Page 7 of Loved By the Gargoyle

My heart fluttered at his words, though. At the confirmation I didn’t know I needed.

We seemed to bask in that fact for a long time, until I realized we couldn’t stay like this all night.

“I want to meet,” I told him. “Not now… maybe not tomorrow. But I want to meet. In person. And you don’t have to answer right now. Think about it and let me know.”

There was a brief pause.

“Yesss…” The word sounded like a hiss.

I smiled, pressing my forehead against the door. “My name is Mia, by the way.” My hand tightened on the knob. “Mia Song.”

I didn’t think he would reply, so I started to pull the door closed, but his grip tightened a final time right before he said. “And I am Xavir.”

Sha-veer.

I rolled the pronunciation in my head and smiled before he finally, gently, closed the door between us.

Hearing her voice was an otherworldly sensation that no words could ever come close enough to describe in all its perfection. She was…

Mine.

Mine.

Mine.

And she wanted to meet.

Ever was I getting closer to conquering her heart, to making her my wife–and least importantly, of appeasing my Lord of Hell.

Yet…

My reflection stared back at me. A terrifying monster with sharp teeth and gray skin. Long, black hair slipped against my face, making me appear as though I were a fractured piece of stone.

Seeing how much I differed from the humans she was used to made something discomforting clench at the pit of my abdomen.

I knew hatred as well as I knew of torture and shadows, and for a moment, it seeped so deep into my core, the sensation utterly new and alarming. A hatred for my own face, my appearance.

“My wife feared me,” Nazzar had told Qanek and I. “She thought I meant to harm her. She was frightened of my appearance. Frightened that I had stolen her.”

Would my wife fear me too?

Mia Song.

Even her name was far more delicate than my own, as gentle as she was.

Would seeing me break her? Would she scream? Would she curse me to the depths of the Underworld?

I was not a coward by nature. One did not become the Second General of the Legions of Hell by being cowardly. Yet what else would one call me as I hid away in a dusty attic, too afraid to face the one person in the universe that was made for me out of fear.

Pathetic.

I could almost hear Qanek’s voice in my mind, his brand of violence spurring me into action.

I crawled from my hiding place.

My mate, my wife, wanted to meet me, and so I would meet her in the way that I knew best. Hidden in the shadows, away from prying eyes.

I was the spy of my legion, possessing the magic of the three lords of the Underworld within my veins. The magic of shadows, gifted to me by Lord Kane, the King of the Pit, flowed through me. He must have gifted me with his vicious thirst for violence and torture, because I knew that as surely as I knew my own name.