nights and planted seeds of hope in my young, pliable mind. He’d taught me how to call my fire and spoken of a world where people lived in steel and glass towers. He’d given me the true gift of freedom. I bested my owner and escaped the netherworld with Akil. He taught me how to be human. How to live in this world. He was my first love, the first to hear my laughter, the first man to summon desire in me, to make me feel like a human woman. He’d shielded me when the demons wanted me dead simply for being a half blood. He’d protected me when the Institute planted a spy in my bed. He’d done all of that, and I’d walked away from him. I’d washed my hands of him and all things demon. He’d promptly tried to get me back in the only way a Prince of Hell knew. He’d set me up, tested me, roused the demon within, and tried to get back what he’d lost. I turned on him, drained him of power, and shoved him back through the veil, where the netherworld hadn’t wasted any time in stripping him of his title and probably more. He’d even protected me from myself when I’d lost control and almost killed innocent people.
When he’d believed me dead, he’d grieved, not like a demon who laments that which they could have possessed, but like a man, who’d lost the only thing he truly needed in life. I only knew that because he’d let his guard down and begged me to love him like a man, not a demon. He didn’t understand it. Neither did I, not really.
And now he thought I’d turned on him again, lured him into that alley with promises. I’d asked him to free me of Damien, and he believed my words were a web of lies spun to trap him.
Now he was in that room, chained up like a rabid beast, not demon, not man… Something locked partway between the two. God, what was I going to do? Even if I did somehow get him free of this facility, I couldn’t stop him from destroying the Institute at a time when we needed them. Yet, we needed Akil too. He wasn’t technically on anyone’s side but his own, but he had been helping us, and if Val was coming, bringing half bloods with him, I wanted Akil by my side. Nobody could deny the two of us together made a formidable weapon. We’d beaten back a Larkwrari demon over the skies of Boston. Together, we could take on anything the netherworld threw at us.
I had to convince the Institute to let him go: a seemingly impossible task. Adam would never release his prize catch. Sabine might. Could I somehow convince her that freeing Akil now was the only logical solution? Free him and pray he doesn’t turn around and burn them all. It might already be too late. What if PC34 had a lasting effect on him? What if by subduing Mammon, it altered his human vessel? What if Akil was changed?
I had to see him, talk to him. Surely, there was still hope he was in there and could be reasoned with. Jerry had said it might be possible to burn PC34 out of our veins. He’d also said it shouldn’t have any effect on Akil. I could hope it was all a ruse, right? If not, he might kill me the second I stepped inside that cell.
The darkness crushing my heart gave a painful squeeze. I winced, clenching my hand around my coffee, and tried to ride it out. Then there was that little issue. Without Akil to undo my soul-lock, I was effectively the Mother of Destruction in waiting. Tick-tock, tick-tock. My time was up. I needed Akil to do whatever it took to get the sick bastard poisoning my soul, out of me, or I was as good as lost.
“How deep does your relationship go?”
I looked up at Sabine beside me. I’d not heard her return and didn’t feel quite up to fake smiles and biting my tongue. “Deep.” I bowed my head and lost my gaze in my coffee. “So damn deep I can’t see the bottom.”
“I have a theory about demons. They are not so unlike us. I think, perhaps once, we were the same. Wherever we came from, evolution, or cosmic intervention, we share too much with them. Look at you, a half blood… An