I’d given birth in this shack and screamed Adeuto into being. And he’d become my world. With him came so much joy and love. With him came more fear than I had known was possible.
“I will be back tomorrow, my little love,” I said. I kissed his forehead and breathed him in. “I love you so much.”
Adeuto held a finger next to his eye, then to his heart, then pointed at me.
I smiled. “Thank you. Now, to sleep.”
“The sun comes up, and I get out of bed,” he told me seriously.
“That’s right. If it’s dark, stay in bed. You’re such a big boy now,” I answered just as seriously. I stole one last kiss and swallowed down the urge to climb into bed beside him and ignore everything I’d started.
I pulled the curtain across his small bed and walked outside, sitting on one of the two flat rocks I’d lugged here from about a mile away.
“Are you prepared for battle?” my grandfather asked, gutting a Svoli. We’d had dinner, but life out here meant little rest. If you weren’t eating, then you were thinking or preparing for the next meal.
I sighed. “Less so than usual.”
“He gets under your skin. Have you returned to his bed?”
Demon grandfathers were a little different. Then again, my magus grandmother might’ve asked the same question. Or she just would have killed Carmine for me. I was sure she’d tried her best to do so before her end. “No, and I won’t.”
“The boy’s life depends on that.” The blue demon grunted.
The blue demon who had landed a crimson mate and helped to create a son of extreme power, and then somehow survived his mate’s death too.
“I know.” His warning sharpened my mind. I’d needed the reminder of my purpose tonight.
He lowered his dagger. “Do you?”
I glared. “Do I know that Carmine would murder his son? Yes, I fucking know.”
There were animals that did the same, but in this realm, demon kings killed any threat to their throne, including their own sons. Some kings let their sons live until the age of sixteen—as in Carmine’s case—until demon power surfaced. Others killed their sons immediately. The only way sons managed to ascend the throne at all was if they received help, usually from their mothers.
Even if I believed Carmine capable of controlling that icy monster of his—which I didn’t—I was a mother, and the potential of harm coming to my child was enough to never risk Carmine learning of his son.
And that was why Carmine had to die.
So my son wouldn’t.
That was the only way out of this. That was why I would never change my mind about Carmine. Because what I felt for Adeuto could not be matched. Not ever.
My grandfather tossed the meager strips of meat into the pot over the in-ground fire, then he opened a portal and tossed the innards through. “I see that.”
“A mating ritual can be broken. Why did you never tell me?”
Blue scales covered nearly every part of his body. My grandfather was a demon through and through, and I could only be thankful that his loincloth was more like a Tarzan skirt. Otherwise, the only difference between my grandfather andother demons was that he had lived a rather different life to most.
“You needed the king’s protection, and I could not be sure that you wouldn’t break the ritual on your bad nights.”
I nodded, moving past the betrayal of his omission. Maybe I was more demon than I thought because his admission didn’t hurt me. My grandfather didn’t owe me anything, and he’d done right because I would have taken the way out if I’d had the option and knowledge. “How is it done?”
“You trust yourself?”
“I do.”
“Mating coats the iron casing around your heart. Because of that, your soul recognizes the mating as part of you. Get between the coating and your iron, and your soul will recognize the mating as a foreign force. It will annihilate the ritual for you.”
The magus in me had expected an elaborate charm or thrice-woven barrier. Maybe a trip to the ghosts of my ancestors. Sometimes I loved how straightforward demons were. “The effect?”
