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CHAPTER4
He thought some distance would help.
It didn’t.
When he could finally bring himself to leave her, Raze gave Becca his card with his personal cell number, told her to head to the casino that night at eight o’clock sharp, then made his escape. With every forceful step of his dress shoe, he hoped that the tugging would quit. That he would outpace the urge to turn around and blurt out, “Come home with me,” to the demoness.
He wasn’t sure if he should blame Lucifer or God almighty just then for the turn in his fortune. Raze had managed to avoid chancing on his soulmate for ages only to discover her in a human-turned-demoness who spent the last few years working for his enemy. Not only that, but how could he admit the truth to her right after she told him about a curse that could only be broken once Raze found his true mate?
Because that’s what the lines on the page meant. Between the rumors spread by the werewolf who’d been lucky—or, perhaps, unlucky enough to spy on Lucifer during his casting of the curse—and Becca keeping her ear cocked in Hell, she was certain that she had the curse captured on paper.
The curse was straight forward enough. She was right when she told Raze that Lucifer targeted the heads of each faction, the royals.
Sever them in three…
Each faction was ruled by three royals; some princes, some princesses.
The nearest object the curse will keep…
Just like how the angel princes imprinted on their key to Heaven, the other factions had a sacred talisman that served as the cornerstone of their power. The cursed object? It had to be, Raze decided.
One to true love it will be…
And that was the part that had Raze fighting against the pull toward Becca. For an angel, a true love could only be one person: his soulmate.
Who—surprise, surprise—was Rebecca Murphy, a demoness who was willing to beg for his help to avoid Raze’s old enemy. Raze, however, had been in the casino business long enough to know a bad bet when he saw one in front of him.
He could save her, but he couldn’t have her; just because fate wanted to interfere with the life he worked so hard to achieve, that didn’t mean he had to go along with it. So, rather than prolong their meeting at the Twilight Bar and Grille, he flagged down Zev again, told him to put everything Becca ordered on his tab, then made his curt goodbyes.
He made sure to tell her that he was a busy angel, and that she would be reporting to Cael. His floor manager would get her set up with a job and a rented room, but if she needed anything—anything—at all, she was free to call him.
That whole first night, he willed his damn phone to ring.
It didn’t. And, considering Cael was a trusted angel, once Raze told him to take good care of the new demoness hire, he honestly didn’t expect there to be any problems. As the floor manager, Cael had full control over the day-to-day workings of the casino, from the security team to the maintenance crew, as well as the serving team.
To get patrons to feed more bills into the slots, House of Sin offered an assortment of free beverages all served by strikingly beautiful male and female servers. Becca, he knew, was enticing enough that she would no doubt rake in the tips. A win-win for them all. She’d be flush with cash while the casino would benefit from such a stunning addition to the staff.
And Raze spent hours trying to convince himself of that.
Yeah. It didn’t work.
Micah noticed, too. While Sam was still conveniently missing, Micah was in the office when Raze came storming back to the casino after meeting with Becca. Even more gruff and short-tempered than he’d been before he left, he snapped at Micah when his youngest brother asked how the mysterious meeting went. He didn’t say a damn thing other than Lucifer was back to being a major asshole, that the rumors of the curse were true, and they had a new hire.
From the puzzled look on Micah’s face as he turned around and left the office again, Raze guessed his brother was having a hard time figuring what one thing had to do with another. A new hire wasn’t unusual, even if Raze rarely paid attention to staffing issues; that was usually Sam’s department. Being cursed by Lucifer? Sadly, that was nothing new, either.
Raze in a pissy mood?
Nope. That, at least, was strictly normal.
Raze leaving work early and locking himself in his executive suite on the top floor of the hotel?
That… that was new. And when Micah risked paging him later that night, Raze covered it up by explaining that he’d left the Bar and Grille on the main floor with a pounding headache and, for once, he was turning in early.
It wasn’t really a lie. Raze’s skull was pounding, his brain beating against the inside of it, so headache? Oh, yeah. He had to admit that it was still stretching the truth a little since it wasn’t the headache that had him confined to his quarters, pacing his oversized bedroom back and forth.
It was the bond.
The invisible tether that burst into existence the moment he looked into Becca’s grey eyes, and that kept yanking on him, demanding that he return to the casino level where—at that very moment—Becca was starting her first shift under Cael’s watchful gaze.
