was a particularly interesting species of insect that he wanted to dissect with thorough, scientific focus. Then one corner of his mouth tipped up, a sly gleam in his eye.
“That must be vexing,” he drawled.
Bastard. He wasn’t going to tell me, was he? Well, I could shoot right the fuck back.
“You know,” I said, putting my hands on my hips, “you might have tried to manipulate your way out of the contract, but all you did was ensure that we’d end up here.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“I hate the idea of marriage.” I leaned forward. “I have since I was fourteen. If you’d done your research on me, you’d know that. You’d know that springing random marriage proposals on me would make me abandon that relationship faster than your wings catch fire. By manipulating the men in my life to propose one after the other, you made sure I never had a long-term relationship with the potential to naturally change my mind and let me accept the idea of real commitment with strings attached.” I gave him a smile that was all teeth. “You ruined this.”
The look that flashed across his face would have been comical under different circumstances. For a second, a glorious second, real surprise flickered over his features, mingled with disbelief and bafflement. I had an inkling that his control rarely slipped, that he usually kept his true emotions on a tight leash and only showed a calculated version of himself, allowing rage and aggression out but suppressing anything else.
It would make sense for a demon raised in Hell, I guess.
So this little slip, this brief glimpse at a raw, untempered reaction, was a glimmer of victory in a war I hadn’t realized I was waging. It gave me a weird kind of satisfaction.
His expression shuttered in the next instant, the cracks of fire in his skin closing up before my eyes. How surreal to see cinematic special effects in real life, my brain supplied helpfully.
“Enjoy eternity alone,” he murmured as he stepped back, drawing the shadows into himself again.
He was at the door before I could shake myself out of my stupor.
“Wait!” I called out.
Too late.
The door fell shut behind him, and a horrible click sounded with the finality of a nail being driven into a coffin.
My breath hitched, and I rushed to the door. Pulled on it. To no avail. It didn’t budge.
He’d locked me in.
I pounded on the metal. “Azazel!”
My answer was silence, the only sound that of my own labored breathing, the pulse in my head, and the crackling of the torches.
That motherfucking bastard.
I’d expected obvious torture, instruments of pain, the punishment of burning. I’d feared being flayed alive or chewed up by a hellhound, maybe being subjected to an endless rerun of the Cats movie.
I had never entertained the idea of being tortured with solitary confinement.
I was an introvert by nature, I did well with being alone, doing my own thing, enjoying the quiet.
But even the most reserved person needed some form of connection. Input beyond books and her own thoughts.
I would wither away here, driven to insanity by the stifling silence of my separation, by the tricks my mind would start to play in an effort to find something to do. I had seen what happened to zoo animals whose exhibits were too small for their wild nature. Broken gazes, numbed instincts, mindless pacing within a tight space that defined their existence.
A poem I’d once read by Rainer Maria Rilke resurfaced from the depths of my memory, about a panther staring out through bars into a world he couldn’t grasp anymore, his vision filled only with the limits of his own enclosure. Pacing in ever tighter circles, his mighty will paralyzed, any and all memories and impressions that make it through the fog in his mind find their death in his heart.
I remembered being moved to tears by the words, by the image they painted.
That same helplessness and despair now crawled through me, drawing the picture of my own future in the same forlorn strokes.
A dry sob wanted to claw its way out of my chest.
No.
I would not cry. Not for myself. I’d already shed tears for my mom, for the people I cared about and the loss they’d suffer with me gone, but I would not weep for my own future—because I would make sure it didn’t resemble that of a panther crippled by captivity.
If that cantankerous douche of a demon thought he could just put me in storage here