“Demon, I don’t want to leave you. I don’t plan to leave you. In fact, there isn’t even the smallest part of me that wishes I was anywhere else.” She paused, lips quirking. “Now, pass me the chips, please.”
Chapter Forty
He’d never hada favorite sound before, but Petra’s laughter was without a doubt the best thing he’d ever heard.
No one had ever found him funny. People tended to be too afraid of him for that, or else he ruined what might have been a light moment by saying something that normal people found disturbing.
Silas knew that he hadn’t really changed since he met Petra. He was the same as he always was, except now there was a new place inside him, carved by Petra’s soft hands to fit her and her alone.
He still said the wrong thing. He still lacked that fundamental thing that made a personnormal.
But Petra said she adored him, and that changed how hefelt.
She lounged in the blanket fort with him for hours, passing snacks back and forth to replace the dinner they’d abandoned. Whenever he said something he knew logically was inappropriate, she didn’t balk. Petra rolled her eyes, maybe released a scandalized snort. If he was really lucky, she laughed.
As the night wore on and they couldn’t stomach more chips or candy, they lay there in the darkness facing one another. She was loose-limbed and soft. Her breath smelled very faintly likewine and sugar. Her hands rested lightly on his chest, the pads of her fingers tickling the base of his throat. They were unnaturally warm and glowed just enough for his demon eyes to catch.
Silas understood passion. Lust.
Tenderness was new.
He found himself gorging on it, on this precious, astonishing softness she showed him. His hands roamed greedily over her side, her hip, her back. Despite his nearly constantly hard cock, it wasn’t a lustful touch necessarily, but a craving to feel every part of her at once. His shadows wove around her in a living blanket, similarly unable to pick a favorite part to settle on, and whenever they brushed her hands, she’d smile and spread her fingers encouragingly.
They’d been talking for long enough that their voices had begun to roughen, but he couldn’t get enough of her husky voice. It didn’t matter what she was talking about. If it was feasible, he would have demanded she never stop talking.
Eventually, as the mood deepened into something nuanced and sweet as molasses, Silas found himself unable to hold back his curiosity any longer. “Why do you really hide food?”
Petra’s eyes were closed. She didn’t open them when she answered, “I told you it’s a sad story.”
He figured as much. A part of him truly didn’t want to know, only because it would drive him nuts that he couldn’t go back and fix it for her. But the bigger part of him, the one that contained the pathological curiosity, had to fill in all those blank spaces in Petra’s past so he could understand hernow.
“Tell me,” he urged, rubbing the side of his thumb over her spine.
She took a moment to adjust the position of her head on a pillow, bringing it just a little closer to his. Her fingers slid under the collar of his t-shirt. He suspected she sought his touch for comfort.
How novel.
“You know about my family already. My mom and her brothers moved to Los Angeles just after the war ended. They mainly moved guns and alcohol. Small-time stuff that got bigger over time.”
Petra rubbed his skin in a back and forth motion. Her eyes stayed closed, but he could see them flickering beneath her eyelids, as if she were watching the events of her life playing across the pink insides.
“My family was always poor and arrant. No magic, no connections except for the ones we’d made ourselves. When the gun business really took off with all the leftovers from the war, we were doing better than we ever had. My mom met my dad through a friend of a friend and when he proved himself to my uncle, he joined the business. Then I was born. And not long after that, Mad Thad restructured the territory.”
Ice tipped into his veins. He was only a decade older than Petra and grew up in rural Appalachia, so he wasn’t exactly tuned into major political movements in the 1970’s, but he knew the broad strokes. Enough to understand where the story went off the rails, at least.
“The EVP was a mess at that time,” she explained, not quite bitterly but not unaffected, either. “Black markets were everywhere. The infrastructure was destroyed by the war. People like my dad and uncles were flooding the market with new, more dangerous weapons that went mysteriously missing from every army in the UTA. That’s how my uncle met Rasmus, as well as a lot of other unsavory types. There wasn’t enough food for normal people. The elves were in a silent civil war. Los Angeles was a cesspool of desperate people looking for work, food, or guns. For the people my family knew, it was usually all three.”
His home hadn’t fared much better, but the chaos hadn’t been as centralized. Mostly that was because dragons had razednearly every major population center in the Neutral Zone at least once during the one hundred year war that altered every aspect of life in the UTA. There were simply fewer places for chaos to cluster.
Petra took a deep breath before she continued, “Sometimes we were poor, but mostly things were pretty good for the criminals in my family — until Mad Thad decided enough was enough and ordered the major elvish families to get a handle on their territories or he’d take it from them. Suddenly there was law and order. Curfews. Raids. Overnight, easy money became gang wars in the streets as people fought to hold onto what they had.
“My uncles died one by one. I could see Max withering away from grief as the violence just kept going on and on. He tried to convince my parents to get out while they could, but they didn’t have anything else to fall back on. They spent all their money on alcohol and had no skills, no training for anything like normal life.” She shook her head a little, as if she had to dislodge something from within her mind.
Silas pulled her closer and, swinging one thigh over her hip, pressed her face into the hollow of his throat. His heart pounded as he imagined all the things she wasn’t telling him. The shock of swinging back and forth between prosperity and poverty. The neglect she must have suffered from parents who were so wrapped up in themselves. The fear of living in a city on the brink of violence every day.
And we haven’t even gotten to the bad parts yet.Cold sweat broke out across the back of his neck.
Petra’s voice went soft and small when she said, “Max was shot and I guess he finally had enough. One day, my uncle just disappeared. Everyone said he’d died from the shot. I was heartbroken. My parents loved me, but he was the only one who ever seemed tocare.”
