"None if we can help it. You know that yourself, Grace. You’ve been there,” he said, trying not to bite back. He didn’t want to argue with her. “But demons have been on this earth as long as we have. They are living and breeding among us. You’re proof of that.”
She was quiet beneath him, the muscles in her slender back tensing, her shoulders rigid.
He ran a hand down between her shoulder blades. "You truly believe I’d grant sanctuary to just any of them?”
“Why would I assume different? I’ve seen you give mercy when they come through, hands up in surrender.” Her voice sounded desperate, confused.
“We also bring them back here to be interrogated. I’m not sure you know this, but Zenon is Hell born, that’s how we know not all demons want to cause harm, some just want to live in peace.”
“Hell born?” she choked.
“We only learned he existed when he stepped through the portal.” Chaos didn’t go into details, it was Zenon’s story to tell, but he wanted Grace to understand why they didn’t kill every demon who left Hell. “It used to be a lot harder to decide, which was why many didn’t get a pass, but now that we have Eve, we can easily learn their motives for wanting sanctuary.”
“What can she do?”
“Read people’s thoughts. Her power’s grown a lot since she mated with Laz, though. She can block it out now, easily, thank fuck. Only listens to people when she has to. But she can do a lot more than that. I’ve seen her pull information from someone, riffle through their brain like a filing cabinet to get what we need.”
Grace was quiet for several long seconds.
“Grace?”
"Can you get off me."
Something had upset her, he could hear it in her voice.
"Now. Get the hell off me."
Like fuck. "What’s going on? You didn't know, now you do. Why are you freaking out?”
She struggled, her breath sawing in and out of her chest. "I said…Get. Off. Me.”
Her thrashing increased, but this wasn't just anger, this was something else altogether, this was panic, fear. "Calm down, you're going to hurt yourself."
"You're lying. You're a damn liar. I don't believe you." Then she reached back and scratched at his arm.
Before he knew what he was about to do, he lifted his hand and brought it down on her ass. Hard. The smack of his palm against the thin fabric of his shirt covering her rounded cheeks was loud and rang out in the now quiet room.
She stilled instantly and twisted to look at him, eyes blazing with fury, but there was heat there as well. “You did not just spank me.”
“You were throwing a tantrum.” The scent of her need hit him hard, low in the gut.
She gritted her teeth. "Get off me.”
Something had her spooked. If fighting with him helped her deal with whatever it was, he’d give her what she needed. For now.
He raised a brow.
“Please.”
He eased off the bed, not bothering to hide his massive erection. Why would he? When a male found his mate, fucking her, being ready to fuck her, was part of the M.O. Her gaze dropped to his dick and she sucked in a breath, followed by a whole lot more of her intoxicating scent filling the small room, driving him insane.
He bit back a vicious curse, suddenly frustrated and angry with himself for how he’d fucked all of this up so badly. He adjusted his dick before his jeans cut off his blood supply. “It’s how I’m hardwired. I know who you are. My demon knows who you are, we can feel it. Making you our mate includes fucking, and right now, we want to fuck you. That’s not going to change. So either ignore it, or give in to it.”
“I don’t want you,” she hissed. “I will never give you that.”
He had no idea where the animosity had suddenly come from. He’d thought things between them would improve after admitting she was a skilled fighter, after asking for her help. After saving her life. Apparently not.
His anger and frustration shot higher. “I can smell how much you want me, Grace. Lying is pointless.”
Her eyes hardened, fire blazing from their depths. “I’m out of here.”
“You’re giving up immortality, you realize that?” A pathetic last-ditch effort, but he was that desperate. If immortality was the only reason she’d accept him, he’d take it.
She laughed. It was bitter, humorless. “I’m sorry, but playing house with you for eternity does not sweeten the deal, Chaos.”
In other words, she’d rather be dead than with him. Awesome. He drew in several steadying breaths and motioned to her thigh. “I’ve cleaned your wounds, but you need them properly dressed to stop infection."
"I'll do it myself, or get someone else to do it." Climbing off the bed gingerly, she brushed past him toward the bathroom, leaving him no choice but to follow.
Jealousy struck, fast and unexpected. "Who?"
“Who, what?”
“Who would you get to tend to you?”
She lifted her filthy and shredded clothes off the bathroom floor and cursed. “That's none of your damn business."
"Oden?" The green-eyed monster had taken over, and he had no control over the words spilling past his lips. “Now you’ve dropped your block and we can both feel it, it will be me you want when you’re wet and aching. Not him,” he all but roared. “It will be me you hunger for.”
"Shut up..."
“I could tie you down, have you at my mercy, and you’d beg for it. You’d let me give it to you, too, give you what you need, because as much as you try to deny it, you will always want me. Only me. The fates made you for me, female. Every part of you was designed for me. No one will ever be able to satisfy you like I could. Protect you, take care of you like I would.”
"Shut the hell up," she yelled. Then she came at him.
He held his ground as her fist connected with the side of his jaw with enough force to rattle his teeth. And sick fuck that he was, he'd never been more turned on in his life.
She got in his face. “You're a fucking bastard.” There was pain in her voice, pain he didn’t understand.
Yeah, you do. You just keep on hurting her.
He rubbed his jaw, taking a moment to get his shit together. Her pain was loud to him, filled the room. He’d caused it. He knew he had. But he got the feeling that something else was going on here.
He searched her eyes when she finally looked up. Disappointment, disgust looked back at him. He felt sick to his stomach.
She truly hated him. He grabbed for the doorframe. The blow of that reality hit harder than he thought possible.
She’s never hidden how much she despises you.
His brothers thought he was a heartless bastard. And for most of his life, he’d lived up to it. But for some reason, he didn't want the female in front of him to see him that way. He wanted her to see him as something more than a cold-blooded, ruthless asshole.
Grace took a step back, then several more, and fear washed through her gaze.
Yeah, that didn't make him feel like a fucking prick at all. His mate not only didn’t want him, she was now scared of him.
“Chaos?” she whispered and used the back of her hand to brush away a stray tear.
The tear sent another wave of fury through him. He’d made her cry?
“Are you going to go full Kishi on me?”
He looked down at his fingers wrapped around the doorframe. The wood had been reduced to splinters under his hand. “I hurt you. My demon doesn’t like it. Neither of us do.”
Her gaze darted to his destroyed doorframe and back to him.
“We would never hurt you.” He wanted to put her mind at rest, wanted that look of fear off her face. “Now that I know who you are…hurting you would hurt me. I will never do anything to hurt you. But my emotions, what I’m feeling…it’s volatile. I’m sorry I lashed out, got…jealous. You have to understand, Grace, there is a demon inside me that knows you should be his, ours, and that instinct is…strong.” Understatement of the century.
“Seeing you with another male for example…and things could get bad…for him.”
“Is that a threat to control me?” she fired at him.
He shook his head. “It’s instinct, pure territorial instinct.”
“So basically, you’ve pissed all over me and no one else will come near me?” She crossed her arms, looking even angrier.
He took a steadying breath, trying to keep his shit together. “No. No one will know you’re mine except you and I…”
“I’m not yours.”
“I don’t see it that way. I can’t.”
Her fist came down on the bathroom counter. “This is what I didn’t want. What I was trying to avoid.”
The words came out before he could stop them. “Would being with me be so awful? I know we’ve had our differences…”
“Yes, damn you.”
Her words were another blow, hard and sharp. “I won’t force you into something, not when it repulses you so much, but you have a power that you obviously can’t control…”
“What? No…I don’t have a power. I never have…”
“Grace, you drew mine right out of my body, and when you gave it back, it flung me across the fucking alley.”
“I what… What did I do?”
“You need to stay here until you learn to use and control it, just like every other demi new to their powers.”
She stiffened.
“Right now, you’re a risk to others. You can leave when you can control it.” Just saying it felt wrong.
He turned to go.
“I won’t be pressured to mate.”
He dipped his chin. What could he do? She didn’t want him.
“You’re doing this to punish me, aren’t you? Making me stay here…with you.”
Fuck. Ouch.
Her words struck like daggers, causing an anguish inside him he didn’t know how to process. He turned back to her, and the truth came unbidden, a truth he barely understood, but for some reason needed her to hear. “I would never punish you, Grace. How could I when my every instinct is screaming out for me to drop to my knees and worship you?”
She looked at him, shocked, but said nothing.
Grace didn't want anything from him. She didn’t want him. Maybe that was a good thing since he only seemed capable of hurting her.
He’d made her a promise to leave her alone. Now somehow he had to learn to live with it.
Chapter 13
Zenon sipped his beer, and sat back, scanning the bar—people watching, humans called it. And the frail creatures in this shithole were watching him right back. Not meeting his eyes, though, never that. Nothing new. He had the same effect on humans as a hungry lion walking into a room.
It used to bother him.
Now it kind of amused him.
How Mia saw him was all that mattered. His mate didn’t find him terrifying, she told him all the time he was “beautiful” or “insanely hot” and showed him daily. No one else’s opinion of him mattered.
As for his brothers, things had improved there as well, and their mates had grown used to him.
The demi they retrieved and trained still weren’t sure of him, so he left the training to his brothers, but you couldn’t win them all.
The door across the bar opened and Silas strode in. At six and a half feet tall, and built like a warrior, the angel was seriously intimidating. Like always, he was dressed in black from head to toe. Add in the heavy black boots and thick dark lashes that ringed his silver eyes, so it looked like he was wearing eyeliner, the guy looked like some kind of devil-worshipping, goth, serial killer.
Silas spotted Zenon and shoved his fingers through his short, gold and black hair, and made his way over.
“This place is a dump,” Zenon said by way of a greeting.
Silas took the seat across from him. “I thought it had a certain charm.”
A waitress hustled over and put a glass in front of the angel and smiled. “Your usual.”
“Thanks, Mandy.” Silas took a sip and scowled at Zenon’s raised brows.
“Your usual?”
Silas shrugged. “The noise, the realness of this place, helps me think.”
“Isn’t there some place in Heaven you can hang out? You know, a room full of angelic assholes comparing dick sizes?”
“Yup.” His lips curled. “But the other angels got jealous, so I gave up. Besides, I much prefer humans.”
Zenon took a sip of his beer. Despite the bar and the light chitchat, there was no missing the urgency in his own voice or the sharp tension in Silas’s gaze. “You know why I wanted to meet?”
Silas lifted his glass and downed the rest of his drink, putting it back on the table with more force than necessary. He dipped his chin, jaw tight. “And I’ve been given strict instructions to keep my mouth shut.”
“Why?”
“The usual fucking bullshit.”
In other words, leave it to fate and butt the fuck out. “Do they get that Hell’s about to bust free and either wipe out humanity or enslave it?”
The glass in Silas’s hand exploded, glass shards flying everywhere. The angel jolted, looking down at his clenched fingers. He cleared his throat. “My hands are tied,” he rasped, still looking at his hand like he didn’t know who it belonged to.
Zenon couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You know the outcome?”
The angel shook his head. “I’m too close.” He glanced back at Zenon. “Have become too…involved. They’re preventing me from seeing.”
“Can you at least tell me where to find Lucifer?”
Silas opened his mouth, then gasped in pain.
Zenon searched the angel’s gaze, his eyes were glassy, bloodshot. “They’re physically preventing you from helping us?”
“I’ll lose my wings if I disobey, if I help you.”
“They’ll throw you out of Heaven?”
Silas shoved his fingers through his hair again. “I’ve gone against them before. They have good reason not to trust me.”
They were keeping tabs on him, probably listening to him even now, to their conversation. Zenon didn’t understand any of this. “What did you do?”
Pain lined Silas’s face again. “I can’t say.” His fingers curled into a tight fist again and he snarled. “Follow your course…” he bit out and clenched his teeth.
“Find Lucifer, contain the beast?” Zenon asked, fury coursing through him when he saw the blood vessels in Silas’s eyes had all burst, the whites now completely red.
Silas stood suddenly, staggering to his feet, and held out his hand. Zenon took it, and the angel clasped it tight, giving him a subtle nod. “I have to go. Take care.”
Then he turned and walked out, swaying like he’d downed a bottle of whisky. Zenon cursed and stood as well. Something caught the light, glinting brightly on the floor. He crouched down.
A feather of spun gold, long and delicate, lay by Zenon’s feet.
The angels weren’t fucking around. Silas had done something to piss them off, and they were punishing him for it. They were punishing them all.
Grace was doing her best to ignore Chaos. He stood across from her in one of the training rooms, and the way he was watching her was making that extremely difficult.
She forced herself to focus on James and what he was saying. James, a demi as well, lived permanently at the compound and helped the knights train their people when they were brought here, freshly transitioned and desperate to control their powers. He was also one of her crew. Something Chaos and his brothers did not know.
James was an amazing fighter dedicated to the cause. He was also loyal to the knights, loved them like family, but he’d gotten sick of seeing them and his people suffer and not being able to help.
So he’d sought her out after the knights found out about her. She’d been wary at first, worried that he was a spy, but in the end he’d proven himself more than trustworthy.
And right now, she was finding it hard to focus on what her
friend was saying with Chaos watching them so intently.
He stood with his arms folded over his massive chest, thighs braced apart, and a look on his face that she was sure would’ve wilted a great deal of the demi who had stood in this room before her.
She was determined to master her power, though. True to his word, Chaos had not let her leave the compound, and she was going out of her damn mind. At night, he and his brothers left to hunt the beast, and she was forced to stay behind. She had people counting on her, one of them still missing, and a freaking job. Still, Chaos refused to budge.
Three nights she had spent in his bed. Three nights in his apartment filled with his things, his maddening scent—him. He’d given her the bed, had insisted on it, while he’d taken the couch. It was pure torture. The more time she spent in his presence, the louder the bond between them called. She was in a constant state of arousal, and with Chaos in the next room, she couldn’t even get herself off. The whole situation was making her seriously cranky.
She needed out of this place and away from Chaos before she did something she could never take back.
He dropped his hands to his sides, veins and tendons roping them, his strength evident in every inch of his body, in every move he made. The male was all warrior, honed to perfection. Lethal.
And if you asked him, he’d drop to his knees and worship you.
Dammit, she needed to stop thinking about that. Unfortunately, it was all she could think about. The words he’d said to her kept playing over in her mind. To have any kind of control over the male in front of her seemed ridiculous. But instinctively, she knew if she became his, if they mated, he would do anything for her. Anything. Like having her own personal guard dog.
Yeah, no, that was too tame. More like a guard dragon.
But tying herself to another being for the rest of her life was not something she would ever do. Especially not to a knight. It would be a betrayal of the worst kind. Her parents would be disgusted with her for even being in the same room as him.
Knight's Dominion (Knights of Hell Book 4) Page 11
