Demon King (Claimed By Lucifer #1) - Elizabeth Briggs Page 0,25
them handsomely too.”
And now we were back to the demon talk. It had to be some sort of quirky billionaire eccentricity—a way to amuse himself when he could already afford every other sort of amusement in existence, no doubt—but it was really getting old. Of course, it would explain what I saw earlier today… But no. There had to be a more reasonable explanation for that.
Lucas caught my hand and pulled me close, still laughing. “Dance with the devil?”
Maybe he was crazy, but as he drew my body flush against his, I found myself melting in his arms. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to want to pull away from him. I soon lost myself in the song and the feel of Lucas’s hard chest pushing against mine. Though he was much taller than me, his masculine body molded against mine perfectly, and the sense of rightness I felt in his arms was unlike anything I’d ever felt before.
His hand on my bare back led me across the floor, and for a few minutes all I knew was the pounding of the bass drum and the tingle where Lucas touched me. I couldn’t deny how much I wanted him at this moment, even if getting involved with someone like Lucas was a terrible idea. Even without his obvious eccentricities, he was powerful, and it was the kind of power tainted by danger. He bargained for the things he wanted but couldn’t buy, and fear as much as lust slid cold fingers down my spine as I considered my position at his side.
When the song ended and another one began, Lucas left his hand lingering on my back and turned me toward the bar. “Come, let’s get a drink.”
We walked toward the bar, and many people stopped to notice us, especially the way his hand claimed me. There would be no doubt in any of their minds that I was Lucas’s woman, at least for tonight. For all I knew, he had a new woman on his arm every week.
As the thought of that made my stomach clench, someone in the crowd shouted. We both turned and watched as something on the stage exploded with a burst of light and a deafening boom, setting off multiple screams in the audience. One of the screams might have been from me.
The members of The Hellions ran off stage as blue flames shot into the air, quickly engulfing everything and spreading unnaturally fast along cords and into the audience somehow. People began to run toward the exit in a panic, while Lucas wrapped an arm across my shoulders and turned us away from the conflagration.
“Ignore it,” he said, as he signaled to someone on the sidelines to deal with the fire. “It’s all an illusion.”
“What?” I glanced behind my shoulders as the flames danced across the pool’s water, my head spinning and my heart pounding.
“An illusion. Imps can create them. Someone is causing a distraction, though I’m not sure why.”
As he rushed me away from the burning stage, I spotted Zel running forward with Gadreel and some others, presumably to put out the fire…or whatever you did with illusions. Then the panicked crowd swallowed us up and I was bumped into by several people. In the chaos, I was separated from Lucas and surrounded by strangers, while blue flames suddenly sprouted up near us, so close that many people jumped and screamed. I took a few steps back, until I was pressed up against the wall surrounding the edge of the roof, but the flames kept coming while people around me tried to escape.
Then something hard and fast plowed into me with such force it sent me flying.
No, not flying. Falling.
The sudden force of the collision knocked all air from my lungs as I somehow went over the wall of the roof and plummeted toward my death. I couldn’t even scream, because I couldn’t suck in any air. Time slowed as I suffocated on my own panic, my limbs flailing, trying to grab onto something, anything, while my body dropped toward The Strip below me.
Then it hit me—I was going to die.
My life didn’t pass through my eyes. There were no moments of clarity. Instead, I felt only regret for all the things I hadn’t done and for not finding Brandy, along with an unexpected pang of loss for not getting to finish my seven nights with Lucas.
There was something else too. A sense of inevitability. As if I’d always