are nonexistent. Precious metals are as common there as dirt. We do whatever pleases us.”
“Sounds more like Heaven than Hell.”
“Heaven is overrated. Too many rules.”
She looked down when she laughed that time. Something about the shy aversion of her eyes and the sound of her laugh was making me...feel...something. But my brain kept confusing whatever overwhelming feeling this was with a desire to squish her, as if I could find an outlet for this annoying emotion by just taking her face in my hands and squeezing.
I managed to resist.
“What did you do there?” Her question snapped me out of my fantasies of affectionately crushing her. “For fun?”
She wasn’t cleaning my wounds anymore. She was listening with rapt attention, waiting eagerly for what I would say. “There’s plenty to do. There’s —”
“No, no, what did you like to do?”
I hesitated. Talking about Hell was strange; talking about myself was even stranger.
“I...I liked to…” Fuck, it had been so long. “I liked to explore. To wander. I wanted to see the edge of Hell, see all the places even others of my kind wouldn’t go to.”
Wandering into the unknown, with hardly any plan and no expectations, was the wildest I’d ever felt. To lay in a dark woodland where no demon had set foot for millennia, or find some ruin of a city the old Gods built, was my freedom.
“You miss it,” she said softly.
“Every day.”
Our eyes locked. There was something about those wide brown eyes that felt as warm as her hand, as bright as the sun, as deep as the forest. Eyes that were searching my face for answers, for insight, as if she could crawl inside my head and nest there like a little bird.
“That damned curiosity of yours,” I said softly. “I was like that once. I think I envy you, to still look at the world with such fascination.”
“You can still,” she said, frowning. “Why not?”
“If you live in the dark long enough, you’ll forget what the light feels like.”
She looked like she wanted to argue, and she tossed the cotton ball aside, back on the coffee table. When she turned back, she laid her hand against my chest again.
“It will heal better now,” she said. “Just...keep an eye on it.”
“I have more important things to keep an eye on. It’ll be fine.”
“You can drop the tough guy act — you have a bloody open wound on your chest that’s likely infected,” she pursed her lips irritably. “I don’t know if demons can die, but it would probably be better if you didn’t.”
“It’ll take more than a few beasts to kill me.” I cracked my neck, and winced when the movement sent sharp pain from the wound down through my arm. “We can die, sure, but I’d have to be ripped to pieces — unable to heal fast enough to keep up with blood loss and shock. It would heal faster with rest but...I have to find the grimoire.”
“You can sleep here,” she said. “The couch is pretty comfortable.”
I tweaked an eyebrow at her. “Trying to tempt me to stay? You’ll have to offer more than a couch.”
She glared. Her hair had fallen forward, the soft black strands partially obscuring her face. I tucked it back behind her ear, my fingers brushing over the multiple studs and rings pierced through her cartilage. The sight of them made my cock twitch.
“Indulge me, doll,” I said. “Convince me to stay. Tell me your deepest, darkest desire.”
My darkest desires were tucked away in the back of my mind, the kind of things I’d only hinted at to my previous partners yet hoped they’d somehow figure out. They weren’t the kind of things I had any experience in speaking out loud, and his request made me protectively shove those wickedly secret things even deeper.
“I don’t know.” It was a lame answer, and by his expression, he knew I was lying, immediately.
He rolled his eyes, and a bizarre pressure squeezed the back of my neck. “Oh, come now, Raelynn. Don’t play coy with me.”
“Stop doing that.”
“What?” His crooked smile was anything but innocent.
“That little mind game...trick...thing.” I shuddered at the sensation of fingers running over my scalp. “I know that’s you. It’s...weird.” Weirdly pleasurable, in a way that made my mind feel void of anything but lust.
“Does it scare you?” His eyes widened. He was a sight to behold like this: entirely naked, fresh from the shower, so close that I could trace the lines of his tattoos under my fingertips. “I