It was aneed.
Shadows rippled up and down his body, restless as they sought something beneath the sheets. Encountering nothing, they spread out across the floor, seeping into the natural darkness of the bedroom like a living net.
There was faint magic in that darkness — a whisper, soft as a breath, of intelligence. But it was unformed, too young to be more than a spark, and vanished under the dominance of Silas’s own overbearing shadows.
When Petra walked out of the bathroom a few minutes later, it was to discover him with his nose pressed into the pillow that smelled strongest of her. Her voice was strained, pitched high, when she demanded, “What are you doing?”
“Savoring it,” he answered, unashamed, “and adding to it.”
“Addingwhat?”
He rubbed his cheek against the pillowcase, his eyelids lowering as the lushness of her scent sent his instincts into a tailspin. Beneath the sheets, his cock had gone hard as steel. He was pretty sure there was a wet spot on his thigh, too.
“Adding me,”he answered. Silas flipped her side of the sheets over, beckoning her to climb in. Around her, perhaps invisible to her untrained eye, his shadows writhed at the edges of the shaft of light she stood in. “C’mere.”
She looked very small and un-priestesslike as she stood there in the glow of the tiny bathroom. Her nightgown was not the one he’d covered in his scent, but he knew she wouldn’t listen to him. It fell to a modest mid-thigh and looked like a soft, unadorned cotton edged with eyelet lace. It was an incongruously modest garment for someone who routinely wore dresses with V’s so deep they almost touched her navel.
It was positively virginal compared to all the scraps of lace and mesh he knew she possessed.
He wanted to push it up around her breasts and feast on her cunt until she screamed. When he was done, he’d take great pleasure in arranging it around her thighs again — like a doll, all virginal and sweet for him and him alone.
Of course, he liked all the strappy lingerie she had in her drawers, too. He wasn’t picky. If she wanted to be his vixen for anight, he’d take that just as happily as this sweet little bite who lingered uncertainly in the bathroom doorway.
I’m a man of multitudes.
She must have seen something of his fantasies in his eyes because the look on her face grew increasingly alarmed. “That sounds like averybad idea.”
“It is, and that’s why it sounds like something you’d do, doesn’t it?”
He counted it as a win when her face screwed up like that. It meant several layers of her masks had fallen off, revealing more of the mysterious woman who’d managed to fool even him into believing she was the same as all her ilk.
“It’s awfully bold of you to assume I won’t try to kill you in the middle of the night.”
“I haven’t assumed anything,” he replied, loving the bite in her voice. “That’s why I’m sleeping with a weapon, baby.”
Petra’s eyebrows hiked up her forehead. “Is that a threat, demon?”
The only real threat was that his cock might go off the second she brushed her skin against his. Anything else wouldn’t stand a chance against him. Petra needed him too much to follow through on any bluster, and her enemies…
Every fine muscle of his body, from his fingers to the strong ropes of flesh bracketing his spine, tensed. “No one is getting into this den,” he promised her. “No one will ever touch you but me, Petra, and it’s not your pain I’m after.”
Her toes curled at the smudged edge of the light cast on the floor. Maybe she sensed the reach of a predator in the darkness. His shadows weren’t weakened by light, not like a wraith’s were, but it was instinct to wait, hiding just out of sight, for the right time to pounce.
They were an extension of him. If demon tradition was to be believed, they were a manifestation of a demon’s soul, tied to allthose of their line, and each demon’s shadow was unique. His would never be confused for another’s. They existed within and without a demon, a symbiotic parasite they were all born with and one that acted on base impulses as well as will — a being that would, as old demon stories claimed, survive far beyond that of its bodily host.
Silas had always had finer control over his shadows than other demons, but around Petra they were in constant flux, desperate to be near her and yet rippling with unease in her light.
That disquiet seemed to have melted away at some point while he was away from her, however, because now they surrounded his witch, crawling up the walls and just outside of her little fortress of light. A deep growl, more motion than sound, shook his chest as he waited for her to step into the dark with him.
The glow of light silhouetted her body within the thin material of her nightgown. It formed a halo around her golden head, making her appear both untouchable and irresistible when she murmured, “Are you saying I’m safe with you, Silas?”
“With me? Yes.” His claws bit into the empty side of the mattress, curling around a body that instinct demanded already be there. Silas’s voice was gritty with want when he promised, “From me? Never.”
She stood there a moment longer, her expression unreadable, before she slowly reached back to flip the old fashioned switch on the wall inside the bathroom.
He wouldn’t have blamed her for squeaking or even screaming with alarm when the trap sprung around her bare legs, but his witch was always full of surprises. Petra merely stumbled to a stop, barely a step outside of the bathroom, with a quick, forceful exhale.
Her tone was carefully measured when she said, “Silas?”
