“Come home, Nini.”Evangeline. She was there for Evangeline. Morals were a luxury, and she couldn’t afford them.
Nyx closed her eyes and silenced the lingering guilt as she went inward and searched for the mark of the blood bond on her soul. It had guided her this far. She imagined it would see her to the end. Or at least she hoped. She sure as shit didn’t know how to put a beating heart back into a butchered chest cavity.
As the thought crossed her mind, a feeling of rightness caressed her senses.
No. Did it want her to–
“Seriously?” she asked it aloud. Nyx opened her eyes and gulped. She reached out, her fist closing around the Devil’s heart as she raised her hand and turned it left to right. Was she supposed to wipe the sand off of it?
Nyx held his heart to the sky for inspection and as the moonlight fell over the heart in her hand, a low drumming filled her ears. The sound resonated in her chest, and as she watched the fading rhythm in her hand, Nyx realized it matched her own.
“Double fuck,” she breathed. “Here goes nothing.”
Nyx hovered over the Devil, cradling his heart in both hands as she took a moment to look over his face. The man made of nightmares didn’t look so scary then. She almost pitied him.
She descended into his chest, keeping her hands cupped around the organ to protect it from protruding bones. The jagged edges of his broken ribs sliced at her hands and stabbed at her forearms as she pushed. Nyx swayed on her knees, her muscles cramping and vision blurring as her pulse weakened. Pressure built in her chest and worsened with each push like she was returning the heart to her own chest.
Nyx stopped when her fingers met the backside of his ribs and released the heart. Was she supposed to put it in a certain way? Or make sure that all of the arteries matched up?
She whined as she retracted her arms and stared down at the puncture wounds from his ribs. She couldn’t stop the blood from running down her arms and into the Devil’s chest. Not that it mattered. He’d taken more than his fair share earlier. He obviously hadn’t been too worried about her lowly peasant blood mingling with the pureness of his own.
Nyx sat back on her heels and waited for something to happen. Anything. The sea calmed and the blood stopped falling from the sky, and Nyx fought the urge to fidget. He didn’t dare look over her shoulder again. It was only a matter of time before she was caught. And what would she say?
Hi, I’m Nyx. I saved this piece of shit for the hell of it and have been spying on you. Want to be besties?
“Ow! What the–” she exclaimed as a cold hand flew to her wrist and enclosed it in an iron grip. The Devil stared back at her with those milky white eyes and she shuddered as she watched the hole in his chest weave itself back together.
A flash of movement from the side drew her attention. The Soul Eater caught his fallen beauty as her knees buckled. He moved strands of hair from her face and rubbed her jawlineso gently that it sent a pang of guilt rocketing straight through Nyx’s bones. If the moonlit goddess had been the one to kill the Devil, what must he have done to her to earn it?
“We have to go,” he croaked.
She pulled her gaze from the lovers’ caress. “How do you suppose we do that? I can’t carry your heavy ass anywhere, and this may be my only chance to get to him. I will not risk my family to get you off this beach. I did my job and saved your worthless life,” she spat.
Anger deepened the lines across his brow. “Give me a nightmare and I can take us back to the cave. If I die, little thief, then so do you.”
“What? I’m not giving you shit–” Her temper flared, and the regret was immediate. The Devil used her distraction to weasel his way into her mind. Her vision clouded as she was thrown back in time to a place she had sworn she’d never revisit.
Putrid breath assaulted her nose as he pinned her wrists against the wall.
“You owe me, you piece of shit.” Spittle dotted her cheek and if his unwashed hand wasn’t covering her mouth she may have vomited.
Unnamed brutes scoured her rundown village and bullied the starving citizens into paying protection costs that they simply didn’t have the funds to cover. Nyx couldn’t live with herself if a family was torn apart. She was an orphan with no one to miss her. If it meant saving even one family, she would deal with soldiers of Ares. It had always been her burden, and it would be so until the day they took her life.
The brute lifted her arms until her feet dangled. She winced at the coarse brick shredding the top layers of skin as he dragged her up, but Nyx wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of crying out.
“Where are the dues for our services?” he spat, voice raised an octave.
Nyx looked down at the hand covering her mouth and back up. Strong he may be, but smart he was not. He pulled his hand away with an annoyed grunt and she spat in his face.
“There’s your payment you ugly piece of–”
His fist connected with her face and the darkness damn near took her. She’d taken punches, but it was always worse when your head was pressed to a brick wall.Tears mixed with blood and ran in streams down her face, the tang of copper coating her tongue as it flowed over her swollen lips.
“You’re gonna regret that, you half-blood filth. If you don’t have the coin, you’ll pay another way.”
Fear fueled her outrage as she kicked and bucked against him. He delighted in her struggle. Nyx fought as he ripped her shirt. Screamed her fury into the sky when he palmed her breasts in a bruising grip and rubbed his dirty, stubbled cheek against them.
Nyx was thrown from the nightmare and curled to her knees as she spilled the contents of her stomach into the stand. The Devil wore a stormy expression she couldn’t identify, jaw flexing and those eerie eyes swirling. “Did he touch you?” he said, his voice nearly a whisper.
