“He’s not Satan. He’s a demon.”
Unable to bring myself to nod, I simply pulled my gaze from his face and stared out of focus at his chest. Good to know I didn’t have sex with the Devil himself. Although, a demon wasn’t much better. Too much information was given to me at once, and I struggled to process it, to put the words together into sentences and pull them through my mind in an order that made sense. I took a couple of minutes to let the words come to me, to let them swirl around in my aching head until I could bring them to some semblance of sense.
Helovesme?
I tried to shake my head again. I needed to make this man understand. “I saw… you haven’t seen… what I saw.”
“You’d be surprised what I’ve seen.”
When I looked at him again, his eyes were white, a cloudy covering over the blue that swirled for a moment before dissipating. I yanked against the restraints on my hands, jolting them against the metal bars of the bed, and he shushed me again, smoothing my hair from my face.
“There is much to this world you know not of.” The tears were coming again as I listened to him speak, and when I pulled my gaze back to his face, his eyes were that perfect ocean blue again. “All you need to know is this… he loves you, and you’ll never,neverbe unsafe with him.” He wiped away the tears from my cheeks with his thumbs. “Sleep now. I’ll tell him you’re okay, I promise.”
“Who… you?” My eyes were already closing, and the feel of his touch was soothing, calming my nerves and pain.
“You already know, but I don’t matter. Just let yourself love him back.”
Do I already know?His words confused me, so little made sense right now. I clung to the things he said and kept them locked in my mind, hoping they would make sense when I woke next, but right now, I was tired. I wanted to watch Cade sleep, to see him as a man, as a human, and remind myself I wasn’t crazy for feeling how I did. For having my heart skip a beat every time I saw him leaning in the doorway with the beat-up leather jacket and his hair falling in front of his brows.
What did I know of angels and demons?Only the common lore.
I never considered myself religious, except toward the end of my mother’s life when I prayed for her health, and if that couldn’t be provided, I prayed that she’d be safe, happy, andwithout pain wherever she was going. Maybe I should have prayed for the strength to live without her, for that was the hardest thing to learn, only made bearable by my father’s support. Was his love a lie? Or just his life? How could a man treat me the way he did, be the father he was, when behind closed doors, he was a murderer worthy of eternity in Hell?
I loved Cade, I did, but I didn’t want to.
Especially now that I knew what he was.
Did that make me a bad person?
I managed to pull myself to move enough to roll my head and watch Cade, he looked troubled in his sleep, and I wanted to tell him I was okay. God, what was wrong with me? He was a demon and didn’t need comforting. But there was something so soothing about the man’s words, he could have told me anything, and I’d have believed him. His touch felt like he was pushing all the stress and pain from my body, and I was left relaxed.
It was near impossible to correlate the Cade before me now with the monster I had seen in my home, even as my vision grew fuzzy and my eyelids began to droop. Should I try harder to remind myself they were one and the same? If my father had taught me anything, it was even the darkest men were capable of love.
Probably not a great lesson to learn, but while everything was falling apart around me, every truth I thought I knew and held close, Cade was this passionate being who made me feel more alive than I had in years.
Let yourself love him back.
Yes.
Yes, angel man, I think I will.
CADE
Zaqiel told me she woke after nine days, and it was during one of the rare times I was asleep. As a demon, I could comfortably go without sleep for a couple of days, and at a push, I could make it to almost a week, which is exactly what I’d done. But in the end, emotional and physical exhaustion had won out, and I was forced to fall back in the uncomfortable chair and allow my body the sleep it craved. I’d been out for seven hours, and during that time, Zaqiel had come back to visit Nikki again, and she had regained consciousness for a few minutes.
He wasn’t pleased with the way I grabbed at his shirt and shook him, demanding to know what she said and what he said back, but it seemed he had accepted this as how we communicated now and no longer insisted I let him go before he’d answer my questions. Somehow, his patience only increased my anger. The doctor I had hassled—once I got the information from Zaqiel—told me Nikki’s waking was anexcellent sign, given how lucid Zaqiel had advised she was, but she’d still need more rest.
She could wake again at any time, though, and I’d be there.
When the room was clear of doctors, the angel told me Nikki remembered my transformation into my demon form and was still frightened, but when she had woken, she had tried to call for me. He said he could see it in her eyes, the mixture of fear, pain, and confusion.
He said he’d told her I loved her, and I wished he hadn’t. I didn’t want to burden her with that fact. If she wanted to walk away from me after what she had witnessed, I wouldn’t stop her, and I didn’t want her to feel any guilt over that.
All the guilt was mine to bear.
Thirty-six hours later, Nikki stirred again.
I almost tripped over the leg of the chair in my rush to be by her side, forgetting for a moment that my presence may frighten her. I held onto the line of hope Zaqiel had thrown me, that she wanted me when she woke up last time. I could only hope it was from some deep part of her that loved me back and not through confusion or some side effect of the accident.
