Chapter 35
Dante
IT HAD BEEN DAYS SINCE Serenity woke up and started getting back to herself.
We sat in her favorite spot—the round window seat in the library.
A fire crackled softly in the hearth. I leaned against the rounded window pane while she sat between my extended legs.
Her body fit against mine, like I’d been designed with her in mind.
She rested the back of her head against my chest, and she played with my palm, drawing little lines and shapes over the skin.
“Can I ask you something?” Serenity queried softly, still drawing little symbols into my hand.
“Of course,” I answered immediately.
“What were those voices I heard when we were in your head in Hell?”
I pressed my lips together on instinct. I’d kept my past and the results that came from it to myself for so long.
Only Zagan knew the full extent of it. I’d tried to open up to her, even briefly, that night on the bridge.
I’d wanted to give her the reason for why I’d done what I had.
But even then, I couldn’t stomach the words.
I couldn’t dig up what I’d worked so hard to bury.
Serenity turned between my legs to look over her shoulder at me. She searched my troubled gaze and squeezed my hand. “It’s alright if you can’t talk about it. I understand.”
She did understand. The rocks and walls keeping my story contained began to crumble until I felt the truth rising up my throat.
Maybe it was because I’d found someone who understood the suffering of silent trauma.
Maybe it was because I’d almost lost her to the demons in her head.
Maybe it was because I finally realized that, just as I was her safety, she was mine.
Whatever the reason, I no longer wanted to keep anything from her.
Swallowing hard, I looked at our joined hands. “There was a human woman named Isesu. She was a widow at only twenty years old with a small son. Akhom.”
I closed my eyes against the memories of his small, tan face and big, bright onyx gaze.
The tug on my sleeve when he wanted me to carry him, the gentle tenor of his laugh as I chased him around the field, the warmth in my chest as he told me he wanted a dad like me.
The memories were so fresh, he could’ve been standing before me now, smiling his toothy grin as he always had back then.
Clearing my throat, I opened my eyes to stare at Serenity’s hand, which I squeezed gently.
“Isesu’s husband died early, leaving her and her infant alone.
I stumbled upon the two of them in the street one day as I was searching for a meal.
They were doing the same. Food for an Incubus like me was trickier to come by back then because of traditional values, so I typically had to work a bit harder to find someone to feed off of.
I usually bedded those who were married, women with children, ladies and gentlemen of the night, widows, and so on.
I knew I’d be safe from getting bonded to a virgin that way. ”
“Like Zagan and Iyla?” Serenity asked.
I nodded. “Exactly. Like Zagan and Iyla.” I blew out a breath and found myself back in the memories. The dirty and worn clothes hugging Isesu and Akhom’s skinny bodies were a picture permanently seared into my brain.
I pictured them now as I went on, “Isesu was sobbing because someone had just stolen what little money she’d had, and … little Akhom, at only four, was trying to console and protect his mother.”
He’d stood protectively over her where she’d fallen to her knees in the streets, a small hand on her back and determined chin held high. He’d been looking around for something he could do for her.
“I knew it wasn’t my place to help,” I said with a shake of my head.
“I wasn’t there for that. I existed to seduce humans.
I introduced them to the thrills of embracing the side of themselves that they were told was wrong.
But … I took pity on the little boy trying so hard to be brave for his weeping mother and decided to lend a hand.
I bought them a hot meal and even got them set up with some lodging.
Akhom immediately took to me, and even though I’d never had an urge to be a father, something inside of me liked being that figure for him. ”
Baba! Baba, look at me!
His voice still called to me the way it did when he showed me how he could lift a heavy basket of barley. I’d patted his dark head and took the basket from him while telling him how proud I was of how strong he’d gotten. My son, I’d called him.
“What was supposed to be me helping them once turned into weeks with the two of them, and each day, I started to feel more and more human. I forgot what I was and became a man who could and wanted to raise Akhom and care for his broken-hearted mother. I thought maybe, just maybe, a demon like me could have a family. I could be more than a monster people told horror stories about.”
The somberness strangling me morphed into a violent ball of hatred as I growled, “But it was all a lie.”
Serenity’s eyes widened as she listened to me recount the tale of my stupidity, my fall from hope to anguish.
“Isesu wasn’t Akhom’s mother. She wasn’t a widow.
She was a member of a secret group of occultists who had worshipped dark magic and coveted demons.
They’d learned about Incubi and realized we were easy to bind to their will if they could get us to sleep with a virgin.
They had been trying to enslave one of us to their group and had apparently seen me bedding a human and shedding my human guise in a moment where I thought I was hidden from view. I … I’d walked right into their trap.
“Akhom was actually the group leader’s son, and they’d certainly trained him well.
He was a very good actor, even at such a young age.
” I couldn’t help the acrimony bleeding into my words.
I couldn’t help snarling, “I learned that the hard way when I took to Isesu’s bed and was instantly bound to her after claiming her virginity.
She and the group she belonged to kept me prisoner for decades in a well outside of their village. ”
For a moment, I was back there. My legs and waist were submerged in dirty water while the rough stones cut into my bare back and the metal shackles burned against my wrists and ankles.
The man-made bindings that should’ve been powerless against a demon kept me prisoner due to the command of my bond.
The sun beat down on me from the small hole above me, but that wasn’t as bad as when they sealed the small ray of light with the cover.
The sound of my own breath would bounce off the stones until it felt like I was going mad in the cramped and cold hole.
“Isesu’s group had done their research, most likely with the help of a different class of demon who liked seeing the torture of others, even if it was their own kind.
The group knew the incantations that an Incubi’s bond could say to control them.
So in that dark, wet well I lived, alone and chained to the rock walls. ”
It was an experience many Incubi had to endure.
Individuals or groups of dark worshipers would keep us locked up in some miserable place like a well.
In Zagan’s case, he’d been captured and kept in a coffin that the greedy group hid beneath the pulpit in their dark church.
Perseus had been bound and shut away in a tight crevice of a mountain cave, the space occasionally flooding with the Grecian sea.
None of us found freedom until Coldin came along, the vicious demon that he was.
Only after he’d brutally murdered our bond, the key to our imprisonment, were we able to take our lives back. And our revenge.
It was part of the reason we’d agreed to let Hell’s killer join our band.
Sure, he already had a knack for beats, constantly tapping and making rhythms in his stone cell of Hell, but I was pretty sure our lead singer was also secretly grateful to the Letum demon for what he’d done for me, Zagan, and Perseus.
Even though Coldin had only killed our bonds as a job from the Big Man, he was still the reason we’d managed to get out.
We’d all been in a miserable situation from bonds; however, Zagan and Perseus hadn’t been swayed into feeling for the bonds they’d been tricked into.
Isesu and Akhom’s group didn’t have to get my heart involved.
They could’ve had Isesu open up to me on night one, caging me to their whims much sooner.
But they’d drawn it out, wanting me to fall for the woman and her son as a family of my own.
They wanted to control me, not just with food, but with my heart, too.
Serenity’s face had gone pale, and her hand shook as she squeezed mine.
I laughed ruefully. “I only got to come out when they needed me for something—making their crops grow, even during the harshest of seasons, accruing wealth and status for them within society, killing off those who opposed them or stood in their way. The worst was honestly becoming their own personal sex show with Isesu. It was the perfect entertainment at their orgy parties.”
My heart began to race with deep-rooted hatred for myself and everyone who’d crossed my path back then.
My body shook as I practically panted through quick, angry breaths, “They’d taken something as beautiful and natural as sex, the very thing I was made to do and loved doing, and warped it into this fucking nightmare.
I’d get sick to my stomach every time they called me in to have sex.
I fought against Isesu and my own body, trying so fucking hard to not enjoy what was being used against me.
I hated Isesu. I hated that group of people. I hated what I’d once loved.”