Bittersweet Freedom
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright ? 2016 by Nina Croft. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Entangled Publishing, LLC
2614 South Timberline Road
Suite 109
Fort Collins, CO 80525
Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.
Select Otherworld is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.
Edited by Candace Havens
ISBN 978-1-63375-618-2
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition April 2016
To anyone and everyone in search of freedom…I hope you find it.
Chapter One
Oh God, they were kissing again.
Ugh.
It went on…and on…and on.
Shera propped a shoulder against the stone wall, folded her arms across her chest, and waited. And still it didn’t end. She wished she could look away, but her fascinated gaze remained glued on the couple.
No one had ever kissed her like that—as though she was the most important thing in the whole world and he would never get enough. But then, she wasn’t the most important thing in anyone’s world. Never had been, and—if she didn’t get away from this place—never would be. Tugging her notebook and pencil from her back pocket, she thought for a moment, then scribbled on the bottom of her bucket list:
Find someone to kiss me for…five minutes, non-stop.
Her bucket list was getting longer. Not that she had much hope of doing any of the stuff on there. But she had to try. And to do that she had to talk to Asmodai. Unfortunately he was preoccupied, his long, lean figure wrapped around his wife, her fingers clenched in his midnight dark hair.
Finally, he lifted his head, and Shera took a step forward. “My lord—”
He cut off her words with a wave of his hand, and her mouth snapped closed. Obedience to this man was ingrained in her, and she hated that. She waited for him to speak to her. Instead he kissed the woman. Again.
Shera gritted her teeth, and the pencil she still held in her hand snapped in two.
Her family were cat shifters—though Shera could also shift into a hellhound, something she tended to keep quiet about as it made people nervous—and had been bonded to the demon Asmodai for generations beyond memory. Which made her nothing more than a slave, a chattel. Shera even bore his sigil wrapped around her left arm like a brand: a perpetual sign of her servitude. Last week she’d tried to cut it out, but the skin had healed overnight, leaving the mark as perfect as before.
She’d been his housekeeper for the last five years, since she had turned twenty-one. It was the job her mother had done before her. The woman who had given birth to Shera then promptly slit her wrists before jumping from the top of this very tower.
Even her mother hadn’t cared enough to stay.
At last her lord and master raised his head.
“My lord—”
“Later,” he snapped, his dark eyes still focused solely on the woman in his arms—Faith, his new wife. “Come on,” he murmured, “I’ll take you to your friends. They get half an hour before I want you back.”
Without glancing in Shera’s direction, he lifted Faith against his chest, and launched himself from the ledge that ran around the tower. For a few minutes, Shera stood there like an idiot gazing at the spot where they’d vanished. Then she shook her head. She might as well be invisible. Maybe she was invisible. Wasn’t that what the perfect servant should be? But she had seen the look of pity in Faith’s eyes as she had briefly caught her gaze.
She didn’t want to be a goddamn object of pity. She didn’t want to be a freaking perfect servant.
Wrapping her arms around her middle, she stood at the edge of the tower and gazed out at the twilight landscape of the Abyss—the flat ochre plain and the high rise of mountains silhouetted in the distance. She turned her gaze closer and peered down to the flagstone courtyard far below. Unlike Asmodai, she had no wings to carry her safely to the ground.
She didn’t know what was wrong with her. While she’d never been particularly happy, she’d always been content enough. But these last few weeks everything had changed, and she didn’t know why. It was as though something alien had awoken deep within her, stirring up desires she’d never experienced before. She wanted so much and felt as though her heart might explode with the needs inside her. But it was more than that. All her life, this had been her home, her sanctuary. Now she no longer felt safe here. Her skin prickled constantly as though someone was watching her, waiting…