Tonia swallowed hard and glanced up at me.Raphaela sat there, unmoving.And Dani smirked like she had the entire world in her hand.She could bend this to go any way that she wanted, and she would if nobody stopped her.
“It would be the greatest sin of them all,” Dani said to Tonia.“I bet Raphaela tastes so good.”
I pressed my lips together.“I think that’s enough,” I said after gathering all the sense I had left.
I inhaled the scent of cinnamon deeply and groaned to myself.Why’d Eros smell so good all of a sudden?
I glanced over at him, the muscles in his arms flexing through his shirt, the way his full lips parted into the smallest of smirks, the way his eyes lingered for longer than they should if he was still angry with me.
I didn’t know what the fuckRaphaelaneeded, but I knew exactly what I needed.
A good fuck to push all this nonsense away.
And he would give it to me later tonight.
Raphaela tensed next to Dani, placing her hands in her lap and rubbing them relentlessly—as if she couldn’t do or think of doing anything else.I eyed her and wondered just what kingdom she’d end up in.
Not Lust.
Not Pride.
Maybe Tartarus, where all the rejects went.
“This is Hell,Angel,” Dani said, eyes teetering between white and black—a deadly combination.She stood up, brushed out her dress, and threw Raphaela a smirk.“If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t be here.”
Forty-Three
“You guys talk,”Dani said, waving her hand in the air and walking toward the bar.
Biast sat with some of his buddies, fire bursting from his fingertips as he tried to intimidate a poor Envy.
“I need to relax.”
Eros gazed after her, watching her sit next to Biast and barely looking Biast’s way.Then he turned to me with such want and need in his eyes.We walked away from the girls, who were still struck with shock, and toward the side hallways.
“Raphaela?”he asked, cracking half a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
I could tell how hurt he was that I had chosen her over him last night, how I’d let them leave like he didn’t mean the entire world to me.
“What’s it like to have her back?”
I shook my head and walked with him down a hall and away from the party, breathing in his cinnamon scent.“You know there was never an us to begin with.”
“In Heaven there was,” he said.
“For a few decades.”My fingers brushed against his, and I pushed away all those thoughts I’d had earlier.All those doubts and fears and heartbreaks.Raphaela and I might’ve been married, but our love was nothing like my love for Eros.
The word felt so foreign on my tongue because I didn’t love.I fucked and did my own thing … but this was different.I felt different with Eros.
“Nothing like us,” I said.
“Us …” Eros spoke so softly, tilting his head in my direction and letting his gaze fall on my lips for only a moment.“What are we?Because I’m getting mixed signals, Lucifer.”He swallowed hard.“I thought you actually wanted to try to have something with Dani and me, but the way you looked at Raphaela yesterday made me think otherwise.”
Sadness crossed his face, and he turned away.I could feel his pain, his heartbreak from how I’d reacted with her.I wasn’t going to make an excuse for it.I had been taken aback, totally in love with the idea of Raphaela falling from Heaven forme.But … I couldn’t deny the feelings I didn’t have for her anymore and the feelings that were always there between me and Eros.
“You’re right,” I said, stepping closer to him.“I loved seeing her fall, knowing that she was here for me.I let my pride get in the way, and I didn’t think about how you’d feel about it.”I took another step closer to him until I had him pressed against one of the stone walls, trapped.“But what I feel for her is nothing.It’s pride.”
“You are pride,” Eros said to me, staring at me with those alluring green eyes.“That’s what you are deep down, and that’s what you’ll always be.”
