From his downward gaze, I got that he didn’t just refer to my shining personality. I was curvier, and my breasts were larger. My grandmother and mother had taught me how to fight while alive, but now Iwasa fighter. I was honed muscle, a warrior. As for the burning smolder in his eyes that told me Carmine would like nothing better than to shove me against a graphite surface and work out some of that hate physically, I couldn’t care less about the seductiveness of my new body. My body was a weapon and a tool, and it would be a weapon and a tool until I died.
I’d learned how much I was physically and emotionally capable of, and the extent of those limits had shocked me. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to achieve my ends.
He forced his gray gaze back to mine. “Why did you enter Tiers?”
Should I tell him that I intended to kill him? “To win.”
“What trouble are you in? Who has a hold over you? Do they have something you need? Has someone touched or harmed you?”
“Only you, Carmine.”
Walking past him, I rounded the couch and swept my focus over the living room that took minimalist fortress to the extreme. “You don’t redecorate much.”
“That would be the job of my queen,” he answered. His eyes tracked my every step. “Syera, you know that I will not allow you to escape a second time.”
My stomach lurched. Because, no, he wouldn’t. Yet I’d given up falsefreedom for the chance attruefreedom, and in doing so risked losing any semblance of the word. “You do you.”
“You do you,”he echoed, then frowned. “A humanism?”
I ignored his question and faced him. “I’ll need to enter the Crave Arena each week to fight. I’d prefer to stay in the Pinnacles, so the other contestants don’t put more of a target on my head. I’m sure we can reach a compromise.”
“Compromise,” he repeated.
Even I paused at that. Did I really use that word with a demon? I might as well ask Carmine to be level-headed while I was at it.
“Yes, compromise.” I placed my hands on my hips. “Where I get some of what I want, and where you get some of what you want.”
A tension rippled through his Viking-like frame. That had been my first thought of him when I’d woken in the demon realm—that he was an ancient Viking. The ink symbols on his torso, and the loose fighting garb that he tended to wear that gathered tight at the waist and ankles.
Carmine crossed the cool, black floor, a hunter’s intent in his movements. I watched his approach.
He hissed, “What Iwant, Syera?”
I didn’t answer. He was close to crossing into unpredictable cold territory.
Carmine’s hands twitched by his sides as if they itched to wrap around my throat. “What Iwantis to have my mate’s thighs wrapped around me. I want to make her scream. I want to hurt her the way she hurt me when she left three years ago.”
He roared the words in my face, panting hard.
“Control yourself,” I answered in icy tones.
Carmine blinked.
Gripping his wrist, I shoved his hand off my throat, only possible because I’d shocked the hell out of him. “I will never complete the mating ritual with you, Carmine. You will never enter my body again with me willing.”
“I would not enter you any other way,” he said savagely.
On that front, I believed him. I’d been the one seducing him from sixteen years old, not the other way around. He didn’t touch me for two years despite my best efforts.
“Then I can stay here in the royal fortress and fight in Tiers each week.” I shrugged a shoulder. “But you should never forget we will never be what we were. We are just strangers locked in the same curse now.”
He stilled, and my brows drew together at the intensity of his reaction.
Mother be,his body was designed for mine.Giving in would be so easy.
And I’d never forgive myself.
“You speak of me like I’m a monster,” he said.
