His mother would say that seeing Petra shot had put the fear of the gods in him. But he didn’t fear the gods. Before Petra, he’d never feared anything at all. Now he feared losing his mate before he ever got the chance to have her. He feared losing her in the same way a normal man might agonize over his own death.
No punishment from the gods could be worse than that.
Now that he knew how vulnerable he was, it made him go more than a little bat-shit to think she’d consigned herself to death all along.
Back in the lab, Silas had been about two seconds and one bad thought away from laying her down on his desk, thrusting his cock in to the hilt, and making her swear that she’d never, ever scare him like that again. He wanted to punish her, to make a point, and demand an endless string of promises to soothe that awful, nauseating terror that made a permanent home for itself inside him.
He didn’t like being scared and he refused to feel it again. If that meant he had to fuck her hard and fast and mean until she learned her lesson, then he’d do it. But that was the rut and the bastard in him speaking. The logical part of him — and the new, uncertain mate — managed, by the skin of their teeth, to be just a bit louder than his base impulses.
She was recovering. She needed time. If he punished her like he wanted to, he’d tip over into his rut and she wasn’t ready for that. He’d fail her again, and he’d hurt her, and she’d leave him because that would be the right thing for any sane person to do.
So he fled, for both their sakes.
But that was then. Now, he watched her like a hungry animal from across the table, a heated casserole set between them. She’d put on some comfortable clothes and pulled her hair up since he last saw her. He’d heard her, though, moving around quietly, doing gods-knew-what with those boxes.
He’d posted up in the living room all day with his tablet and tried to lose himself in decrypting the data he’d stolen, but he’d only been partially successful in keeping his mind occupied and wholly unsuccessful in making any headway. Turns out Vanderpoel wasn’t quite as self-assured as he first appeared. The data was locked behind an impressive, multi-layered encryption that, even after the discovery of a backdoor vulnerability, would take his automated systems weeks to crack.
Luckily they had the time to spare. Now that the man was dead, what was the rush? Silas intended to take his time with his witch, who everyone believed was on sabbatical anyway. Even if she wanted to, it was too dangerous for her to return to San Francisco. Laying low was the only option for her — and a boon for him.
Petra looked nervous. That normally would have pleased him because he liked seeing her off-kilter, her masks discarded. Tonight he found it grating.
There were dark circles under her eyes. Her cheeks looked too thin. Even her hair had lost a bit of its luster.
This was not his little goddess. This was a woman who’d been pushed to her limit, and instead of turning to him for support, she fidgeted with her fork and refused to make eye contact with him.
Wrong,his instincts berated him.You’ve done something wrong.
Beginning with their doomed creator, Blight, demons were unerringly devoted mates. They were supposed to be trustworthy and loyal. They were supposed to know how tocare.
He didn’t know how to do any of that. All he understood was cause and effect, reward and punishment. Stick and carrot. Those techniques had gotten him everywhere in life, but they were almost useless in a successful mating. A part of him wished Tal was around to tell him how to act. Tal wasn’t normal either, but he’d been around so long, seen so much, that he’d know what to do.
When Silas was a child, Tal taught him how to navigate a world that rarely made any sense to him. He was the only one who seemed to really speak Silas’s language.
As far as Tal was aware, he’d never been a mate in his previous life, but Silas knew he wanted to be one with a frankly unhealthy desperation. It was about eighty percent of the reason his brother wanted a body. Surely, after watching and learning for so long, he’d know what to do and could tell Silas how to fix this.
Unfortunately, the thought of his brother entering Silas’s dennow,just before the rut, made him flex his claws beneath the table.
It didn’t matter that Tal was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost and therefore unable to compete for Silas’s mate. He couldn’t stomach having him or anyone else near her, in their den, during such a vulnerable time.
Tal understood that, of course. He’d taken off as soon as they made it to Silas’s parents’ house. While he was certain Tal was avoiding a blistering tirade over his failure to keep Petra in the closet, Silas would bet the house that the bulk of the reason hehadn’t darkened their door was a respect for the new boundaries that had been drawn.
None of that helped Silas as he glared at his mate from across the table.
He decided he wasn’t going to be angry at her anymore. Being angry apparently meant not hearing her voice, and that was more of a punishment for him than her. Not to mention that he discovered he didn’tlikebeing mad at her, even when he knew he had the right to be.
Being happy with her, entertained by her, lusting after her — those were all far more pleasurable ways to spend his time.
“Did you find what you wanted in the boxes?”
She rubbed the edge of her thumb nail into a groove in the table. Her eyes were down, attention fixed on the food she moved around her plate. “Yes and no. There’s hundreds of files in them. I went through the ones he had on me and Max, but I didn’t find anything incriminating — other than the fact that he’d connected us through that stupid post office box. Everything is— It’s too much. Some of the photos, the records… I could barely stomach peeking at them. And then there’s thescaleof it all. I have no idea where to start. Max refused to tell me anything, so I’m stumbling blindly through hundreds of years of some of the saddest, most vile secrets I can imagine.”
She sounded downtrodden.Damn.
Silas shifted in his seat and just barely stopped himself from rubbing his horn. “What did you expect? That he’d keep all his grand plans inpaperfiles?”
He hadn’t meant for that to come out as harsh as it did. Apparently his tone hadn’t gotten the memo about letting his anger go. Petra’s flinch was a splash of acid on the new, tender part of him.
Her fingers tightened around her fork as she drew her elbow in toward her side, unconsciously making herself smaller. Silashated that. She wasn’t supposed to be small. She was powerful and beautiful and fearless and canny. The fact thathe’dmade her shrink away like that was… bad.
