Through Flame and Blade

Ch. 32 His Angel

*Logan

At the very moment he and Chiara ducked out of the brothel hallway and into a side tunnel, Logan started to fall into a mind-trap. Gritting his teeth, he wrenched his brain back to the here and now.

Hell thought it could fuck with his mind? Not a chance.

He took Chiara's hand to lead in her the near total darkness, through one of the many tunnels that coursed through the stones of Hell like veins, tugging demons back to a dark heart.

But she went rigid, refusing to follow. A moan of heartbreaking sorrow came from her mouth.

Shit, shit, shit!

"Chiara!" he shouted. She fell and he caught her. She fought him. He pinned her arms down.

She cried, weeping the same way she had for so many nights in the dungeon—silently and in despair, with a pain that came from a deep, hidden place.

The invisible monsters haunting these tunnels had wormed their way into her head through the path carved by that ass-scum Zeigfel. Logan would destroy him utterly. But that had to wait.

He pressed his forehead to hers. "Chiara, come back to me."

His heart sang the same words as his mouth. She had to come back—she had to find the way. "Fight them."

He cradled her close, forcing her to be still and not attack him on accident. The fight was in her mind, her heart, and for her soul. He kept repeating the words, not knowing how else to reach her.

The last drops from the flask of the Fountain of Life water?

No. She wasn't injured. It wouldn't help her this time. It gave him an idea, though.

He only knew scraps her angelic language, bits and pieces mostly picked up during training so demons would understand if orders were shouted on the battlefield. But this was the battlefield, was it not?

"Chiara, revernale am lii."

Chiara, come back to me.

The words stung him sharper than needles piercing tongue and throat. Time stopped, the angelii words acting like a strange spell in the tunnel, and then other words crashed into him harder than a wave during a storm at sea.

No angel would ever freely choose a demon echoed in his head. His own words, whispered to himself when they first went into the Hall of Gluttony, were slicing into his heart and mind like whip lashes to his back.

He had taken her, his angel, while caught up in the sin of lust, and he had enjoyed the sweet bliss she gave, savored every cry and whimper and every gasp of pleasure he dragged from her body, but he knew—with terribly certainty—that she would never have chosen to fuck him if she hadn't been in one of the halls.

What had he done? To her? To himself?

Having tasted her once, so completely, would he ever be able to let her go when the time came, because the time would come when she would look at him with utter disgust and hate herself for fucking him.

Or, worse, would he give into his daemonium's call to become her new torturer, keeping her in a different kind of dungeon, with different chains on her wrists?

His stomach turned remembering her pinned to the filthy wall across the room from him, jaw clenched against a scream as Lucius or Dirk worked at her with a sharp blade.

No.

He wouldn't chain her again, even if his torture would be a different kind. It would still be torture for her. How would he find the strength to let her go?