Page 16 of The Halo & the Heathen
I scream against his skin and bite down harder.
Laughing at me, again, he dips his head and kisses the place behind my ear.
“You’re mine.” He presses deeper. “Mine ineveryway.”
I am.
“You can hate me for it, but you can’t deny it anymore.”
I screw my eyes shut, crying because he’s right. Crying because I want things I shouldn’t… things I can’t have.
And I cry as my orgasm finally sweeps through me.
Everything here is pain.
“Look at yourself.”
My face is still stained and glittering from his earlier cum, but now, it’s joined with the messy gray smears of his blood. Both are broken by the lines my tears cut through.
The words and symbols he carved into my skin glow like they’re molten—like hellfire peeks out from inside me.
“My beautiful pest.” He laughs and jumps backward, off the wall, sending us out into the vast emptiness of the cavern.
Air flutters and ruffles through his tattered wings, but we glide down to the place I think of as his home.
“Youaremine, Iona.”
I stiffen and look up at him with a new kind of fear. “How do you know my name?”
“You drank my blood. There’s a cost to that.” He leans close and whispers. “I know everything now.”
There is a cage in the corner, but he doesn’t put me in it.
He doesn’t need to. I’m too boneless to run anyway.
And I hate myself for it.
The demon brings me a bowl of something. It looks like water. It smells like nothing.
He holds it to my lips so I can sip, and when I try to take it from him, he brushes my hands away. “You will not make yourself sick.”
But it’s cold and everything else is hot and I would drink all of it if he let me.
Except, the bowl is still full when he takes it from me.
It’s full after he tosses its contents in my face and wipes away the remnants of his blood.
I’m still too tired to ask questions as he sets it aside and lets me lay back down.
But even from here, I can see the dark glow of the Devil’s halo.
I need to try harder.
“I’m tempted to let you take it,” he says, softly, curling my hair around his claw.
I look up at him, wishing I was able to get up and fight him. But I am so, so tired.
“It’s not the answer to your problems. It won’t save your sister.”
