Sweet Disgrace

  She only stared silently at his back. He turned to look at her.

  “Isn’t it?” he repeated. “It’s real, and I’m going there.”

  “Those are the terms of your agreement, yes.”

  “When? I know he said twenty years, but I don’t even remember what date that all went down.”

  “The deadline is tonight. Adjusted for your current time zone, it’s just after eight p.m.”

  All the breath seemed to go out of him. He looked around wildly as if seeking some exit that would take him away from all this, but there wasn’t one. Celeste approached him, arms reaching for his. “Adam. Adam, calm down.” His terror was threatening to throw them out of the dream. His chest was heaving, his eyes panicked. She gripped him hard, trying to push her calming influence into him, to give him peace. But what peace was there to be had for the damned? It wasn’t working. Every second that ticked by brought him closer to doom.

  “You said you could help me…right? You said…” He struggled to catch his breath, to bring himself under control. Somehow, he managed to do it. She watched as his senses seemed to go off alert, but the shadows didn’t leave his face. His cheekbones stood out in sharp relief to the hollows of his cheeks. He shook his head with a new determination. “I don’t want to be that guy who lives however he wants only to realize at the end he’s screwed everything up and begs for forgiveness so he can squeak through the pearly gates. That ain’t me. Whatever’s about to happen, I brought it on myself.”

  Oh, Adam. You have no idea what’s about to happen to you, or you wouldn’t utter those brave words. You’d cast yourself prostrate at my feet and, yes, you would beg.

  He filled his lungs full, the last of his terror seeming to fold up and disappear. In his eyes, though, was a troubled knowledge that hadn’t been there before. Bravado she saw straight through.

  The decision she knew she’d been working toward ever since Damael made his proposal finally solidified itself in her mind.

  “You’ve made mistakes, Adam. You exercised extremely poor judgment, and you got yourself into a dire situation because of it. You aren’t perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination.” She drew a breath, knowing as soon as she spoke the words, she would be bound by them. She could almost feel Damael’s lips on hers again, feel his arms around her. Oh, God… “But I know of a way to help you, and…I’m going to do what I can.”

  Hope widened his eyes, and some of the darkness faded. The dawning elation she saw there only strengthened her resolve. She would do this. One time, to save one soul, she would do this.

  “I want you to listen to me,” she said firmly, increasing her grip on his arms. “If I do this for you, no more screwing up or shirking responsibility. Make amends to the people who love you. I’m going to be watching you, Adam, and after the reprieve you’ve been given, you’d better not disappoint me, or your fate at the demon’s hands might be preferable. Understood?”

  It was a nice bluff, and she felt silly saying it, but it worked. Adam nodded vehemently. Celeste almost had to chuckle as he suddenly yanked her into his arms and gave her a fierce hug. She of all people knew the gift she’d just given him, and took comfort in the fact that he realized it too, as much as he could. She was too appreciative of that to be insulted at his effrontery.

  “Time’s up,” said a silky voice from behind her, and she felt the fear engulf Adam whole again when he recognized it. The dream shattered around them.

  Chapter Four

  Celeste materialized in Adam’s bedroom to find Damael standing next to her. The two mortals were still asleep, though morning peeked between the drapes, casting a single sliver of light across the bed. Adam tossed and turned, kicking off the covers. His hair was plastered to his face with sweat.

  “How long were you there?” she demanded.

  Damael gave her an odd look. “I’d just arrived.”

  “Did you hear what we were saying?”

  “I fulfilled my end.” Though the reply was smooth, she got the curious feeling he was offended. “I arrived in time to see a very touching, tearful embrace. What was that about, anyway?”

  He’d fulfilled his end. He’d also kept his word to her outside Nicolae’s house. Apparently he really hadn’t heard what she’d said to Adam about helping him, or he would be crowing about it.

  She almost wished he had heard, so she wouldn’t have to be the one who instigated this. It would be far easier to succumb to his seduction than be the one doing the seducing.

  Now that he was in front of her, her nerve was wavering. She’d been trying to keep his kiss out of her mind, not to mention that final moment when he’d touched her beneath her robes. The way her entire being had lit up with heat that had her dying to shed her garment and arch her naked body against his, just as he’d asked for back in Adam’s dressing room. If she had started thinking about that, she feared it wouldn’t have mattered what impression Adam left her with. She’d be lost.

  She didn’t want to give in because of lust. She wanted to give in because Adam deserved her help. But if she tried to deny that her desire for Damael was a factor in this decision, then she would have to add lying to her list of sins.

  He stood perhaps an arm’s length away. She closed the distance, reaching up to cup his face in her hands as he stared down at her. His entire countenance seemed to be one of agonized suspense, as if he were holding his breath, afraid the tiniest movement might interfere with what she was about to do.

  She stood on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his.

  And felt that shock again. Like before, it nearly threatened to throw them apart before it melted into a cocoon of warmth that enwrapped them both until it became almost unbreakable. It had been all she could do to muster the strength to pull away from him before.

  For a moment, he simply yielded to her questing mouth, and then with a ragged groan he took control, pulling her closer, burying a hand in her hair, slipping his tongue between her lips.

  It was a liberty he hadn’t taken before. She welcomed it. Her body came to roaring life, so desperate to join his she had the sudden ridiculous notion they’d once been two parts of a whole, separated and flung apart and polarized on the moral spectrum. Ridiculous, surely, but stranger things had happened.

  She reveled in the warm mastery of his mouth until she sensed him tense up against her. His fingers gripped her shoulders and he pushed her away, holding her at arm’s length as his eyes bored into hers. They blazed the ruthless, hungry crimson that normally sent shivers of unease through her, but her body screamed to be pressed against him again. To know him, to learn what was really in his heart. She was becoming increasingly convinced he had one.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice laced with desperation.

  “What you wanted me to do,” she said softly, stroking his forearms through the silky fabric of his jacket. “What I suspect you’ve wanted for centuries, and perhaps I wanted as well. But most importantly, I’m accepting your offer.”

  Incredulousness filled his expression before he threw off her hands and stepped back. Without the overwhelming heat of his body near her, she felt cold. Too cold. On his face now was an expression she’d never witnessed there before, a look of…fear?

  He’s afraid. As soon as her eyes widened with the stunning realization, he turned away from her, pacing several steps.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “You weren’t supposed to accept.”

  Oh, God, no, he wasn’t going to do this to her now… “Wasn’t supposed to…? So it was a lie? For what? Simply to torture me, to make me think it was my fault if Adam perished?”

  “No. I…”

  She’d never heard him at a loss for words before. She didn’t like it. His head was lowered, his face partially hidden. He went on, his voice low, pained. “I can’t say it was a lie when it’s…the only thing in my entire existence I’ve ever truly, deeply wanted, Celeste.”

  His use of her name stunned her as much as hi
s confession. How many years, how many millennia had she known him? He’d never before said it, not once that she could recall. Again she found herself closing the distance between them, reaching out until the tips of her fingers met his back, touching him with all the tentativeness and delicacy with which one might handle a poisonous snake. Finally, her palms flattened against the hard muscles. He trembled beneath her hands. His head tilted back and he sighed.

  Encouraged, she slid her hands upward, until they became lost in the silk of his hair. “I’m giving it to you,” she said.

  “So long as I keep my end of the bargain.”

  “Well…of course. That was the deal. That’s only fair. You’ve shown me lately there’s a certain measure of honor in you. Please, don’t disappoint me now.”

  Stepping away from her touch again, he turned to face her, such devastation on his face that it shredded her soul. “I don’t want to. And I don’t know why that is.”

  “Then release him, Damael. Take what I’m offering and release him.”

  Something surged in his eyes, something dark and furious, and she thought of a caged animal. Never taking his eyes from hers, he pulled the cursed scroll from his pocket and with a harsh yank, ripped the thin black ribbon from it. She watched in astonishment as he snapped the tightly furled parchment open, clenched each end in a white-knuckled fist, and tore it cleanly down the middle. Again and again, he ripped the thick pieces until the contract was beyond anything salvageable.

  “He’s released.”

  Adam sat straight up in bed with a strangled gasp. Melody struggled up beside him, grabbing his shoulders and demanding to know if he was okay.

  Celeste saw it all out of the corner of her eye. She couldn’t take her gaze off Damael’s stricken face as he stepped backwards away from her, casting the destroyed pieces of the scroll into the air. They caught fire and floated eerily away, like dying fireflies in the dimness.

  “I’m all right,” Adam finally managed, shrugging off Melody’s hands. Celeste looked to see he was breathing heavily, his eyes scanning the room as if he expected to find someone there. Perhaps he did. “In fact, I feel…hell, I feel fantastic.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He rubbed a hand restlessly across his bare chest. “It’s like a weight is gone. I know that sounds weird. But it’s like this…dread that’s been sitting right in the middle of my chest for years. It’s so real, and I could feel it all the time, even in my sleep. Like something was watching, waiting. It’s always been there, ever since…”

  “Since what?”

  “I don’t know, some crazy hallucination I had when I was a kid. I’d almost convinced myself it was real because lately this feeling has gotten worse, and I thought I was about to lose my mind or die. But now it’s…gone.” He took a deep breath and smiled. Probably for the first time in years.

  “What hallucination, Adam? This sounds craz—”

  “I wrote songs about it, Mel. And about that feeling it left me with. That’s how tangible it was. I took every kind of pill and drug imaginable trying to get rid of it. It was real enough, and heavy enough, that I knew the second it was gone.” He collapsed on the bed, heaving a sigh. “God, I hope it doesn’t come back.”

  Slowly, she shifted her gaze from the couple on the bed to the demon who’d just granted the greatest gift a mortal could ever know. He was watching them too, looking as if he were about to burst out of his skin at any moment. Then, without another word or glance at her, he turned and walked out of the room.

  Apparently he wasn’t the evil bastard he’d thought he was.

  What had he done? The easy answer was that he’d lost. She’d beaten him. But if he chose to look at it that way, then her lips on his had been the sweetest defeat he’d ever suffered. So sweet it had shaken him to his core, more so than at Nicolae’s. Then, she’d only succumbed for her own gain. For one moment, one utterly insane moment just now, he’d thought she wanted him. And then he’d realized what she’d done, why she’d needed time alone with Adam. To convince herself if it was worth defiling herself to gain his release.

  It shouldn’t matter, but it did. He should have carried out his orders, but he couldn’t. If she wanted Adam’s soul so badly she would sully herself by rutting with him, she could by Lucifer have it. She could have it and every one of the others that belonged to him at the moment, still on earth waiting to be reaped.

  There would quite literally be Hell to pay now. He could only hope the moments of bliss he’d experienced as her mouth tenderly explored his would be enough to get him through the worst. He liked to tell himself that. It had been worth it, it had, just to give her what she wanted this one time. To see the elation on her face.

  He trudged along the damp sidewalk with no clear destination, the sounds of the city of Miami a roar that didn’t even register amid the cacophony in his head.

  He needed to go home. It would be worse if they came for him, if they had to drag him back to answer for what he’d done. He’d made that mistake once before, centuries ago—

  Glowing white robes, gently brushing the concrete, appeared in his downturned gaze. Grinding to a halt, he lifted his deadened stare to the loveliest face he’d ever beheld and fought the urge to run the other way. Or to drop through the ground to endure the torment that was waiting to punish his failure, because surely it couldn’t surpass the torture of looking at her soft, full lips and remembering…

  He was burning alive, and her kiss had been like a drop of water on his tongue.

  “That’s it?” Celeste asked, her blue eyes like a cool autumn morning. Something he wouldn’t be seeing for a while. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s not meant for you to.” He attempted to slide around her. She stepped into his path.

  “I demand an explanation.”

  “Oh, you demand it.” When she only went on looking at him, he shrugged. “You won.”

  “You let me win. Why?”

  He managed a smirk, but knew it came out too weak to fool her. “Don’t expect me to make a habit of it.” If they ever let me come back, he finished silently.

  To his amazement, tears glimmered in her eyes. “I thought you wanted me.”

  Want didn’t begin to cover it. He craved her like fire craved oxygen to burn. A want, a need so primal and ingrained it was simply a given, a law.

  “Celeste,” he whispered, savoring the sound of her name on his tongue. So foreign, so familiar. She shuddered visibly at the sound, her eyelids falling closed. “Wanting you and letting myself have you are two entirely different things. I didn’t really see that before. I see it now. It couldn’t happen that way.”

  “Don’t you tell me all these centuries have been a lie. Don’t you dare. I’ll never be able to face you again.”

  “You might not have to,” he said grimly. “Surrender is not something my masters look kindly upon.”

  Her eyelashes fluttered up as she looked at him. Fear clouded her features, an expression he didn’t like seeing on her face. He wanted to destroy anything that dared to threaten her, or even distress her. If that included himself, then so be it.

  “What will they do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. But if I never see you again, know that—”

  “No.”

  Dismay wracked him as she pitched herself toward him, and God help him—because certainly no one in his realm would—he caught her in his arms. So slight, so fragile, so insubstantial. He could crush her with one sharp movement, one viper-strike of his power. They weren’t bound by their common laws of negotiation now. She knew that, and she trusted him. She buried her face in his chest and cried tears that literally burned him through his clothes.

  “Please,” she whispered, her fists clenched around his jacket. “Don’t go yet.”

  His hands went on stroking her, soothing her. His face lowered to the cool silk of her extraordinary copper hair. All at once, he was so hard it pained him, throbbing with the need to possess the being in his arm
s, his mortal enemy. “If I don’t, they’ll come for me.” And what’s waiting will be ten times worse.

  He couldn’t tell her that. He couldn’t hurt her more.

  “It’s all right, little angel,” he murmured, as she only cried harder. “It’s nothing I haven’t endured before.”

  “How you came from that despicable place…”

  Chuckling, he slid one arm between their bodies and tilted her chin up so he could witness the impossible: an angel weeping for a demon’s fate. He hadn’t known those tears would eat into him like acid, but he could endure all things where she was concerned. So it seemed.

  “It’s all I’ve known. Until now.”

  She swallowed, and he felt the delicate constriction of her throat muscles under his hand. Her eyes blazed into his, the blueness taking his breath away. If white clouds had drifted across the clear, flawless irises, he shouldn’t have been surprised. Nothing was that color where he came from. Nothing.

  “Now,” he went on, mesmerized, “I think I can say I’ve finally seen Heaven.”

  Her slender hands slid around his neck and she kissed him. Sweetness engulfed him whole. It terrified him. It decimated him. Her tongue slid into his mouth, and the taste of her passion filled him, unleashing dark desires she couldn’t possibly fathom. He fought them valiantly, but at his core, his very nature was decadence and destruction. He wouldn’t be able to fight them for long, even for her.

  And dammit, he didn’t have the strength to refuse her yet again.

  “Be certain this is what you want,” he rasped between mouthfuls of her dewy innocence. “Once I start with you, I fear I won’t be able to stop.”

  “Don’t. Don’t stop. Damael…”

  A surge of demonic lust laid waste to all further protests. His name, so often spoken in fear or dread, now uttered for the first time in that soft, musical lilt…it undid him. There was nothing between them now, no bargaining, no souls in the balance, nothing to be gained. No deceiving. Just the two of them. This he could do.