Pandora's Box - Eve Newton Page 0,5
wrapping her arms around me and sliding her hand up to the back of my neck.
She sighs and pulls away a moment later, her eyes searching mine.
“I’m ready,” I croak out, needing her to know that I’m not afraid of her and her newly revealed role as the Anti-Christ.
“No, you aren’t. You’re doing this to prove to yourself that you’re okay with what you now know about me,” she says, her eyes lowering as she kicks the bat at her feet gently.
“I am,” I insist. “I want to be with you.” I know that I do, I know what it entails.
She shakes her head, looking back up at me with those remarkable green eyes. “You have no idea how hard it is to say ‘no’ to you right now, Gregory, but I have to. I can’t let you in unless I know you’re one hundred percent committed to me and this life.”
“I am committed to you,” I say, anger getting the better of me. She is telling me how I feel, and it is pissing me off.
“Anti-Christ,” she says and then presses her lips together.
Okay, I flinched. How could I not? She has the ability to end the world with two footsteps on the Earth’s soil.
“See,” she whispers and turns from me,
I grab her arm, not wanting her to go. “Annabelle, please, listen to me…”
A stinging pain shoots through my hand and up my arm. I stumble back to see Drescal leaning casually up against the wall behind us.
“The lady said, ‘no’,” he says.
I grimace at him as Annabelle tuts. “That’s not fair, Dres. Don’t use your powers on him.”
If I’d thought I was angry before, that was an understatement. My temper zings up a notch as she defends me against having my arse kicked by Drescal’s magick. So, she has a point. I wouldn’t stand a chance against a nine-hundred-year-old Demon, but it still stings.
“I’m ready and I will prove it to you,” I snap at her and turn on my heel to stalk off.
“Gregory, wait!” she calls after me, but I ignore her.
I don’t want to discuss this further with Drescal hanging around and a part of me hopes she will come after me.
She doesn’t.
It doesn’t surprise me. There is no reason in Hell, why she would chase me.
I sigh and make my way back to my rooms on the ground floor. I pull up short as I realize that I’m living downstairs, while they are all residing upstairs.
I make a decision. One that I would never have contemplated making before I came here. I storm through my office and into my bedroom. I start to pack up the few belongings that Annabelle bestowed on me and the fewer things that Shax went back to Earth for, a few weeks after he abducted me. I stuff it all in the holdall that Shax handed me wordlessly such a short time ago but seems like forever. Not in an all bad way. I just feel that I have lived here longer than I have.
I march back out of my bedroom and back through the office, heading for the main staircase in the residence. Ascending them two at a time, I arrive at the top and look all the way down the long corridor to Annabelle’s bedroom door.
Then I count a few doors down and walk over to the one that sits four down on the left. Judging by my count, I expect it to be unlived in.
I’m right. It is made up, nice and tidy, but belongs to no one.
Until now.
“Making yourself at home?” Devlin asks, appearing next to me in a swirl of black air.
“Why not? Everyone else is,” I snap, still pissed off at Annabelle’s rebuff.
“She’ll be pleased,” he replies, ignoring my shitty attitude.
“Sorry,” I murmur, feeling the need to apologize for my mood.
“She wants you, but if you decide that Hell isn’t for you… you’ll hurt her. She is, for once, thinking with her head and not her heart,” Devlin informs me.
“Hell is for me,” I retort. “She gave me an out and I stayed.”
“I’ll ask you again in a hundred years.”
“I’ll be dead by then.”
Blue eyes sparkle. “Like I said, I’ll ask you again.”
I smirk at him, ignoring the spike of fear that races through my veins at his words, and putting on a front. “Sure thing.”
“There are ways to prolong your existence,” he starts, but I hold my hand up.
“Don’t. We’ve already talked about that.”
“I doubt you discussed all of the options,” he says.
“And?”