“I love you,” he whispered.
My heart stuttered.
He'd said it before. In the car, that day his voice broke open and he told me about King. In our bed, the night he first sank into me with his eyes wet and our hands tangled.
But not like this.
Not on his knees, with my release on his mouth and his hands cradling my wrists like they were something holy. Not in his demon form, with his wings spread wide and his horns gleaming and his eyes that violet I'd come to recognize as the truestversion of him. He had said it before as the man. He had not said it as the demon.
Until now.
Until he'd looked up at me – wrecked, sated, his hunger naked on his face – and given me the three words he had been giving me in softer rooms, in gentler positions, in moments I could explain away as tender. This time there was nothing tender to hide behind. This time he said it as what he was. As what he had always been. As the dark thing on his knees who had just used me and was looking up at me like I had granted him salvation by letting him.
I love you in this form too,I understood him to mean. I love you with my hands around your wrists. I love you with my mouth tasting myself on your face. I love you as the creature I am, not the man I pretended to be for eight years.
I wanted to say it back. I wanted to drag him up by the horns and tell him I loved him exactly like this. That I'd been waiting for him to stop apologizing for being made of darkness. That I would meet him here, in this form, in this hunger, in this everything, every single time he wanted to be met.
Dagon didn't give me time to say it back. He kissed me deeply. All was right in the world. All was right as long as I had this precious man by my side. The man I loved more than anything. The man I would always love.
The man I would always love, in every form he took.
Chapter thirty
Dagon
What we did in the bathroom was wild, and my skin still burned with desire for more. Submitting to Diablos, letting him ride my face and grip my horns felt divine. But him submitting to me? On his knees, letting me mark him with my cum? That sent my demon into a frenzy.
I wasn’t joking when I warned Diablos, but I also couldn’t deny the fire in his eyes, the mirrored need I saw there.
Diablos didn't just submit to me. He showed me he can handle my darkness, my obsession, my devotion. Even though I didn't give him a chance to say it out loud, I saw it in his eyes – the complete acceptance of me, the rawness of his love, the same hunger I felt within. I saw it and I felt it all.
I'm never letting go of him. Not of what we have. Not of what we're slowly, day by day, building together.
I helped him out of the shower. His legs were still unsteady, his pulse still beating fast under my fingers when I dried his hair. I watched him from the corner of my eye. Watched for the moment he might flinch from me. Might look at the bruises forming on his wrists and remember what I had done with them. Might step back and realize the man who had just used him was not, in fact, the safer version of me he had been allowed to love before.
He didn't flinch.
He met my eyes in the mirror and smiled. A loose, drowsy, well-fucked smile. Then he turned to me, kissed the inside of my wrist and said, "Stop watching me like I'm going to break."
"I'm not."
"You are."
I was. He knew. He always knew.
He kissed me one more time, softer than anything we'd done in the last hour, and reached for his clothes.
For the first time since I was twenty-one years old, I felt something I had no name for. Not joy. Joy was too clean. Not relief. Relief was too short. Something closer to rest. Like I had been holding a heavy thing for years and someone had finally come and taken half the weight.
He had seen me. The real me. The dark thing. And he had not asked me to be smaller.
I followed him downstairs to the kitchen since we were hungry. Even in the kitchen, I couldn’t keep my hands off him. He huffed when I clung to him as he chopped vegetables, but he didn’t complain.
However, when he finished, I noticed the way he bit his lip and fidgeted with his hands. I sensed the change in his mood. He was suddenly nervous, and I didn’t like it.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing. Everything’s fine.”
