21 Beelzebub
Beelzebub
I couldn’t fucking get enough of this little angel. Her scent had taken over half my brain, and every time I looked at her, another piece of the night came rushing back. Nick kept going on about her wings, but I hadn’t seen those yet. I had seen plenty of everything else, though.
I knew how her thighs tightened around my head when she got close, how her voice changed when I curled my fingers the right way, and exactly how hard she grabbed my hair when I used my tail with my mouth.
Every time I looked at her, another reaction came back to me, and the glutton part of me immediately wanted to know what else I could make her do.
I still didn’t know what the fuck to do with the fact that Temptation had spent most of her existence believing she was an angel, and sorting through everything I’d ever been taught about Heaven was the only reason she was currently pouting at me from the corner instead of sitting in my lap.
I’d finally made myself put some distance between us after spending entirely too long with my mouth on her, and apparently she considered that a personal offense.
She was curled into the corner of the couch in my shirt, watching me like she was waiting for me to lose whatever restraint I had managed to scrape together.
I definitely wanted to go back over there.
My mouth still remembered the taste of her, and every time she shifted beneath my shirt, my attention dropped to her thighs before I could stop it.
But I needed a fucking minute. We all did.
There were too many questions pressing against the inside of my skull, and if I gave in every time she looked at me like that, we were never going to get through a single one of them.
I shifted my cock in my pants yet again and tore my eyes from her long enough to stare at Nick and Luc. They had to know something was wrong with this whole situation. Stumbling onto me didn’t feel accidental anymore. It was too convenient, too neat, and Dante didn’t do neat without a reason.
“Alright, I need someone to start explaining. Now.”
Ari made a soft sound from the couch and immediately ruined any chance I had of sounding threatening.
I looked over before I could stop myself.
Her head had tipped back against the cushion, her legs shifting beneath my shirt just enough to flash a strip of bare thigh, and I had to drag my attention back to the room before I decided questions could wait another hour.
A slap cracked across the back of my head.
“Snap out of it,” Luc said. “It gets easier after a while. Took us like three days. But you’re Gluttony, so…”
I rubbed the back of my skull and glared at him. “You could’ve just used words.”
“I did. You weren’t listening.”
Nick snorted from the counter. “He really wasn’t.”
The problem with all of this was that I knew more about impossibilities than either of them. Not enough to make any of this simple, but enough to know that Dante had been setting pieces in motion long before Ari ever walked into the Pink Flamingo.
Find the impossibilities.
That had been the assignment. No explanation beyond what I needed to identify, where I might look, and enough scattered information to keep me occupied. Dante had always been good at that. Give someone just enough to make them useful, never enough to make them comfortable.
I did everything in excess, and the need to complete whatever he put in front of me had consumed me for months.
Why I’d ended up bouncing at that particular club was still anybody’s fucking guess, but finding Temptation there after all of that didn’t feel random anymore.
Neither did the way she had looked at me in the alley, or the way my body had settled around hers like some part of me had been waiting for her without knowing it.
“You look like you know things.” Nick leaned against the counter, glaring at me. “Spill ’em.”
I thought about telling him to shove it, but that would only wind the room tighter, and we had already learned how quickly Ari reacted when the three of us started pushing against each other. Coming back here had been bad enough.
I’d spent half the night with my mouth between her legs while Nick and Luc watched, both of them getting progressively more irritated every time I told them to stay where they were. I probably should have felt bad about monopolizing her, but I didn’t.
Once I finally let them close again and we tried to have an actual conversation, Nick and I discovered pretty quickly that we didn’t see eye to eye, and it wasn’t just about what to do with Ari.
We had managed to start several arguments in the last few hours, usually with him getting hotter while I dug my heels in harder. Ari kept drifting closer whenever it happened, touching one of us and then the other like she could feel the tension building before either of us admitted it.
The weirdest part was that it helped. Nick still irritated the fuck out of me, but the second Ari wedged herself between us or put a hand on my arm, some of the need to keep pushing eased off.
I didn’t know whether it was Ari, the bonds, or something specific to Temptation, but whatever sat between us seemed to react hardest when Nick and I were at each other’s throats.
With one last grimace in his direction, I finally answered.
“Look, it’s fucking weird that Temptation spent most of her life in Heaven and nobody knew what she was.
I know you told me she isn’t an angel. Fine.
But she still lived up there, and everything I found on impossibilities said the same thing.
There aren’t enough of them for anyone to know what the fuck their bonds are supposed to look like.
Nothing I read prepared me for three of us locking onto the same person. ”
“But we’re twins,” Nick shot back, like that somehow solved anything.
“That doesn’t make this less weird.” I rubbed a hand over my jaw. “There are supposed to be limits to what angels, demons, and IDEAs can become, but apparently Dante knows where every fucking loophole is.”
Ari appeared beside us so quietly that I nearly jumped. Her eyes went straight to Nick first, that same look she’d been giving him all night settling over her face until some of the heat drained out of his expression. “So we don’t even know which rules are actually rules?” she asked.
“That’s the problem.”
She looked to me for more, and I dragged both hands through my hair before letting out a long breath. “Dante loves loopholes. The seven of us are proof of that much.”
Her brows pulled together. “Seven of you shouldn’t exist?”
“Not the way we do. At least not according to anything I found.”
“But if that’s true, then what keeps everything from just…” She made a vague motion with both hands. “Breaking?”
“I don’t know.” I hated saying it, mostly because there was a time when I would have torn through every book I could find until I did. “That’s the part nobody ever writes down.”
Nick and Luc both stilled at that, the same question sitting between them even if neither one said it.
I resisted the urge to drag Ari against my chest. She had that little crease between her brows again, and I wanted to smooth it out with my thumb, kiss it away, then keep going until I found another sound worth remembering.
My cock had been hard on and off since she curled up in that corner, but strangely, getting her naked again wasn’t the only thing I wanted.
I wanted her close enough that I could feel her breathing.
“That’s why this is an impossibility,” I said. “Not because I have some clean answer for what you are. Because none of the clean answers fucking fit.”
Ari tapped my arm, and my eyes went straight to her bruised lips before I managed to drag them back up.
She had no idea what she was doing to us, did she?
Had Nick and Luc explained any of this properly, or was she just going along because that was what Heaven had trained her to do whenever someone with more authority told her what came next?
The thought irritated me more than it should have. I didn’t want her touching me because some bond made her think she had to. I wanted her to reach for me because she wanted me.
“You’re thinking really hard,” she said.
I nearly laughed. “That obvious?”
She nodded and this time I gave in, wrapping an arm around her waist and dragging her against my side. She settled there without hesitation, and the simple weight of her against me loosened something in my chest.
“Nick and Luc know most of the basic mate shit,” I said.
“Dante had me studying impossibilities. Problem is, there isn’t much to study.
Half the records contradict the other half, and there are so few impossibilities that nobody has enough examples to call anything a rule.
” I glanced toward Nick and then Luc before looking back at Ari.
“Three bonds forming around the same impossibility is already something I never found in the records. Seven would be fucking unheard of.”
Ari’s brows pinched together. “So you don’t actually know what happens?”
“No. And that’s the part I don’t like.” I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck.
“What I think I know is that whatever sits between us reacts when we’re out of sync.
Nick and I normally grate against each other.
Wrath wants to explode. Gluttony wants to keep consuming whatever feels good until there’s nothing left.
Put us together long enough and shit gets destructive. ”
“Even right now?”
I turned to look at her as she reached up and brushed her fingers along my cheek.
Her palm was warm, fingertips softer than I expected after the way she had yanked my hair earlier, and I turned my face just enough to press my mouth against the center of her hand before catching it and holding it there.
“No,” I said quietly. “I don’t hate him so much when we’re with you.”
It felt weird to admit, but it was true. Nick was still annoying as fuck. I just didn’t feel the same urge to keep pushing every time he opened his mouth.
Luc finally cut in, though Ari didn’t move out of my hold.
“So we have three bonds already, Dante is deliberately putting her in front of the rest of the Sins, and none of us know what happens if this keeps going. Great.” His jaw tightened before he looked at me.
“I still want to know how he managed to create seven of us.”
“And that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.
” I let Ari’s hand go only so I could rub both palms over my face.
“Seven Sins shouldn’t have been simple to create, especially not seven that can keep existing independently of him.
Dante had to find some kind of loophole, bargain, counterweight, something. I just don’t know what.”
Nick snorted and shook his head in disbelief.
I couldn’t imagine what it felt like for him and Luc.
Dante was complicated for all of us, but they had actually grown up under him.
Most of what they knew about themselves came from the person we were now realizing had been keeping half the fucking picture hidden.
“What are we supposed to do, then?” Nick asked. “We can’t just ask him what his plans are. We tried that and he talks in cryptic circles until everybody wants to throw him through a wall.”
His eyes had gone darker, Wrath sitting close enough to the surface that the red was beginning to show again.
Ari pulled slightly away from me and looked between the three of us for an answer. I couldn’t blame her. She had been dropped into the middle of all of this with even less warning than we had.
“Find the others, I guess,” Luc said. He didn’t sound thrilled about it. “Figure out what Dante told them. See what matches and what doesn’t.”
“That’s probably the best place to start,” I said.
I had one advantage over them. Dante had sent me looking for impossibilities long before Ari appeared, so I had already learned not to take his explanations at face value.
Luc and Nick had grown up under him. They questioned him, sure, but until Ari arrived, they had trusted the rules he taught them. That trust was cracking fast.
I also wasn’t next in line for Dante’s throne.
That particular headache belonged to Pride and Wrath, and for once in my life I was grateful there was something I didn’t have to want.
Luc and Nick had Dante, Ari, the rest of the Sins, and an entire realm sitting on their shoulders while everything they thought they understood had started coming apart.
I just had to figure out why Dante sent me searching for impossibilities before Temptation ever walked into my bar, and somehow that didn’t feel like the easier problem.