As if sensing his unease, Petra stroked his spine and asked, in a lighter tone, “Can I go back to sleep now?”
It was hard to speak around the lump in his throat, but he managed to rasp, “Yes.”
If every nerve in his body wasn’t straining to pay attention to her slightest shift, Silas might have thought it was his imagination that conjured the soft, seeking touch of her lips to his throat. “Goodnight, demon. Sleep tight.”
“Goodnight, little goddess.”
After a few minutes, Petra’s body went soft again, her breathing even and deep. Silas didn’t follow her into slumber, though. He stared into the darkness and thought,Maybe Tal’s right.
And then, like there might be some benevolent god listening, the pathetic, newborn thing in him prayed,Please be right.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The last dayof her life as she’d known it began with a demon breathing in her ear. All things considered, it wasn’t a bad start.
As Petra lay there, nearly suffocated by the weight of a full-grown demon, she tried to summon some great swell of feeling about what was to come or what she’d allowed to happen the previous day.
But there was nothing. After so much work, so many sleepless nights, and too many quiet tears, she found an unnatural stillness within herself now that the day of reckoning had arrived.
As for regret…
Petra turned her head as much as she was able. It wasn’t easy, since Silas had apparently decided to become a sentient blanket in the night. She only just managed enough movement to see a sliver of his face, nearly obscured by a fall of chocolate brown curls. She expected him to look relaxed in sleep, but he appeared quite the opposite.
His brows were drawn tight together, his lips pressed into a flat line. This close, she could even see that the skin around the base of his dark, slightly ridged horns was tense.
But the arm around her middle wasn’t too tight. His breathing was even. His smell, thyme andhim,created a hazy comfort in the warmth of her bed. Which was ridiculous, because nothing about the man could be clinically defined as comforting.
Liar.
Petra let out a slow sigh. She had to acknowledge, if only to herself, that though Silas was clearly off his rocker and deeply amoral — atbest —she hadn’t exactly suffered in his company. At the very least, he’d done marvelous work in taking her mind off of what was to come, and gave her several shattering orgasms on top of it. If nothing else, he deserved a bit of credit for giving her a lusciously sensual penultimate day.
And sometimes, if she really squinted and turned her headjust so,she thought she could see something almost boyish about him.
Dim memories of the previous night’s conversation bubbled up as she admired the fan of his lashes, thick and sooty, where they lay against the tops of his cheekbones.
She remembered waking up to his low drawl and complaining about it, though she hoped she didn’t say anything about how she’d been enjoying what might be the last good night’s sleep of her life. There were clearer memories of bickering, their bodies shifting, and the odd, comforting pressure of his shadows wrapping around her body.
And then he asked her about food.
Obviously, it wasn’t something she’d talked about with anyone besides Max, but even he hadn’t known the true extent of her anxious habit. He knew enough about what had happened to her between the time when he faked his death and when he tracked her down years later to riddle him with guilt. She never wanted to add onto that load with something she could manage on her own, and she’d certainly never told him how she’d pawedthrough trash for food scraps or stolen things like shoes and blankets when the cold became unbearable.
But with Silas, the words had simply tumbled out. Not because she thought she’d find some deep well of compassion in him, but rather the opposite. There would be no pity from Silas. He was too frank, too removed from ordinary feeling, to weep for a hungry child.
Petra didn’t want pity or tears. Her life was what it was. The past couldn’t be changed, and she wasn’t special. Many children, particularly those who didn’t quite fit into the fabric of respectable society for one reason or another, ended up with worse fates than hers. She’d been rescued. Others hadn’t.
If she came out of it with scars, then she didn’t want someone to look at them and flinch. She wanted someone to see them plainly, with neither pity nor scorn, but with admiration for how she’d survived.
In the moment, Silas seemed like the perfect person to tell because he wouldn’t offer her platitudes or false praise for coming through adversity mostly okay in the end.
What shedidn’texpect was the almost panicked note in his voice when he told her he’dget her more.
He didn’t ask more questions. He didn’t get angry on her behalf. His first reaction was to immediately connect her explanation to what he’d done and how she’d reacted to it.
Her half-asleep mind could barely comprehend it, but she thought she’d heard an almost childlike, anxious guilt in that simple promise and those that came after it.
Maybe she was reading too much into it. It did seem a little outlandish to assign guilt to a man who, rumor had it, had once been hired by three separate clients who all put hits out on one another and somehow managed to collect his payment for every single one of them.
But Petra didn’t want to think too hard about it. She didn’t want to regret wringing the last drops of pleasure out of her life in the most inappropriate ways possible. She wanted to live in the fantasy world where Silas was actually kind of sweet in his own awful little way for a moment longer.
