Silas let out a low groan. He couldn’t stop himself from pawing at her, his hands shaping to fit the curve of her waist and the perfect slope of her ass. “You know I love it when you’re scary, baby.”
He loved it when she was icy cold. He loved it when she was soft. He loved it when she was submissive. He loved it when she was a whirlwind of rage and sass and magic. He loved all the different versions of Petra. Within her there was an ever-twisting kaleidoscope. Every time he looked at her, he found something new to dazzle him.
Petra didn’t scold him for his reaction. Instead, her expression softened with exasperated amusement. Dropping her head to press a hard, too-brief kiss to his lips, she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do now, but going forward, let’s be scary together, okay? Let’s work as a team, not against each other.”
“Making sure you’re not going to get murdered isn’t working against you,” he protested.
She had the gall to pinch the short, pointed tip of his ear. Silas made an outraged sound more for her benefit than out of any real offense. “You know what I mean.”
Whether she knew it or not, Petra was asking him to act like a mate. Silas had seen many good matings and many bad ones, both at home and in his line of work, so he understood the principles of a solid relationship in the way one might understand the recipe for baking a good loaf of bread without ever having made one.
You put honesty, compassion, attraction, independence, and a dash of reliance in a bowl. Knead. Let it rise. Bake for an hour at 350 or until your relationship is perfectly golden brown.
Relationships, like baking or sigilwork, could all be broken down into easily understood parts. All he had to do was follow the directions.
It didn’t sound too hard, except for the fact honesty was a flexible thing in his mind, compassion wasn’t something he’d been born with, his attraction to her was borderline pathological, he despised the idea of her being independent from him, and he still struggled to grapple with the fact that he was totally and completely reliant on her.
Fuck.
Petra put her hand over his heart.
Something in him went taut when she looked at him like that, like she was silently praying for him to not let her down. “Right now, you’re all I have in this world. I want to be able to trust you implicitly. I think you want that, too. But that won’t work if I worry you’ll go behind my back to do whatyouthink is right at any moment. Can you promise me you’ll try, Silas?”
“I’m going to protect you,” he said, caught between instinct and an existential sort of confusion. He needed to please her, but he also needed to guard her. When those impulses clashed, hewas left unsettled, rudderless, and angry at the thing in him that couldn’t make up its damn mind.
With more patience than he probably deserved, Petra explained, “I’m not asking you to stop protecting me. I’m asking you to talk to me. To work with me so we can protecteach other.”
That taut feeling only grew. He fisted the material of his shirt where it fell over her hips and bit out, “I’m not a good man, Petra. I’ll never be good. You can’t change me. Everyone’s tried and failed. I’m a monster. Always will be.”
“Demon.” The hand not covering his heart found its way under his chin. Petra tilted his head up a bit more, forcing him to look her square in the face when she explained, “I’m not asking you to change. I’m asking you to bemymonster.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Silas,if you’re leading me into a torture dungeon, please just say so. I won’t be mad, I promise.” Petra’s grip on his hand tightened as he led her down a flight of rickety, old, hand-hewn stairs.
“I don’t have a dungeon,” he replied, matter-of-fact.
“Then why do you have so many high-tech locks on the door of this basement?”
“It’s a root cellar, actually. Or it was before I expanded it.”
He descended ahead of her. As he crossed the halfway point of the stairs, lights came on. Trying to reassure her in his own twisted, Silas-y way, he said, “I don’t have the patience for torture. It’s messy, loud, and unreliable. Any answers I can get from torture aren’t going to be better than what I can get through blackmail or, when I have to, a bolt to the knee.”
It said a lot about her that his easy explanation actually made her feel better. She wished she could say that it was because he was being frank with her, but the more honest answer was that she would always be a criminal’s daughter, and it was better for her to know exactly what kind of violence she was dealing with than something unknown.
As Max used to say,“A man who shows you who he is will always be more trustworthy than the man who hides himself, even when what you’re shown is ugly.”
Just to be sure, though, she asked, “Do youlikekilling people? Causing pain?”
“Nah,” he answered, easy as you please. “I don’t feel much of anything when I do it. Worried the shit out of the clan for a while, but I guess they decided that was better than me liking it.”
All things are relative,she thought. Silas probably had no idea how lucky he was to have a family who accepted him, more or less, for who he was. The world was lucky, too.
Gods only know what he might’ve become if he’d been left to his own devices.
It was an odd thing, realizing that she was coming to know Silas so well. Some essential facet of who he was had clicked into place the previous night, when she discovered he could be wounded and didn’t even know it.
Now she felt like she was picking up a foreign language, her understanding snowballing until she could actually understand him — mostly.
