by Larissa Ione
“I don’t think you’re a slut,” he said softly. “And …” This was going to hurt. “I’m sorry for implying that you were.” Yep, ouch. He and apologies didn’t get along. “I just assumed you had some experience. Was I wrong?”
She sighed, and most of the tension melted out of her posture. “You’re only my second. My first… didn’t go well. We only did it once.”
He fucking loved that answer. He wrapped his arms around her and tugged her back into him. “Why just the once?”
“My power. When I…get excited…I lose control of it. That’s why it came out that night with you.”
He frowned. “Then why didn’t it attack me just now?” When she didn’t respond, he traced his fingers over the gentle slope of her shoulder. “Regan?”
“It’s gone.” She paused, as if struggling to find the right words. “I think it’s got something to do with the pregnancy. Please don’t tell anyone.”
“Don’t tell The Aegis, you mean.”
She didn’t answer, so he shifted back to the original topic, but he wouldn’t forget. “Did you kill the guy?” He kind of hoped so. He didn’t like the idea that there was a male out there who had touched Regan.
“No, but it was scary. I swore I’d never have sex again.” She shivered, and he immediately dragged a blanket up over her.
“And then I came along, and you thought you didn’t have to worry about your ability hurting me.”
“Yes.” She rolled over, with a little effort if her grunts and groans were any indication. “I’m sorr—”
“Don’t. Remember what I said about that? It didn’t hurt me.” He lowered his mouth to Regan’s, a kiss meant to comfort her, but the moment their lips met, heat ignited. His hunger for her was all-consuming. Dangerous. Undeniable. “And it sounds like both of us have a lot of catching up to do.”
Twenty-three
God, sex with Thanatos was good. Even when he wasn’t inside her, his touch and voice alone worked her up.
“Come here,” he said roughly, as he rolled onto his back and lifted her so she was straddling his waist. He lifted his hips to penetrate her, but horrid memories gripped her, dragging her back down into the guilt Thanatos had asked her to leave behind, and she tried to scramble off him.
The last time they’d been in this position, he’d been restrained, and she’d been…taking him.
“Thanatos,” she whispered, fighting his hold. “I can’t do it like this.”
“Let it go, Regan.” He skimmed his hand up her ribcage to her breast, and despite her misgivings, she arched into his touch. “I wanted it. We both wanted it.”
“But you had no choice.”
He’d cupped her cheek, his palm warm, the calluses firm. “Neither did you.” With exquisite tenderness, he brought her hand to his mouth, where he kissed her knuckles. “Take away the fury and death, Regan.” His lips were satiny against her skin. “Only you can do that. Only you.”
Tears scalded her eyes. Dear God, he was amazing. Dizzy with desire and some other emotion she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—put a name to, she began to rock on top of him. His hands caressed her, stroked her, encouraged her. This was nothing like their first time. This was how it should have been.
“That’s it.” His dark, guttural voice rumbled through her in a wave of heat. “Take me.” He surged upward, his shaft plunging deep, his pelvis lifting her off the bed.
His expression was intense, eyes wild, and when his lips parted to reveal the white points of his fangs, the first contractions of a climax coiled inside her. Those things were wicked sexy, and she wasn’t even going to ponder why she thought that or why she wasn’t denying it. Instead, she reached out and stroked one.
Thanatos let out a growl that should have terrified her, but the reaction that came with it made her want to do it again. His urgent thrusts crashed into her harder, faster, and his grip on her grew tighter, more possessive. And when she took the fang between her finger and thumb and caressed the smooth surface, he roared in ecstasy.
Bucking beneath her, he came in a hot, wet flow, triggering her orgasm. The pleasure crested twice, massive surges that left her gasping for breath and collapsing bonelessly next to him when it was over.
“Damn,” he breathed. “Holy … damn, that was good.” He shifted so he was facing her and tenderly brushed her hair away from her face. “The fang thing? We’ll have to remember that.”
For next time. The unspoken words were there, hanging awkwardly between them. Well, maybe it was only awkward for her, because she had no idea where this thing between them was going. He’d taken the months-of-pleasure thing back, but what if she still felt like giving it to him? She owed him so much, but the reason she owed him had grown to include the fact that no one had ever made her feel so valued.
Not even The Aegis.
His hand and gaze roamed her body, light, soothing sweeps that seemed oddly like petting, as if he were showing Styx affection. The only place he wasn’t touching, though, was her belly. Smiling, she took his hand and put it just above her navel. It was funny—endearing, really—the way he was so tentative and unsure about handling a pregnant woman.
But then, she supposed that when you mainly dealt with violence and death, new life must be bewildering.
And talk about bewildering … she was still overcome by everything that had happened tonight. He’d come in from out of nowhere, his eyes full of murder, and then his energy had morphed into something else. The lethal, electric rage had still been there, but somehow, it shifted focus from violence to sex.
“Thanatos?” She idly played with one of his nipple rings. “Why did you say that when you were gone, all you could think about was me?”
On her belly, his hand stilled. Just as she thought he wasn’t going to answer, he grumbled, “I said it because sex makes a male stupid.” He took her hand in his and brought it to his lips. She liked it when he did that, which was good, because he did it a lot. “And because it’s true. Usually when I’m trapped in a mire of hate and the need to kill, no other thoughts break through. But since you’ve been here, there’s been a sexual fever rushing through me that gets worse when I’m angry, or like today, when I’m forced to a scene of death. It felt like I could burn off the violent energy with sex instead of blood. That’s never happened before, and I could only think of you.”
“Do you think it’s because we’d had sex and it woke up that sex demon side of you?”
“Yeah. Ares and Reseph always found that to some degree, sex could use up energy that would otherwise cause them to kill.”
“It’s weird,” she said, “that for you guys, sex can stop bad things from happening, but it’s the opposite for me.” She bit down on her lower lip. “Well, until now.”
“Why don’t you want The Aegis to know you’ve lost your ability?”
She shrugged, not fully understanding it herself. The Aegis had condemned the ability as a curse, but at the same time, it had made her the only Guardian who could handle certain assignments. With that gone, all she had left was her psychometric gift, which was handy, but so limited by the fact that it only worked on skin and ink.
What if she lost that, too? She was a good fighter, but so was pretty much everyone in The Aegis. She probably knew more than anyone about vampires, but it wouldn’t take another Guardian long to catch up to speed, and if she couldn’t share what she knew about the day-walkers, she didn’t have much of an advantage over anyone else.
“I guess I worry about what they’ll do.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know… demote me back to a regular Guardian.”
“They’re assholes,” he muttered. “I don’t trust them.”
Which meant he didn’t trust her, either, but she couldn’t blame him. “I do. They took me in when they should have killed me, and they taught me to have control over my abilities.”
“On Ares’s beach, you said your father was put down. What about your mother?”
�
�My mom gave birth to me and left me on the doorstep at Aegis Headquarters before doing a death-by-demon.”
“She found a demon to kill her?”
“Basically. The Aegis had been taking casualties from a nest of demons hanging out in some electrical tunnels nearby. She armed herself, went in, and took out as many demons as she could before one killed her. It was a suicide mission, and she knew it, but she saved a lot of lives.” Val had found her body and the voice recorder she used to chronicle her kills. “So anyway, instead of killing me, like protocol demands, they put me with foster parents … other Aegis couples.”
“Couples? Plural? Not one set?”
She nodded. “The first couple divorced when I was four, and neither of them wanted the responsibility of raising a kid like me alone.”
Thanatos cursed. “Are they dead?”
“No.”
“Do you want them to be?”
She laughed. Thanatos definitely took his Horseman name to heart. “It’s okay. I barely remember them. The next couple kept me until I was nine, when my foster mother, Jean, was killed in a car crash. My foster father was so distraught that he left The Aegis, so everyone thought it was best to put me with another Aegis family since my psychometric abilities had fully developed.”
The move to the new family had sent Regan into a tail-spin of depression and emotional outbursts. She’d lost the only home she’d ever really known, from her foster parents, to her house, to their black lab puppy named Buster. Even though Kevin, her foster father, had been strict about Regan’s Aegis training and remote with his own feelings, Jean had been warmer, and Regan had loved them both.
“How long were you with the new family?”
“Until I turned thirteen.” Her stomach churned a little, because she really hated revisiting this part of her past. Tabitha and Shawn had been stationed in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and they’d been kind… at least, on the surface. After the trauma of losing Jean and Kevin had faded, Regan had come to accept Tabitha and Shawn, thinking she’d found a family in them. “Then my foster mom got pregnant, and they didn’t want me around their kid.”
“Are they dead?” he growled.
She smiled thinly. “No, and I don’t want them to be.” She ignored the slight twinge of pain that always occurred when one opened an old wound. “I get why they got rid of me. By then, I was starting to exhibit signs of the power the Aegis feared. I could have been a danger to their kid.”
“Bullfuckingshit.”
She trailed her fingers over the tiny foot pressing against her navel. “I can’t blame them. I’d do anything to protect the little pony.” But that didn’t mean their rejection hadn’t hurt. After being dumped by three families, and going through puberty with abilities she didn’t understand, she had needed someone to care about her. To tell her it was all right and that she was wanted. “So I went to the next family, a nice couple who ran one of the London cells, but things were bad from day one.” She chewed her lower lip, buying herself time. “You might have noticed my tendency to be a little … obsessive-compulsive.”
His brows raised. “A little? You leveled all the paintings in my keep.”
“How do you know?”
He gave her a cocky grin. “Because you straighten everything you touch, so I tilted all the paintings to see how long it would take you to put them right again.”
The man had the strangest sense of humor, so quirky, playful, and quiet, but she liked it. Especially because she had a feeling he reserved his playfulness for those inside his small inner circle. “Yes, well, wait until you look in your cupboards.”
Still smiling, he leaned forward and kissed the tip of her nose. Like his sense of humor, his gestures of affection were understated and surprising. “I can’t wait to see what you do with my sex toy drawer.”
Her cheeks grew hot. “You have a sex toy drawer?”
“No, but I think I’ll put one together just to see you twitch when I mess everything up.” He sobered, tracing a finger along the angle of her jaw. “So did the OCD start with this new family in London?”
She nodded. “No gradual buildup… just, all of a sudden I became a clean freak. Everything had to be organized, in order, and perfectly spaced. I couldn’t start anything or go anywhere if my watch’s minute hand wasn’t on a five-minute increment mark. Weird stuff like that. It was frustrating for all of us. And then, only a year into living with them, my soul-sucking ability got a man killed.”
“What happened?”
“I was on a demon hunt with a couple of other Guardians. We’d trapped a Soulshredder in an alley, and it raked me across the ribs with its claws.” The pain had been blinding, enough to launch her into a killing fury. “The next thing I knew, a light shot out of my body and attacked the demon. It ripped his soul from him, and the soul needed a body. It found some man on the street and took him.” She shuddered at the horror that had only gotten worse when they were forced to kill the poor guy.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Than said softly. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I did know. The Aegis had identified my ability when I was eleven years old, and I’d been going through training to manage it. I thought I had it under control, but I was wrong.”
“The Aegis was wrong. Not you. You were only fourteen. You couldn’t have known any better.”
“That’s what my foster parents said. And they might have even believed it. But they started fighting a lot after that.” The baby kicked, and she shifted to give the little guy more room. “I’d hear them in their bedroom arguing about me. They got divorced just before my sixteenth birthday.”
So she’d now been responsible for two divorces. Her OCD had gone off the rails then, and she’d become bulimic, to boot. She’d needed control during a time in which she’d felt she had none.
“Anyway, after that, The Aegis figured I needed closer Aegis supervision than any foster parents could have given me, and they were right. I went to headquarters, and during the first few months of training, my ability killed someone else. A Guardian this time.” She’d thought her colleagues would put her down right then and there. Fortunately, Valeriu, who had been the one who had argued to save her life in the first place, convinced the Elders to give her another chance. “Eventually, as I worked to master my abilities, the OCD got better. I was only twenty-two when I was promoted to the Sigil. Youngest ever.”
Youngest, but at twenty-two, she’d had more experience under her belt than most Elders, since she’d been literally raised to fight demons. Her first books hadn’t been about Dick and Jane. No, her foster parents read her stories straight out of Aegis battle accounts and species compendiums.
“And now you’re at the head of an organization that makes most demons tremble in their boots.”
“Well, the ones that wear boots, anyway.”
He chuckled, a smoky rumble, and she decided he needed to do that more often. His laughter touched her, tugged at happy emotions she’d been afraid to feel for so long.
“Regan?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m sorry if I scared you tonight.”
She smiled against his skin. “I’d say it’s Limos who deserves the apology. You made it up to me very well.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
He braced himself on one elbow, all stern and grim-faced. Even the braids at his temples hung in straight, serious ropes. Only Thanatos could have serious hair.
“I could have hurt you.”
She sighed. “You already told me what you came for, and it wasn’t to hurt me.” She held his gaze, which glittered with twenty-four-karat gold flecks in the light from the fire. “And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you wouldn’t harm your son.”
His voice was thick with emotion. “You don’t know what I’ve done, where I came from before I arrived—”
“Yes, I do,” she whispered. “We saw it on the news.”
His expression darkened. “The impalings.
”
She nodded, her stomach clenching at the vivid imagery. “It was identical to the scene I saw through your tattoo.”
“It was Pestilence,” he said, his voice as stormy as his expression. “He staged it to make me remember.”
Okay, so while it was a relief to know Thanatos hadn’t impaled anyone last night, she still had that horrible scene from the past in her head.
“And those people from before…did you…” She couldn’t continue. And honestly, she hoped he wouldn’t answer. To know what he was capable of…
“No.” He swung his legs off the mattress and jammed his legs into a pair of sweats. “Ever hear of Vlad Tepes?”
“Vlad the Impaler. Also known as Dracula. Of course. Some of the first books my foster parents read to me were of his exploits.” She got a glimpse of his fine ass as he tugged the sweats up, and her stomach fluttered. There were fingernail scratches on his cheeks.
“And I thought demon parents were messed up,” he muttered. “Those people you saw in my tattoo were some of his victims. Inhabitants of a town he conquered. This was before he got really good at impaling people and killed thirty thousand in a single event.”
She frowned, remembering how Than’s Watcher had popped onto the scene and scolded him. “Then what was Gethel talking about when she said you’d gone too far?”
“I went into a killing rage and slaughtered the soldiers Vlad had ordered to impale the villagers. A lot of innocents were caught up in it.”
“I don’t understand. Ares is drawn to battle, and he fights in the human realm without mass casualties.”
“Yes, but he fights… he doesn’t necessarily need to kill. I need to kill. We’ve all learned a measure of control over the centuries, and while I’m drawn to death, I can generally control myself. But when I’m angry or hurt as well … sometimes things can get out of hand.”
How well Regan understood how things could get out of hand and have horrible consequences. The deaths and pain she’d caused because of her ability weighed her down like an anchor, leaving her hesitant to get close to anyone who might suffer because of it.
