She didn’t care that she was nude and vulnerable with him in a way she hadn’t been before. He’d seen her at her worst, her weakest. What did it matter?
It was hard to be self-conscious when the man stood in the shower with her, still wearing a pair of soaked briefs, and meticulously massaged conditioner into her hair. It was harder still to find any awkwardness when he turned off the shower, ran a towel over every inch of her, opened a fresh toothbrush for her, and then hauled her into his arms to put her back to bed.
She watched him from under the blankets, her eyelids heavy, as he prowled around the brightly lit room.
It was a nice bedroom. Simple. Lots of natural wood and whitewashed, textured walls. The furniture was obviously handmade and well-crafted, the lines masculine but natural in a way that spoke of another century. If she’d expected some sort of deep, dank lair, she would have been sorely disappointed by the minimalist rustic luxury that was Silas’s bedroom.
Her attention strayed from him occasionally, taking in the verdant greenery that shimmered in the breeze just outside the partially opened window or the simple linen curtains thatwhispered against each other in the breeze. Mostly she watched him, though.
Silas looked tired. The lines of his face were taut, strained. Even the skin around his horns appeared tighter than normal as he roughly towel-dried his curls and then stripped out of his wet underwear.
She admired the gorgeous, perfect curve of his ass as he dug around in his dresser for clothing, as well as the flex and contraction of his back muscles when he donned said clothing.
It should have been hard to reconcile the man before her with the shadow monster who’d appeared like a vengeful god in the belltower, but it wasn’t. Something fundamental in her recognized that they were one and the same. He was a vengeful god forged of shadow and malice, but he was a man, too.
When he turned back to the bed, now dressed in a plain white t-shirt and low-slung, well-worn blue jeans, his feet bare and his hair still damp, she realized that it didn’t bother her.
Silas, man and monster, was the only one looking out for her and… she liked him. A lot. Not in spite of what he was, but because of it.
“Here.” Silas trotted back to her side and drew her attention to the nightstand nearest to her. There was a small collection of things there that she’d been too distracted by him to notice. “Drink that bottle of water and then take those pills. Dad said you’re going to be depleted of a bunch of vitamins and minerals for a while, so you need to take supplements. You should also eat something. It’s been almost a full day since you had anything.”
He helped her sit up and then stuffed the bottle of water and a handful of colorful pills into her hands. Petra didn’t argue but took them dutifully, one by one, under his hawkish gaze.
She’d never been so catastrophically injured before, but she knew that healing wasn’t just a spontaneous thing where one went back to perfectly normal afterwards. Healers worked withwhat the body provided to close wounds, which meant that when something like blood was lost, they spurred bone marrow to make more at a hyper-fast speed. That meant that some of her fatigue likely came from her body’s sudden depletion of essentials, not just the shock of what happened.
“Now eat,” he instructed, handing her a protein bar as he sat on the edge of the bed by her hip.
She felt a little ridiculous for thinking it, but Petra couldn’t help but feel like Silas was worried. Not the average kind of worry, but theI-haven’t-slept-in-three-days kind of worry that changed the way one held their shoulders, the curve of their spine. Dark smudges were stark under his eyes. The corners of his mouth were crimped. When he circled the fingers of one hand around her calf over the sheets, his grip was stiff, manacle-like.
Using her thumbnail to open the stiff paper packaging on the bar, she tried to piece together what the events of the last twenty-four hours would have looked like for him.
Her stomach lurched, briefly threatening another meeting with the toilet, when she thought of what he’d been doing before her dinner with Antonin. It all seemed so far away now, and she shied away from asking him important questions about what he might have found.
She was certain that if he found anything at all, it was important that the public know what had been putrefying in the heart of Glory’s Temple, but on a personal level, she was momentarily exhausted. She’d gotten what she wanted, right? Antonin admitted what he’d done and he’d died a horrific death. Was that justice?
It all seemed too big, too heavy for her to handle just then. It was much easier to imagine what it must have been like for Silas to sneak her out of the cathedral, take her to Rasmus, then smuggle her out of the EVP, across the continent, and back tohis home town in…Tennessee?She wasn’t entirely certain where the Smoky Mountains were, but that felt right.
Wherever they were, it made sense that he would look a bit haggard. Not even his mad spirit could come away from a marathon like that unaffected.
The soft, vulnerable part of her whose protective shell had been scoured away ached at the sight of his slightly rounded shoulders. Silas seemed just a bit more human now. Breakable.
And if her heart quickened at the thought of the source of that vulnerability beingher,well… she didn’t have to think about that just then, either.
After taking a tentative bite, she surprised herself by asking, “Do you want some?”
She wasn’t entirely sure if Silas knew how monumental it was that her first impulse was to share her food with him, but she suspected he understood enough.
“No, baby,” he said, his tone gruff, “that’s for you. I put more in the drawer there, see? There’s also energy gel packs and some fruit leather in there. It’s not great, but that’s what I had in the cabinet. I’ll get you more from the market soon.”
It hit her like a fist. Petra clutched the protein bar to her chest and curled over instinctively until her forehead pressed against his bicep.
“Who are you?” she gasped.
Silas cupped the back of her head. His claws threaded through the damp hair there, holding tight, when he answered, “I’m yours.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
She hadn’t thoughtof what Silas’s clan would look like. Petra knew that many demons had close-knit family units, but for some reason, she never considered the fact that Silas might have one, too.
