Chapter 31 #2
“Oh, mi aves fénix. . . how very romantic.” His smile was all teeth and knowing amusement. “Or perhaps this is just foolish. I confess, I do not possess the foresight to tell which.”
I said nothing. Couldn’t trust my voice not to shake, not to reveal how close I was to changing my mind, to grabbing his offer with both hands and damn the consequences.
His knowing smile told me that he enjoyed my moral struggle like a fine wine. “Tell me, mi gatita, does your boyfriend know what you are sacrificing for him? Does he understand the weight of the gift you offer with your refusal? Does he understand just how much you lust for the blood of this man?”
“That’s no one’s business.”
“Oh, but it is.” Damien leaned back in his chair, crossing one leg over the other with casual grace.
“Everything that happens within my domain is my business. Every choice, every sacrifice, every delicious moment of indecision.” He picked up his coffee cup again, inhaled the aroma, and sipped.
“And you, gatita, are positively aching with indecision right now.”
Rowan’s grip tightened on my hand while the other clenched into a fist. “We’re leaving,” I said over my shoulder as I turned to leave. “No deal. No contract. No help finding Edward. We’re done.”
“Hold,” Damien said, but the word sounded. . . odd? The tone and timbre of his voice sounded off, sounded heavy. It was spoken as neither a request nor a command, but more of a simple statement of fact.
We stopped walking away and turned to face him.
Damien set his coffee cup back down before he stood. “There is still the rather significant matter of the boon he owes me for the death of my good friend Jules,” Damien said, pointing to Rowan. “I would be remiss if I did not insist upon something in recompense for such a tragic loss.”
“Tfu! As I told you once before, High Demon, you may have my silence as a boon. You will get naught else from me.” Rowan took a step towards Damien, placing himself between me and the demon. “If you are unhappy with that offer, then strike me down and be done with this farce.”
You idiot! My pulse thundered in my ears as the image of Damien’s hand ripping Rowan’s heart out swam in my vision.
The thought of his body crumpling to the floor, the same as Jules’s, like a puppet with its strings cut, impaled me with a spike of fear.
I knew Rowan was fearless to a fault, but even he had to recognize that whatever the hell a demon like Damien was capable of, this was neither a fight he could win nor a person he could intimidate.
Unless. . .
Unless Rowan knew Damien wouldn’t risk the relic that seemed so important to him. Unless he was willing to gamble his life—possibly both of their lives at this point—on the assumption that Damien needed him alive to find his way to some lighthouse. Whatever that place was.
Damien studied us for a long moment. I felt his amber eyes peeling me apart layer by layer. Then he let loose a full-throated laugh that filled the study with its rich warmth. The sound bounced off leather-bound spines and polished wood, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere.
“Very well, chico.” He picked up his coffee cup and raised it in our direction before taking another slow sip of coffee. “You may both leave the Second Circle. For now.” The implication hung heavy—but you'll be back.
Just like that.
No threats. No bargaining. No attempt to sweeten the deal or point out everything I was throwing away. Just. . . his permission. Like I’d asked to be excused from a dinner party rather than walk away from the only solid lead I’d had on Edward’s location in weeks of searching.
My muscles trembled with exhaustion and spent fear, but I forced them to hold steady. Forced myself to straighten my back and keep my chin up. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me crumble. Wouldn’t let him see how much walking away from this was costing me.
My legs nearly betrayed me as I turned and walked towards the door.
The adrenaline crash hit like a truck—hours of terror, revelation, murder, and resurrection all caught up at once.
Jules’s death. Rowan’s secret. This entire negotiation with a demon who killed as easily as breathing and smiled while doing it.
Rowan shuffled beside me, and I knew he had to be in agony—the slight hitch in his movement, how he cradled his wrist, the tremble in his limbs. Pain flashed across his face, and I could only imagine how his body must have felt after coming back from being dead.
Being resurrected wasn’t the same as being healed, I suppose. He’d been beaten, slashed, and bitten tonight before being drained nearly entirely of blood. His wrist was barely functional, badly swollen. He was running on pure stubborn willpower combined with his obsessive compulsion to protect me.
And I almost traded him to a demon.
The thought made bile rise in my throat, acid-sharp and bitter enough to water my eyes. As we neared the door to the study, I sniffled at the thought of losing him to Damien, which prompted him to check on me.
“Violet, are you okay?” he asked, timbre low and hoarse.
“Honestly? No, I’m not.” I released an exhausted sigh, crossing over the plush rug. “But I don’t think anybody would be after the night we’ve had. I’m still pissed at you, by the way.”
“For dying?”
“No, you idiot,” I said. “That you’ve already lived a life before. . .”
Rowan reached for the handle to the study’s door as he said, “Well, my reincarnation is not exactly the same as yours, Levi’s, and Charlie’s. It is—”
“Ah, I nearly forgot,” Damien’s voice called out behind us.
Every muscle in my body locked down. Here it comes. The twist. The double-cross. The revelation that we can’t simply walk away from a High Demon after declining his offer. Surely there would be consequences for wasting Damien’s time—for rejecting him.
I turned slowly, Rowan’s hand still gripped in mine like a lifeline.
Damien moved around his desk with that liquid grace that made the mundane act of walking look like a dance, as if his feet barely touched the ground. He approached us with measured steps, each one deliberate and unhurried, stopping close enough that his scent wrapped around us both.
Again that smell of smoke and red wine, but now there was also a hint of coffee, sandalwood, and something distinctly carnal—the scent of sex and sin and a pleasure so intense it rolled off him in waves and saturated the air like an intoxicating fog.
Part of my brain screamed to run, while another part begged for him to come closer.
The heat from his body reached me even from two feet away, fevered and inviting and wrong.
He extended his hand towards me, palm up, fingers long and elegant and still faintly stained with Jules’s blood that no amount of silk handkerchiefs could fully cleanse.
The stains were russet-brown now, dried in the creases of his skin, under his perfectly manicured nails.
“May I please have your hand, gatita?” His voice was honey and smoke.
The phrasing was polite. Courteous, even. The tone of someone asking permission rather than demanding compliance.
But I had a feeling that nothing about Damien was truly a question. Just opportunities to consent to things he’d already decided would happen.
I hesitated, every instinct screaming don’t touch the demon, but the combination of curiosity, exhaustion, and the sheer weight of the past hour won out. “Why?” I heard myself ask.
“I have a gift to bestow upon you. You may consider it my own version of recompense for how this evening’s events have played out. . . regardless of who may or may not have been at fault.”
Rowan squeezed my hand. “Violet? We do not accept gifts from demons. Let us go.”
I knew he meant well and that he understood a whole helluva lot more about all the supernatural shit we’d found ourselves in. But I was still mad as hell at him.
Against my better judgement, I reached my hand out and placed it in Damien’s.
The warmth radiating from his palm against mine was shocking.
No, not warm. Hot, like he’s all fire inside.
His flesh was impossibly soft, no calluses, no scars, perfectly maintained in the way that came from never doing manual labor, never struggling, never bleeding for anything.
His fingers closed gently around my wrist, turned it over so my hand was palm up.
The pad of his thumb traced a line from my palm to my pulse point, the touch impossibly delicate, as if he was savoring the moment.
His skin against mine sent heat crawling up my arm and made my pulse spike beneath his fingers.
Then he pressed down.
Heat flared beneath his touch—not quite burning or painful, but intense.
Like liquid gold poured directly into my veins, spreading up my arm in waves of sensation that stole my breath and kicked my pulse into a gallop.
It was pleasure and pain braided together so tightly they became indistinguishable, building to a crescendo that felt obscene in its intimacy.
The heat spread up my arm, across my shoulder, down my spine. My skin flushed hot, then cold, then hot again. Every nerve lit up like Christmas lights, oversensitive and overwhelming.
Oh my god, was the most intelligible thought I could manage.
My knees went weak. Heat pooled low in my belly, slick and urgent and completely wrong given the circumstances.
Rowan had died, had come back, had lied to me.
Jules was dead. We were in a demon’s study in the basement of a nightclub.
I should not be getting aroused—should not be biting back a moan—while this thing pretending to be human caressed me.
But my body didn’t care about what it should do.