I felt full with emotion. Hate and fear and pain filled me, but underneath it all was love. Through our connection, God did in fact penetrate this place. I swallowed down my rising sickness. My one last link to God lay in this connection. This connection to the devil.
This was so wrong.
He stood, and he caught me before I could leave. Cupping me cheeks, he said, “Asiri.”
I furrowed my brows.
“Say it,” he said.
“Why? What’s the point?”
“Say it.”
I sighed. “Asiri.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, more than just an infinite swirling abyss stared back at me.
“Let me go,” I said, latching onto his wrists. I’d pry them off of me if I had to.
“Don’t you see it? We are more, Gabrielle. You know this. We hate more, but we can also love more.
“Let me in, consort. Let me into the heart of yours. I swear I won’t betray it.”
First an apology and now a request.
“You’re already in my heart.” Thanks to the connection I could feel him with every beat of that organ.
“By design I am, yes. But not by choice. Let me in.”
“I wouldn’t even know how.”
“You need to give in. Give in.”
“To what?”
“Your heart.”
It was already taken, and the man that held it lived in a different realm.
I closed my eyes.
“Look at me.”
I shook my head.
“Teach me how to be better. Open your eyes and show me how to live. How to love.” His voice was so gentle, so soothing. I desperately wanted to believe that he wasn’t an evil being.
A tear trickled out of my eye, and I felt his thumb brush it away.
“Please,” he said.
All at once, it broke.
I broke.
The damn that held back my rising pull to him and all the emotions that went along with it poured out.
My eyes snapped open and I drew in a shuddering breath. “Asiri.”
“Consort, I feel you. I finally, truly feel you.” He smiled, and angels should weep at the sight. It was almost too much, and I was falling, falling, falling. Down into those eyes of his, down into our connection. There was nothing separating us except two sets of skin and the space between us.
He pulled me to him, and kissed me.
I could feel him. Him. This ageless, timeless thing. His soul was full of whitenoise, of shrieking souls and pain.
I wasn’t sure where I was. My lips were on his, and I could taste him and feel him, but that was distant, background noise to the feel of him. I’d reached inside him, and he’d let me in. Of all the beings out there, Asiri seemed like the most closed off, and he let me in. Only his soul, or whatever this was, battered against mine. I was surrounded by a terrible howling noise, and I could feel the discontent that festered inside of him.
So I began to hum, softly at first. I pulled on the siren, brought her through the connection, and together she and I began to sing. The storm inside Asiri settled, the howling quieted, and it calmed the raging madness inside of him.
The air shifted, and we were back in his bedroom—our bedroom. He moved us to the bed I dreaded so much.
And then I was running my fingers over his wing scars. And then I was kissing them.
“No more pain,” I whispered against his skin. He laid me on the bed before joining me. For the first time ever, I saw an expression on his face that was free of the violent tendencies he was so well known for.
Only one thing lay in his eyes now.
Hope.
Chapter 25
Gabrielle
What am I doing?
I felt like I was surfacing from a dream. One where monsters and gods played with mortals, and I’d tamed the worst of them.
My thighs rested over sculpted shoulders. A mouth pressed against my core, giving me the most intimate kiss. Not a shred of fabric covered me. Without thinking, I fisted my hands—hands that gripped already mussed up hair.
The color was wrong.
Not Andre’s.
What in the bloody hell am I doing?
Every fiber of my being focused on the naked man kneeling between my legs. He paused in his ministrations to kiss my inner thigh, and I saw his face.
My heart almost died of fright.
The devil was going down on me.
OhGodohGodohGod.
This was my own personal nightmare.
I shook off what felt like the aftereffects of a drug.
“Gabrielle.” His lips moved against my skin.
I yelped and tried to disentangle myself from him. I’d willingly let the devil into my heart, and I’d lost myself in the process. I could still feel him there, making himself comfortable. He was in me and I was in him.
His hands captured my thighs and held them in place. “No sense being shy now, little bird,” he said, his hungry gaze moving over me. “You are going to finally, completely be mine.”
Cue internal screaming.
No, no, no, no, no.
I squirmed against his hold. “That can’t happen.”
His eyes narrowed, and I felt the shift in his mood as though it were my own.
“You say this to me now, even exposed to me as you are?” He glanced meaningfully at the juncture between my thighs—which was, to my utter mortification—spread before him.
“I love someone else.”
He glared down at me. “You gave me your heart, and I gave you mine.”