“I don’t.” But he did, and lying about it didn’t change anything, any more than staying up all night reading about hypoplastic left heart syndrome could change a diagnosis. “I don’t blame myself for Max’s death. I blame myself for not being able to make it right for Nicky afterward. We just couldn’t make it right again. For weeks, she didn’t speak, and when she finally did, she said she couldn’t stand looking at me. Every time she looked at me, she thought of Max. She said she cried just so she wouldn’t have to see me through the tears.” He clenched his hands, and the ring seemed to hold the heat, still burning though the rest of him was ice. “No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t love her enough.”
“Is that how it works?” Bella sounded genuinely curious, and somehow the fact she was a demon who wouldn’t know any better made the question reasonable and soothed the raw edges of his wounds. “If we hope and pray enough, should we be able to save a life, save a love?”
“Yes,” he said fiercely. “Otherwise, what does it matter? What does anything matter?”
“Don’t ask me.”
He reversed the clasp of their hands, so he was holding her. “Now do you see why I need to find my abraxas, why I have to defeat Thorne? This holy war is all I have left, and without it… It will all have been in vain. I couldn’t love enough, but with the sword, I can kill enough.”
She eased her hands out of his grip, and the loss shocked the breath from him. He hadn’t realized how much he needed her touch.
“Cyril, that is so…” She framed his face with her soft hands. “…So fucked up. And, yes, I see.”
A surge went through him, a shock from the chill of her fingers, but also a gentler swell that mediated the burn of his hands and the ice of her touch into a strange warmth centered in his chest.
She leaned down and kissed his forehead. “Poor angel-man. The sphericanum asked too much. Even the talyan with all their centuries of sin are not so broken.”
“Don’t pity me,” he warned.
“The tenebrae don’t feel pity. That is too close to mercy.”
“I don’t want that either.”
She tilted her head, the red of her beehive a match to his hands, as if he’d reached into her fire and burned himself. “Then what do you want, angel-man? Don’t make it a prayer, because those I can’t answer.”
“I want, for one night, to forget,” he murmured. “I want you.”
She straightened, doubt sketched into the furrow between her brows. “You want an imp?”
Why couldn’t she be a good demon, happy with lies and his downfall into temptation? He took a breath—as shallow and empty as the house he’d inhabited alone for too many years—and met her gaze steadily. “I want someone who has looked into the darkness. And somehow lived.”
Still she did not waver. “I did not look into that place, Cyril. I am the darkness.”
“And still you fought your way out. That is what I want.”
She stood there so long in a silence so deep he heard only the shush of his pulsing blood, keeping its own time. This was his twisted purgatory: to wait for a demon to give him one night of peace before the next battle.
Then she opened her arms.
He picked her up—her red boots and her big hair were the heaviest things about her—and carried her upstairs to his bedroom.
The master suite was as big and empty as the rest of the house. He didn’t even turn on the light because he didn’t want to see it. Instead, making his way by the dim glow from the chandelier in the foyer, he bore her directly to the bed and laid her in the middle of the indigo duvet.
While he unlaced her boots, she reached up to tug out the pillows, but the tight tuck defeated her. She laughed a little breathlessly. “You make your bed as tight as a chastity belt.”
“Not me. My cleaning crew. I’ve told them to leave it alone.”
“They want to make you happy.” With a mighty heave, she wrenched the duvet and blanket back, revealing the stark sheets underneath. Against the white, the sight of her red in his bed made his eyes widen and his pulse pound.
Slowly, he stripped off his coat, ignoring the ache in his hands. “Now I want to make you happy.”
She knelt in the bed facing him, but her expression was somber. “Forget happy, just make me come.”
“You should fight for more.”
“There is light in that, light enough to hold back the cold and dark.”
“Enough,” he murmured.
“For now.” She reached out and hooked her finger through his third button, the one she had stopped at in her apartment a million years ago when she’d told him she was a demon. “Come here.”
What did it say about him that he was faster on the buttons than she was? He stripped out of his shirt while kicking off his boots, but she held up one hand.
“Wait,” she ordered. “I want to see.”
He stood in front of her, hands clenched, blood raging. It seemed the house temperature control had soared with a vengeance. “What do you see?”
“A man. An angel…” She flopped back on the pillows, her legs coiled to one side. “Why does the angel need muscles like those?”
“The sword was heavy.”
Her clouded gaze drifted downward. “I’m sure it is.”
He didn’t know what she saw, but he felt the response in his body, his erection surging to free itself from the unbuttoned fly of his trousers.
She gave him a smile of such wicked promise all his memories fled, and his scattered thoughts converged to here, now, her. Enough, he reminded himself.
He knelt on the bed beside her and reached for her glasses. “May I?”
“Please.” Despite her permission, her lashes drifted down in a shy flutter.
He eased off the cat’s-eye frames and folded them on the bedside table. “Do they make a difference?”
“To the people who don’t have to look me in the eye.”
He leaned down, poised to kiss her. “What would they see?”
“Nothing.” Her tone pitched to a minor key. “Nothing at all.”
Though he longed to cover her mouth with his, he lifted his head instead. “Look at me.”
Her lashes lifted to half mast, her clouded eyes dark in the shadows beneath. “What do you want?”
“I said already: you.”
She opened her eyes wide, and he stared down.
Without the glasses in the way, the cataract-clouded pupils swallowed her eyes in the low light. He didn’t see the demon, he didn’t see himself, he just saw her, now, here.
With a sigh, he closed the distance between them in a long, slow kiss.
For a moment, her mouth was tense under his, then she parted her lips on a moan and wrapped one arm around his neck, anchoring him to her. The kiss went on and on, tongues and teeth and the hot exchange of gasps fueling the epic caress.
Without parting, he fumbled at her shirt, but the little buttons down the front resisted his big fingers. Finally, he just yanked the last few off and shoved the striped fabric from her shoulders, banishing the thankfully front-clasp bra with it. She tugged at his trousers and boxers, and he shoved them away awkwardly between their tangled legs. She laughed into his mouth, and his heart pounded as if the extra breath had expanded his chest, as if she had made her way into his body with that one laugh.
While she was distracted, he unzipped her jeans and sank his hands into the gap at the waist, sweeping his fingers over the curve of her waist.
She squirmed. A ticklish demon? With her scooted up closer to his chest, he was able to skim the denim over her hips and ass and down her thighs. Refusing to let go of the kiss, he struggled blindly with the skinny jeans at her heels, and she finally kicked them off inside out and gone.
Naked, skin to skin, breath to breath… She arched up into him, her breasts soft and giving against the hard thud of his heart, the tight peaks of her nipples a tease. She traced her hands down his flanks and closed on his ass, fingers driving into his flesh, pulling him closer yet. He angled between her thighs, his cock thrusting toward her, seeking a different kind of possession…