Rage filled her eyes. “I got lots to say starting with that whore he was all smitten with. Normally, I ain’t got anything against women who get naked for pay. They want to take off their clothes for money and men are dumb enough to do it, good for them. But this one was greedy. And that’s a whore.”
Maybe, but I nodded along like I believed her because that was good information and hopefully could give me a place to start.
Wiggle into for a way to investigate if nothing else.
“Tell me everything and I promise I will check out as much as I can and do right by Steven,” I told her, nodding when she seemed suspicious again. I decided to go another way to placate her. “Maybe it was bad drugs and someone slipped it to him, but that’s something we need to know if you’re sure he’d never done drugs.”
And she was off to the races again, adamant that he’d never touched drugs and wouldn’t. She might have been rough around the edges and harsh on women, but she was fierce in her love for the victim.
We could all use someone like that in our corner.
4
“You are consenting to what we agreed to?” Mason checked the moment I walked through the portal.
“Yes,” I breathed, shivering when all of his desires hit me.
Mason Garret was a next-level warlock, bred for power, and the eldest child of the head of the warlock council. Their eldest of the same sex of the more powerful parent was supposed to be more powerful by far so there could never be any infighting between siblings.
Or the eldest? Maybe it was the eldest and the magic simply made the child always the same sex as the more powerful parent.
Orthat was bullshit and they tended to be male and helped that species just push bullshit that women were only needed to pop out babies. I wasn’t really sure, and I wasn’t sure they actually knew.
Probably a combination of all of the above.
Either way, I met Mason when he was working while hiding from his father and what his asshole father wanted from him. Mostly to use him as a puppet and stud horse for power alliances and probably mold his child in ways he’d never been able to do to Mason.
So horrible things.
But we’d instantly clicked and it wasn’t our attraction… Though that was off the charts.
No, we recognized our own, and those with shitty family situations immediately trauma-bonded. I was fairly sure that was the technical term for it? Or the new psychological way of putting it.
The attraction was also unreal. From the moment I’d looked into his silver eyes that seemed to bubble in a way that pulled me in like a moth to his flame—I was hooked. He’d called me his goddess and I’dfeltone.
All the lines over all the years being a lust demon, stripper, and more and this man had instantly made me feel his whole world could revolve around me if I was smart. And I was always smart.
It was how I was still alive.
He was six-two or three and lean. Depending on what he was wearing, too many would write him off as maybe skinny, but they would be wrong. There was sculpted perfection under his clothes. Every muscle was defined like living Photoshop in a way that made me drool. His arms were much thicker—a swimmer’s build, and he hid it well.
Good. It was only for me now.
Yeah, a lust demon who was possessive. I found it startling as well since it was new to me after decades and decades of never caring much.
But the fucking mop of sexy brown curls that hung over his glasses just did me in. It was like the perfect mix of innocence and sin when he looked up at me or down at me when he was on top of me.
Right then he was shirtless and pushed his curls out of his face, his glasses somewhere else so he could see more with his magic than the rest of us could. I shivered. I fuckingshiveredknowing he was seeing me down to my very soul.
And I knew this was all staged. I didn’t care.
We’d talked at length about doing better and making this work after he’d betrayed my trust and tricked me. He’d thought it was more to prove a point, but he’d been lying to himself, not just me. Mason had a lot of darkness in himself, and I’d help him see he needed to accept it and learn to live with it instead of pretending it wasn’t there.
Having darkness didn’t make him his asshole father.
What he did with it was the risk of making him a monster.
And after too many years watching his father emotionally abuse and treat his mother like a second- or third-class citizen, basically a mix of whore and servant just to birth him and then be discarded, Mason had a very skewed view of how relationships should work. While it was amazing how he treasured women, he went too far the other way.
