“Careful, Shemhazai. Keep playing these games with me, and one day, you’ll find you’re playing them alone,” I spat before releasing him and spinning away.
“Don’t you walk away from me!” he hissed, and I glared at him over my shoulder as I did up my pants and straightened out the cuffs of my shirt.
“Why not? You do it to me all the time.”
Then I left him there because if I stayed, I was worried we would never come back from all the fucked up shit I wanted to do to him.
Alexa play: Run Away to Mars by TALK
Iwasn’t sure how long I roamed the streets of Salem after Shem ruined my orgasm in that Satan-forsaken club. My mind was in shambles. The anger in my chest gathered and pulsed through my veins with each beat of my black heart, and I couldn’t get a handle on it.
I spent hours going back and forth on whether or not I should hunt that witch down and fucking kill him. At one point, I manifested the scepter, spinning it in my hand as I stood in an empty cemetery. I didn’t even know which one I had wandered into.
It didn’t matter.
No matter where I went, I couldn’t escape the haunting image of Shemhazai kissing another man.
Kissing him.
It was somehow worse than fucking. It was something I had foolishly assumed he’d only reserved for me.
I considered finding a drink somewhere.
I considered leaving Shem here and returning to Hell.
I considered disappearing for good.
But finally, I went back to the dead man’s house because as much as I hated it, the truth was—Shemhazai had my heart… whether he deserved it or not.
I didn’t know what to do with him or what to do with this toxic, bleating need in my chest to be close to him. It was like he was a part of me, and I think, in some way, he always had been.
I still remember the first time I saw him. Yahweh had sent me to Hell as Ramel’s replacement, and I had found Shemhazai alone and morose in the House of the Fallen, staring into the viridian flames of the main fireplace like they could fix whatever was broken inside of him.
His hair—black as the feathers on my wings—had fallen in limp tufts over dull green eyes, and I’d felt a click in my chest. I knew immediately that this demon would mean something to me, I just hadn’t understood what.
I knew now.
We had been crafted of similar materials, and we fed off the same darkness born from abuse and trauma. Though I knew on some level, whatever Shem had suffered was much worse than what I’d suffered. On top of that, he’d been left for millennia to deal with that pain alone.
But still.
It was no excuse.
Even I had a breaking point.
I didn’t want to leave him, but I couldn’t stay if he refused to give me any real pieces of himself.
It wasn’t fair to either of us.
I walked into the house, my scepter hanging from limp fingers and my bones so tired I felt mortal.
The lights were on, but that wasn’t unusual. It’s not like we’d beenworried about saving electricity.
So, I didn’t think anything of it as I kicked the door shut behind me and made my way to the stairs with plans to take a hot shower and go to bed.
“I told you not to walk away from me.”
I glanced up, surprised to find Shemhazai waiting for me in the kitchen, his hands in his pockets and an unreadable expression on his face.
