Chapter 31 #3
The sensation peaked as a white-hot, nearly overwhelming, and delicious pleasure-pain.
My toes curled, and my breathing came in shallow gasps—sounding far too close to the noises I made during sex—before the feeling faded.
As Damien lifted his fingers from my skin, I was left with a throbbing heat in my wrist.
I yanked my hand back, cradled it against my chest, and looked down.
On my inner wrist, where Damien had pressed down with his thumb, an intricate and gorgeous golden snake glowed.
Coiled and sinuous, its body wrapped around itself into a heart-shaped knot.
The lines were delicate, artful, exquisitely rendered.
I squinted at it to see that each scale had a level of minute detail that was breathtaking.
He had tattooed me. Without permission. Without warning. Without asking if I wanted to be permanently marked by a demon’s power, branded like property, claimed in a way that went deeper than skin.
Anger bubbled up, and I burst out, “How dare you—”
Rowan reached out to take my arm. “What did he do? Did he hurt you? Let me see.”
“Calm yourself, chico. The pain was pleasurable for her, of that I can promise you,” Damien said with a low laugh.
Rowan bristled. “Fuck you, demon—”
“It is a gift freely given from me to you, mi gatita.” Damien’s voice was velvet soft and filled with satisfaction in every syllable.
He looked pleased with himself. Smug. “It is for when your pride inevitably crumbles when you realize that you do need my help. . . help that only I can provide.” He paused, smiled wider.
“All you need to do is simply whisper my name with intention, with a real longing for me, and I will hear you. Regardless of where you are, regardless of how much time may come to pass, regardless of how desperately you come to regret denying my offer of assistance tonight,” he said as he bowed his head slightly.
“Whisper my name to the snake, and I will come.”
The tattoo pulsed once against my skin—warm, possessive, claiming—then settled into stillness. I still felt it there. Not painfully, but present.
I stared at the golden snake coiled upon my wrist, at the delicate lines that formed runes within its scales.
It was beautiful. Objectively, undeniably beautiful.
It was the kind of ink I’d have gladly paid serious money for if I’d seen it in a portfolio at Inkwell or Sacred Skin or any of the other parlors I’d visited since my rebirth.
It was the kind of art that made other people stop and ask where you’d gotten it done, who the artist was, and how long it took.
Despite that I didn’t choose this tattoo, despite that I knew I should have felt violated for Damien essentially branding me without my permission. . . I loved it.
And damn him for knowing that I would.
Damien returned to his desk and settled back into his chair. He picked up his coffee cup, inhaled the aroma with the appreciation of a connoisseur, took a slow sip while watching us over the rim with those too-knowing amber eyes.
We turned towards the door again. Rowan’s hand found mine, his grip steady despite the exhaustion I heard in his breathing—shallow and controlled, the breathing of someone in pain and trying not to show it. The slight tremor in his fingers said his body was running on fumes.
Again, Damien’s voice stopped us from leaving. “It is a long walk from here to wherever you two are headed. Would you like for me to conjure up a door, mi aves fénix?”
The question stopped me mid-step. I turned, certain I’d misheard. “What?”
Rowan said, “If there is no cost to such an offer.” His voice was cautious, suspicious in the way that came from decades of learning that nothing was ever free.
That generosity from the powerful always came with strings attached, hooks buried in the gift, prices that didn’t reveal themselves until you were already bleeding.
“It seems your dearest boyfriend did not tell you how gods and demons travel, gatita.” He made a small gesture with his hand—barely a flick of his fingers, casual as someone swatting a fly—and reality just. . . shifted.
One moment, there was only a wall next to us. The next moment, there was a door.
Heavy oak that looked centuries old, dark enough to be almost black, with grain visible in the firelight like muscle beneath skin. Iron hinges hand-forged and ancient, the kind of metalwork that belonged in museums or castles or places where history had weight and blood.
Just a door that absolutely, definitely, had not been there a second ago.
My stomach dropped. The floor felt unstable beneath my feet, as if the ground itself had betrayed me by allowing this impossible thing to exist. The air pressure in the room changed—subtle but noticeable, like my ears needed to pop, like we’d suddenly gained or lost altitude.
“Huh,” was all I could say.
“Think of a place you have been,” Damien purred. “It must be a place, not a person nor a time, and it must be a place you desire to go. Then?” He waved his hand. “Open the door and walk through.”
I thought of all the places I could have gone. I needed somewhere to retreat to, somewhere to feel safe, somewhere I could process the overwhelming deluge of this night’s events.
Home? As in my parents' house, my childhood home, my bedroom. I still thought of that as home, and why wouldn’t I? I hadn’t even been at college for a full semester. But then I thought of Daddy, how he would worry and wonder and pepper me with questions as to why I was home.
Dorm? It was where I’d spent most of my nights since being reborn, where I’d spent so much time plotting and planning my vengeance against Edward. But Alice might be there, which would mean that Natalia might be there, too.
Rowan’s? In the short time since we had become lovers, we had made so many memories in his place.
In his bedroom, specifically. I knew that I would feel safe there.
But I was still pissed at him, and as childish as it might have been, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of picking his apartment as my refuge.
Then it hit me, and I realized there was only one place in all the world I could go in that moment to settle my heart and calm my mind. It wasn’t even a question, and I felt ridiculous for even entertaining any other destination.
Before I could question it further—before I could demand clarification on how the door worked or refuse Damien’s offer—I thought of where I wanted to go, grabbed the handle, and opened the door.
And I saw grass.
Familiar grass, autumn-brown and damp with the recent rain, stretched out in a field I knew intimately.
Had ridden through dozens of times. Had jumped fences in.
Had spent hours grooming and training in.
Whenever this second life felt too heavy to carry, when the only thing that seemed to make any sense was the rhythm of hoofbeats and the simple joy of speed and movement and freedom.
The Shademore Equestrian Center.
The stables.
Hyacinth.
The intense warmth of Damien’s study collided with the cold night air beyond the door, creating a fog that rolled across the grass. The field was empty, dark except for the distant lights from the stable buildings casting yellow-warm glows that didn’t reach this far.
Yes, I thought, realizing that somehow the door had known I wanted—needed—to ride Hyacinth. Only rushing through the fields on my baby could help me forget everything, even if only for a moment.
Rowan started to ask, “Is that—”
A soul-wrenching sound tore through the air, a scream shattering the silence.
High and piercing and wrong—the kind of sound that reached down into your guts and activated every prey instinct evolution had instilled over millions of years.
Not a human scream, but unlike any sound I’d ever heard an animal make.
It was a sound of terror and pain braided together into a noise that I knew would haunt my nightmares until the day I died.
It came again, closer and more panicked.
“No,” I whispered as horror ripped into my chest, stole both my breath and balance. My heart stopped, then slammed into overdrive, pulse pounding in my ears, drowning out everything else.
My horse.
My baby.
He was screaming.
I ran.
Didn’t think. Didn’t plan. Didn’t slow from Rowan shouting my name behind me, his voice sharp with warning and fear. I just ran—through the impossible door, through the space that shouldn’t exist between Damien’s study and the fields behind the stables.
My hands hit earth as I stumbled through, as momentum and portal-physics and my own desperate speed sent me sprawling.
Grass met my palms—cold and damp and real.
Blades tickled between my fingers, bent beneath my weight.
The ground was soft, yielding, saturated from earlier rain that had turned the equestrian center into a swamp of mud, grass, and horse shit.
The impact jarred through my wrists, up my arms, into my shoulders. Pain sharp and immediate that grounded me, proved this was real, proved I wasn’t hallucinating or dreaming or trapped in some nightmare my brain had conjured.
The smell hit me next. Wet earth and manure and autumn decay—leaves rotting in piles by the fence line, grass turning brown as winter approached, the particular organic stink of a stable that never quite left even when you were fifty yards away.
Compost and hay and horse sweat and leather and the sweet-sour smell of grain.
And beneath it all—
Blood.
The night air slapped me cold and sharp, stealing the breath from my lungs. My exhale came out as visible mist, the temperature having dropped into the low forties while we’d been in Damien’s study. Cold enough to make my fingers ache, my ears burn, my breath catch.