Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 109033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
“We’re quite sure,” he echoed. “Who’s we?”
“Me, Tobe, my mom, Alfie, Jolene, her anchor, Khloë, and Ciaran.” And Lou, but she wouldn’t mention that just yet.
Luka’s eyes went slitted. “Tonight wasn’t the first time you’d encountered the clerics, then?”
Her nape prickled at the silken menace in his tone. “No.”
His nostrils flared. “So you knew that danger dogged your heels . . . and you said nothing of it to me or Konstantin?”
Naomi inwardly winced. “Yeah.”
There was a flash of something very dark in his eyes, but he killed the emotion fast, as if striving to maintain his cool. “How long have they been coming for you?”
“About a month now.”
He clenched his jaw, his teeth grinding. “Are there more of them?”
“Probably. We tried to find the location of the monastery, but we’ve so far had no luck. We believe the dark practitioner is posing as an angel to manipulate them. He’s calling himself Kushiel, from what I overheard. I’m pretty sure that’s the name of the Angel of Punishment, so it would explain why he chose it.”
“Why would the clerics believe that the prophecy refers to you?”
“It features a symbol that matches a birthmark I have.”
Luka’s brow creased. “I’ve explored every inch of you multiple times, and I’ve not seen a single birthmark.”
“I started covering it with concealer after I came to suspect that it was what had led the clerics to me.”
“When did they first come at you?”
“The evening you met Jolene at the pizzeria. A little over a week later, they surrounded me when I was on my way home from work. It was roughly two weeks after that that they broke into my home again. Then nothing until now.”
“So essentially you’ve been in the direct path of danger since the day I came into your life, and I knew nothing of it,” he summed up, his voice a low rumble of fury.
Naomi internally cringed. “Essentially.”
A gleam of something hard and dark came and went in his eyes. Snakes seemed to slither beneath the skin of his face and throat, telling her that his demons were pissed.
Her stomach seized as she braced herself for him to blurt out Fuck this shit and go. Her entity, too, expected it—and planned to rip him a new asshole as he made his way out.
“I knew you were keeping things from me,” said Luka, his voice eerily flat. “You were open with me about that much. But I didn’t ask myself if there was a threat aside from Iain hanging over your head, because you never seemed in any way nervous or afraid.”
She hadn’t been scared, not believing the monkhood presented a real risk to her life. They could use magick, yes, but she was more powerful. She hadn’t thought they would ever use explosives. “I wasn’t—” She cut off as Luka stalked angrily toward her.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” He dipped his face to hers, pinning her gaze with his own. “Don’t say that it isn’t my business, Naomi. I declared you mine—I was very fucking clear about it. Any possible danger to you is absolutely my business.”
She let out a heavy breath. “I said nothing for two reasons. One, I didn’t want to drag you into this mess unless I absolutely had to. Two, I couldn’t have told you the full truth; I would have had to lie to you.”
“About what?”
She thought about blowing off the question. After all, he wasn’t going to stay. He hadn’t even addressed what he’d witnessed her do, shocking though it must have been, as if to block it out. Which meant he couldn’t accept it.
Her demon urged her to keep quiet, feeling it owed him no answers. It wasn’t merely angry with him, it was angry with itself. Because it had begun to believe that just maybe he would be able to look past Naomi’s need to drink blood. The fact that she apparently didn’t matter enough to him for that to be the case made her entity want to claw his face off.
And it hurt.
You don’t know that he can’t accept it, a voice in her head whispered. You’re making assumptions because you’re bracing yourself for the worst.
True. Was she doing him a disservice by deciding that he wouldn’t overlook it? Maybe. The reality was that she couldn’t truly know what his reaction would be unless she told him everything and helped him understand. If she didn’t do that here and now, if he walked out as a result of that, she’d never know for certain.
And she found that she wanted to know.
“About what?” he repeated.
She dragged in a preparatory breath. “The prophecy isn’t actually inaccurate, the clerics just didn’t properly translate it. It doesn’t state that I’ll birth the child of the devil. It says that I am the child of the devil. Which is true.”