It wasn’t until long after the rage and lust finally burned out of me that I realized what I’d done.
Blaise hadn’t just been riding adrenaline like me. He’d had a chunk torn from his neck. He’d lost a lot of blood, and what remained of it in his veins had been tainted with vampire venom.
And I’d been so consumed by my own want that I hadn’t stopped to question whether Blaise was capable of consenting to anything at all.
I had untangled myself from him with shaking hands, shoved a pair of sweatpants at him, and fled to the shower before the weight of it crushed me completely. By morning, all I could offer him was an apology and a promise that it wouldneverhappen again.
I should have left. Lived out my penance in the Shadow Realm.
But Blaise had just shrugged it off and cracked a joke, like it was nothing more than another night that blurred into all the others.
And because I was a weak demon, I stayed.
I found one of the bloodied buttons from his shirt a few days later and kept it as penance. Something solid to anchor my shame to. And each night, I rolled it between my fingers in the dark, telling myself that his cardamom and sandalwood scent, clinging so stubbornly in the air, wasn’t for me. Telling myself that my body shouldn’t respond to it, shouldn’t tighten and ache for him. Telling myself that I would never trust myself with him again—not now that I knew how his lips felt against mine, how easily my body had fit between his legs, how my name had sounded on his lips when he’d lost himself enough to forget all other words—
A fridge door slammed shut, yanking me out of my thoughts.
I glanced at Blaise, half expecting to find some sign that he’d broken our pact and undampened his senses, that he might somehow feel the lust and guilt I’d let slip loose.
He didn’t.
Instead, he stood in the muted, colorless echo of our mortal apartment, his back pressed to the gray fridge as he tore open a carton of milk and drank straight from it.
Just like he did every morning.
Despite the fact that, as an incubus, it was of no nutritional value to him. Despite the carton being nothing more than a figment of our shared imagination in the Shadow Realm.
Despite a decade of me telling him to use a damn glass.
He let out a satisfied sigh, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and set the carton down on the counter.
Not in the fridge.
Gods, I hoped his fated mate would have the patience for him that I did.
I hoped she’d be able to see past the clutter and chaos and see the demon I saw—the demon who would turn up to what might be the most important night of his existence in a neon-green novelty T-shirt simply because, under any other circumstance, it would’ve entertained his friend.
The demon with a rotating library of vocal stims—most of them from his favorite supernatural soap,Hexes at Noon—that surfaced whenever his thoughts ran faster than his mouth could keep up.
The demon who could forget to do his laundry for weeks, then suddenly spend an entire weekend cleaning the flat so meticulously that if I ate mortal food like him, I could eat it off the toilet seat.
The demon who had, on more than one occasion, gone to a job wearing his slippers—prompting me to start keeping a spare pair of boots in the van, just in case.
“Man, am I glad things don’t go off in the Shadow Realm,” Blaise said, his voice thick with a grin. “Remember when we first got the apartment and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that mortal food had an expiry date for a reason?”
“I remember cleaning up a week’s worth of projectile vomit,” I replied dryly, resisting the smile that tugged at my lips.
The endless bleaching of the bathroom, I could have done without. But I had enjoyed playing nurse—caring for him, stroking his fevered brow, holding him through the worst of the sweats. At some point, I’d even convinced myself he was doing it on purpose, just to keep me close a little longer.
But like everything with Blaise, the moment he was back on his feet—now armed with a hard-earned respect for expiry dates—he moved on as if it had never happened. As if we hadn’t spent a week entwined on the couch while I passed him a bowl and whispered reassurances between bouts of vomiting.
“I’ll never understand why you insisted on buying mortal food in the first place,” I muttered.
But I knew why.
Everything Blaise had done was in preparation for meeting his fated mate. For the witch who would eat mortal food. For the witch who lived in the mortal realm. For the witch who he would spend the rest of his life with.
A life that did not include me.
