Page 122 of Chaos
Christian’s grin told me everything I needed to know. He might as well have patted my head and told me I was pretty.
“How long is it going to take you?”
“The better part of a week. Unfortunately for me, no one else on this property is capable enough to weave magic of this kind.”
“Not even Mal?”
“Not even him. Although don’t tell him I said that.”
“Don’t tell Mal what?”
Both of us turned to face Sin as he sauntered toward us from around the corner.
“Nothing,” I said with a cheeky grin.
“Oooh, keeping secrets, huh? Bet I know how to get you to talk,” he said with a suggestive lift of his brows. “What are youdoing out here, anyway? It’s about as comfortable as a naked walk through the Sahara.”
“Know that for a fact do you?”
“I never say no to a dare,” he quipped with a flirty grin.
I left Christian’s side and closed the distance between me and Sin, giving him a light shove on the chest. “I wouldn’t know anything about naked desert walks, but I couldn’t stay indoors any longer. I spent a long time hiding in my room inIniquity. The outside air is something I can’t give up. Not yet.”
His expression went soft and lost all of its playfulness. Well, shit. I hadn’t been looking for pity.
“Come on, I want to show you something. It isn’t outside because I’m not the biggest fan of hanging out in hell on earth, but I think you’ll like it.” He held out his hand for me and I took it without consciously deciding to.
Somewhere between my vow to keep my distance from these men and partnering with Chaos to feed Sin the other night, I’d completely given in. It was too hard to maintain walls between us when they were actively showing me that they cared about me and my well-being. Even if the only reason they cared was because of the accidental link I’d formed between us with my dreamwalks, it was still my catnip. As a person who’d spent so much of her life starved for affection, both physical and emotional, I had zero resistance against it.
His thumb rubbed the back of my hand as we walked. It was a simple gesture, but everything about it felt right. Fuck, my head was a jumbled mess of emotions. I wanted this kind of intimacy, and if I was being honest, I wanted it with him. With all four of them. Which meant I’d royally fucked up.
Christian might have woven a web to protect us all, but I’d trapped myself and the horsemen in one of my own making. One I hadn’t even realized I was creating.
I still couldn’t believe that I’d accidentally drifted into Chaos’s dream. Or that he knew about it. He’d all but said he wished I’d stayed there. But that had to be because he didn’t understand the danger my presence there posed to him.
“Hey,” Sin called softly, giving my hand a tug and pulling me out of my thoughts. “You okay?”
“Yeah, sorry. The apocalypse has been on my mind a lot.” I gestured to the bleak landscape around us. “It’s not as easy to ignore anymore.”
He tilted my face toward him and smiled at me before dropping a light kiss to my forehead. “Well, let’s see what we can do to get your mind off it, huh?”
Sin
Man,I hoped she liked what I’d set up for her. It was a gamble. This date thing. I’d never done something like this before, but I’d been studying romantic comedies for the last little while, and I learned that if you wanted to build something real with your girl, you had to make it about more than sex. I’d like both. Real and sex. It was fucking terrifying.
And not just because we weren’t supposed to keep her.
But that was future Sin’s problem. Right now, I was just focused on connecting with her in a way that made her hopefully want to fall into bed with me for no other reason than because she wanted to. Currently, the only way we ended up in Pound Town was when one or both of us needed to feed, but I wanted to be more than her go-to bangburger. I wanted to be her man. One of her men. Whatever.
Which meant I had to rely on more than my sexual prowess to get her to be with me. I had to woo her if I was going to become one of the men she wanted to keep. The fact that I even had to plot for something like that was absurd, but here we were. A little voice in my head crooned,That’s the difference between lust and caring about someone.
If Hades was right and the four of us were destined to be hers, that meant our connection had to be a lot stronger than Lilith had indicated. Anyone could be a sperm donor. Not just anyone can be what Hades suggested. And sure, maybe the four of us might be the only beings in existence that were equipped to face off against Lucifer, but that couldn’t be the only reason fate had thrown us in Merri’s path.
And we weren’t even going to talk about the fact that Merri was probably Famine’s daughter. I couldn’t touch that one just yet because all it did was make me more convinced that she was made for me. It definitely explained why I was so drawn to her when I hadn’t ever been drawn to anyone else. She was more like me than I’d known. Part horseperson, part sex demon. Aside from my counterpart, who had taken her succubus powers and warped them into something malicious, Merri was the only other person like me in existence. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
“What in the world did you do, Sin?” Merri asked, her voice dragging me from my maelstrom of thoughts.
“I thought we could have a little sip and dip.”
