Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
Deimos’s call wasn’t a surprise. The edge in his voice was.
It wasn’t his usual ice-veined arrogance, the kind that dripped from every syllable like he thought the world owed him reverence.
No. Tonight, it was something else. Something raw.
Tight. Like he was barely holding it together.
Like the truth had clawed its way too close to the surface and he hadn’t figured out how to shove it back down yet.
Which, of course, meant I had to see the damage with my own eyes.
Cassiel and I arrive just past midnight. The door creaks open, and the scent hits me first—ripe and cloying. Sex. Sweat. Blood. Death.
It’s thick in the air, sticky and metallic, coating the back of my throat like syrup and rust. The kind of death that isn’t clean. The kind that’s taken, not given.
A kill soaked in hunger.
My boots stick slightly to the hardwood as we step inside. There’s a quiet crackle beneath my heel—something brittle. Something broken.
And then we see him.
Shawn.
Laid out like a fucking offering. Pale, drained, hollowed. His limbs limp. His mouth slightly parted. His cock still out like he died mid-climax, some final, desperate moan caught in his throat that never made it to air.
He looks ridiculous.
I stare at him for a beat, the grotesque comedy of it settling in.
“Fucked to death,” I mutter, letting out a low chuckle. “Damn. What a way to go.”
Deimos doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even blink. Just paces behind us like a caged animal, radiating tension in slow, rolling waves.
Cassiel, ever the moral compass, crosses his arms and frowns at the corpse. “You’re okay with this?”
He’s talking to Deimos, but I answer instead. “What? The girl’s got talent.”
And it’s true. Real talent.
Lillien—the little lost lamb we dragged from the dark—has teeth now. And claws. She didn’t just feed. She took. She didn’t hesitate. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t cry afterward or look for a moral escape hatch.
She just opened herself up and drank until there was nothing left.
That’s not just instinct. That’s birthright.
Deimos rubs a hand down his face as if he’s trying to scrub the night from his skin. It doesn’t work. He keeps looking at the body. Not with horror. Not even with disgust.
Something else. Something worse.
Possession.
I grin, staring at the corpse. Shawn’s skin is sallow, paper-thin, his cheeks sunken. His chest doesn’t rise. Doesn’t twitch. Doesn’t fight. He’s beyond saving, and gods, doesn’t that just paint a beautiful picture?
I imagine her there—Lillien—knees bracketing his ribs, hair falling like a veil, eyes glazed over with need. Her mouth parted in something not quite pain, not quite ecstasy. Her body moving with a rhythm she didn’t even know she knew. Pulling him apart thread by thread, breath by breath.
Not with mercy. With purpose.
My cock stirs. Not with jealousy. But with awe.
“Planning to keep him as a trophy?” I ask, glancing toward Deimos. “Could mount him on the wall. Maybe dress him up first.”
He stops pacing just long enough to glare. If he had any real energy left, he’d rip my head clean off. But right now? He’s too torn.
That makes it better.
“No? Alright,” I say lightly. “So we’re burning him. Boring, but fine.”
Cassiel glares. Deimos growls. I stretch. And the tension? It keeps climbing. Tangling.
Humming.
Deimos doesn’t speak for a long moment. He just watches the corpse. I know what’s really eating at him. The reason he hasn’t said her name.
He wasn’t expecting to feel it. That first feed. That crackling tether between them. The way it rewired him on a cellular level. Like she reached inside and rearranged his bones just by touching him.
I step forward, voice dropping. “You’re really twisted up about this, huh?”
He doesn’t answer. Not with words. But he doesn’t deny it, either.
Cassiel watches him now, too. The silence says more than Deimos ever could. It's heavy, charged. Like the moment right before lightning splits the sky.
“You caught feelings,” I murmur. “Didn’t think it’d be you first, but here we are.”
His jaw tightens. The faintest tremble in his hand betrays him.
I press in, slow and cruel. “She didn’t need your help. Didn’t need your protection. Didn’t even need your permission. She just took. Like she was born for it.”
He finally snaps his gaze to mine, eyes black and burning. I lean in.
“I bet you keep seeing it, don’t you? Her mouth. Her thighs. Her moan.”
Cassiel stiffens beside me. Deimos surges forward—but Cassiel steps between us.
“Enough,” he says, tone quiet but absolute.
I pull back, the smirk fading but the pleasure lingering. Watching Deimos unravel is its own kind of satisfaction.
He wanted to be her handler. Her goddamn savior. But she doesn’t need saving.
“Where is she?” Cassiel asks after a beat.
Deimos’s voice is rough when he answers. “I told her to go home.”
Cassiel raises a brow. “And she listened?”
A bitter scoff. “Of course not.”
I laugh again, low and honest. “She’s the sort of fire that you can’t put out, brother.”
Deimos’s glare turns lethal. “Don’t.”
But I see it. I see the hunger in him. The fury and need all knotted together.
He liked it. He liked her power. Her bite. The blood on her lips. He’s scared of it, sure—but he’s drawn to it too. And that? That’s the beginning of his end.
I back off, just a step. Just enough to feel the air shift again. “You want me to find her?” I ask.
“No,” he growls. “She can’t possibly get into more trouble.”
I arch a brow. “Famous last words.”
He storms off, Cassiel trailing behind, both of them too wrapped up in their own mess to care what happens next.
Which leaves me and Shawn. Or what’s left of him. He doesn’t weigh much. Not anymore. Just skin and bone and the echo of a man who never stood a chance.
I hoist him over my shoulder. “Come on, lover boy,” I mutter. “Let’s take you to the fire.”
And just like that, I walk out into the night. Still thinking about the girl with blood in her mouth and a moan that could kill.
The mortuary’s quiet the way graveyards are—as if even the walls know better than to make a sound.
It’s after hours, not that it matters. No one's here to see me pull around back, kill the lights, and slide out of the car with a corpse slung over my shoulder like it weighs nothing. Because to me? It doesn’t. Not anymore.
It’s just another night. Another body. Another heatless fire chewing through skin and memory.
Inside, the air is still. The kind of stillness that feels like it’s watching you. I don’t bother turning on more lights than I need. The ambient glow from the furnace is enough, pulsing low and orange.
The cremation chamber is already humming, warm and waiting. Hungry.
I set Shawn down on the metal table with a grunt. His limbs flop. Slack. Empty. He doesn’t look peaceful. He looks used. Like someone wrung him dry and forgot to throw him out after.
“Bet this isn’t how you thought your night would end,” I mutter, mostly to myself. “Though I gotta admit… death by orgasm? Not the worst way to go.”
His face doesn’t twitch. His mouth is still half open, as if he died mid-whimper. I roll my shoulders, take one last look at him, and shove the gurney forward.
The furnace greets him with a whoosh, flames flaring high, licking eagerly at his flesh. The heat blasts against my skin, but I don’t flinch.
First comes the bubbling—his skin blistering like meat in a pan. Then the pop. Little bursts of pressure beneath the dermis, each one like a knuckle cracking under strain. His tendons seize. Contract. There’s a sudden twitch—violent and unnatural. Nerve endings firing off too late to matter.
A death spasm. I’ve seen enough to know that bodies lie, even after death.
The smell hits me like a fist. Burning hair. Cooking flesh. That thick, greasy stench of carbonized skin and muscle. But beneath it—there’s something fouler. Something obscene.
The acrid scent of cum. His last release, still fresh on his body. Still staining the shell he left behind. The bastard came himself to death.
I stare into the furnace, eyes watering from the smoke curling up, the heat crawling into my lungs, coating them in ash and memory.
And I see her. Not him. Her.
Lillien.
The image burns behind my eyelids—her flushed cheeks, her thighs slick and strong around his waist, her mouth open in a gasp she earned. Blood smeared between her legs. Power glinting behind her eyes like moonlight on a blade.
She sat on his death like a queen.
A goddess. A monster.
And fuck, if that doesn’t make something inside me ache in a way I haven’t let myself name.
The flames shift. Dance. For a heartbeat, I swear she’s there in the smoke, smiling. Smirking like she knows I’m thinking about her.
I blink. It’s gone. Just fire. Just meat. Just bone turning black. But I can’t stop seeing her. Not her face, exactly. Not her body.
Her becoming.
And the thing that coils low in my belly isn’t disgust. It’s not even fear. It’s pride. It’s hunger. It’s that pull again. The one I keep trying to drown beneath jokes and jabs. The one that curls tighter every time I hear her name.
Lillien.
She doesn’t know what she is yet. Not really. Not fully. But I do. She’s not just powerful. She’s ours.
At least, that’s what I tell myself. That it’s the novelty. That it’s biology and instinct and nothing more. I tell myself it’s because she’s a succubus. That any of us would feel this draw. That it doesn’t mean anything.
And yet…
As the flames reduce what’s left of Shawn to soot and ruin, I know it’s a lie. Because I’m not thinking about the corpse.
I’m thinking about the girl who made it.