Page 12 of Demon Daddy’s Hidden Son (Demon Daddies #7)

DOMIEL

I become destruction in search of salvation.

The mirror in my chambers reflects a stranger—hollow cheeks carved from sleepless nights, silver-blue eyes rimmed red from wind and exhaustion.

My dark gold hair hangs loose, unkempt, the metal clasps abandoned somewhere between the third village and the seventh false lead.

The scar at my temple throbs with phantom pain, matching the ache that's taken permanent residence in my chest.

My wings feel heavier now. Not from disuse—I fly constantly, covering impossible distances in pursuit of whispers and rumors—but from the weight of carrying hope through two endless years.

The white and gray feathers have lost their luster, dulled by dust and desperate searches through places that swallow light.

The estate staff treats me like a ghost haunting familiar halls.

They scatter when my boots echo across marble floors, their eyes filled with the kind of pity that makes my hands clench into fists.

Mrs. Althren, my head housekeeper, leaves meals outside my study door like offerings to a temperamental god.

I find them hours later, cold and untouched, because the thought of sustaining this body feels like betrayal when Kaleen's might be broken somewhere beyond my reach.

"Master Domiel," she ventures one evening as I stride toward the entrance hall, my traveling pack slung across shoulders that have grown sharper from weight loss. "Perhaps a night's rest?—"

"No."

The word cuts through air like blade through silk. I don't slow my pace, don't acknowledge the way her face crumples with concern. Sleep means dreams, and dreams mean waking. Waking means remembering all over again that she's gone.

The road calls with promises of possibility. Every horizon might hide answers. Every settlement could shelter the woman whose absence has carved me hollow.

I've interrogated records in dusty archives until my eyes burned and clerks fled from my intensity.

Parish registers, merchant logs, healer records—anything that might contain trace of a human woman found injured or seeking aid.

My questions become demands. My requests transform into barely controlled threats backed by the full weight of xaphan nobility.

"A woman," I tell the trembling clerk in Kaerion's capital registry. "Human. Brown hair, amber eyes, about this tall." My hand shakes as I measure her height against my chest, muscle memory betraying me with perfect accuracy. "She would have been hurt. Confused. Someone would have helped her."

"Sir, we've checked every?—"

"Check again."

My voice carries the chill of mountain wind, the promise of winter storms. The clerk's hands fumble through pages already worn thin from previous searches, desperate to escape my presence.

The rogue mages demand payment in favors and nodals for their whispered intelligence.

I empty coffers accumulated over decades of careful work, trading prosperity for possibility.

A hedge witch in Marlhaven claims to have seen a human woman with golden eyes working in a bakery three towns over.

I arrive to find a girl of sixteen with brown eyes and a cough, nothing more.

Informants feed on my desperation like carrion birds on fresh death.

They spin tales of mysterious women appearing in distant villages, weaving lies from my obvious hunger for hope.

I chase each lead with the single-minded focus of a predator, only to find disappointment waiting at the journey's end.

Two years of this. Two years of becoming something cold and sharp and relentless.

My colleagues whisper about my decline when they think I can't hear. "Poor Domiel," they murmur over wine and crystallized fruits at social gatherings I no longer attend. "He's lost his mind along with his woman."

They're wrong. I haven't lost my mind.

I've simply reorganized it around a single truth: Kaleen is alive.

The alternative is unacceptable. Impossible.

The bond between us—forged in quiet conversations and sealed in desperate love—would have broken if death had claimed her.

I would have felt it like a severed wing, like light extinguished forever.

Instead, I feel her absence like a phantom limb that aches but hasn't been amputated.

She's out there. Breathing. Existing in some corner of the world I haven't yet searched.

The certainty sustains me through days that blur together in endless motion. Village after village, question after question, hope after crushing hope. I've grown lean from travel, harder from disappointment, quieter from the gradual erosion of everything that wasn't essential to finding her.

But the nights—the nights are different.

When exhaustion finally claims me in whatever inn or roadside camp serves as temporary shelter, I dream—even though I try to resist. And in dreams, she returns.

Kaleen . Whole and warm and laughing at something I've whispered against her ear. Her amber eyes spark with that familiar mix of affection and exasperation that meant home, meant safety, meant everything I'd built my carefully ordered life around.

In dreams, I hold her again. Feel the silk of her chestnut hair between my fingers, the steady rhythm of her heartbeat against my chest. She fits against me like the missing piece of some cosmic puzzle, her curves perfectly aligned with the hollow spaces I'd never known existed before her.

"Where have you been?" I ask, and she smiles that secret smile reserved for moments when the world narrows to just us.

"Right here," she whispers, her lips moving against my throat. "Always right here."

We make love in dreams with the desperate intensity of reunion. I map every inch of skin I've memorized, trace each beloved scar and freckle with reverent attention. She arches beneath me, gasps my name like prayer, holds me close enough to share breath and heartbeat and soul.

In dreams, nothing is broken. Nothing is lost. We exist in the space between seconds where love is infinite and separation is impossible.

But dreams end.

I wake on floors of unfamiliar inns or beneath alien stars, and reality crashes over me like ice water. The space beside me is empty. The air lacks her scent. My arms embrace nothing but shadow and wishful thinking.

Each awakening kills me. Each return to consciousness tears the wound fresh and deep, until I'm certain my heart will simply stop from the repeated trauma of loss.

But it doesn't stop. It keeps beating, keeps pumping blood through a body that feels increasingly foreign, keeps sustaining a life that has no purpose beyond finding the woman who made it worth living.

So I rise. Pack my things. Take to the sky or road or whatever path might lead closer to answers.

And begin another day of searching for the other half of my soul.