me back against a hard surface.
“Pet,” a familiar voice said from behind me, the deep baritone rumbling through my back pressed to his chest. “She’s my pet.”
The weird spell I’d been under effectively broken, I blinked, wanted to shake my head...only Azazel’s hand still on my mouth held me fast. His fingers smelled faintly of leather, metal, and fire, and inhaling his scent catapulted me back to that moment during the flight over here when I’d given in to the urge to lick his skin.
Heat centered low in my belly, and I clenched my thighs to alleviate the sudden ache between my legs.
“Pet?” the other demon asked, his curious gaze now focused over my head, on the irritatingly hot male clutching me to him.
“A special deal we made,” Azazel said nonchalantly, and if it weren’t for the tension in his hand, I’d have believed him to be completely relaxed and in control. “She is to serve me here in her human form in repayment for a debt.”
Excuse me?
I widened my eyes and grabbed on to Azazel’s arm, trying to dislodge his hand from my mouth. I might as well have attempted to move a full-grown redwood tree by shoving at it. Outrage building inside me, I tried to speak, which of course came out as pathetically muffled mumbling.
A push against my mind, a weird popping sensation in my head, and then I heard Azazel’s voice like my own thoughts, much like the hellcat’s words had somehow sounded directly projected into my head.
You better play along.
Out loud, he said, “Unfortunately, she is still a bit rough around the edges.” He wiped a trail of blood from my cheek with his other hand, making me quiver. “She shouldn’t have been wandering around my house on her own. More training—” now his free hand settled around my throat, and my traitorous nipples pebbled underneath my tank top and bra “—will ensure she remembers how to obey...and please.”
His teeth closed around the top of my ear. My legs, the fiends, threatened to turn to cooked spaghetti.
You have got to be kidding me, I thought with as much force as I could muster, hoping to push back along the same line of mental communication as he’d done. You’re passing me off as your...submissive sex pet?
Your powers of deduction are astounding, he said in my mind.
The other demon raised a brow, a glint of humor in his lavender eyes. “I didn’t know you had such inclinations, Azazel.”
A soft laugh from my devious demon husband. “She begged to be of service. And who am I to refuse a human offering when it lays itself so sweetly at my feet?”
Oh, no, he didn’t. Before I knew what I was doing, I bit his hand and twisted out of his hold in the second of surprise.
I opened my mouth to—
Do. Not.
Azazel’s growl filled my mind, shocked me enough to falter.
Outwardly, he was the epitome of calm, poised and in control as ever, not a single dark hair out of place, his power a velveteen caress.
Inside my head, his energy scratched me raw. An acrid scent permeated my mental senses, and it took me a second to realize its nature.
I closed my mouth, stared at him in dumbfounded amazement. You’re afraid, I whispered with a mental push.
Lightning flashed in his eyes as he glared at me.
I didn’t hear what the other demon said next, my thoughts racing, putting the pieces together.
Azazel didn’t want his visitor to find out the true nature of our relationship, that much was clear. And the taste of panic underlying his snarled warning not to divulge the truth hinted at the reason why… I thought of how both Azmodea and Mammon had taken the news of my “tricking” Azazel into a marriage contract as something to be weaponized against him, albeit with familial affection and a teasing intention.
What would someone outside his trusted family circle do with this information? If this was enough to get him a hundred years of being lovingly picked on by his sister and nephew, what would the revelation of this secret do to his reputation among other demons?
At first, I’d thought he was trying to humiliate me by passing me off as his sex pet. Now, though, I realized it was the other way around—he was the one who didn’t want to be humiliated in front of his peer by his shameful secret getting out.
Talk about a chink in his armor. This was much more than that. All this time, he’d