“Do you have any idea who you are talking to, sweetheart?” Bael asked coolly.
“I could say the same to you,” she sneered.
“I think I am talking to the person or relative who enchanted Nix to like the asshole Oadess douchebag I sent to Hell earlier today.”
Elle gaped. “Hell?”
“The one and only.”
“I swear, if you—”
“Annoying.” Bael grabbed her shoulders and disappeared with her into the ether. When he popped back, he clapped his hands, rubbed them together, and said, “Welp, looks like she belonged in Hell, too.”
It was rare for Bael to transport someone who popped right back to Earth because they did not belong there. Surprisingly, the twisted incubus was a good judge of character.
“Did you…really just send her to Hell?” Bowen asked uneasily.
“Let’s get you to fix our Nix, shall we?”
CHAPTER 27
“You act as if you know me, child,” Nix’s future captor, Lemmuns, told her in that same amused voice that made her nauseous.
He stood at the counter, with his back to her, mixing together a concoction of potion ingredients like she had watched him do so many times before. In the past. Or the future. It all blended together.
It’s really him.
She glared at him. Tired of tears. She gripped the bars, ignoring the searing pain and smell of her own burning flesh as she pulled at them, trying to bend them and escape.
She had vowed that if she found him in this second life, she would kill him. She had hoped to master fighting or potions by the time she ran into him, but…she would either kill him now or die trying.
She would never let him turn sunshine Persius into the dark and jaded man she knew in captivity.
“Youdoknow me,” Lemmuns told her, shocking her.
Stunned, she stopped yanking at the bars.Does he…know?Did he know their future together? How?
“I’ve worked for the Oadess family for years,” he admitted.
Oadess. Adar. Her love.
Her future captor worked for them.
She clutched at her head as her thoughts ripped through the pink veil of love for Adar. Had the Oadess family known what happened to her after graduation? Had anyone gone looking for her?
Did they really sell me to him?
“Kellan Oadess has funded much of my research,” Lemmuns rambled excitedly. “A remarkable man, your adoptive father is.”
Nix ground her teeth and began pulling at the bars again, hoping he could not hear the sizzling of her flesh as she gripped the rods of iron.
“I met you when you were a young child,” Lemmuns said cheerily as he worked on grinding some herbs together in a bowl. “Kellan was concerned you were not fitting in with his clan. He had me concoct your special, weekly illusion potion. Though I heard you had stopped taking it recently?”
Lemmuns turned to look at her, and she quickly released the bars and hid her bleeding hands.
He turned back to pour a vial of blue liquid into the bowl and mixed again, whistling like he had no worries in the world.
The whistling. She could never have forgotten it. Certain tunes always hinted at what experiments he would perform on her.
