Origin

mouths touched in the sweetest torture. We’d been intimate before, twice, but right now it felt like the first time. Excited nervousness hummed through me while my blood heated up.

Daemon lifted his head. Between the narrowed slits of his eyes, his pupils were like polished diamonds following the movement of his hand. My insides tightened as his fingers moved dangerously close to the edge of the towel. Each slow pass along the fabric had my pulse pounding. My gaze traced over his broad cheekbones and then got hung up on the perfection of his lips.

His hand stilled around the knot I had made in the towel, his eyes flicking up to mine. “We don’t have to,” he said.

“I know.”

“I really didn’t buy the condoms thinking that we’d do this tonight.”

I slipped into a grin. “So…you weren’t overly confident?”

“I’m always overly confident.” He swooped down, kissing me softly. “But I don’t know if this is too much right now. I don’t want—”

I silenced him by slipping my hands to the band of his pants, hooking my fingers under it. “You’re perfect. I want this—with you. It’s not too much.”

A breath shuddered through him. “God, I was hoping you’d say that. Does that make me a terrible person?”

A little laugh came out. “No. It just makes you a dude.”

“Oh? Is that it?” He captured my mouth again, then pulled back with a slight nip. “Just makes me a dude?”

“Yes.” I gasped. My back arched as he moved his hand down my front and then back up to the knot. “Okay. You’re more than just a dude.”

He chuckled deep in his throat. “Thought so.”

His breath was warm against my swollen lips, scorching hot as it trailed down my neck. He pressed a kiss to where my pulse pounded in my throat. I closed my eyes, happily swept away in the rush of sensations. I needed this—we needed this. A moment of normalcy, of just him and me, together like we were supposed to be.

He kissed me as his fingers worked the knot loose, distracting me as he parted the towel. Goose bumps followed the cool air rushing over my body. He murmured something in that lyrical language of his, a language I wished I could understand because his words sounded beautiful.

As he lifted up, his gaze chased away the tiny bumps, searing me from the inside out. The edges of his body blurred into a faint whitish light. “You’re beautiful.”

I thought about my back.

“Every part,” he said, as if he read my mind.

Maybe he had, because when I tugged him closer by the band of his pants, he obliged, fitting his body to mine. Bare chest to bare chest. I tangled my hands in his hair as I wrapped a leg around his hips.

He took a sharp breath. “You drive me insane.”

“Feeling’s mutual,” I rasped out, tilting my hips up against his.

The muscles in his arms bulged as he made a sound deep in his throat. The set to his jaw was hard, the lines of his mouth tense as he slipped a hand between us. Those clever fingers went from soothing to breath- stealing in a second, and I felt the coiling deep—

A bright yellow light suddenly flooded the room, shattering the moment.

Daemon was off me so quickly, he stirred the hair around my temples as he shot toward the window and peeled back a small section of the curtain. I scrambled up, smacking the mattress until I found the towel, covering myself as I darted off the bed, grabbing the pistol.

Terror climbed up my throat. Had they found us already? I twisted to where he stood, as I still clutched the towel around me. My hand shook so badly the pistol rattled.

Daemon let out a long breath. “It’s just headlights—some ass with his high beams on pulling out of the parking lot.” Letting the curtain fall back into place, he turned. “That’s all.”

My hand tightened around the gun. “Headlights?”

His gaze dropped to what I held. “Yeah, that’s all, Annie Oakley.”

The gun felt glued to my hand. My heart was still pumping fast with residual terror, and that horror was slow to drain from my veins. It hit me then, in startling clarity, that this was what our lives had been reduced to. Flying into defense and panic mode every time headlights came through a window or someone knocked on our door or a stranger approached us.

This was it.

My first reaction to headlights would be to grab a gun, to get ready to shoot—to shoot to kill if necessary.

“Kat…?”

I shook my head. A fire crawled through my stomach, up my throat. Tears burned my eyes. So many thoughts raced through my mind. Pressure clamped down on my chest, tightening around my lungs with icy fingers. A shudder rolled down my spine. Four months of tears I didn’t let fall built inside me.

Daemon was in front of me in an instant, gently and carefully peeling my fingers away from the gun. He placed it on the bedside table. “Hey,” he said, cupping my cheeks with both his hands. “Hey, it’s okay. Everything is okay. No one is here but us. We’re okay.”

I knew that, but it was more than headlights in the night. It was everything—an accumulation of four months of no control over any aspect of my life or my body. Everything piled up on me—the tangy fear that never eased, the dread I had woken up with every day, the exams, and the stress tests. The pain of the scalpel and the horror of watching the mutated humans die. It all cut through me. The harrowing escape where I shot people—real, live people who had families and lives of their own—and I knew I’d killed at least one of them. His blood had been splattered all across my face.

And then there was Blake…

“Talk to me,” Daemon pleaded. His emerald eyes were full of concern. “Come on, Kitten, tell me what’s going on.”

Turning my head, I closed my eyes. I wanted to be strong. I’d told myself over and over again that I had to be strong, but I couldn’t get past everything.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Look at me.”

I kept my eyes squeezed shut, knowing that if I looked at him, the balloon that had been so full and tethered so delicately would burst. I was wrecked inside, and I didn’t want him to see that.

But then he turned my face to his and dropped a kiss on the lids of my closed eyes and said, “It’s okay. Whatever you’re feeling right now is okay. I got you, Kat. I’m here for you, only you. It’s okay.”

That balloon burst, and I lost it.

…

Daemon

My heart cracked as the first tear rolled down her cheek and broke with a hoarse sob, making its way out of her lips.

I pulled her against me, wrapping my arms around her as she shook with the force of her grief, her pain. I didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t talking. There was no room around the tears for that.

“It’s okay,” I kept telling her. “Let it out. Just let it out.” And I felt stupid for saying that. The words were so lacking.

Her tears streamed down my chest; each one cut like a knife. Helpless, I picked her up and brought her to the bed. I gathered her close, yanking up the blanket that seemed too coarse for her skin and wrapping it around her.

She burrowed into me, her fingers clutching the strands of hair at the nape of my neck. The tears…they kept coming, and my heart was shattering at the raw sound of each of her breaths. Never in my life had I felt more useless. I wanted to fix this, to make her better, but I didn’t know how.

She had been so strong through all of this, and if I had thought for one instant that she hadn’t been deeply affected, then I was an idiot. I had known. I’d just hoped—no, I’d