I couldn’t let Murphy know that this line of questioning was unusual, that demons don’t question their victims. If we want to know something from a human, we cut them and drink their blood, allowing the offering of their darkest memories to fill us with fuel we can use against them.
I smiled, knowing it showed the sharpness of my teeth and made my yellow eyes glint and glow in a way that made humans’ skin crawl. I chuckled. “I’ve been on the surface, I know Nikki. She’s quite an attractive woman. Maybe I’ll—”
“You stay thefuckaway from her!”
The smirk was still on my face as I watched him. Should I tell him I had already fucked her? More than once? No, that was between her and me, and my lip lifted in a possessive snarl at even the idea of someone else thinking of her the way I do.
“Does it torture you?” I snarled, making sure I was close enough he could feel the heat from my skin. “To know I was with her?”
His teeth were bared as he pushed out the word,“Yesss,”ending in a hiss.
“Then I’m still doing my duty.”
I didn’t tell him that it tortured me too.
Murphy’s forehead was slick with sweat, and panic was etched into his usually hard expression. The idea of a demon so close to his daughter was driving him crazy, but I wasn’t leaving until I found out his reasons. He wasn’t the saint she thought he was for all these years.
“Tell me,” I snarled, letting the words draw out into an otherworldly growl that had him trembling in his shackles.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, his expression was stony again, fighting to keep control in a game where he had no leverage. “When I met Yasmin, we were very young, back before I even knew what the family business was.”
I said nothing but didn’t fight to keep my expression neutral. The frown that was adorning my face made Murphy flinch again. But it wasn’t anger, it was confusion. Nikki had said Murphy and her mother, Yasmin, were only married a few years. Now he was talking about her like they were together since they were young.
“She was my first love, and I was hers. But when I got into the business, I cut ties with her, not wanting her to be involved.” Murphy looked away from me, and I approached, grabbing his face and digging my claws into his skin when he didn’t speak again straightaway.
I was done waiting. “Talk.”
“We met again years later, and feelings I’d forgotten I could feel came flooding back. She had Nikki, and she said she’d had her with another man. But the timing… there was that one night we’d seen each other after the split… and Nikki’s eyes…” Murphy looked at me with hazel eyes I hadn’t paid much attention to before, and my stomach churned. “I think Nikki was mine. But even if she wasn’t, she was like a little angel. I lied to her and her mother about what I did. Even the name she knew me by when we were young wasn’t real. Yasmin never knew. I was schooled under one name, worked under another, and conducted business as who I was. I told Yasmin I changed my name to distance myself from a cruel father and claimed Garrett was my name now. Yasmin loved me, but she was naïve, and she didn’t question me much. We only had a few years together anyway.”
Murphy scowled, and I returned the look, feeling the waves of emotion coming from him. “My son, born from a one-night stand who didn’t want him, was dropped at my doorstep at age seven, shortly after I first left Yasmin. How the slut found me, I can only fucking guess. Maybe her family was in the same business as mine, but I never found out her last name, so I couldn’t give him back. He knew who I really was. He resented Nikki, but he was a dark boy, and perhaps I made that worse with how I treated him. When he hit nineteen, he got worse, like there was an evil living within him, and even by my standards, he was violent.”
He lifted a shoulder, and his indifference to how he treated his own child made my skin crawl. “He wanted to sell Nikki when she turned eighteen and her mother, my Yasmin, was gone. Nikki was beautiful as she grew, and she looked innocent. Someone would pay a hefty price for her as a slave, he said, or perhaps to use as a bargaining chip to sweeten a deal. I cut him from the business and my life, and that was a couple of years before I was killed.”
He looked at me then, his expression hard. “I don’t dispute that I deserved to die, but I always assumed it would beformy business. That fucker, Emrick, found out about my family, about Nikki, and threatened them after what he did to me…” He tilted his head, indicating his missing ear. “I have no doubt he’d have followed through with his promises. He left me alive, but without the protection of my business and with the enemies I had made, I was easy pickings.”
“Who killed you?” I whispered. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped, and I waited for him to utter a name that would end Nikki’s suffering. A large, clawed hand landed on my shoulder, and I dropped my grip from Murphy’s face as another hand gripped my arm.
I knew I shouldn’t have asked, but I had to try.
It wasn’t up to demons to seek revenge nor bring murderers to justice until they were in our realm. The question I had just asked was not taken lightly, and as I was dragged away, Murphy shouted out to me. “You stay the fuck away from her! You hear me?”
I wanted to laugh in his face because I’d never stay away from Nikki. But a demon stood in front of Murphy before slashing its claws across his chest, a waterfall of blood dripping down over his naked body before he was gone from my sight. The demons dragging me away said nothing, and I didn’t struggle. While I hadn’t gotten the information I came here to get, I had found out more than I thought I would. If I hadn’t been so selfish and asked the most important question first, perhaps I’d have gotten away with it and had my answers before I was caught.
Because I was always going to be caught, I knew that.
But no, I needed to know so desperately why she was special. She may have been hisactualdaughter, and while it shouldn’t make a lick of fucking difference to how you treat a child, stepchild, or otherwise, it ignited some long-forgotten, old-fashioned father protectiveness in Murphy. But this didn’t erase all the other things he had done, the people he had killed, and the lives destroyed in his pursuit of more power and money. Not to mention the way he had treated his son as a second-class citizen, exactly as his father had treated him before, and on and on, creating a cycle of abuse.
Where was his son now?I didn’t know. Perhaps he is running his own business, following in the footsteps of his father, not knowing any other way to live.
To suggestsellingNikki as a teenager, he was just as sick as Murphy.
Dragged into a chamber, my arms were lifted above my head and shackled to the warm stone wall with heavy restraints. I didn’t try to struggle, knowing this would happen.
Banishment from Hell can only be achieved by destroying the pentagram etched into the skin on my chest. Incantations would be needed, and while the pentagram could be destroyed simply by breaking the outline, cutting and scarring me, that wasn’t enough for them.
Demons took pleasure in the pain of others, and they would make sure it would be more excruciating than necessary to get the job done.
But for Nikki, for what I had done and who I was, I’d take it all.
