Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen

If she wasn’t strung out on adrenaline and anger, Silas suspected Petra would have been dead on her feet by the time she reluctantly escorted him through the short, utilitarian secret passage connected to her closet.

It annoyed him that he’d missed the secret door when he went through her room, but not so much that he regretted it being there. That door would make coming and going much easier for him. Silas made a mental note to inform Tal of its existence in the morning.

Not that his brother needed doors. Tal could move from shadow to shadow in a way only a wraith could. If he wanted to, he could have hidden himself away in any tiny corner and no one but Silas would have known.

Not that he would, though. His brother wasn’t allowed into Petra’s den unless it was an emergency. Silas had made that very, very clear.

No one was allowed into her den but him. Ever.

He’d timed their little date to coincide with a morning when she wouldn’t be expected to give dawn service, but his witch was used to early mornings and therefore struggled with the late hour. Considering how badly she’d begun to flag, he was impressed by how strongly she fought him on the sleeping arrangements.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” she insisted again. She’d only just given up on trying to convince him to leave the cathedral grounds entirely and seemed to have swung hard to putting all her weight behind a ridiculous notion that they wouldn’t be sleeping together.

Silas dropped his backpack on the floor next to his side of the bed — the one closest to the hidden door, because one never knew — and rummaged around for his sleep pants.

His preference was to sleep nude, of course, but quick escapes were a pain with a cock out.

“Sleep on the floor and I’ll just join you there,” he said, extracting his clothing.

“Why?”

“Besides the fact that I want to wake up with your ass cradling my cock in the morning? Well, tonight I learned that you do a lot of stupid, reckless shit when no one is watching, so it’s now in my best interest to make sure I have my eye on you at all times.”

If Petra went any redder, she’d match her formal robes perfectly. When she spoke, it was through her teeth. “You can keep an eye on me just fine without sleeping next to me.”

“Nah, that’s an essential part of the process.” Silas toed off his boots and reached for the collar of his shirt. Pulling it over his head, he told her, “Besides, I wanna try it. Never slept a night with a woman. I might hate it. Who knows?”

Going by the way Petra made a gurgling noise and spun around, averting her eyes from his naked chest like she hadn’t sucked on his tongue earlier, he was pretty sure he’d like it. He was growing to like just about everything about Petra.

My little puzzle, he thought, grinning at the back of her head as he popped the brass button of his jeans. I’m going to take you apart to see how you work.

Once he’d crushed Vanderpoel’s head under his boot and presented his witch with whatever part of the man she preferred, he’d take great pleasure in unraveling Petra strand by strand, discovering how all the little contradictions of her interconnected.

Power-hungry but self-sacrificing. Loyal but alone. Powerful but powerless. An open book with so many pages missing.

“Put your nightie on, baby. The one that smells like me,” he ordered, just to get a rise out of her.

As he hoped, Petra’s head swiveled around to glare at him just in time to see him sliding his jeans and briefs down his thighs. His cock, pretty much constantly half-hard since he saw her for the first time, gave an enthusiastic twitch when her eyes dropped.

“Good gods,” she hissed, marching over to her dresser to angrily yank out a different nightgown. “You keep that thing to yourself, Silas, or so help me Glory, I’ll burn it off.”

“Careful, little goddess, that’s not as much of a deterrent as you might think. I like it when you get all hot on me.”

Pulling the loose waistband of his airy sleep pants over his cock was a little bit like torture. He was sure it’d only get worse as he burrowed in her sheets, imprinting his scent not only on her bedding, but her skin as well.

Silas padded over to her and bent to murmur in her ear. “I bet when your cunt is wrapped around me, it’ll feel like you’re burning me alive.”

He dodged the wadded up socks she threw at his head by inches. She stormed around him, nightgown in hand, and very nearly slammed the door to the bathroom before apparently thinking better of it.

The way she flicked the lock into place was awfully cute, though.

Silas’s grin cramped his cheeks as he turned off the glaring overhead light and moved back to the bed to wait for her. It was hardly big enough for him, but he’d slept in worse positions than curled on his side so his feet didn’t hang off the edge. Certainly his accommodations during his little trip hadn’t been half as comfortable as Petra’s bed.

He’d been in a bad mood during his time away from her. It was soured further by the discovery of so very little. The demon part of him, animalistic and hungry, took every unanswered question as a challenge to his claim. The man part of him, on the other hand, was both delighted by her mystery and increasingly vexed by it.

Silas thought he knew Petra. She was a fixed quantity in his mind: a beautiful hypocrite caught in a web of Temple intrigue and an easy mark to exploit. The fact that he wanted to fuck her was just a happy bonus to a mildly entertaining diversion from his usual pursuits.

He’d expected their bargain to be a simple and a relatively tidy affair once he’d gotten what he wanted. With Petra tied to him and the first half of his promise to Tal fulfilled, he could then use her dependence on him to get access to the m-generator.

And then their business would be done. She could have her lofty seat in St. Emaine’s and he wouldn’t think twice about abandoning her, bond or no bond, because there were no real ties between them save magic and lust.

That was before. Silas slid his hand beneath the pillow on his side, checking to make sure his gun was safely tucked out of her reach.

Now he understood that he’d vastly underestimated Petra, and he wouldn’t put it past her to try and shoot him in the night if he pissed her off too much. Silas kind of hoped she’d try it.

Listening to the rustle of fabric and the running faucet in the bathroom, he made himself comfortable under the sheets and immediately stifled a groan of pleasure at the waft of rich scent that enveloped him.

That scent was his new favorite thing. Well, he allowed, imagining he could still taste her on his lips, maybe not the only new favorite.

A deep, sensual craving tightened the muscles of his abdomen. That craving was a solid wall in the face of his previous plans to leave her to her own devices as soon as their business was done.

Silas frowned at the canopy of the bed. Even if he got everything he wanted — a foregone conclusion — he balked at the idea of letting the puzzle of Petra lay half-finished, forgotten.

He needed to know what filled those blank fifteen years before she became an initiate. He needed to know why she’d had a secret phone under a pseudonym and a PO box under another. He needed to know who Maximilian fucking Dooraker really was and why she’d put herself at such risk simply to uncover the truth of something she couldn’t change.

Silas blinked into the darkness.

I need to understand her.

It wasn’t a want. It wasn’t a passing fancy. It wasn’t even a fixation, like the many, many times he’d lost himself in sigilwork or hunched over a sea of wires, soldering gun in hand.

It was a need.

Shadows rippled up and down his body, restless as they sought something beneath the sheets. Encountering nothing, they spread out across the floor, seeping into the natural darkness of the bedroom like a living net.

There was faint magic in that darkness — a whisper, soft as a breath, of intelligence. But it was unformed, too young to be more than a spark, and vanished under the dominance of Silas’s own overbearing shadows.

When Petra walked out of the bathroom a few minutes later, it was to discover him with his nose pressed into the pillow that smelled strongest of her. Her voice was strained, pitched high, when she demanded, “What are you doing?”

“Savoring it,” he answered, unashamed, “and adding to it.”

“Adding what?”

He rubbed his cheek against the pillowcase, his eyelids lowering as the lushness of her scent sent his instincts into a tailspin. Beneath the sheets, his cock had gone hard as steel. He was pretty sure there was a wet spot on his thigh, too.

“Adding me,” he answered. Silas flipped her side of the sheets over, beckoning her to climb in. Around her, perhaps invisible to her untrained eye, his shadows writhed at the edges of the shaft of light she stood in. “C’mere.”

She looked very small and un-priestesslike as she stood there in the glow of the tiny bathroom. Her nightgown was not the one he’d covered in his scent, but he knew she wouldn’t listen to him. It fell to a modest mid-thigh and looked like a soft, unadorned cotton edged with eyelet lace. It was an incongruously modest garment for someone who routinely wore dresses with V’s so deep they almost touched her navel.

It was positively virginal compared to all the scraps of lace and mesh he knew she possessed.

He wanted to push it up around her breasts and feast on her cunt until she screamed. When he was done, he’d take great pleasure in arranging it around her thighs again — like a doll, all virginal and sweet for him and him alone.

Of course, he liked all the strappy lingerie she had in her drawers, too. He wasn’t picky. If she wanted to be his vixen for a night, he’d take that just as happily as this sweet little bite who lingered uncertainly in the bathroom doorway.

I’m a man of multitudes.

She must have seen something of his fantasies in his eyes because the look on her face grew increasingly alarmed. “That sounds like a very bad idea.”

“It is, and that’s why it sounds like something you’d do, doesn’t it?”

He counted it as a win when her face screwed up like that. It meant several layers of her masks had fallen off, revealing more of the mysterious woman who’d managed to fool even him into believing she was the same as all her ilk.

“It’s awfully bold of you to assume I won’t try to kill you in the middle of the night.”

“I haven’t assumed anything,” he replied, loving the bite in her voice. “That’s why I’m sleeping with a weapon, baby.”

Petra’s eyebrows hiked up her forehead. “Is that a threat, demon?”

The only real threat was that his cock might go off the second she brushed her skin against his. Anything else wouldn’t stand a chance against him. Petra needed him too much to follow through on any bluster, and her enemies…

Every fine muscle of his body, from his fingers to the strong ropes of flesh bracketing his spine, tensed. “No one is getting into this den,” he promised her. “No one will ever touch you but me, Petra, and it’s not your pain I’m after.”

Her toes curled at the smudged edge of the light cast on the floor. Maybe she sensed the reach of a predator in the darkness. His shadows weren’t weakened by light, not like a wraith’s were, but it was instinct to wait, hiding just out of sight, for the right time to pounce.

They were an extension of him. If demon tradition was to be believed, they were a manifestation of a demon’s soul, tied to all those of their line, and each demon’s shadow was unique. His would never be confused for another’s. They existed within and without a demon, a symbiotic parasite they were all born with and one that acted on base impulses as well as will — a being that would, as old demon stories claimed, survive far beyond that of its bodily host.

Silas had always had finer control over his shadows than other demons, but around Petra they were in constant flux, desperate to be near her and yet rippling with unease in her light.

That disquiet seemed to have melted away at some point while he was away from her, however, because now they surrounded his witch, crawling up the walls and just outside of her little fortress of light. A deep growl, more motion than sound, shook his chest as he waited for her to step into the dark with him.

The glow of light silhouetted her body within the thin material of her nightgown. It formed a halo around her golden head, making her appear both untouchable and irresistible when she murmured, “Are you saying I’m safe with you, Silas?”

“With me? Yes.” His claws bit into the empty side of the mattress, curling around a body that instinct demanded already be there. Silas’s voice was gritty with want when he promised, “From me? Never.”

She stood there a moment longer, her expression unreadable, before she slowly reached back to flip the old fashioned switch on the wall inside the bathroom.

He wouldn’t have blamed her for squeaking or even screaming with alarm when the trap sprung around her bare legs, but his witch was always full of surprises. Petra merely stumbled to a stop, barely a step outside of the bathroom, with a quick, forceful exhale.

Her tone was carefully measured when she said, “Silas?”

He shuddered. Awareness of her filtered in through his shadows: the silky warmth of her skin, the smooth glide of shadow over the slopes of her legs, even an impression of the salty-sweet taste of her as they curled around her limbs to squeeze possessively.

He was rarely taken by surprise, but it seemed to happen every few minutes in Petra’s presence.

Silas had been through many ruts before. He knew the power of instinct, the senseless urge to breed. He understood the demonic urge to seek out a mate and hoard them close, to fuck them well and often enough that they wouldn’t seek out another.

And yet the sight of Petra, glowing faintly with her own precious light, nearly swallowed by his seeking shadows, inspired such a blistering wave of desire in him, he was forced to take his cock in hand and squeeze hard enough to hurt. It was the only way to beat back the release that screamed down his spine.

He liked the idea of coating her bed in his come, but not when he had her within arm’s reach.

Still holding himself with punishing force, Silas rumbled, “Come here. Now.”

“I can’t move!” She waved her hands over her body, her eyes wide in her striking face. “It’s touching me.”

“They’re learning you,” he explained, though he was only moderately certain of that himself, “but if you don’t start walking toward this bed, they’ll bring you to me. I’d start moving. Now.”

She didn’t move as fast as he would have liked, but Petra did make her way over to the bed. The shadows clung to her like long sheets of cobwebs, a cloak of hungry darkness that couldn’t decide if it wished to protect her or consume her.

Bit of both, I imagine.