But for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, she believed him.
Maybe it was the rage that had glowed in his molten metal eyes or the quick, raw look of panic he wore when she’d begun to unravel. Or perhaps it was the almost childlike confusion he’d expressed just before he left.
Shade was undoubtedly a monster. Only the gods knew how many people he’d killed, the secrets he knew, and the money he’d raked in with bloodied claws. But the more they interacted, the more she thought she understood the way his mind worked.
Shade was a monster, but he was an honest sort of monster. Unlike her.
Petra tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable spot in a bed that had never really felt like hers. Now it felt even less so. No matter where she settled her head, she could smell him there.
Thyme, citrus, and amber.
Every time she breathed, she could almost taste him on her tongue. Memories of walking into her bedroom to find him there, transformed into his monstrous shape, lounging amongst her pillows, haunted her as surely as her mortification did.
Why was the sight socompelling?
Why had something hot and heavy curled in the pit of her stomach when he pressed himself against her back and hissed into her ear? It had to be the stress. Finally, after so many years of constant vigilance and grief, she’d begun to lose it.
No wonder,she thought, drawing her pillow a little closer to her nose for a deep breath of thyme.
The stress was bound to catch up with her eventually. It wasn’t just her situation, either, but running the cathedral and all its programs, carrying the weight of so many lost soulsseeking comfort… add Antonin’s ultimatum, and her meltdown didn’t look so unreasonable.
That didn’t clear the bitter taste from her mouth, though.
Being exposed was never comfortable for her. Being exposed toShade,a man who seemed to take great pleasure in taunting and humiliating her, was a different level of pain.
It was impossible not to lose it with him, though. He apparently boasted a preternatural sense for exactly where her buttons were hidden. He picked and picked and picked.Whyhe took such great delight in hounding her, she really couldn’t say.
That man wants me to bind myself to him.Her stomach turned at the thought.
Petra couldn’t say she was sentimental. That had been beaten out of her early on, when her parents sold her toys to pay for food and when her friends at the children’s home snitched on her to save their own skin. Life in the Temple wasn’t kind to the soft, either.
Despite what the High Gloriae preached to the public, witchbonds weren’t always the result of a fated love connection. In the Temple, they were used to carve out alliances that could never be broken. It was hard to stab someone in the back when your souls were tied together. The Gloriae encouraged the practice of exchanging witchbonds amongst acolytes, since it tied all involved parties to the fabric of the Temple that much tighter and, if they were lucky, could result in a new crop of magically gifted children.
Petra had entertained a handful of offers herself before her machinations brought her to San Francisco and some small measure of power. But she hadn’t been a rising star then, and the people who’d proposed matches were as low level in the hierarchy as she was.
Out of all the ways her plan to discover the truth Max’s murder could have gone awry, never, notonce,did she suspect it would have to do with her suddenly being a desirable match.
A cold sweat broke out across her skin. Shade’s demand rang clear as the cathedral’s bells in her mind.
Ideas of what it would be like to give her magic over to the demon, what he mightdowith that power, made her gorge rise. She could admit that some stupid, tiny part of her was attracted to him — surely a byproduct of her dysfunctional upbringing amongst criminals — but she could never imaginewillfullytying herself to him.
And that was why she lied.
The likelihood that she would live past Antonin’s visit was slim, and that was the best possible outcome. Because surviving meant one of two things: either she tied her life to a half-mad, sociopathic demon…
Or she tied herself to Antonin.
Two days crawled by after Shade broke into her bedroom, and Petra knew for certain she was going crazy.
The cathedral was in an uproar. There’d been no time to panic before the Protector’s last visit, when he’d shown up with his entourage and his easy smile just after sundown service.
“I was in town to meet a friend,”he’d said, oozing charm even as her staff quivered with fear behind her in the dining hall.“But I couldn’t pass up a chance to visit our rising star. I hope you don’t mind.”
No one knew much about Antonin Vanderpoel besides two essential facts: firstly, that he was the head of investigation andsecurity for the entire Temple and secondly, that the people around him tended to simply disappear.
Not his closest entourage, of course.Theywere a terrifyingly dull-eyed, silent unit rumored to be packed with intensely magically gifted witches he’d hand-selected as children.
But everyone else, from esteemed Priestesses to lowly acolytes to domestic staff, seemed to vanish with a snap of his fingers.
