Chapter 39

Chapter Thirty-Nine

He gave her until supper.

It nearly killed him to do it, but he did. Flushed with hormones and the instinct to guard his new mate, it was a special kind of torture to keep a whole house between them, but he knew it was necessary.

He was too angry to be trusted with her. It wasn’t because he would ever intentionally hurt her, but because he worried he wouldn’t be able to control his other impulses. Not just the rut, but the driving need to make her his mate in all ways.

He’d claimed her, but he didn’t have her. He didn’t have her secrets. He barely had her trust. And now he knew that all along, she’d never intended to give him her bond.

That alone didn’t bother him, really. In fact, he was actually a little proud of her for double crossing him like that. He adored the conniving part of her. In her place, he would have done the same.

What made him want to rip the walls down was the reasoning behind it. She didn’t double cross him with a grand plan to somehow wiggle out of their deal — a doomed prospect, but a commendable one. No, she’d agreed to giving him her bond because she believed either Vanderpoel would take it before he could, or she’d be dead.

He could hear it in her voice, see it in her expression. Even if she never said it aloud, a large part of Petra hadn’t believed that she would make it out of that belltower alive.

That really, really pissed him off.

It was misery knowing that something essential to him existed inside her now — a soft, squishy, vulnerable thing he couldn’t live without. She held it in her powerful hands without even realizing it was there. If something were to happen to her, that essential part of him would die, too.

His mother would say that seeing Petra shot had put the fear of the gods in him. But he didn’t fear the gods. Before Petra, he’d never feared anything at all. Now he feared losing his mate before he ever got the chance to have her. He feared losing her in the same way a normal man might agonize over his own death.

No punishment from the gods could be worse than that.

Now that he knew how vulnerable he was, it made him go more than a little bat-shit to think she’d consigned herself to death all along.

Back in the lab, Silas had been about two seconds and one bad thought away from laying her down on his desk, thrusting his cock in to the hilt, and making her swear that she’d never, ever scare him like that again. He wanted to punish her, to make a point, and demand an endless string of promises to soothe that awful, nauseating terror that made a permanent home for itself inside him.

He didn’t like being scared and he refused to feel it again. If that meant he had to fuck her hard and fast and mean until she learned her lesson, then he’d do it. But that was the rut and the bastard in him speaking. The logical part of him — and the new, uncertain mate — managed, by the skin of their teeth, to be just a bit louder than his base impulses.

She was recovering. She needed time. If he punished her like he wanted to, he’d tip over into his rut and she wasn’t ready for that. He’d fail her again, and he’d hurt her, and she’d leave him because that would be the right thing for any sane person to do.

So he fled, for both their sakes.

But that was then. Now, he watched her like a hungry animal from across the table, a heated casserole set between them. She’d put on some comfortable clothes and pulled her hair up since he last saw her. He’d heard her, though, moving around quietly, doing gods-knew-what with those boxes.

He’d posted up in the living room all day with his tablet and tried to lose himself in decrypting the data he’d stolen, but he’d only been partially successful in keeping his mind occupied and wholly unsuccessful in making any headway. Turns out Vanderpoel wasn’t quite as self-assured as he first appeared. The data was locked behind an impressive, multi-layered encryption that, even after the discovery of a backdoor vulnerability, would take his automated systems weeks to crack.

Luckily they had the time to spare. Now that the man was dead, what was the rush? Silas intended to take his time with his witch, who everyone believed was on sabbatical anyway. Even if she wanted to, it was too dangerous for her to return to San Francisco. Laying low was the only option for her — and a boon for him.

Petra looked nervous. That normally would have pleased him because he liked seeing her off-kilter, her masks discarded. Tonight he found it grating.

There were dark circles under her eyes. Her cheeks looked too thin. Even her hair had lost a bit of its luster.

This was not his little goddess. This was a woman who’d been pushed to her limit, and instead of turning to him for support, she fidgeted with her fork and refused to make eye contact with him.

Wrong, his instincts berated him. You’ve done something wrong.

Beginning with their doomed creator, Blight, demons were unerringly devoted mates. They were supposed to be trustworthy and loyal. They were supposed to know how to care.

He didn’t know how to do any of that. All he understood was cause and effect, reward and punishment. Stick and carrot. Those techniques had gotten him everywhere in life, but they were almost useless in a successful mating. A part of him wished Tal was around to tell him how to act. Tal wasn’t normal either, but he’d been around so long, seen so much, that he’d know what to do.

When Silas was a child, Tal taught him how to navigate a world that rarely made any sense to him. He was the only one who seemed to really speak Silas’s language.

As far as Tal was aware, he’d never been a mate in his previous life, but Silas knew he wanted to be one with a frankly unhealthy desperation. It was about eighty percent of the reason his brother wanted a body. Surely, after watching and learning for so long, he’d know what to do and could tell Silas how to fix this.

Unfortunately, the thought of his brother entering Silas’s den now, just before the rut, made him flex his claws beneath the table.

It didn’t matter that Tal was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost and therefore unable to compete for Silas’s mate. He couldn’t stomach having him or anyone else near her, in their den, during such a vulnerable time.

Tal understood that, of course. He’d taken off as soon as they made it to Silas’s parents’ house. While he was certain Tal was avoiding a blistering tirade over his failure to keep Petra in the closet, Silas would bet the house that the bulk of the reason he hadn’t darkened their door was a respect for the new boundaries that had been drawn.

None of that helped Silas as he glared at his mate from across the table.

He decided he wasn’t going to be angry at her anymore. Being angry apparently meant not hearing her voice, and that was more of a punishment for him than her. Not to mention that he discovered he didn’t like being mad at her, even when he knew he had the right to be.

Being happy with her, entertained by her, lusting after her — those were all far more pleasurable ways to spend his time.

“Did you find what you wanted in the boxes?”

She rubbed the edge of her thumb nail into a groove in the table. Her eyes were down, attention fixed on the food she moved around her plate. “Yes and no. There’s hundreds of files in them. I went through the ones he had on me and Max, but I didn’t find anything incriminating — other than the fact that he’d connected us through that stupid post office box. Everything is— It’s too much. Some of the photos, the records… I could barely stomach peeking at them. And then there’s the scale of it all. I have no idea where to start. Max refused to tell me anything, so I’m stumbling blindly through hundreds of years of some of the saddest, most vile secrets I can imagine.”

She sounded downtrodden. Damn.

Silas shifted in his seat and just barely stopped himself from rubbing his horn. “What did you expect? That he’d keep all his grand plans in paper files?”

He hadn’t meant for that to come out as harsh as it did. Apparently his tone hadn’t gotten the memo about letting his anger go. Petra’s flinch was a splash of acid on the new, tender part of him.

Her fingers tightened around her fork as she drew her elbow in toward her side, unconsciously making herself smaller. Silas hated that. She wasn’t supposed to be small. She was powerful and beautiful and fearless and canny. The fact that he’d made her shrink away like that was… bad.

Silas prided himself on being able to fix anything — cars, wards, guns, microchips, anything. It was disorienting in the extreme to realize he had no idea how to fix this, the most important and complex thing he’d ever held in his hands. Their relationship felt so delicate. One wrong move and he’d crush it.

What would Tal do? Silas tried to conjure the wraith’s voice in his mind, to imagine what he might say in this situation.

Trying hard to soften his tone, he told her, “I didn’t get a good look at everything before shit hit the fan, but it seemed to me like he’s been keeping those files for a century at least. My guess is he just didn’t go through the hassle of digitizing them like the rest of his more recent files.”

She still didn’t look up at him. “My file was printed.”

“And it looked like he had it tucked away in his briefcase for ease of access. Who knows? Maybe he was too old to figure out how to easily access shit on his phone. Or maybe he just liked to look at your picture.” Silas scowled at her plate. She hadn’t eaten a bite, which was unlike her. “I stole a metric shit-ton of data from his computers, as well as several encrypted hard drives. I think you’ll have better luck finding whatever he’s been up to once I’ve decrypted them. It’s gonna take a while, though.”

“Right. Okay.”

They lapsed into silence again. He normally liked quiet, but this was a kind of silence he’d never heard before. It was the loudest fucking thing on the planet.

Where was his little goddess? Where was the woman who’d thrown a punch at his head the second she was able to?

Longing for that car ride to his cabin struck him hard. He didn’t realize at the time how happy it made him to sit with her, needling her, as she secretly enjoyed the food he’d gotten her. The car was dark and close — the opposite of the airy kitchen and the stupid table that separated them.

Fuck this.

Silas dropped his fork onto his plate and pushed away from the table. Petra jumped. He could feel her gaze tracking him as he stalked out of the room.

When he returned a few minutes later, he found the table cleared and the casserole put away. She was scrubbing her plate in the sink with quick and jerky movements, her back to him. Her shoulders looked like they’d been hoisted up by her ears with rope.

He hovered in the doorway, afraid that if he stepped into the kitchen again, he’d abandon his plans and just throw her over his shoulder. The idea had appeal, except for the fact that he’d almost certainly vault up the stairs and end up throwing her into their bed.

Rest. Recovery. Then rut.

“Petra.” She froze mid-scrub. “There’s snacks in the cabinets. Grab as much as you can and meet me in the living room.”

He didn’t stay to see what she’d do. If she didn’t join him, then he’d figure out something else, but he had a feeling she’d do it, if only because his witch was nosy by nature. No one who went digging for the truth with as much dogged intensity as she did lacked a keen sense of curiosity.

So he waited, listening to the sounds from the kitchen, and held his breath. There was a pause, then the gurgle of the sink draining. A splash of water from the spout was followed by the clink of dishware being set in the drying rack.

Then, slowly, feet padded over the floor. It filled him with immense satisfaction to know that under those perfect toes were slate tiles whose undersides were carved with his own sigilwork. Nearly every part of the house was saturated in his magic. She lived in an invisible fortress, protected from everything short of a nuclear bomb.

His pleasure and anticipation increased when she began to open up cabinets. He silently thanked his parents for the grocery run they’d done for him. Still listening, Silas peeled himself away from his hiding spot just out of view of the kitchen doorway and silently crept toward the living room.

He snagged a bottle of his family’s whiskey from the antique cart by the door before he recalled she didn’t drink hard liquor. He traded it out for red wine. Dropping to his knees, he crawled one-handed into the blanket fort he’d thrown together.

Anticipation was a feeling he knew well, but he experienced a new shade of it as he waited for Petra to make her way to him. His leg bounced. His muscles were tense, jittery. The urge to rub a horn was constant. Silas plucked the cork from the wine with a claw and found himself taking a deep pull just so he had something to do.

The sound of fabric rustling, feet on hardwood, and the crinkle of wrappers was both sweet relief and a shot of adrenaline to his system.

She paused outside the makeshift tent. He could see her toes under the flap of the entrance. Otherwise she was just a silhouette, backlit by the single lamp he’d kept on. Warm light filtered through the blanket, just enough for her to see by when she entered, but still dim enough for him to recreate that soft closeness he craved.

It took a lot of willpower to restrain himself from snapping a hand around her ankle and dragging her inside.

His patience was rewarded when she knelt and nudged the flap aside.

Petra’s expression was wide-eyed when she whispered, “What is this?”

“Get in.” He leaned over to take some of the food from her arms, allowing her to crawl in.

She settled into the cushions he’d arrayed on the floor a bit like she was expecting a trap to spring. “Silas, what’s going on?”

“I hated sitting at the table,” he explained, setting the food around them. He wanted to pull her into his lap, but the skittish look in her eyes warned him against that, so he contented himself with being so very close to her in the semi-dark. Her rich scent of sunshine and incense immediately perfumed the air inside, mixing with his own musk. A tight knot between his shoulders began to unwind.

Much better.

“Why did you hate the table?”

“Because you were too far away.” He snagged a bag of chips and tore it open. “And you weren’t eating anything. I thought maybe this would be better for both of us.”

He offered her the bag. When she continued to stare at him with those wide eyes, he shook it a little, tempting her with greasy, salty potatoes. “Go on. You need to eat, baby.”

Her lips trembled. “You’re… you’re not mad at me?”

“Not anymore.” Silas frowned. He glanced at the bag in his hand. “D’you not want chips?”

He nearly dropped the bag when Petra flung herself at him. Her arms coiled around his neck as she half-crawled, half-leapt into his lap. “What is this?” he demanded, reflexively wrapping an arm around her waist. “What’s happening?”

She pressed her face into his hair and clung as tight as a barnacle to him. “I’m really sorry. I’m really, really sorry I lied to you.”

“Sorry?” It took him a second to figure out what she was talking about, let alone process the fact that she was apologizing. To him. He wasn’t sure anyone had ever done that before. Not for anything that mattered, anyway.

Silas set the chips aside as he tried to arch his neck to get a look at her face. It wasn’t easy when she was stuck to him like that. Not that he was complaining. Having her skin to skin again after so many hours apart was paradise.

Still, he wanted to look into her face when he asked, “You think I was pissed because you lied?”

Petra nodded. Despite his best efforts, her face remained hidden.

Silas gave up trying to catch her gaze. Instead, he leaned forward a bit until he was stooped over her, his arms looped around her back. This way it felt a bit like he was hiding her, gathering her close enough that she might be able to just burrow inside him, where he could keep her to himself forever.

Shadows crept around her legs, holding her in all the places his arms couldn’t, when he explained, “Baby, I don’t give a fuck that you played me. If you didn’t try something, I would’ve been disappointed, frankly. What pissed me off was the fact that you didn’t seem to care that you could have died. That’s not fuckin’ allowed.”

“I cared,” she whispered into his skin. “It just… it just seemed like the trade I was going to have to make. And it’s not like I had anything to lose.”

Pissed all over again, he snapped, “Fuck that! You’re the High Priestess of San Francisco. You’re Petra motherfucking Zaskodna. What do you mean you don’t have anything to lose?”

She seemed awfully small and breakable in his arms. He loved and hated that. Having her vulnerability in his hands was a heady, powerful thing, but seeing her diminished was sour. Ugly.

He’d experienced her small and soft before, but not like this. He wanted that other version back. He wanted the Petra who could be vulnerable with him but still fearless, confident, and powerful even when she submitted to him.

“I’m a fraud, Silas,” she answered. “I lied to become High Priestess. I’m nothing and no one. My entire family is dead. I don’t have a coven. I’m just an orphan from the streets of Los Angeles playing dress-up and hoping I don’t get caught. And now— now I’m even less than that.”

“So?”

“So?” Petra finally pulled back enough to give him an incredulous look. That was better than tears. He loathed her tears.

“So what?” he repeated impatiently. “So you’re no one. I’m no one. So you lied. I lie every day. So your family is dead and you don’t have a coven to back you up. Take my clan. I’ve got more than enough family to spare.” Silas skimmed her cheek with his lips until he found her ear. “You’re a survivor. You’re San Francisco’s High Priestess. You got justice for someone you loved. You’re ruthless and intelligent and ballsy. Best of all, you’re mine.”

Petra tilted her head, putting them cheek to cheek. Her chest brushed his when she breathed deeply. “How is it that you can make me feel so powerful, demon?”

“Because I’m the only person lucky enough to see all of you,” he replied. “That means I can tell you how it really is, even when you might not want me to. You can’t hide from me.”

He could feel the curve of her smile. “Are you sure you don’t just enjoy giving me shit?”

“Can’t it be both?”

Petra’s arms uncoiled from around his neck. Before he could inform her that he had no intention of letting her go, she cupped his cheeks and pressed a series of soft, whispery kisses to his lips. His chest went tight with each one, making it hard to breathe.

Maybe he was dying. It felt like it. Not that he cared.

“You are a little shit,” she murmured, “you’re definitely a bad person, and I’m pretty sure you’re crazy, but I think I adore you, Silas. I really do.”

The tightness made it difficult to speak, but he managed to inform her, “I’m going to make you happy. Then you’ll like me even more and never want to leave.”

“You keep saying that.” She snagged one of his hands and, after a brief struggle to unlock his arm from its place around her waist, brought it up to her heart. Petra gave him such a look that Silas went from “ maybe I’m dying” to “ maybe I’ve already died” in a heartbeat.

“Demon, I don’t want to leave you. I don’t plan to leave you. In fact, there isn’t even the smallest part of me that wishes I was anywhere else.” She paused, lips quirking. “Now, pass me the chips, please.”