapple. You look quite confused. Is power exchange not something you enjoy?”
Luc’s voice filled the room before he stepped out of a shadowy corner. Something inside me relaxed at the sight of him, my nervous system finally regulating because I could see him and know he was safe.
Fuck.
“That depends.”
“On?”
“Who’s submitting to whom.”
His lips curled up in a devious grin. “Oh, I think we know the answer to that.”
A flicker of arousal caught in my belly at his words, but there was no universe in existence where I was going to let him call the shots right now.
“Do we? Because I assure you, if you think I’m getting on my knees for you after the shit you pulled, you’ve seriously underestimated your sway over me. ”
“I beg your pardon. Shit I pulled? Do you recall what you did to me nary a week ago? You seduced me. Mated me. Claimed me. Then fucked off with four other men.”
I had to fight the wince that wanted to appear at his words. When you summed it up like that, it did sound pretty awful.
“You seem to be forgetting the part where you were holding me hostage and I had to escape.”
Ha. There. Let him talk his way out of that one.
Lucifer sighed and rolled his eyes. “Still on about that, are you? You really need to get some new material, crabapple. We’ve already been over this. I did what I had to do.”
“Kidnapping is a crime in all fifty states.”
“You are quite the little grudge holder, aren’t you? Since we’re going to be pedantic about this, technically, you came to me. Not kidnapping.”
“You locked me in a cage.”
“A house.”
“A cage dressed as a house.”
“Also, need I remind you the doors were never locked?”
“NONE OF IT WAS REAL.”
He was in front of me in the blink of an eye. Dream magic was funny like that. Then, with a slow drag of his knuckles over my cheek, he said, “The way I feel about you is.”
I smacked his hand away with a scowl, but not before my uterus performed an entire fucking backflip in my belly and my ovaries set off a grand finale of fireworks.
“I’m just a means to an end.”
He held my stare, not taking the bait.
“You want me to fight with you, darling, but I have no interest in verbal sparring.”
“Then what do you want? Because I have no interest in anything else.”
His smug grin reappeared. “Liar.”