25. Eyes Like Fire
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
EYES LIKE FIRE
DEKE
“ R eady?”
After having my mate in my arms—in my bed —the whole night, the last thing I wanted to do was go see my siblings. Not when there were so many places left on her perfect body to kiss.
Taste.
Mark.
Un-fucking-fortunately, Nate had been correct. There was a lot to discuss.
Aurora looked up at me from where she sat on the couch.
Christ, she’s beau ? —
My thoughts were interrupted by her loud cry, and my muscles tensed, ready to fight whatever was behind me.
“Your eyes.” She jumped up and closed the distance between us. “I didn’t notice them this morning.” Her cheeks burned red, but her lids went hooded. “It was dark in the bedroom, and my thoughts were otherwise occupied. Didn’t you see them in the mirror after your shower?”
“Mirror was fogged up. What is it?”
But she was already dragging me through the apartment to the bathroom.
Not that there was much dragging necessary. I would follow my mate anywhere.
“Look.” She jabbed her finger toward the mirror. “You said my curse was a gift, but it’s not . It’s a curse. And the curse spread.”
“Aurora, if you call it a curse one more time, I’m gonna fuck you so hard, you don’t doubt your perfection again. Or it permanently knocks the word from your vocabulary. Whichever comes last .”
Her mismatched eyes met my own newly mismatched set. In a soft, sultry voice, she slowly said, “Curse.”
I reached for her and hoped the bathroom sink was sturdy since I intended to give her the fucking of a very long lifetime on it. But she dodged me, throwing a carefree laugh over her shoulder.
“Your siblings are waiting.”
“Let ’em wait.”
“Evil is lurking.”
“Let it lurk.”
“You already had me during the middle of the night and this morning.”
“There’s a limit now?” I caught her belt loop and yanked her back to me. Her breathy oomph when her body hit mine was enough to harden my cock. “The day I stop craving you is the day you can?—”
“Let me guess, it’s something with your left nut?”
“You have a filthy mouth,” I muttered, my gaze dropping to stare at that filthy, fuckable mouth.
She tried to keep us on track. “Your eyes are exactly like mine now.”
“Opposite.”
“What?”
“My black is your blue and your blue is my black. Completing each other. Balance.”
“Oh. Why do you think it happened? And why aren’t you freaked?”
“No idea and nothing to be freaked about.”
She let out a cute growl. “Well, I’m freaked enough for both of us about this damn curse. My eyes?—”
Fuck it.
Palm to her head, I gently pushed. There was no hesitation or resistance. Aurora folded to her knees, the pupils on those gorgeous eyes blowing with her desire.
Her need for me.
Grabbing her chin between my thumb and crooked index finger, I tilted her head back and looked down at her. I let myself take the time we didn’t have. “Your eyes are like the darkest night and the brightest dawn. Each beautiful in its own way. If you think I’m disappointed to share something else with you, you’re wrong.”
My hands went to my belt buckle, and she dropped her gaze to watch the way the tendons and veins flexed. I could feel her attraction to them.
“They’re hands, my one.”
At my words that weren’t spoken out loud, her head shot back so quickly, I thought she’d keep going and tumble.
“Don’t eavesdrop on my thoughts. And they’re good hands. Touch me, and I’ll prove it.”
Her attempt to talk was choppy, cutting in and out, but I could piece it together.
Another layer to our bond.
Another expectation exceeded.
I finished undoing my jeans and reached in to free my cock. Pre-cum dripped from the tip as I watched her tongue swipe across her bottom lip.
Holy fuck, she’s gonna make me blow my load just from the way she looks at me.
I squeezed the shaft before releasing it to skim my finger down it. A tremor went up my spine and tightened my balls as I swiped at the sticky liquid that steadily leaked. “What did I say would happen if you called it a curse again?” I pressed the coated fingertip past her lips. She swirled her tongue around it, her lids lowering as she let out a happy moan.
The same noise she made when she ate my cooking.
A noise I’d fantasized about hearing when her mouth was full of something else.
I pulled my finger free, and she tried to get up.
I didn’t let her.
“You said you were going to fuck me,” she pouted.
“I am. But I never said what I would fuck.” Wrapping her golden ponytail around my hand, I gently jerked her closer. “Open wide, baby.”
“You’re late.”
“Sue me,” I said to Nate as Aurora and I entered his house.
Through the front door.
After knocking.
“Another attack?” he asked. “Did something come up?”
Denny and Juno both snickered, but it was Denny who said, “Something came up all right…”
“Ha.” Juno grimaced. “But also, eww.”
Nate looked between them. “What am I missing, hellion?”
She pointed at me. “His eyes.”
“I noticed. The mate bond. It happened to all of us.”
Confirms what I suspected about the changes in theirs.
“Do you remember what we were doing to bring on that change?” Denny asked.
A wide grin spread across his face. “You gave me your love.”
That hasn’t happened with Aurora.
Yet.
I risked a glance at her, but her expression was blank.
“Yes. And once you had a soul again”—Denny waggled her brows—“I gave you something else, and your eyes changed.”
“Oh. Ohhhh .”
“We done?” I bit out.
“Nope,” Juno said, but she walked into the living room and flopped onto the couch next to Stellan.
I wasn’t going near the bay window, so I took the desk chair and pulled Aurora onto my lap—without fear of her doing bodily harm to my dick.
I’d assumed it was over, but Juno smirked at Aurora. “So… worth the five-day wait?”
For the love of fucking angels.
Expecting my mate to get embarrassed, I opened my mouth to tell my sister to cut it out, but Aurora answered first.
“Worth joining a cult for.”
“Nice. Again, also eww. But nice.” Thankfully, she turned her focus on our brother. “How’s retirement? Picked up golf yet?”
“Today is my first day off. I’d hoped to spend it in bed with Lilith, but those Absolve bastards have to ruin everything.”
“Don’t cross those plans out yet,” Lilith said. “Everyone talk fast.”
The other two took their default spot, and Nate grabbed a notebook.
“We need more than that.” Juno lifted her arms and spread them, and a shimmering whiteboard stretched across the entirety of the room. The timeline with all our individual variations was mapped out. No matter where we sat, the entire thing could somehow be seen. It was impressive.
It also had an unhinged-serial-killer edge to it thanks to the scrawled notes, photos, and length of magicks yarn.
Aurora stood and pointed at one of the photos. “I know him.”
“You know Thomas Hale?” Nate asked.
“Or maybe as Corey Willard?” Stellan added.
“No. I know Steve Jones. And I don’t actually know him. He’s the guy from my vision.” Adrenaline or fear—or both—made her tremble as she paced in front of the expansive data.
I was going to go to her, but I didn’t have the chance to move.
She sought me out.
Sitting on one of my thighs, she lifted her feet to my other one and wrapped her arms around her bent legs. I added my own arms, holding her tightly.
Her tremors stopped, but she remained rigid.
Hesitating for a few beats, she gave the room the bullet points of her relationship with the dick bag. She didn’t go into the same detail with them as she’d shared with me, but it was enough to make me tempted to reanimate the dust and bring the sorry bastard back to life, just so I could slowly and painfully take it away.
That wasn’t in my skill set, but I was sure I could find someone capable of giving me a hand.
I didn’t say any of that to Aurora. She didn’t need me interrupting the story that was already difficult to tell, and it wasn’t about me. My job was to comfort her, so that was what I did.
She continued by telling them about the vision of him handing her over to Steve Jones—the representative from some church.
Through the whole thing, her back went straight. She released her defensive hold on herself. Her legs lowered, and her chin lifted.
Fuck, she’s strong.
She might not have needed support, but she still got it. And not just from me.
“He groomed you,” Juno seethed.
Aurora shook her head. “No, he?—”
“He isolated you, groomed you, and abused you.” She bolted to her feet. “Let’s go back to that house so I can kick that dust around. No, let’s swing by to get Tom and Victoria from Lea and then we’ll let them shit in his ashes.”
“That’s a nice offer. A gross visual, but a nice offer. But I’m at peace after getting that closure.” She smiled, and nothing about it was forced. “I will take my dog back, though.”
“They’re at the dog park now, but later. For the shitting-in-the-ashes thing.”
“The house was empty,” Stellan reminded her before speaking to the group. “We swung by and checked.”
Juno grimaced. “Right. Well, still. I want to do something.”
“Maybe we’ll luck out, and you’ll get your chance for some mayhem.” He tore his smiling focus away from her to pull out his phone as he asked Aurora, “What was the name of the church?”
“Beacon of Absolution.”
His thumbs moved across the screen at a blur, like he’d been souped up by Juno’s magicks. “Nothing.”
“There has to be something.” Denny got up and nudged our chair out of the way before starting her computer. She spoke as she typed. “I’m not an IT expert or anything, but I’ve had to find accidentally deleted files or website landing pages before. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the internet is forever… Except apparently this. There’s no record of any church by that name. Not a trace of anything online. Not even old data.”
“There has to be. I saw the emails. He went to a service in Portland.”
“There are churches. An abandoned one. But nothing by that name.”
“The abandoned one,” Aurora said.
“What about it, my one?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I didn’t get that far. But it’s making something fuzz at the back of my mind. I think maybe they held the service there to make him think it was legit?”
“We need to focus on finding a way for you to get these visions without going catatonic,” Juno said, surprisingly serious as she looked from Aurora to me. “And test if the mate bond gave you anything.”
Nate turned his attention to me, too. “What did you find out from Heaven?”
“Not much,” I said. “Levi wanted Aurora, but?—”
She whipped around. “The devil wanted me ? Why? What’d I do?”
I could feel her heart pounding since mine sped up to match it. “Juno sent a message to him when you said you were his creation. He wanted to see if it was true, that’s all.”
“Who’d you draft on your angel fantasy league anyway?” Juno asked.
“Uriel.”
“Of course. Her name. His ink. The light archangel. As in, the archangel of light, not like a weird diet angel.”
“All the uptightness, half the calories,” Lilith whispered.
Everyone else looked at my arm despite the fact my flannel covered my tattoo.
“We go through this every time, yet no one else has bothered to pick up a baby name book or research the archangels.” She sighed, throwing her head back onto Stellan’s arm. “Aurora means dawn. His tattoo is of the sun at the tree line. The light angel is… Well, that one’s self-explanatory.”
Nate tried to steer the conversation back on topic, but I lowered my mouth to Aurora’s ear. Keeping my voice low so only she could hear, my lips brushed her skin. “My dawn after a lifetime of darkness.”
A small tremor went through her. I wasn’t sure if it was my words or the gentle touch. I liked it either way.
“You mentioned a possible Absolve encounter,” Nate said to me as Juno added Aurora’s info to the board.
I told them the gist of my relationship with Marissa. Even though I didn’t go into much detail, Aurora’s jealousy radiated from her until she looked as murderous as I’d felt.
I was a sick fuck because her possessiveness had me fighting a hard-on.
I was contemplating getting us out of there when the song “Sympathy For the Devil ” blasted in the room.
“What the hell?” Denny grabbed her phone to see if that was where the music came from.
“More like who in the hell,” Levi corrected, standing in the corner of the room.
“What happened to the little jingle?” Juno asked.
“You mentioned entry music. I decided to lean into it.”
“I approve. Can you hook me up with some?”
“Maybe. We’ll brainstorm later.” Unbuttoning his jacket, he put his hands in his pockets and crossed one of his ankles over the other. “Right now, I’m here to meet my daughter, who isn’t actually mine. I’m sure of it now. I’ll still answer to Father—though that’s usually reserved for heavenly roleplaying. Dad. Papa. Papi? Daddy?—”
“How many deals do you think you can make if I cut that tongue out?” I gritted through clenched teeth. Because devil or not, if he kept flirting with my mate, I’d make Hell look like a playground compared to what I’d do to him.
He held his hands up in surrender. “I just wanted to meet the last mate.” He scanned Aurora, but it was clinical. “You’re old.”
“I get you’re the ruler of Hell…” Aurora muttered, scowling at him.
“Not like that. At the risk of your mate taking an axe to my legs—or the slightly shorter third one hanging between them—you’re as beautiful as the others. But your soul is old. Much older than your body.” His head tilted.
And then he was gone.
“Where the hell did he go?” I asked.
Aurora crossed her arms. “Now you see how it feels.”
“Sorry, my love.”
My words were barely free of my mouth when they swirled. Twisted. Spiraling around the room and through my head like something physical. Sentient.
When they faded to an echo, Aurora and I were no longer at Denny’s. We were in an unfamiliar house. Floor-to-ceiling windows showed we were up on a cliff with crystal-blue waters crashing below us. As far as I could feel, no one was around for miles.
No one except Levi.
“Know you’re here,” I called.
He entered the room. “You called her your love. She’s enjoying that—along with a slight freak-out. I wasn’t sure if it would turn into a fight or a fuck, so I was giving you privacy.” He gestured to a table on the other side of the room. “If you opt for the second one, that table is reinforced and unbreakable.”
Continuing to be a sick fuck, I was tempted.
Un-fucking-fortunately, Aurora didn’t seem to be. She scanned out the window. “Where are we?”
“One of my homes,” Levi said.
She inched closer to me. “Why?”
“A private matter that I didn’t know if you’d want to discuss around the others.” He raised a brow at me. “But I knew better than to take you without your mate.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“If it were possible, would you want answers about your family and your accident?”
Her jaw dropped. “What?”
“If a devilishly handsome man. A smart man. A man with raw sex appeal and a giant?—
“We get it,” I cut in.
“Heart,” he continued, “had information, would you want to know it?”
She nodded so quickly, I worried she’d give herself a headache. “Yes. Of course. Tell me.”
“Even if it’s unpleasant?”
“Nothing can be as unpleasant as not knowing. Nothing .”
“You were in an accident,” Levi started.
Aurora’s body deflated. “I already knew that.”
“Not the hiking one. A car accident fourteen years before that. On your sixteenth birthday.”
“Math has never been my best subject, but this definitely isn’t mathing.”
“You’re originally from New Hampshire. You were heading home after a birthday dinner with your parents. Your car was hit, and all three of you were killed instantly.”
“Absolve?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Death isn’t always nefarious. Sometimes it’s just stupid and reckless and pointless. Unfortunately, the plan for The Four and their mates was created long ago. No one knew to take into consideration how destructively stupid humans would become.”
Panic seized my heart. “I thought she was immortal.”
“She is. Now.” He tipped his head. “At least, we think. But that builds due to the mate bond. At the time, she was just human.”
She threw her arms out. “The two things I confidently knew were my name and age. And it turns out half of that was wrong.” She sighed. “Though I guess this explains why I never felt my age. So how did I end up in the middle of Arkansas fourteen years later?”
“When your soul reached the intake desks, the angels knew there was something special about it, but not what. They brought you into Purgatory. It was actually how they found Juno’s soul hanging around. Anyway, you were placed there for safekeeping. Once the universe said it was time, you were brought to Arkansas.” He gestured to me. “To the same spot you were blasted to after the battle in the church.”
“A few centuries apart.”
He lifted a shoulder. “It’s not a perfect science.”
“My parents… Are they with you?” When Levi just looked around, she clarified. “In Hell. Are my parents in Hell?”
“Oh. No. They’re lovely people. Lilith’s father has been teaching the angels about history from a human’s point of view. They join in some days. Denny’s lovely grandmother runs a raucous book club that your mother frequents. Reading is a shared love between the four of you.”
Aurora grinned. But it fell as quickly as it’d formed. She looked like she was battling between crying and anger. She landed on both, tears streaming down her cheeks as rage made her voice tremble. “Why did they have to wipe my memories of them, though? Couldn’t I have kept something? A blurry image. Their laugh. Something .”
“That wasn’t us. That was the accident.” She opened her mouth, but he beat her to it. “I wish I could give them back to you, but unfortunately, some things are so severely damaged, no one can fix them. Not even me.”
“Is that it?” At Levi’s chin lift, I wrapped an arm around Aurora and tried to take her home.
Nothing happened.
“Wards,” Levi explained. “Before I send you back, why did you think you were my creation?”
Aurora told him about the exorcism, the foster fuckhead’s words, and the scar on her chest.
“How I got linked to an upside down cross, I’ll never know. I’m not one for jewelry to begin with, but especially not something so tacky. I am, however, one for righting wrongs where I can. Do you want to keep the scar?”
“What?”
“Is it a badge of honor? A reminder of what you’ve overcome?”
“I have that reminder just by being here,” she said. “By being alive.”
He waved a hand over her chest. “Then another wrong is righted by yours truly. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a matter in Arkansas that needs my full attention. The apartment or Nate and Denny’s?”
Since our meeting had been cut short, it would be smart to return.
But Aurora answered for me. “Apartment.”
A sharp smirk curved his mouth, and he winked. “Have fun.”
Less than a second later, we stood in the apartment.
In the bedroom.
Naked.
I was, at least.
Aurora was naked underneath one of my unbuttoned flannels.
I would’ve sent a prayer of thanks to the generous bastard, but all thoughts left my head when I raised my gaze to see Aurora’s was locked on me. And not my eyes. My dick surged at her hungry stare.
“Come here, my one,” I rumbled, taking a step toward her.
She stepped away.
“Aurora.”
Raising her gaze—slowly—she met my eyes. “You called me your love earlier.”
“I did.”
She opened her mouth before closing it again, seeming to choose her question carefully.
I didn’t make her.
Closing the distance, I speared my fingers into her hair and used my hold to tilt her face and pull her onto her toes. Keeping her as close to me as we could get without me being inside her.
Which I would be.
Soon.
But not before I laid it out so there was no misunderstanding. “Do you want to know if you’re my love, Aurora? You are. Not because of the universe or being mates or any of that shit. I told you I wanted you because you’re you, and I love you for exactly the same reason.”
“I love you, too,” she whispered, blinking back tears.
Blinding dawn.
Having her was already brightness after centuries in the dark. But at having her love, it was a searing brightness that surged through me to warm that spot in my chest that I never thought would be filled.
That always felt hollow.
Not any longer.
My lids closed, and my head hung back as I savored that moment. That fullness. And then my mouth took hers in a desperate kiss until I couldn’t wait any longer.
But she wasn’t done tormenting me.
Grabbing my hand, she pressed it to her tit. “Can you believe the scar is gone? I thought I’d be cursed with it for the rest of my life.”
“What did I say?” I asked.
She blinked up at me, forcing innocence despite her lust-blown pupils. “I don’t remember.”
“On the bed, ass up.”
She didn’t hesitate. Not for a second. Positioning herself as ordered, I skimmed a finger through her pussy.
Soaked.
Always soaked for me.
Pushing the flannel out of my way, I gripped her hips to position her how I wanted. My fingers dug in as I slowly sank into her. Taking my time. Watching as she stretched around me. Loving the way she tried to rock back, greedy for more.
Once planted fully inside her, I ordered, “Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“And I fucking love you.”
It was fast.
Rough.
Ruthless.
Unable to hold back even a little, I fucked my mate with brutal intensity. And she took it all.
Loved it all.
Because she was made for me.
Mine .