And so was Lothar.
The trees were gnarled and ancient, their branches laden with vibrant reddish-purple fruit. These orchards were so vast that we were still a full day’s travel to Asmodeus’s keep when night fell.
Lothar decided we should stop and camp for the night, which was probably a good idea. I needed my wits about me when I was with the attention-loving lord. When I visited, he expected the bubbly, high-energy brat he liked me to be. Hopefully, we hadn’t been spotted. I didn’t want him being tipped off about our visit. Az sucked at thinking on his feet, and when I questioned him about Beelzebub, I didn’t want him to have time to come up with some lie to cover for his treasonous bestie.
The fire crackled as I spread out my bedroll.
“Gonna do a perimeter check,” Loth said and strode off.
Good, I needed a break from the infuriating hound. His continual presence was making me seriously twitchy. Kicking off my boots, I slid into bed, checked Gus was asleep, then turned to Ursula. “Promise you won’t sleep while I do.” I’d woken the night before, standing a few feet from Lothar. He’d been asleep, thank the gods, and I’d hightailed it back to my bed.
“I got you, Rox,” she said from her spot, leaning against the gnarled trunk of a pomegranate tree. She sliced open one of the fruits. “You start walking and talking in your sleep, I’ll toss a rock at your head.”
“Thanks, Urs,” I said and put my hands behind my head, looking into the darkness above us, so dense, limitless.
“You doing okay?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said, not bothering to lie. “I feel…angry, and I don’t know how to lock it away again.”
“You got any idea what’s changed? Why you’re feeling this way again all of a sudden?”
I shook my head. “Could just be spending so much time with him, I guess.” Though I knew that was a lie, and it had nothing to do with the date and the twisted anniversary I had to suffer through every year. If I was honest with myself, I’d been slowly feeling a change over the last few months, maybe even longer.
“Do you wish things could be different?” she asked, almost gently, hesitantly. Ursula was never hesitant and she sure as hell wasn’t gentle. “That you’d done things differently?”
“No…I don’t know.” I rubbed my hands over my face. “It’s too late now. What’s done is done, right? There’s no going back, there’s no changing the past.”
“You could have,” she said. “Why didn’t you?”
Yeah, Lucifer had offered to make things right back then, or at least try. Attempting to send me back in time, giving me a do-over, wouldn’t have been easy, not with an angel present. Their powers interfered with Lucifer’s. I’d chosen not to try, but there were no guarantees it would have even worked if I’d said yes.
It was too late to go back and try to fix this mess now. At the time, the pain had been too much, had cut too deep. I hadn’t been thinking clearly. I hadn’t been thinking at all, and I’d agreed to the unthinkable. The result had nearly been the end of me. I’d refused Lucifer’s help at first, but in the end, I let him use his powers to dull the sharpest edge, but not take my pain away completely, never that. If I hadn’t relented, I wasn’t sure I’d still be here.
The whole thing was just too awful to think about. If Lothar ever learned the truth, not only would there be devastating consequences, but he wouldn’t want anything to do with me, anyway.
That was the real reason his instincts told him to avoid me. That’s why he always turned me down when I asked him to hang out at the clubhouse, why he ended our hugs as fast as he could. Even though he had no memory of what went down, somewhere deep in his subconscious, he was still trying to get the fuck away from me.
My hand slid down to the center of my chest, attempting to ease the ache there, and I squeezed my eyes closed.
“You get any sleep last night?” Urs asked, again far too gently.
I shook my head. Exhaustion was like a heavy cloak I’d been carrying all day. After I’d sleepwalked, I’d forced myself to stay awake.
“Use this. Two drops,” Urs said, tossing me one of her vials.
I took it, doing as she said. Urs wasn’t a witch, of course, but she had a well-stocked bag of tricks, along with the tools of her trade. Within minutes of taking her sleep tincture, blessed darkness was creeping in from the edges of my mind.
I eagerly let it take me away.
Excitement filled me as I jogged through cavern after cavern, until I finally reached Lothar’s door. Without knocking, I slipped into his quarters and stripped out of my leathers. Crossing the room as quietly as I could, I lowered to the edge of his bed, but before I could get in properly, his long thick fingers locked around my throat from behind and he tugged me against him, so my back was pressed tight to his front. His arms wrapped around me, and he buried his face against my throat.
“About fucking time, kitten,” he growled against my ear.
My eyes snapped open, and I blinked up at the darkness above me. I hadn’t dreamed about him in a long time, and oh gods, didn’t want to now.
That’s when I became aware of the hard, solid body under me, radiating heat like a furnace. That’s when I also realized it wasn’t darkness above me, it was below me. I was staring at a black T-shirt, and I wasn’t lying on my pallet, I was lying on top of Lothar. I froze. Oh fuck.
Oh fuck.
