“Joy.”
Confusion flickered in her eyes.Another word that didn’t exist in the demon dictionary.
“You make fun because you do not like her,” Carmine’s sister correctly deduced.
Did anyone like Carmine’s mother?She’d formed her reputation on being hated. Demons didn’t like her, and so part of themlovedher. Depended on her. Believed in her. If a demon looked at Carmine wrong, they’d have his mother to deal with. She was the unrelenting, vicious-to-the-core protector of her son and her line. In short, his mother was fucking scary. Three years hadn’t been enough time to downplay her terror. As mothers-in-law went, I’d pulled the very, very short straw.
Gratia raised a hand to the fireplace mantel, and her sylk dress—modest by demon standards and more like lingerie by human standards—slithered across her crimson scales. She’d worn sylkto fuck with me after last night’s banquet.
“Carmine says that you wish to reenter Tiers,” she said.
“I do.”
Gratia looked at me. “Which means you need or want something. Desperately.”
“I’d say that’s a given.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What could you need or want that being with Carmine can’t get you? He would give you nearly anything. He would have done so when you were a weak human too. Now that you might be worthy, you could name your price, and he would pay it.”
She had answered her own question with the “nearly anything.”
My price was one he would never pay, because if he wanted to pay it, he would have freed Tempest already to win my favor.
Perhaps he didn’t wish for my favor any longer—there was always that. But demons served their own interests nearly always. Carmine was no different. Whether by lust or by deeperfeeling for me, I believed he would have freed Tempest already if he was ever going to.
I approached Gratia, and the demoness tensed. With good reason. I was more powerful than her now. If I wanted, and with considerable effort, I could kill her. Carmine wouldn’t hurt me, though he may punish me severely.
“You must have been so disappointed when Carmine returned from the Earth realm with me.” I snorted after. Because after several years’ distance from the turmoil of that time, I could appreciate how that would’ve appeared. The demon king had returned with a half-drowned, wide-eyed magus-demon, who spoke and behaved like a human and had no clue about demons. My demon magic gave me inherent knowledge of nearly everything here, but the influx of that power at sixteen when combined with my grief had delayed my smokeandknowledge. But Carmine had never shown any trace of embarrassment in that first year, or the year after.
I was woman enough to give him credit for that. And woman enough to laugh at the irony of everything that had happened.
Gratia’s red eyes lit with amusement. “Disappointed is an understatement. Yet Carmine told us to bide our time. He reminded us a blade is forged. He said that you possessed everything needed to become the most lethal weapon in this realm. I seem to recollect wishing to laugh every time he reminded us of that.”
I was sure she had. “If that’s all, it’s been a pleasure.”
“I can see what he meant now,” she said to my back.
Hell just froze over. Gratia complimented me. I glanced back. “Shall we be friends then?”
“That is something that remains to be seen.”
“If only my memory wasn’t quite so good,” I replied. She’d humiliated me more than once during my time here. When the other crimsons had seen how Gratia had treated me, they hadfelt comfortable doing the same. Carmine was the ruler. His mother was the protector. Gratia held the strings of the royals in the fortress. I had always held the strings wherever I went, so the experience I’d had here at sixteen was very much a first.
Gratia shrugged a shoulder. “I did wonder if I might be your blacksmith for a time. The forger of your blade. Alas.”
I tilted my head, thinking back to the string of months when she’d tormented me.
“You want to play Tiers,” she said, and unlike her brother, I could see Gratia didn’t particularly care why I wanted to play the game. She’d been trained for one purpose, and per her reasoning, I couldn’t pose a threat to her brother because that would pose a threat to myself. Anything I desperately wanted was insignificant. What Icoulddo was strengthen her brother by completing the mating ritual with him, and if I’d become a lethal blade in the meantime, then even better.
Gratia wanted to get me on board.
I paused. “And what can you offer me?”
“Knowledge.”
Knowledge was a powerful thing. Knowledge of my twin in the dungeons had made me enter Tiers despite the dangers, after all. Knowledge could change a person’s life. “I’m listening, but not for much longer.”
“My brother cannot deny anything which makes the realm or his position at its head more powerful,” she stated. “If you wish to play Tiers, then this is what you must convince him of, or he will never allow you back in. Nothing else will work.”
