Page 61 of Wings of Ashes
“I’m not a damsel.”
“But the distress part is still up for debate?” Bael smirked and tugged her chair even closer to his. Their outer thighs touched, and Bael reveled in the spicy scent of her arousal spiking the air. “The fact that I care enough to hurt someone who threatens you is a peculiar thing.”
She shot him an expression ofduh. “You don’t often offer to help others?”
“Iama demon.”
Nix nodded, and her gaze fell over his face and body for a moment. Was she trying to remember all the horrible things she knew about incubi? “Just because wearesomething, doesn’t mean we need to be a certain way,” she said.
“Aw, you think you can change me?” Bael chuckled darkly. “Baby, I was raised in Hell. I watched others being tortured. I had to fall asleep to the sound of their screams and their cries for help. Day after day. Hour after hour.”
Something in Nix’s expression abruptly changed. Her lips pursed on a sharp inhale and curled into a scowl. Her furrowed eyebrows framed wild, pissed off eyes as she stared at him.
Bael’s chest twinged in pain when he saw it.
For the first time, she looked at him with pure hatred.
Bael hadsleptthrough people crying out from torture? Instead of trying to help them, he chose to tune them out?
It reminded Nix of her heartless captor, who kept her caged and laughed when she bled and cried. Her captor, who showed no empathy during the four years of torture she endured.
He is a demon. A monster. Soulless?
If Bael had stumbled across Nix in her future, caged and screaming for help, would he have just walked away?
“You never tried to help them?” she asked in an enraged voice that grated at a low volume.
All she could imagine was her screaming in her cage after being injected with mysterious liquids that broke her mind with the horrible pain, and an indifferent Bael watching her from the opposite side of the room.
“Of course, I did,” he replied in an angry voice that mimicked hers. “When I was a young demon, before I knew any better.”
“But now you wouldn’t?”
Bael reached over to play with a piece of her pink hair. “One time, an old man, who could hardly walk, was being brutally flogged. Screamed for three days straight.”
Bael paused. “Finally, I couldn’t take it any more. I broke the rules and stopped it. I was impulsive back then.” Bael smirked, and Nix rolled her eyes. “I begged to receive the punishment in his stead, trying to save him from the pain.”
Nix watched quietly as Bael’s eyes glazed over at the memory. He seemed to fade away, into it. Reliving it.
He told her, “I lasted about six days before I couldn’t take anymore. My back and wings were so bloody and scarred by the end of it that I had to sleep on my stomach for two years, or risk permanent damage to my flight. I was ten.”
Nix’s stomach turned. “Gods.”
Bael shrugged. “I stepped in to lessen a man’s torture, a man’s pain—and for what?”
Nix shook her head and said, “I am sure it meant a lot to him—” Bael’s sharp expression shut her up.
“Turned out he was a rapist who killed thirty-three teenage girls in his mortal life.”
Nix’s mouth hung open in shock.
“I have learned not to stand in the way of fate,” Bael said simply. “In my wise twenty-one years of age, when I see someone in pain, I mind my own business. I let bad things happen to bad people.”
Bad things happen to good people too, Bael, Nix wanted to tell him. After all, any experiences he had would be skewed in Hell. But he looked so serious for once. She did not want to interrupt him.
“I don’t rescue or defend or protect people.”
He gazed deeply into her eyes and twirled a lock of her pink hair around a finger. She swallowed, and he watched her pupils dilate with arousal.
