“Oh, now you want to talk to me.” I didn’t miss the oddly desperate note that reverberated when the demon spoke my name. It was different than how it had warned me against saying Pithius’s name aloud. It sounded more nervous. Uneasy. That was interesting. And new.
So, the thing inside me didn’t want me looking at myself? Why would that be?
I marched up to the full-length mirror and stared at my reflection.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then I felt a flicker of pressure behind my eyes. A tightening in my chest that wasn’t quite pain. The demon, pushing back. Trying to make me turn away.
I smiled at my reflection and stayed exactly where I was.
Tilting my head, I turned a little to the side. I looked almost pretty, I thought, if you didn’t count the smears of blood or the fading vestiges of Sharpie ink on my skin. And for the first time in my life, I wondered whathesaw when he looked through my eyes. Did he see the same pragmatic, grim-eyed fighter I was checking out? Or did he see something else—something he’d keptmefrom seeing clearly all these years?
The thought made heat curl low in my belly.
For my assault on Descent, I’d dressed up in the most goth thing I could find that still covered me up—black jeans, black tank top without a bra, black hoodie, black boots. I’d shed the hoodie downstairs next to Steve, and my markered-up arms gleamed with their epithets and slurs, but I didn’t care so much about those anymore.
Instead, I focused on my hazel eyes, my longish dark brown hair, and my too-pale skin that rarely saw the sun. I was neither skinny nor fat, my body way more functional than curvy, but…I liked the way I looked, I decided. I was fierce. I was strong.
I’d had to be, I supposed, given that I was lugging a freaking demon around.
Suppressing a giggle, I lifted my hands to my temples, pressing my fingers along my cheeks, my neck, and over my shoulder blades, as if memorizing new terrain I’d never mapped before. New, wild,deliciousterrain.
And I was delicious. Yummy enough to gobble up whole.
Inside me, something shifted. Not quite a flinch—more like attention snapping into sharp focus. Like I’d just walked into a room my demon had been guarding, and now he couldn’t look away.
Good.
I dipped my hands farther down my chest and felt him twist inside me—not away, but toward. Like a hooked fish fighting the line.
“You don’t like this?” I murmured, staring into my own eyes as I cupped my breasts, feeling their weight and roundness. I kneaded them slowly, deliberately, and heard the hiss in the back of my mind.
But beneath the hiss was something else. A low, subsonic rumble that I felt more than heard. Hunger. Want. The kind of need that had been carefully choked off, starved for fifteen years.
My nipples hardened under my palms—from my touch or the demon’s attention, I couldn’t tell anymore.
I also didn’t care.
My lips quirked into a smile. “Is this why I never feltanythingforanyonebefore now?” I whispered to my reflection. “Were you cock blocking me, you sack of shit?”
And since when was that a thing? I knew enough from researching possessions with Mordechai that most demons gloried in the sexual depravity of their hosts—driving their trapped humans to ever-worsening acts of debasement.
“But not you?” I cooed as I squeezed my breasts more firmly, then slid my hands down my thin tank top to drag it free from the waistband of my jeans. “That’s not your thing? Or maybe…it was all along, hmm? But you didn’t want to push your luck?”
When my fingers brushed along the skin of my belly, the demon twisted again, the movement tight, even a little angry. Interesting.
I pulled off my tank in one smooth motion—my brows lifting. I’d forgotten about the words I’d written all over my torso.
No. Not me. The realization hit me cold and sharp.Ihadn’t written these phrases and lines. It had.Hehad. Using my hand, yes, but these weren’t my words.
“Poetry,” I breathed, tracing the shaky letters across my ribs, my belly, circling my breasts like a brand. My skin prickled beneath my fingers, hypersensitive, as the thing inside me went utterly still. “You wrote poetry on me. Here—and here, and here. Why? Is there something you want, down there in the dark?” I whispered the challenge, fingers drifting lower, following the text down to my hipbones. “Something you’ve wanted for a while?”
The silence inside me felt like a held breath. Like the moment before surrender.
I played my fingers up over my breasts again, feeling my own rising heat—and something else beneath it. His desire bleeding into mine like ink in water, impossible to separate.
“You could have had this any time,” I murmured, watching my hands in the mirror. “Fifteen years, you’ve been inside me. You could have made me do anything…but you didn’t.”
Without warning, I pinched my nipples hard, trapping them between my fingers. Pleasure spiked through me—both mine and not-mine, doubled and reflected back. Inside me, the demon made a sound I’d never heard before. Not a hiss. Not a growl.
