Petra felt unclean just holding the thing in her hands. Within its smoky, aged pages were records of unspeakable abuse — not only to “patients” like Rasmus, but to Dr. Wyeth’s own daughter, Josephine. There were so many horrifying secrets in those trunks, but this existed in a class all its own. It wasn’t just blackmail or personal secrets stowed away for another time. It was a record of a world-changing crime, and it was up toherto figure out what to do with it.
Yes, it had been long before her time, but she was a High Priestess of Glory’s Temple. It was her responsibility to bring the truth to light.
Giving it to Rasmus was the only thing that felt right. Silas didn’t get it, but she didn’t expect him to. Her gut told her that it had to go to him. It washisname she saw first, and it washisstory.
And despite his displeasure, his instincts, and his general disregard for things like guilt or morality or “doing the right thing,” Silas was helping her put the truth into Rasmus’s hands.
She touched Silas’s thigh. The thick muscle beneath her palm was rigid with tension.
“Thank you, demon,” she murmured, stroking him like she would a big cat threatening to pounce. A little bit of the guilt released when she touched him, and knowing that soon they’d make things right in some small way brought even more relief.
Silas grunted. The bridge of his nose wrinkled when he flashed his fangs at a distant passing truck. “This is a fuckin’ terrible idea.”
And yet you did it anyway,she thought, chest tightening with a great swell of warmth. Petra was beginning to suspect that Silas would do just about anything she asked of him, which was… heady. Never, not once in all her long, miserable life, had someone been so completely on her side.
It wasn’t the time, but she couldn’t stop herself from leaning over the center console to press a tender kiss to the base of one curled horn. “I adore you, demon,” she whispered there.
“Why?” He sounded suspicious, but that didn’t stop him from tangling his claws in a lock of her hair. He stroked it between his thumb and forefinger almost absentmindedly, like he needed to soothe himself.
Petra’s lips traced a path from his brow to the corner of his tightly compressed mouth. “Because you have my back no matter how stupid my plan is, and even though you don’t care about this at all, you respect that it’s important to me.”
“A good mate would’ve told you no,” he gritted out.
“A good mate wouldn’t have asked you to do this right now, either,” she countered. “See? We’re equal.”
“Petra—”
Oh, she knew she wasreallyin trouble when he said her real name. Hoping to distract him as well as ease some of the tension that radiated from him like an electrical storm, her fingers crept up his thigh, following the inner seam of his well-worn jeans.
He stiffened. A low rumble vibrated the air in the car.
“Little goddess,” he growled, snaring her wrist just as she reached the button, “what do you think you’re doing?”
Petra rubbed her lips back and forth against the corner of his mouth as her free hand snaked around the back of his neck to tease the curls at his nape. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Angling for a punishment.”
She smiled. Despite every grim reality weighing the air down, desire thrummed between her thighs. It was impossible not to feel it when he spoke to her in that dangerous, raspy drawl, and when her magic lurched toward him, burning just beneath her skin, she was utterly helpless against the tide of need that swept away her good sense.
“Let me help you relax a little, demon,” she whispered, her voice husky with want. His grip was like steel around her wrist, but he hadn’t pulled her away. She could still brush the rigid outline of his cock where it was probably being squeezed to death against his thigh.
“Look at that — it’s another terrible idea.” His fingers flexed on her wrist, but he still didn’t pull her away. “You know how dangerous it is to send me into rut when we’re away from the denandyou’re asking me to expose you to another man?”
“I promised to stay in the car,” she pointed out. “And did it occur to you that maybe you might feelbetterif we took the edge off a little?”
He snorted. “I don’t think that’s how my hormones work.”
“You said that if you touchme,it’ll send you into rut,” she pressed. “But you won’t be touching me. I’ll be touching you to show you how much I appreciate you, and it’ll be a little stress relief before Rasmus gets here.”
Silas turned his head just enough to pin her with a narrow-eyed look. “And if it triggers my rut?”
Her toes curled within the confines of her shoes. “Then you give the journal to Rasmus as quickly as possible and we haul ass back to the house.”
She could see the war happening in his eyes. Her chest tightened just a little bit more. For all that Silas thought he was incapable of caring for her as he should, he unknowingly proved himself wrong at every turn. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have said yes to this meeting, and he certainly wouldn’t have bothered to keep his hands off of her while she healed.
She couldn’t say how much she appreciated that, but Petra was acutely aware of the fact that she hadn’t done a whole lot of caring for him. Before Antonin’s grisly death, she hadn’t allowed herself to become invested in him. Now, despite all the uncertainty they faced, shecould.
She wanted to.
