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This, I realized, would be my last deployment.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew this wasn’t it.

Where would I go? I didn’t know anything else. This was all I wanted to do.

But I came to protect innocent people, not harm them.

“Down! Down! Down!”

I responded too slow, too caught up in emotions I should’ve had a better control on.

The explosion was so loud it left me with nothing but a high-pitched ringing in my ears, so deep it felt like it was within my brain and now embedded in my mind.

Maybe it was.

My vision was obscured by a blinding white light.

Pain, so much fucking pain.

And then nothing.

ILSA

Ray had drawn blood. Her teeth were sharper than I realized, and when she came, she clamped onto my shoulder, punctured my skin, and created a small stream of blood that flooded her mouth. Her lips stayed over my skin, her tongue dancing across the wound. I trusted her to know what she was doing. Obviously, the bonding thing only worked one way, otherwise, she wouldn’t still be near the wound she’d created.

Minutes ticked by.

Ray gripped me, painfully hard, with her breathing heavy and ragged. Her eyes were closed and her pupils twitched, darting back and forth underneath her eyelids as though she was dreaming.

When she jerked away from my shoulder, and her eyes shot open, they were yellow, and I had withdrawn my fingers from her. Her pussy had tightened around my fingers when she came, and it was so fucking hot. She was beautiful in her ecstasy, and I reveled in the twitches of her body and moans against my skin as she came down.

But something was wrong, her pupils still flickered back and forth. She wasn’t focusing on anything—it was like I wasn’t even there.

She was somewhere else.

Was this normal?

Did this happen last time?

Suddenly, I couldn’t remember.

What’s normal for a demon anyway?

“Ray—”

“Collateral damage,” she whispered, blinking a few times. When her eyes returned to the shades of gold of her human eyes, she was crying, and it shook me.

Such human emotion from a demon. It took me a moment to respond.

“Ray, did I hurt you? Are you okay?”

She shook her head rapidly, but instead of wiping her face, she wrapped her arms around me, crushing me against her and burying her face into my shoulder again.

When she sobbed, I thought my heart was going to break.

“What’s wrong? Did I do something wrong? Please talk to me.”

This wasn’t a reaction I’d had before after giving a woman an orgasm, and I didn’t understand what was happening. Was it different for demons? Did I do something to hurt or upset her?