What an unbelievably stupid thing she’d done.
Closing her eyes, she bowed her head. No, not stupid—if Josh could retrieve the amulet and save the world. Except… he was a demon. Why would he want to save the world? And if he did want to get the amulet, would he keep it for himself?
She banged her head on the mirror. Stupid. Bang. Stupid. Bang. Stupid!
She’d fallen hard for him. An incubus who had probably used his sex demon tricks on her. Thing was, he hadn’t even seduced her with smooth lines and pretty talk. No, he’d done it by protecting her from danger, being nice to cats, and giving her out-of-this-world orgasms. He’d done it by being rough and tough, with a touch of sweet. But how much had been an act?
She heard a sigh, a shuffling of feet, and a door closing. She waited another minute. Cautiously opened the bathroom door.
Only to see Josh sitting on the floor, back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling. He was wearing jeans but nothing else. Even his feet were bare. His broad, thickly muscled chest heaved with the force of his breaths, and lower, his chiseled abs bore no signs of injury.
“You look pretty good for a guy who got run through with a magical sword and almost died.” The words were casual, but what she felt for him was not, and she prayed he didn’t hear the emotion in her voice.
“You saved me.” He didn’t look at her. “I can still… taste you.”
“Because you’re a vampire.” She snorted. “And a demon. Let’s not forget that minor detail.”
A shudder shook his body, and he closed his eyes. “Yeah.”
“Yeah? That’s all you have to say?” She cursed, a nasty, base word she’d never used. “Was anything you told me about your life true?”
He finally looked at her. “Too much of it, actually.”
“Tell me more.” She crossed her arms across her chest, wondering why the hell she was bothering, why she had this crazy need to understand him.
“Serena, you don’t want to hear.”
Anger lit her like a match. “I gave you my life, Wraith, so you can damned well tell me about yours.” He flinched, and she almost felt sorry for him. Almost. “Give me all of it. Starting from the beginning.”
He rubbed his eyes, and when he was done, he looked at his lap, shoulders hunched. And there she went feeling sorry for him again.
“You’re right. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He ran his hand up and down his chest, as though it hurt. It was a long time before he said, “My dad had the same gift Shade has—he can manipulate bodily functions. He found a woman who was on the verge of being turned into a vampire… she’d done the blood exchange and was just about to die when he raped her. Used his gift to keep her in that in-between human and vamp state for nine months, raping her over and over while I grew inside her. He left when she gave birth to me and by then she’d gone insane.”
Wraith spoke rapidly, the words coming so fast Serena barely had time to be shocked. And still, he kept his head bowed, his hair falling forward so she couldn’t see his expression.
“She gave me to a wet nurse until I was five, and then she put me in a cage and turned my nurse into a vampire while I watched. She spent the next fifteen years torturing me. Torturing humans and demons in front of me. When I turned twenty, I went through the first of two maturation cycles. I needed sex or I’d die. My mother shoved a prostitute into the cage… I was crazed with need…” His voice cracked, but his head came up to fix her with a penetrating stare. “I took her, and I didn’t wait for her consent.”
“Oh, my God.”
“I warned you.”
He had. But she needed to hear more. “Go on.” When he hesitated, she put her hand on his knee out of some crazy need to comfort him. “What happened?”
“The prostitute was just doing her job, right?” His voice was hollow. Dead. “That’s how I’ve always justified what I did. Sometimes, the lie even works.” A flicker of emotion passed over his face, disgust, she thought, but then he looked down and she couldn’t read him anymore. “The next time my mother put a female in with me, I refused her, even though I knew it meant I could die. My mother tortured the girl in front of me for hours, until she finally bled out. The next time a woman was put in the cage, I did what I needed to do, but by then I had learned to use my gift. She thought she was doing her boyfriend on the beach.”
“What gift?”
“I can get inside the mind, read thoughts, trick people into thinking things that didn’t happen. I can give them nightmares.” His head came up. There was a challenge in his eyes, as though he expected her to get violent with him. And wanted it. “Or dreams.”
She inhaled sharply. “The dreams I had. Of you… it was you.”
“The first one. Any others were all yours.”