Page 26 of Tall, Dark & Horny

No one would touch my mate. Not while I still breathed. Even death wouldn’t take her from me.

12

CALLIOPE

Everything I thought I knew about myself wasn’t true. The only solid thing I could hold on to was Adan. The man who seemed torn apart by the thought of me being in danger, yet shrugged off the risk to his own life.

“Please keep yourself safe, too. For me.”

“You don’t need to worry, baby.” His arms tightened around me. “I’m not letting anything take you from me. Or me from you.”

His air of utter confidence eased some of my concern. “Good.”

“If I lost you, my demon would burn this entire world to ash.”

He seemed to brace himself, as though he feared my reaction to what he’d just said. But instead of scaring me off, his protectiveness only made me want Adan more. “I don’t need you to tame your demon half. I want every part of you.”

His eyes bled to black with swirling flames as he replied, “I would fight fate itself if it tried to take you from me.”

“Now that I know I have demon blood too, maybe I won’t just stand beside you and can fight with you if it ever comes down to that.” It dawned on me that Adan’s demon might be able to shed some light on what I just found out about my parentage. “Do you know who my father is?”

He shook his head. “No, but it doesn’t matter to me. Human, demon, shifter, or witch…you’re mine no matter what.”

As his eyes turned back to blue, I curled against Adan, his arms a solid anchor in a sea of uncertainty.

I’d walked into The Abyss less than two days ago, thinking I was just a travel blogger trying to salvage a ruined itinerary. Now I was apparently the daughter of a demon, the fated mate to another, and caught up in a curse that had triggered an ancient assassin to come after him.

It should have felt like too much, but I had a sense of all this being inevitable. Like the pieces of my life that had never quite fit were finally starting to make sense.

“How’re you holding up?”

“I keep thinking back to something that happened last year,” I murmured, the words slipping free before I could second-guess them.

Adan stroked his thumb against my waist. “Tell me.”

I shifted so I could see his face, needing the grounding force of his gaze. “It was in New Orleans. I was there for a week, mostly wandering the Quarter, taking pictures, stuffing myself with beignets. I ducked into this tiny shop near Royal Street with crystals, herbs, and the whole vibe.”

He stayed quiet, listening with a stillness that let me know I had his full attention.

“A woman was doing tarot readings in the back. Probably just for tourists, but I was curious. So I sat down, and she shuffled the deck like she’d done it a thousand times. But when she laid out the cards, she froze. Her reaction wasn’t theatrical. She genuinely looked disturbed.”

“What did she see?” he prodded after I paused for a moment.

“That’s the thing. She didn’t explain. She just stared at the cards and then at me, as though she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Then she gathered everything up, told me I had too much shadow in my chart, and basically shooed me out the door.”

Adan let out a low breath. “She must have been a true psychic who sensed your demon blood.”

“Back then, I thought it was just some scam. But now, I think you’re right.” I rubbed my arms despite the warmth of the fire. “She saw something in the cards she couldn’t explain.”

“Something beautiful and unique.”

The way he said it—with quiet reverence and heat—loosened the tension in my chest just enough to let everything else rush in.

I didn’t know who my father was. What kind of demon blood I carried. Or how things would go down with the curse I had triggered.

But I knew what I wanted.

Adan.

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