Page 93 of Demon Food

I tried nudging him off with an elbow, but he reattached himself like a sucker fish.

“Go ahead, baby. Fight it all you want.” He pulled me closer to whisper in my ear, “Reluctantly mine is still mine.”

Chills raced down my spine as my eyes rolled shut. That was another thing. This claim he’d staked on me, it was…doing things to me.

It was slipping beneath my skin and making me crave more of it. The feeling of belonging.

But I shouldn’t be craving fucking anything. We shouldn’t be touching like this. It was dangerous to flirt, or sleep in the same bed together, or talk of the future. There was no future that didn’t involve what both of us feared, so then what was I doing? What was happening to me?

It was like, inside this lethal demon’s arms, I’d never felt safer.

“Go on, sweetheart,” he said, shaking me gently, his voice low and silken in my ear. “Finish it.”

I reread the sentence in my head. I’d assumed a touch of his posh accent, such that when I spoke, it was perfect Vultaen—“The roads were dingy. The chimneys puffed in clouds of raven black. I wasn’t meant for this world. I was born for the blue clean of the sapphire sea.”

“Fuck. Fuck, it’s so fucking sexy.” He slammed the book shut, the spine creaking in triumph. “Turn around. Look at me.”

I twisted to him, lips pinching into a line to hide my smile as I rolled my gaze skyward. “It was only one page. Let’s not go overboard with⁠—”

He seized me, making me gasp when he dipped me in his lap like we were seated dancers doing a seated dance.

A lock of hair fell over one of his eyes, and the way the sun struck it, illuminating strands of gold pieced throughout—it was enough to stop my breath for a second.

“What are the odds, human?” he asked, smiling that demonic white smile of his. “That you would just fall into my lap like this?”

This fucking prince. I shook my head, brushing the hair from his forehead. “You can’t pull me into your lap, then blame it on gravity.”

“Gravity?”

I jolted when he hovered his hand over my chest. Like I could feel a sudden draw upward, into his palm.

Something about his smile was wry and impish. Up to no fucking good. “A thing so trifling as gravity cannot hinder me.”

I gasped when my entire spine lifted from his lap, arching dramatically as if suddenly hooked by an invisible rope attached to the ceiling.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’d never felt anything like it. I was possessed? Was that it? I couldn’t move, but the warm, glittering sensation spreading across my chest and dripping down my arms was delectable.

“Oh, your little heart is beating so fast,” he said, a smile to his words. “Are you frightened?”

A whimper sputtered from me. No. No, I wasn’t frightened. It was too calming to be frightening. It was an incredible, unearthly sensation, as wild as it was visceral, and I could feel my cock getting hard.

“Shhh, baby,” he whispered, lips brushing my ear, lifting his hand higher, forcing my spine to arch more. “I’ll catch you if you fall⁠—”

Then I did fall.

With a crash, I flopped into his lap, as he twisted over his shoulder to cough brutally into the crook of his elbow.

I pushed myself back up, but it took me a moment to orient my body in time and space. The aftermath of his possession was like a pacifying drug, but I managed to scold, “Fucking Alek.”

He yelped when I shoved him, laughing between coughs, twisting away to conceal how horrific it sounded. It sounded like liquid in his lungs. Sludgy and deep-rooted liquid.

“It’s so irritating when you do things like that.” I shoved him again as he winced. “When it only makes your condition worse.”

“My condition?” he asked, his voice hoarse as he scooted back, resting against the wall. “And just what is my ‘condition’?”

Being born too reckless. Too stubborn. Too fucking good.

“It’s called starvation, Prince, and it’s numbering your days.”