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We were back to that?
There were demons all around my younger self. Cackling. Gossiping. One of them licked Shera’s unconscious body.
Goddess, what were they going to do with us?
I woke on a cry, my subconscious getting me out of there in the nick of time.
“Hey, baby, are you okay?” Casey was standing by the bed, staring down at me.
He was everything I needed in that moment. My head was reeling but worse, my soul felt split and untethered. I didn’t know what reality was anymore, but this vampire was the very best of a past I knew was real.
My skin was still crawling from the feel of demon hands on me. I didn’t know if it was something Dean had planted in my head or if it had been a bad dream, but I needed to wash it away.
“Sweetheart, should I call Evan back? She’s pretty good with healing, and you look so pale. What happened?”
That was the problem. I was no longer certain of what had happened. The things I’d clung to for so long were distant for me now. I was starting to feel things I’d buried, and for good reason. I didn’t want to feel that way ever again.
But there was something I could handle feeling.
“Kiss me.”
His eyes flared. “What?”
I reached up, grabbing the front of his shirt. “I said kiss me, Casey. I can’t talk right now. Kiss me or walk away.”
“Baby, I think we…” He stopped, and I saw the resolve come over his face. “You need this?”
I nodded and then he was covering my body with his, his mouth coming down, and all the bad shit fled until I was left with nothing but the feel of his tongue mating with mine.
Heat flashed through me, and my body ached with longing. Casey hadn’t been my only lover. I’d been with my ex-fiancé for far longer, but I could barely remember Scott’s face now. It had been Casey who’d haunted me all these years, whose memory had cut through all the others.
He hadn’t been able to burn away Casey and Kelsey. Wasn’t that what Dean had figured out that day the royals had returned? He’d been in my head that day, too. He’d been there before I’d let the master take over.
Before I’d let him bury me away and do what he wanted to with my body and my magic.
I rolled us over, moving on top of Casey. He was a gorgeous beast, with his fangs out and his eyes going full-on light blue. It was the color of the sky in wintertime, but there was nothing cold about how he looked at me. His hands moved up my thighs to cup my ass.
“You need to be in control, baby?” He squeezed my cheeks, sending a wave of lust through me.
“Yes.” We didn’t play the way Kelsey did with Gray. We hadn’t done a ton of kinky stuff, but I suddenly understood the impulse. I couldn’t be the submissive partner today. I needed to be in control.
His hands came back and away, offering himself to me. “Take what you need, baby. I know you won’t want to hear this…”
I knew exactly what he was going to say, and five minutes before I would have stopped him. The words would have turned in my gut, but I wanted them now. “Tell me.”
“I love you.”
I couldn’t say it back. I couldn’t, but it was there in my heart. It was there in the soul I still had left.
I started to pull my shirt over my head but remembered the veins he would see. They weren’t as dark as they’d been before, but they were still a map of everything I’d done in the last dozen years, physical proof that I’d taken a darker path, one that hadn’t included him.
“Don’t. I still love you. I still think you’re beautiful, Olivia. No matter what.”
I dragged the shirt over my head because I believed him. Because I wanted nothing between us in that moment. The walls would come up again soon enough, but for now I wanted to pretend we could be together. I wanted the world to make sense for an hour or so before I went back to plotting, and those veins, that map of betrayal on my body, led me further and further from him.
Lucky for me someone had already gotten me out of my pants and shoes. Likely because Evan had wanted to take anything off that was constricting me. My underwear was doing a damn fine job of that. “Tear them off.”
I didn’t care that I might not have another pair. Kelsey was now the queen of a whole Hell realm. She could order some new ones. She would likely be thrilled to because she would take this as a good sign.
