“There, now,” he said softly. “The tables have been turned. The captor is now the captive, and all those other fun movie lines I never thought I’d say.”
Idess’s heart pounded against her rib cage as helplessness and fresh anxiety set in. “Let me go.”
“Like you let me go when I asked?”
She swallowed. “Please. You can’t kill Kynan. He’s important.”
“Yeah. Important to me.”
“To the world.”
“I think the world will survive without one human asshole.”
Actually, it might not, but she’d found that demons rarely cared about the fate of humankind, so she switched tacks. “This isn’t just about the world. I have a personal stake in his life.”
He snorted. “What, you won’t earn your wings if he dies?”
“That’s exactly what will happen.”
He rolled his eyes, but when she just stared, he stiffened. “You’re serious.”
“You can’t even imagine.” Tremors of panic swept from her toes to her scalp. Only a handful of Memitim had never Ascended, were doomed to either guard Primori forever or spend eternity as a human, being born again and again and never making it into Heaven. Some had even been snuffed out of existence. But as terrible as those punishments sounded, they weren’t her primary motivation for not wanting to fail.
If she didn’t succeed in protecting the most important human in existence, the very fate of all mankind, of billions of souls, would be affected when the ultimate battle between good and evil erupted on Earth.
Her betrayal of Rami had weighed on her for twelve hundred years, and every day she’d prayed for a chance to beg forgiveness. But if she betrayed the human race? There would be no absolution.
Something hot and wet dripped down her cheek. A tear. Geez, she hadn’t cried in centuries. Not since the day Rami had Ascended. Before she knew it, the tear turned into a stream and suddenly she wasn’t just sniffling or even crying. She’d gone into a full-on bawl that included great, shuddering sobs and gasps for air.
“Idess… calm down… Idess?” Lore’s hands framed her face. “Hey. It’s okay. Easy, Angel. Easy…”
She cried harder. She couldn’t stop… it was as if she’d been storing tears for all these hundreds of years, and now, like a dormant volcano that had finally erupted, the flow wouldn’t be stemmed.
Then Lore’s lips were on hers, and he was kissing her. His mouth followed the trail of tears across her cheeks as his thumbs, one bare, one leather-clad, swept back and forth across skin that had grown as sensitive as if it were sunburned.
“Shh…” He tenderly kissed her ear. “It’s all right.”
“No,” she moaned, because it was far from all right.
His hands stroked her cheeks, his bare thumb drifting lazily across her bottom lip. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m not used to handling anything like this. I don’t know what to do.”
“I—” She cut off when the tip of his thumb slipped into her mouth. She didn’t think. Didn’t want to.
On impulse, she latched on to it and drew it deeper into her mouth. His eyes darkened and his mouth fell open so his piercing flashed and wow, if she’d thought she’d had power over him before, when he’d been at her mercy, chained, and needing release… it was nothing compared to now. The knowledge that she could affect him while she was restrained was a revelation.
Now she just had to figure out how, exactly, to use what she’d just learned.
Drawing on her very rusty seduction skills, she swirled her tongue around his knuckle and then nipped the pad. When he released a ragged breath, a zing of pure excitement shot through her in a powerful, almost sexual rush. Her breasts grew achy, her belly fluttered, and okay, there was no almost about it. Bringing a male pleasure was an aphrodisiac, for sure.
“I hate how much I want you.” His voice was rough, as though he also hated that he’d made such a confession.
She squeezed her eyes closed. “Is it bad that I’m glad you hate it?”
“I’d think it was weird if you didn’t.” He pulled his thumb from her mouth and slid his hand along the curve of her neck. Her skin tingled under his palm, and her nipples tightened into hard little beads.
Why did he have to be so understanding? She wanted to rail at him, to fight him, but he captured her mouth with his in a surprisingly gentle kiss given how tense his body was, how rapid his breathing. His tongue teased the seam of her lips, tiny, wet flicks. She told herself that he wasn’t affecting her, that she wasn’t loosening up, that opening up to him was about seducing him.
But as she parted her lips, all she could think about was how good it felt to be touched like this, no matter what the circumstances.