Fuck. I knew how to handle pain. I created pain all the fucking time. Why was telling her bothering me this much? My body shook with tremors as my shadows coiled over my arms.
“It’s okay. I’m not going to be upset.”
“We were over in The Bizarre when I met a human girl. I was only sixteen, and I had never dated before. Demons don’t always find their mates, so I hadn’t really sought out romantic relationships.” I swallowed what felt like nails, and Wren’s hand rested on my bare chest. “She was in The Bizarre studying lower-level supernaturals, or at least that’s what she told me. I got to know her, and I truly believed that humans were misunderstood. Fuck.” I tugged at my hair as my stomach rolled. “I trusted her. I was a fucking idiot.”
“No, you weren’t. You were deceived,” she told me in a soft voice. “There’s a difference between hearing that humans are monsters and actually experiencing it. They look like us.”
“You’re the purest woman I’ve ever met, little bird. I became fucking obsessed with you the moment you walked into the dorm. So,pleasedon’t think anything of the relationship I had with the human.” I knew that Wren hated humans. “I knew her for about a month before she and I went out on a walk. She took me to the coast. Of course, I noticed the boats, human boats—but like I said, I was an idiot. I was a sixteen-year-old boy. She went in for our first kiss and stuck me in the neck with a syringe. I guess even she wasn’t committed enough to put her lips to a demon’s. She looked at me like I was a rotten heart on the fae market.”
A small growl left my little bird, and I glanced down to see her jaw clenched.
“I trusted too quickly. Way too fast for an act that was laughable at best, but I didn’t know how fucking evil humans were until that moment. Well, actually, it gets worse.” I forced out a chuckle, wanting to expel the bitterness in my mouth.
“You don’t have to tell me any more. If you want to wait, I understand.” Wren’s eyes were filled with tears and some trickled down her cheeks.
I bent forward and trailed my tongue up her cheek, tasting the saltiness of her empathy. Her tears tasted bittersweet. Her pain was delicious, but I never wanted her to feel pain without the pleasure. “Don’t cry, little bird. Don’t cry for me. I learned a lot by getting captured by humans, and seeing you cry hurts me worse than what they did to me.”
She sniffled and scooted closer to me. “I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be.” I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her into my chest, where she belonged. “When I came to, I was chained in the middle of a desert in the human territory. They had wanted to rid me of my shadows, and I was young and inexperienced enough to not know how to call them forth without shade.”
Wren’s lips pressed against my throat as she looked up at me, and my chest swelled in a way that made me want to fess up everything that happened there—things I hadn’t even told my parents that had happened.
“I was chained to a metal X. My arms and legs were bound outward. I was only in my underwear. I had cast away my shadows for the most part, claiming that I wanted to be a vengeance demon. Suchbullshit.I love my shadows. They make stalking and killing so much easier. My telekinesis pairs well with it, but I hadn’t awakened into that power when I was taken.” I pushed out another dry chuckle. “If I had known how to control shadows as well as I do now, they wouldn’t have stood a chance… I caught them off guard once.”
My mind started to buzz as I remembered that evening, and words started to fall out of my mouth. “It was evening. My body cast a shadow on the ground. Not too much of one, but enough for me to control it. The man who stood in front of me had a twisted smile on his face as he grabbed a fucking machete. I forced the shadow below me to jerk forward. I pierced him five different times in the center of his body before thinning the shadow horizontal and ripping outward. I sliced that fucker in half, and his blood soaked me. It was the only liquid I had felt on my body for days. When her parents came the next morning and saw what I had done, they made it a new rule that I was only to be tortured or experimented on when the sun was at its peak.”
“Oh, Kalista. I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
“You didn’t do it. You don’t have to be sorry.” I took in a shaky breath before crumbling down my walls and grabbing her wrist.
My shadows were constantly swirling over my body, hiding the raised scars from my sweet mate. The tattoos had hidden the visibility of them.
“Feel,” I rasped, jerking her hand toward my abdomen.
Her soft touch that was full of love and acceptance paused, and then she started trailing her fingertips over all the raised, jagged edges of them on my body, starting from my abdomen to my chest, throat, and down to my thighs.
Her watery eyes snapped up to mine. “How did they make you scar?”
I disguised a sob retching from my throat as a laugh. “Fucking magic, I guess. My parents think it had to do with a witch working with the humans, but I’m not sure. I don’t really care. All I know is that they ruined me.”
“They didn’t ruin you, Damien, but I can’t imagine the pain you went through. I hate that you experienced it, but you’re not ruined.”
“Little bird, I feed off pain. I don’t think the pain inflicted ever felt bad. I loved it. It kept my magic fueled.”
“I forget that sometimes.”
“I used to forget it too. Until that happened. They got so fucking mad when the torture didn’t have the desired effect. So, they tried everything. The shit they came up with was pretty impressive, actually. The emotional pain of taking me from my home and parents was enough, though. That fucked me up. The solitude fucked me up. All of it really fucked me up. They made horizontal lines on my skin with some weird fucking blade until I looked like a bloody mess. They peeled back my skin until all they could see was muscle and they would take pieces of my body for days before trying to put it back. They took my liver once. I lasted two days before they had to put it back. They took a lung once, but they put it back a couple of days later. They were studying demons, I think specifically shadow demons. The only thing they really found out from me was that we are practically indestructible. I guess they did figure out how to scar me, but that’s the only thing that they figured out.”
At least my capture didn’t lead them to having more fatal information about my kind.
Wren’s body trembled against me, and she dipped her head and started to kiss every exposed area with scars. I ignored the stirring of my cock as I forced myself to continue. I had to tell her everything.
“When my parents found me, it was at the peak of the afternoon. They were opening me up again. I think to steal another organ for a short time. I’m honestly not sure if all of my organs are mine or someone else’s, but they had me opened up, vertically hanging from that fucking X. When my parents found us, they wiped every fucking human there off the map. There were at least fifty different humans and one other shadow demon. It was the first I knew of him being in the desert. He wasn’t as lucky as I was. They had decapitated him over and over again. They had driven him insane by doing it. My parents had to put him down. They fixed me up, and we left.”
“What about the girl? Tell me she’s dead.” She had an edge to her voice that made my cock throb. Murderous sounding Wren was sexy.
“I never knew what happened to her. She wasn’t there when my parents showed up. I’m sure wherever she is, she’s probably carrying on their legacy,” I spat.
