Liora reacted to Asmodeus in the same way she reacted to everything. She embraced her impulses and was in his arms before she could reconsider what she was doing or even contemplate how far south of crazy she was about to go. She tiptoed, slid her right hand around the back of his neck and dragged his mouth down to hers. The moment her lips meshed with his, he froze, going stock-still and as stiff as a board.
Either he didn’t want her quite as much as he had just said or the impossible was possible after all and he had never done this before.
“Relax,” she murmured against his lips and was pleasantly surprised when he obeyed her and the rigidness left his shoulders and his neck, and his mouth fused with hers.
She moved her lips across his, gently grazing them and easing him into it, and he began to mimic her. She liked the firmness of his lips and how his hands settled possessively on her hips, drawing her front against the full delicious length of his. She tilted her head back further, not wanting to break the kiss for any reason.
Asmodeus dug the points of his fingers into her back and pulled her closer still, a low growl rumbling in his throat, thrilling her. The strips of armour protecting his hips pressed into her stomach and each ragged breath he drew caused his chest and stomach to heave against hers. She slanted her head and opened her mouth, and flicked her tongue across his lower lip. That earned her another low, huskier growl and he angled his head, fiercely claimed her mouth and ripped a moan from her. The man was a natural.
Liora’s hands slipped to his shoulders and she lost herself in the kiss. It was gentle and soft, and everything she hadn’t expected. It overwhelmed her and she couldn’t help melting into it, letting him take the lead because she liked how this powerful, sexy male kissed her with tender reverence, as if he was afraid of hurting her.
As if he was worshipping her.
She didn’t feel as though she was kissing an evil angel, but Serenity would be the first to remind her of what he was if she ever found out about this, and Apollyon would likely have some harsh words to say about her choice of male.
She couldn’t help herself though.
She couldn’t help her feelings.
She had felt attracted to Asmodeus from the moment she had noticed him back at the Eiffel Tower and had been struggling to resist the urge to kiss his wicked lips ever since.
He was dark, but handsome.
Evil, yet sweet.
Protective.
Passionate too.
She could feel it in him, bubbling beneath the surface, held back by his inexperience.
He was exactly the sort of man she had always felt drawn to but had never been with before.
He tightened his grip on her hips and deepened the kiss, his tongue thrusting past her lips to tangle with hers. His moan was wanton and erotic, full of undiluted hunger and pleasure that echoed within her. She tackled his tongue with her own, taking the lead, pulling another groan from him and joining him this time.
When breathing became a serious issue, she reluctantly pulled back, breaking apart from him. He breathed hard, his swirling golden eyes bright in the darkness and locked on her lips. That hungry look thrilled her. He wanted more and she wanted to give it to him, but they really needed to pace themselves, and perhaps get away from an area that now looked like a murder scene.
She guessed it was in reality.
Asmodeus had killed one of his master’s men because that fallen angel had wanted to take her from him.
She broke her own rules and kissed him again, silently thanking him and fearing he would get into trouble with the Devil now because of what he had done. Would the Devil send more men to claim her? Why did he want her?
Was the Devil the presence she had felt watching her at times during these past few weeks?
It couldn’t have been Asmodeus. When he had been watching her at the Eiffel Tower, she had sensed his eyes on her but it had felt different. Not a dark threatening feeling like the other times.
She had to speak with Serenity and Apollyon. They might be able to help her figure out why the Devil wanted her and would be able to protect her. She would pay a high price for asking them for assistance though.
Asmodeus had made his dislike of Apollyon clear during the short hours they had known each other. Apollyon hated Asmodeus too. Putting them together in the same room would be asking for trouble.
She drew back to ask him to come with her to Serenity and Apollyon’s home but the words fled her lips when she looked at him. If she asked him such a thing, he would leave her. He would return to Hell. She would lose him, and probably one of her best shots at remaining out of the Devil’s hands. Apollyon could protect her, but she had felt the power in Asmodeus and had seen him deal with that fallen angel, effortlessly killing him. He was stronger than Apollyon, whether Apollyon wanted to admit it or not.
He was her best shot at surviving whatever was coming.
That and she didn’t particularly want to let him go now that they had rocketed past that awkward ‘I want to kiss you but I don’t know how to approach it’ phase.
“Come, we must move.” Asmodeus scooped her up into his arms and beat his wings before she could even form a response, taking off into the crisp night air.
It was getting chilly.
Liora used it as an excuse to cuddle up to his bare chest and was thankful he only had partial armour. It was much nicer curling up against hard hot flesh than it would have been rubbing against cold metal plates.
“You’re going to be in trouble, aren’t you?” she said and the breeze carried her voice over his shoulder.
He beat his shadowy black wings and took them higher, until they were gliding above the city and she couldn’t take her eyes off how beautiful it was. All the lights twinkled in the darkness and cars streamed down streets forming bright slashes of red and white. Boats caused the wide river to glow in places. The Eiffel Tower sparkled in the distance.
“Perhaps,” he whispered and she felt his gaze shift to her, boring into the side of her face. “But I have a feeling that you may be worth it.”
She smiled at that. How could anyone think this man pure evil? She had only had to speak to him to know that while he held darkness inside him, and was capable of great cruelty and violence, there was still some good in him, hidden away beneath the vicious exterior he wore like a shield.
She turned her head to look at him but he moved his gaze away from her, looking down at the city as they flew over it instead. She drank him in, studying the nuances of his expression as his golden gaze flitted around, taking in the scene stretching below them. The wind ruffled his wild black hair and she ached to brush her fingers through it, combing it back and feeling its silkiness just as nature was allowed to do.
“Will the Devil send more men for me?” She feared the answer to that question even though she already knew it deep in her heart.
The black slashes of his eyebrows met in a frown and his golden eyes darted to her. “Yes.”
“Will you fight them?” Her voice trembled and she hoped he would think it was the wind that caused it, not the fear growing in her heart. She had never been this afraid before, had always faced things head-on and without flinching, even as a child. The thought that the Devil wanted her for some nefarious reason and had sent his best man to retrieve her, marking her as important to him, made cold steal into her veins and sent a shiver through her soul.
Asmodeus hesitated and something surfaced in his eyes, something that set her on edge. He looked uncertain.
Over a year ago, Serenity had called and told her that they had to cancel their get together because something had happened to Apollyon. Heaven had exercised its will on him and had controlled him, forcing him to do their bidding against his will, and it had shaken the powerful male.
If Heaven held that power over Apollyon, did that mean Hell and the Devil wielded it over Asmodeus?
“I will try.” He looked away again, the sombre note to his deep voice and the fraction of his emotions that she could sense with her power conveying that he meant it but he didn’t believe he would be able to defeat whatever force the Devil sent after him.
All the more reason to ask Apollyon and Serenity for help, but she still couldn’t bring herself to raise it with him, not while everything felt so tentative and liable to fall apart if she mentioned the other angel.
“Perhaps you would be safer away from me.”
Liora stared at him, shock rippling through her. “No. I’m safer with you.”
“Do not fool yourself, Liora. I feel your fear. I thrive on that emotion. It gives me pleasure as much as anger and rage, and pain.” His voice gained a dark edge that echoed within his power and she frowned when she realised what he was doing. He was driving a wedge between them. He meant to make her leave. “You are safer away from me.”
“I am safer with you. If anyone has the power to protect me, it’s you, Asmodeus.”
“Or Apollyon. He would be the better choice. He is always the better choice.” The darkness in his voice turned to bitterness that she could feel lacing his power and she held on to him.
“How do you know he’s the better choice for me? Isn’t it my choice?” She glared at him now and then it faded away when she caught the tiny almost imperceptible grain of fear hidden beneath his other emotions.
Fear that he would fail her?
Or fear that he would end up doing as his dark master commanded and would hurt her?
He thrived on seeing others hurt and their suffering. He was afraid that the Devil would make him harm her and that he would end up enjoying it. She had thought the Devil would be sick and twisted, but this was taking sick and twisted to a whole new level.
“Asmodeus,” she whispered and he looked at her, his beautiful golden eyes void of any warmth. She wished she could touch his cheek and reassure him somehow, but she didn’t want to loosen her grip on him when they were so high above the city. “You will not fail me.”
He looked away again and uncertainty filled his eyes for a brief few seconds before they cleared again.
“Apollyon will not fail you. I am only a shadow of that male.”
It struck her that he was having one serious existential crisis and she was in part to blame for it. Her careless words when they had first met had dealt blows and wounded him, and now he couldn’t shake the doubts that she had placed in his head. She wished she had the ability to turn back time and relive that moment all over again with the knowledge she had now, but even she wasn’t that powerful.
All she could do was try to smooth things out and heal the wounds she had unwittingly inflicted with her words.
“You’re not a shadow… not any more than I’m a shadow of my cousin. She’s so damn good and caring, and I’m reckless and wild, and liable to go off demon hunting without telling anyone, and I’m forever getting into scrapes. Everyone tells me I should be more like her… but I’m not her. We share blood but we’re not the same person. We couldn’t be more different.” Liora leaned in and pressed a kiss to his cheek, lingering with her lips against his cool flesh.
He paused, beating his wings to keep them steady in the night air high above the glittering lights of Paris.
“You won’t fail me, Asmodeus. I’m choosing you,” she whispered against his skin and then settled her head on his shoulder, waiting for him to rebuff her.
He didn’t.
She looked down at the quiet world below them.
“Do you like the view?” she said to fill the silence.
“It seems alien to me… bright and colourful… strange… unsettling.” He didn’t sound as if he liked it. “Hell is a black cavernous ceiling above a forbidding harsh landscape. Rivers of molten lava and lakes of fire provide the only natural light. It is… different to this world. You would think it bleak, desolate and dangerous.”
Everything Apollyon had told her it was.
She frowned and looked at Asmodeus. “Then you’ve never seen the stars?”
His golden gaze drew away from the world below them and rose to meet hers. “No.”
“Will you take me somewhere?”
He nodded. “Where?”
Liora bravely took one hand away from his neck and Asmodeus’s grip on her increased, drawing her closer to him, filling her with a sense of safety that felt strange considering he was apparently made of pure evil. She didn’t think a male with nothing but evil in his heart would care much about whether she fell to her death or not. A male who was only evil and nothing good would have laughed as she fell and ensured he was close enough to get a good view when she splatted against the pavement.
She pointed to the distance, to the darkness beyond the city boundaries. “Take me out there. Take me to the stars.”
He held her against him and beat his broad black wings, carrying them over the city to the outskirts and then into the countryside. The air grew colder as they flew and she moved as close to Asmodeus as she could get, seeking his warmth. His skin heated hers but it didn’t chase the chill from deep within her.
The Devil wanted her and Asmodeus wanted to protect her.
She didn’t want to think about the reasons why his master might want her or what would happen to Asmodeus because he had disobeyed him, but it ran around her head, taunting her, mingling in with her thoughts about the man holding her.
He hadn’t been lying when he had told her that he took pleasure from terrible things, and her initial reaction had been the one he had probably sought to evoke with his words. He had wanted her to feel she shouldn’t be around him and that whatever this was that was happening between them would never have a happy ending. She had felt that for a split-second before she had rallied and had seen beyond his harsh words and hard expression to the trace of fear in his heart.
She had grown up in a world filled with love and light.
Asmodeus had grown up in a world made of darkness and death. A savage realm where horror and bloodshed were a part of daily life. What was normal there was terrible in her eyes but it was all he had ever known.
He had no friends to speak of and no sense of home.
Apollyon had called him evil, but Liora could see the good in him, buried deep.
Hidden.
“Is there good in you, Asmodeus?” she whispered and looked at him. It was getting too dark to see him clearly now that they were beyond the city lights.
“No.” The bluntness of his reply didn’t surprise her.
“Are you lying to me, Asmodeus?” Liora shifted her right hand to his cheek and tried to make him look at her but he tensed, making it impossible. Refusing her.
She sighed and frowned at him, trying to make him out in the darkness, wanting to see whether he was lying to her or not. If she couldn’t get him to confess there was a seed of good in him, then perhaps she could get him to admit that he viewed it as a weakness. She suspected that was the reason he denied its existence.
“What do they do to good people in Hell?” She tried to say it in a light and conversational tone so he would answer her but wasn’t sure she had succeeded when silence greeted her for almost a full minute.
“You do not want to know.” He beat his black wings and swooped lower, carrying her over fields towards a low hill in the distance.
“I do want to know.”
He glanced at her. “We make them realise that it is a flaw. We… remove it for them.”
That sounded like a polite and coded way of saying that they tortured the good out of people.
“In the same way that the Devil removed the good from Apollyon… torturing him until he lost his mind and held only evil in his heart?” Her voice shook and then she shrieked as Asmodeus dropped her and she hit the grass a few feet below, the impact jarring her spine.
Asmodeus growled and his eyes glowed in the darkness, as bright as the pools of lava in Hell that he had mentioned. He landed and stalked towards her, until he towered over her, his power increasing and pressing down on her. Her own rose in response, coming to protect her from his wrath.
“Yes,” he barked and grabbed her by the front of her crimson short-sleeved gypsy top and hauled her onto her feet. “I torture the good from fools who think that side of themselves makes them strong. I show them how weak it makes them… and I relish it.”
He shoved her away from him and stalked down the slope, a dangerous immense shadow in the darkness.
“Would the Devil torture the good from you if he knew there was some inside you?” she said without a trace of fear in her voice even though her hands were shaking. “Would he punish you, Asmodeus?”
“There is no good in me. You only believe there is. You want to see it, and so you do.” He turned back to face her, his golden eyes verging on scarlet.
“So you’re telling me you’re all bad… and nothing good?”
“To be good or bad you must believe the mortal concept of right and wrong… there is no right or wrong in Hell, Liora, not in the way you think of it. It is a human belief.” He took a step up the incline towards her and clenched his fists at his sides. “In Hell, there is only strength… and that strength is measured by the blood we have spilled, the bones we have crushed, and the pain we have dealt and endured. It is not measured by the good we do. It is measured by what you mortals believe is bad. In Hell… bad is good… and I am second only to the Devil.”
Liora collapsed to her backside on the grass and stared down at him, her heart aching for him. He denied the seed of good in him and now she understood why.
The Devil had conditioned him to resort to violence without a moment’s pause if he felt threatened, to eradicate any shred of positive emotions in himself and in others, to torture and maim, and destroy, because in Hell that was what made you strong.
His master had probably beaten it into him from the moment he had been born into that dark world, moulding him into the powerful male before her, one worthy of being the Devil’s right hand man.
One capable of doing the Devil’s dirty work and strong enough to command the respect of every demon and Hell’s angel in that realm.
A king of demons.
He had to be strong or face losing his standing, and the gods only knew what would happen to him if that happened. What use would the Devil have for a right hand man who had a sliver of good in his heart and knew compassion and caring, affection?
The Devil would kill him.
Asmodeus was something he had created and he would likely view the tiny seed of good in him as a fatal flaw that made him a failure. If a manufacturer found a fundamental problem in one of their products, they simply scrapped it and began again, working harder to ensure the next one didn’t fail.
Asmodeus didn’t want to die so he denied the good in his heart.
Liora held her hand out to him. “I don’t want to argue with you about right and wrong, or good and evil, Asmodeus. If you say there is no good in you, then I accept that. Come, look at the stars with me.”
He heaved a sigh, stalked up the hill, and set himself down beside her on the grass, spreading his black wings. One stretched out behind her, shielding her from the cold breeze washing over the brow of the hill, and the other rested on the grass to his left. His hands settled behind him, propping him up, and he tipped his head back and looked at the dark sky.
She wasn’t sure what to say to him. She’d had a head full of colliding thoughts before she had learned more about him and now she had a whole new bunch of thoughts knocking around in her skull. Apollyon needed a better word than ‘complicated’ for his apparently evil twin.
Liora looked across at him and held her sigh inside.
He had said that Paris seemed alien to him but she had the feeling that it was more than the city that had him constantly on edge. It was everything, from his surroundings, to her, and to the things that she had said to him, that had him questioning himself and all he knew.
This entire world was alien to him.
She worried that it was too alien and he would find a way to leave her whether she wanted that or not.
Liora set her hands behind her to prop herself up and intentionally laid her left hand over his right one. He tensed beneath her.
She tipped her head back, stared at the stars scattered across the black velvet, and said a silent prayer to the gods of nature that Asmodeus would stay because she thought she needed him, and not only because her survival potentially depended upon him.
The gods had never answered her before.
She hoped they would this time.
They owed her for taking her parents.