She despised having him in her space. She’d done an absurd amount of cleansing rituals after she’d kicked him out to purge his toxic energy. Grimalkin had been traumatized for weeks, and she was convinced her cat still hadn’t forgiven her for letting him move in in the first place.
Faust didn’t seem happy about his presence either. He stood at her feet, growling softly.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Why haven’t you answered my calls?”
“I blocked your number.”And I wish I’d done it sooner.The last thing she wanted was to have this conversation in a towel. That was supposed to have been for Meph’s eyes only.
He held his hands up. “I just wanted to talk, that’s all. I swear.”
She studied the self-important idiot in her house and cringed. What the hell had she ever seen in him? Okay, yeah, he wasn’t hard on the eyes—tall and attractive with a gym membership he made regular use of—but he also had that look on his face that told you he was just a dickhead.
Some people had that. One glance in their eyes and you knew the only thing they cared about was themselves. It was in the smug set of their lips, the arch of their brows, the dullness of their eyes.
Antoine was a dickhead, and that was never going to change.
She’d once thought that about Meph too, but the more time she spent with him, the less she saw the dickheadedness he tried to project and the deeper she was drawn into her newfound fascination with trying to uncover who he really was.
With Antoine it was the opposite. The closer she’d gotten to him, the less she’d liked what she saw. And now that she knew the worst parts of him, there was nothing left that appealed to her. She looked at him and her skin crawled.
“You need to go,” she told him. “I don’t know why you suddenly think I’d want to talk to you after all this time, but I don’t.”
They glared at each other. She felt the moment Antoine caved under her stare, and his gaze flicked away. “I just wanted to get my stuff.”
A pathetic excuse. He’d left that rotting bag of work clothes in the back of her closet like an insurance policy. As if he’d show up at her door saying he “just wanted to talk” if he was only after a sack of dirty laundry.
“I donated it three months ago,” she snapped.
“What the fuck, Iris? I told you I wanted it back. If you hadn’t been ignoring my—”
The door opened suddenly behind him.
“Honey, I’m home!” a familiar voice called from behind Antoine’s back. “You’d better be face down on the bed like I—The fuck?”
Iris’s heart started to pound at the same moment she felt her shoulders relax.Safe, she realized. She felt safe knowing he was here.
Antoine spun around, revealing the tattooed demon in her doorway with a dangerous glint in his red eyes. Stepping inside and closing the front door behind him, Meph peeked around him to frown at Iris.
“Who’s this clown?” he asked, jerking his head at Antoine.
“This is Antoine, and he was just leaving,” Iris said with false calm, arms crossed over her towel. God, she wished she’d put on clothes before answering the door.
She was simultaneously relieved Meph was here and nervous because she had no idea how he would react in this scenario. Maybe he wouldn’t care. They were just fuck buddies, after all. Maybe the presence of her ex-boyfriend meant absolutely nothing to him.
But maybe he would care. She knew Lily’s demon was extremely possessive of her, to the point of violence. If she had an asshole ex show up at her house, Iris had no doubt Mist would make the poor sod regret being born.
Were all demons like that? Why did she suddenly hope Meph was? She hated that shit.
But she also really wanted Antoine gone.
“Who you calling a clown?” Antoine said to Meph, and Iris groaned at his sheer stupidity. She was honestly embarrassed at herself for ever sleeping with him, let alone allowing him to live in her flat for a short time.
The shortest of the demons, Meph didn’t loom over Antoine the way Belial or Mist would have, and maybe that was what gave Antoine the false illusion of dominance.
It didn’t matter. It was still an illusion, and a thinly veiled one, as far as Iris was concerned.
“You.” Meph grinned like this was all great fun to him. “You’re the clown.”
