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Moxie rolled in bed the dream bringing a smile to her lips. They were back on the other plane where she reigned supreme. It was night, and Rada’s body was curled around his hell beast form. She missed sleeping with him. He woke; his icy green eyes staring at her before they shifted, watching something she couldn’t see. Then there was a high yelp as he was cleaved in half. She was drenched with his blood as his heart spilled from his body.
“You didn’t really think I would give you up, did you?” Kilryn, the demon who thought he owned her soul. The one she was running from was standing there. He might have been a lower demon, but he was still powerful.
She searched, looking for an escape. Rada’s blood still clung to her skin, making her heart break as she wanted to wail over his broken form.
“He can’t help you. This is real, not a dream you retreated into. You’re mine; if you think I’m going to give Botis the female I spent years cultivating, think again. You will become my slave, turning your life over to me to do with it what I will.”
“I don’t care if this is reality or perceived reality; I will never belong to you. If this is real and you took the only being I love away from me, I will hunt you like a dog tracking a scent. There will be no place you can hide. When you turn, there will be a spotlight highlighting your evil for the world to see. The humans and the demons and whatever else lives in this world will come after you. When I’m finished, you’ll wish you were dead.”
“Big words for a woman who never measured up to her father’s skill.” His hand never touched her, but because of the connection, when he slapped the air, she felt it against her jaw before she went flying backward.
She wiped the blood coming from her lip and worked her jaw to see if it was broken. When she stood, her brown eyes were highlighted with a white fire.
“Why is my father dead? Did he refuse to play your game any longer now that I’m old enough to take care of myself? Was his soul something that if you couldn’t own, you wanted to make sure no one else got it?”
His eyes darkened, and she knew she was on the right path.
“He never turned his soul over to you even after all the years of fighting. It may have been ragged and soiled, but he held onto it anyway. It was almost over, wasn’t it?”
Not every person in the demon’s employment turned over their souls. There were a few under contract. When it was over, it gave them permission to leave. Her father, God rest his soul, wasn’t a stupid man. Nothing scared him more than not seeing his wife in the afterlife. If he gave away his soul that would never happen.
“I’m right; he never gave you his soul. He entered a contract that said what? After so many years of working for you, he’d go free as long as he kept his soul.”
“His soul was only a steppingstone.”
What did that mean? She pondered moving back as he tried to advance on her.
“You never wanted him; that’s why it was so easy to arrange his death.” Her eyes lit with knowledge. She always knew her father’s death was no accident. She thought he died because they wanted her to take his place; she was wrong.
“It was a two-part contract.” The pure evil of it made her shiver. “I was underage, and he had the right to make decisions for me at the time. It wouldn’t matter when I came of age since the agreement was made when I was a child. You were to get my soul when you got his, but he never budged no matter what you did to either of us. He would rather I lived in hell on this plane and be set free at death then spend eternity in hell with you. That’s why you killed him. When the contract was finished, he could walk free and I with him.”
“Stupid man, he gave up what I was offering him to rot in a grave.”
“What did you offer him? You mean the pain, grief, torture, and endless years of taking the lives of innocents. Is that what he gave up? Do you really wonder why being a corpse is better than that?”
“It matters not he is dead, and you are mine.”
“No,” she took her first true breath of air—freedom replacing the shackled that held her down. “I’m not yours. When my father died, any claim past or future died with him. He did one of the things he always promised me. He set me free.”
There was a roar as Kilryn’s image began to fade.
“I am coming for you, and nothing, not even that hell beast, will stop me.”
She woke up with a scream on her lips. She was trembling, unable to stop it. She felt hot and cold, like she was suffering from the flu. Her door was kicked in, the lock breaking like it was a toy. Rada’s form changed the minute he was through the door. The hell beast searched the room, his icy green eyes making her feel better by the minute. She slid out of bed, collapsing on the floor when he was done searching the room.
He came over scenting her until the tension left his body. He lay with her until she was curled around him. He warmed her; his strong body calmed the tremors until she was able to close her eyes. Tomorrow she would tell him what happened. Tonight, she needed her hell beast to remind her that she was safe and at home with the male she loved.
It was a beautiful thought that made her lips curl in a smile before she fell asleep.
She woke to find herself tangled with Rada. Her hands went through his fur, it was coarse but not hard. She loved the way it tickled her palms. She examined his black fur with the white tips, not understanding how it could be course while his hair on his human head was silky soft. Some things in life were a mystery.
“Hi,” she whispered when he bent his head to look at her. “This feels like being back on the other plane. I miss it.” It was strange she had a love-hate relationship with stepping outside of time. She hated that when Zeek was there, Rada was so diminished in who he was. She loved when it was just the two of them, and his genuine personality showed. She missed this, the two of them together in bed or hugging on the couch.
He changed forms. Taking a finger, he traced the side of her face before resting it against her chin. “I’ve missed the time we spent alone, but I did not want to force you.”
“Force me?”
“To spend time with me, or sleep in my room, which would become our room with that strange picture that still hangs on my wall.”
She smirked. There was nothing wrong with the picture. It just wasn’t her kind. Now that the bullet was gone, the amazement she found in it was also gone.
“We could get rid of the picture and replace it with something else, like me.”
“You would look good hanging from the wall.” She punched him in the shoulder, laughing.
“Moxie, what are you thinking?” Her laughter slipped away as the dream from last night came back.
She told him quickly about her dream stumbling over his death.
“I am not dead; that’s an old demon trick. He wanted to acquire your soul in your sleep. If he could have convinced you that I was no more, you might have agreed to something that you would resist when awake.”
“I told him if you were dead, I would hunt him down. There’d be no place he could hide from me.”
“He will come for you, for us; we need to be ready when he does.”
“Shouldn’t we be worried about Botis?”
“Not until we take care of Kilryn. He doesn’t own you, but he has a prior claim. Either Botis will have to kill him, or he will sit back and wait for us to kill him.”
“Then we let him live to keep Botis away.”
“I would have agreed with that if he had not come to you in your dream. He won’t stop.”
She got up, he was right, but she didn’t like it. Two demons were coming after her, and they both planned to have a shot at not only her soul but her life.
“Do you really want me to move into the room with you?”
“I do.”
“We can do that after breakfast and maybe walk through the town later. She wanted this to be her home, but besides knowing there was a cave with a demon in it, the town was a mystery.
“We can do that.”
She went into the bathroom to get ready after Rada left for his room. Her reflection stared at her, asking questions she wasn’t sure she had the answer to. Did she really love Rada, or was it good sex and relief that he wasn’t like the others in her life? If she could leave here and never had to look over her shoulder, would she forget him and move onto someone more normal? She didn’t know but needed to. There was no way she wanted to hurt him or herself.
After she dressed, she went to the kitchen to meet up with him. Leif was sitting there drinking a cup of coffee.
“Fancy meeting you here.” She looked around, but both Silas and Rose were missing.
“I wanted a few minutes alone from my mate and my sister.”
“What’s it like being the mate to a mage?” She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down.
“It’s overwhelming. Silas is not like a normal man.” He laughed. “If he heard me, he would say he wasn’t a man, not a human one anyway.”
“Do you love him?”
Leif’s brown eyes were shining. They reminded her of Rose’s eyes.
“I do. What a revelation that was.”
“A revelation?”
“I was about to die when he found me. I was emaciated. I think I looked like a corpse, and according to him, I smelled to high heaven. Then Silas was there; he rescues me, washes me, feeds me, and takes care of me. It’s so easy to believe that I’ve allowed gratitude, thankfulness, and appreciation to turn into a hazy kind of love that will eventually wear away.”
“That can happen.”
“It could, and I was scared it was happening. I wanted to be around him, but I was scared it was fear of being on my own that propelled me to his side.”
“Was it?”
“No, and yes. I was scared, and he was a safety net, but I’ve been scared before. I will stand up because it’s what I do. I refused to be kept down. It was hard. I had to look beyond where I was at that moment and see where I had been and where I planned to go. At some point, I realized that it didn’t matter if I could leave the planet; I would only go if Silas were at my side. Not because he was a safety net, but because I love him with every fiber of my being.”
Moxie wiped at a tear falling.
“Do you really love me like that?” Silas walked into the kitchen. His eyes were wet from unshed tears, and she knew he loved Leif. This hard man loved fiercely.
Her mind went back to Rada. Suddenly her need to know how she really felt was like a fire in her bones.