He swallows hard. “I would take my time. Draw out their pain. Feast on it.”
I should feel something. Disgust. Revulsion.
I don’t.
“You shouldn’t be okay with this,” he says, as if sensing my…
Oh, yeah, he can.
“I know people who do really bad things.”
“That doesn’t excuse me,” he says.
“Do you still torture people for money?”
His jaw flexes. “No.”
“Do you miss it?”
He blinksa few times. “No. It wasn’t good. This sounds worse, and I shouldn’t say it, but the taking made it lesser—” He shakes his head. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does,” I say, nodding. “Like, in a full-contact spar, we would hurt one another, but it feltgood.We were giving and receiving the pain willingly.”
“Yes,” he says, relief rushing out with the word. His eyes crease with a smile, and I think he might be basking in the sensation of being understood. I wonder how many times that’s ever happened to him.
Then his face drops. “But that still doesn’t excuse what I did.”
“You did it to survive, didn’t you? You said that your siblings disappeared when they denied themselves their energy.”
“It’s true.” He purses his lips. “My energy needs were revered in days past. Many empires loved their warriors, their entertainers, gladiators. When I came to the new land—”
“Hold up. The new land?”
“America,” he says, and my brain stalls out.
“How old are you?”
His face hardens. “Old.”
Roman gladiators old…
I cringe. This is just great. I’m attracted to a cradle-robbing fire demon.
“Anyway, you said you were imprisoned?” I deflect again because I don’t want to examine the age gap too much.
He grunts. “I was caught by the IBMA—the Interdimensional Bureau of Magical Affairs. I had gotten sloppy and part of me thinks it was on purpose.
“The organization I killed for, they were not good people, and I knew in the pit of my soul that I couldn’t work for them any longer, but that they’d never let me go without a fight—one that would end in my death. I wasn’t ready to die.”
Fuck, can I relate…
“Centuries of life, and I still wanted more. Needed more.” His eyes have a far-off look in them and he whispers as if talking to himself, “Needed just one more thing.”
“What thing?” I ask.
He’s caught in some kind of trance, his gaze distant and disconnected.
I cup his cheeks, turning him to me. Our eyes meet and the tension between us crackles. The air rushes out of me as he descends on my lips. His kiss sears me down to the soul with a brand hotter and deeper than the one on my wrist.
