Chapter Twenty-One
NIKKI
This wasn’t my bed.
There was no denying I had drunk too much, way too much, but my memories should be clearer.
I was on my way to the cemetery to visit my father’s grave, the man who was now nothing more than a stranger to me, information I had found with the cost of my sanity.
Beyond that, the memories were nothing but confusion.
There was screaming. Was it the car tires or was it coming from me, I couldn’t be sure.
At the same time, there was pain and darkness, and since then, more confusion.
Bright lights and sounds I couldn’t decipher or understand.
They could have been voices, music, or the grinding of machines, I wouldn’t have been able to say with any certainty.
Now, the darkness remained, but a pulsing pain in my head was making itself known. I tried to lift my hand to rub my forehead. I couldn’t. Was I being restrained or was I paralyzed? There were so many things I didn’t know, and I groaned, the sound tearing through my throat, dry and uncomfortable.
“Shh… it’s okay.”
The voice was deep, soothing, and accompanied by a sweep of cool fingers across my forehead.
Cade?
I wanted to reach out to him or say his name.
I felt my lips part, dry and parched, and my tongue move in my mouth, but the sound didn’t come.
Did I want Cade to be here with me? Wherever here was, I wasn’t sure.
The lights were bright and painful, so I kept my eyes closed, though I’m not sure if I could open them if I wanted to.
I remembered Cade as I knew him. I remembered him being there when I needed him more than once and the feel of his hands on my body.
Moaning, I also remembered when he changed into a monster, and my life spiraled out of control more than it already had. But somehow, that didn’t matter so much because the comfort of his presence surrounded me. Cade had never once tried to hurt me. In fact, he’d protected me.
“Ca…” I managed the first part of his name and nothing more. Choking back a dry sob, the hand was on my face again, stroking my cheek. Why was it so hard to talk?
“No, I’m a friend. Keep still. You’ve been in an accident.”
Pulling my eyes open, I blinked against the bright light above my head. Turning my gaze, my eyes fell upon a man standing next to my bed.
He was beautiful.
There was no other way to describe him. All chiseled features with blue eyes and brown hair kept cut close to his scalp. He was stroking my face, and there was something about simply looking at him that was soothing. He looked like an angel.
“I’m dead?” I whispered.
His lip twitched, almost a smile. “No, you’re okay. You were in an accident, but you are fine. He never left your side.”
“What?”
The man nodded to my other side. “Cade, he’s been here by your side every minute.”
The tears that prickled were painful. Everything was painful.
My throat was dry and raw, my head throbbing, but I managed to roll slightly to the other side and stare blearily at Cade asleep in the chair next to my bed.
He looked like hell, and I realized the irony of thinking that considering I was the one in the hospital bed, judging by the tubes and lines surrounding me.
I couldn’t feel them, but they were there, making me feel like a science experiment.
I never was good with being at the doctor’s office.
Cade. He had overgrown stubble I’d never seen him with before, black circles under his eyes, and his hair was oily and needed a wash.
“He’s a good man,” the man said, touching my cheek and turning my gaze back to him.
I wanted to shake my head but only managed a frown. “Noo… not man.”
“Nikki, please listen to me. Whatever you’ve seen, I promise you that’s not all there is to him. Every being has an aura, and while his DNA may be demon, he’s too good to be truly considered one. He loves you.”
“Not… Devil?”
“He’s not Satan. He’s a demon.”
Unable to bring myself to nod, I simply pulled my gaze from his face and stared out of focus at his chest. Good to know I didn’t have sex with the Devil himself.
Although, a demon wasn’t much better. Too much information was given to me at once, and I struggled to process it, to put the words together into sentences and pull them through my mind in an order that made sense.
I took a couple of minutes to let the words come to me, to let them swirl around in my aching head until I could bring them to some semblance of sense.
He loves me?
I tried to shake my head again. I needed to make this man understand. “I saw… you haven’t seen… what I saw.”
“You’d be surprised what I’ve seen.”
When I looked at him again, his eyes were white, a cloudy covering over the blue that swirled for a moment before dissipating. I yanked against the restraints on my hands, jolting them against the metal bars of the bed, and he shushed me again, smoothing my hair from my face.
“There is much to this world you know not of.” The tears were coming again as I listened to him speak, and when I pulled my gaze back to his face, his eyes were that perfect ocean blue again.
“All you need to know is this… he loves you, and you’ll never, never be unsafe with him.
” He wiped away the tears from my cheeks with his thumbs.
“Sleep now. I’ll tell him you’re okay, I promise. ”
“Who… you?” My eyes were already closing, and the feel of his touch was soothing, calming my nerves and pain.
“You already know, but I don’t matter. Just let yourself love him back.”
Do I already know? His words confused me, so little made sense right now.
I clung to the things he said and kept them locked in my mind, hoping they would make sense when I woke next, but right now, I was tired.
I wanted to watch Cade sleep, to see him as a man, as a human, and remind myself I wasn’t crazy for feeling how I did.
For having my heart skip a beat every time I saw him leaning in the doorway with the beat-up leather jacket and his hair falling in front of his brows.
What did I know of angels and demons? Only the common lore.
I never considered myself religious, except toward the end of my mother’s life when I prayed for her health, and if that couldn’t be provided, I prayed that she’d be safe, happy, and without pain wherever she was going.
Maybe I should have prayed for the strength to live without her, for that was the hardest thing to learn, only made bearable by my father’s support.
Was his love a lie? Or just his life? How could a man treat me the way he did, be the father he was, when behind closed doors, he was a murderer worthy of eternity in Hell?
I loved Cade, I did, but I didn’t want to.
Especially now that I knew what he was.
Did that make me a bad person?
I managed to pull myself to move enough to roll my head and watch Cade, he looked troubled in his sleep, and I wanted to tell him I was okay.
God, what was wrong with me? He was a demon and didn’t need comforting.
But there was something so soothing about the man’s words, he could have told me anything, and I’d have believed him.
His touch felt like he was pushing all the stress and pain from my body, and I was left relaxed.
It was near impossible to correlate the Cade before me now with the monster I had seen in my home, even as my vision grew fuzzy and my eyelids began to droop.
Should I try harder to remind myself they were one and the same?
If my father had taught me anything, it was even the darkest men were capable of love.
Probably not a great lesson to learn, but while everything was falling apart around me, every truth I thought I knew and held close, Cade was this passionate being who made me feel more alive than I had in years.
Let yourself love him back.
Yes.
Yes, angel man, I think I will.