Page 31 of Demon with Benefits (Hell Bent #3)

Not just her pussy. Not just sex. But her . All of her. Everything about her. And he wanted it forever.

By the time they’d finished their orgasms and Iris collapsed with a contented sigh against him, he was going through a full-blown panic attack.

He hadn’t managed to draw a full breath since he’d started coming, and his head was spinning from the lack of oxygen. His hands had begun to shake, and the tremors were rapidly traveling to the rest of his body. His eyes opened, and he stared blankly at the ceiling in pure, unadulterated terror.

What the actual fuck is wrong with me?

Iris lifted her head. “Meph?”

He gasped like a fish out of water.

“Meph!” She jerked upright. “Are you okay?”

He stared at her in horror, absolutely terrified of her and everything she suddenly represented, and kept gulping uselessly at the air.

“What’s the matter?” Her eyes widened with alarm. “What’s wrong?”

He clutched uselessly at his chest.

She scrambled off him, and he lurched upright, twisting away to hang his legs over the edge of the bed and dropping his head between his knees.

“Just breathe.” Her hand rubbed soothing circles on his back. “Just breathe, that’s it. You’re okay.” She seemed to get that he was having a panic attack and kept tracing those soothing circles onto his back. “You’re okay.”

He finally gulped in a breath, his whole body shaking like a leaf.

“That’s it. Deep breaths.”

He sucked in fifteen different tiny bursts of air and then exhaled another shuddering breath. He repeated that a few times and then finally managed to lift his head from between his knees. His hands shook so badly, he could barely control them as he dragged them through his hair again and again.

“Are you okay?” Iris’s green eyes were wide. “Shit, I didn’t mean to push you into that. I shouldn’t have asked you to do something you weren’t comfortable with. I’m sorry.”

She thought he was having a panic attack because he’d let her take control. “Not... that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I—You—” He gasped again.

Fuck, this was the most embarrassing, shameful thing he’d ever experienced. Forget centuries of being a brainwashed, subservient little slave. This was the worst.

“What is it, Meph? It’s okay. You can tell me.”

“You—I don’t—”

He swallowed, telling himself to man the fuck up and stop acting like an idiot. But he couldn’t. He could only stare at Iris and think of all that dumb shit he wanted to do like hold her hand and hear her laugh. Fuck.

“I feel—” He choked.

“You feel what?” She searched his face, intent on understanding.

“I have...” He swallowed. “Feelings.”

She blinked. “Feelings.”

He nodded.

“What kind of feelings?”

“For you.”

Understanding dawned, and her eyes widened. “You have feelings... for me?”

He nodded again.

Silence.

A million things passed across her face, and for a moment, he swore he saw her beautiful green eyes brighten. Something started to soar inside of him.

But then he watched her expression go carefully blank, and whatever had just taken flight within him crashed and burned.

Her eyes deadened, all the concern bleeding out of them. Her posture went stiff, her hand withdrawing from his skin, her entire body closing off. Her jaw clenched, her mouth pressed into a hard line, and she angled herself slightly away from him.

Yeah. That was about what he’d expected to happen.

“That’s too bad,” she said flatly. No emotion. It was like talking to a robot. “I was really enjoying our arrangement.”

He stared at her. It felt like he was dying. Like someone had put a blade of ice straight through his heart.

“Shame it has to end,” she said.

The ice blade stabbed him a second time.

He stood. His head spun from its continued lack of oxygen, but he managed not to black out.

His hands were still shaking so he clenched them into fists.

Their gazes were still locked, and he waited to see anything in her eyes, any softening or emotion or expression, any flicker of what he’d seen before.

There was nothing. Not that he was surprised.

He mentally recalled where his clothes had been discarded—the kitchen—so he could make the quickest escape possible.

He left the room without looking back, got dressed, and got out of there like the building was on fire and he was a vulnerable human with soft skin and not a motherfucking demon who’d once been the terror of the underworld.

Maybe it was time he stopped pretending and went back to what he was good at.

The ringing of a phone brought Suyin out of the trance of the protection spell she was performing, and she cursed.

She’d been so close to completion, and now she’d have to start from the beginning.

But after that dream she’d had last week, the sense of impending doom hadn’t left her.

There was no way she was going to sleep without putting her guard up.

Climbing to her feet, she stepped carefully around the assortment of candles and chalk lines to reach her cell phone on the coffee table. Maybe she should have ignored it, but her duty as coven leader meant she always tried to be available to the witches she mentored.

She was glad she made that choice when she saw Marie-Thérèse’s name on the screen.

Marie had been working at the shop tonight, though she should have finished closing at least an hour ago.

While inexperienced, the young witch brought a lot to the coven.

She was hungry for knowledge and always helpful, staying behind after meetings to stack chairs and clean up.

“Marie, what’s—”

She’d barely gotten a word out before Marie-Thérèse burst into rapid French.

“Suyin, oh god—There’s a man—if he is even a man—but he—I was so scared, and I didn’t know what to do—”

“Slow down,” Suyin said calmly, though her heart rate had increased. “What happened?”

“He—I was closing up for the n-night, and a man came into the store. He threatened me. He told me he would k-kill me if I didn’t do what he said.”

“Are you okay? Where is he now?”

“I ran. I left him in the store! He made me break the ward and let him into the cellar, and he—he—”

Suyin didn’t need to hear the rest. A sense of knowing had settled inside her. The goddamn dream. “Is he still there?”

“I don’t know. I’m too scared to go back inside.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes, okay? Just hold on and stay where you are.”

Stopping only to blow out the candles and grab her coat, Suyin bolted out of her apartment. She made it to the Le Repaire in four minutes, running nearly as fast as she would have in summer, when the sidewalks weren’t covered in black ice.

She went into the store through the front and immediately checked the wards above the door. One was glowing red and one wasn’t. She exhaled.

Marie-Thérèse appeared in the window behind her, white as a sheet, so Suyin opened the door and beckoned her inside. “He’s gone.”

She hesitated on the threshold. “How do you know?”

“The wards, remember?” Suyin pointed up.

After last week’s coven meeting, they’d added a second ward over both entrances to the shop.

The demonic presence ward was the one that was burning red—a sign that a demon was, or had been recently, in the vicinity.

But the other ward, a detection ward, was inactive—meaning there were no supernatural presences currently on the premises.

“Of course.” Marie buried her face in her hands. “I feel so stupid.”

“It’s normal to forget your training in a moment of panic. Next time, you’ll remember.”

Marie nodded and entered the shop, and Suyin locked the door behind her.

“I’m so sorry, Suyin. I didn’t know what to do. I was so scared, and I couldn’t think straight—”

“It’s okay.” Suyin pulled her into a stiff hug. The distraught woman needed comfort, but Suyin had never been the nurturing type. She made the effort anyway. “Let’s go sit in the back, and you can tell me what happened.”

“What if he comes back?” Marie-Thérèse looked sick at the thought.

“He won’t.” She had no guarantee, but it was a gut feeling.

They parted the bead curtain to the back room and sat down on either side of the tiny table. Suyin waited for Marie-Thérèse to get her breathing under control before she was able to speak.

“I was closing the store when he came in. He looked like a man, but...”

“But that’s not saying much.”

Marie nodded. “He came around the counter and—” She swallowed. “He grabbed me. He told me to open the ward over the cellar door or he would kill me.” She looked at her hands. “I did what he said. I was so scared. I should have fought—”

“No.” Suyin spoke firmly enough to make Marie’s gaze flick back to her. “If you fought, he would have killed you, just like he threatened. You did the right thing. Then what happened?”

“After I opened the door, he went into the basement, and I was too scared to follow. As soon as he was out of sight...” Again, she looked away. “I ran. I’m so sorry, Suyin—”

“Why are you apologizing? You ran and you saved yourself. You were smart. You survived.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “I feel like I failed you.”

“You’ve been practicing for barely three years. What would you have done against a demon that powerful?”

“He was powerful?” Her voice hitched. “How do you know?”

Suyin didn’t answer. “Did you see what he took?”

Marie-Thérèse shook her head. “After he went downstairs, I left the store and called you. I was too scared to come back until after you arrived.”

“All right. I’m going downstairs to have a look. Do you want to stay up here or come with me?”

“I’ll go with you.”

They descended the cellar stairs together. The first thing Suyin checked was the cloaking spell that kept Iris and Lily safe from Valefor. She should have been surprised to find it untouched, but she wasn’t.

She turned and went to the bookshelves. She didn’t need to search the entire room. There was a tingling at the back of her neck that told her exactly what was missing.

It’s the fucking dream. She’d known this was coming. This was precisely why they’d started working on those wards, but apparently, the effort was too little too late.

At the end of the last bookshelf on the bottom row, there was space between two faded leather-bound texts that confirmed her instincts.

Suyin sank into a crouch and stared at the empty space, a million questions running through her head, the predominant one being Why?

She’d held onto this book for most of her life, and now it was gone. When her mother had given it to her, she’d told her to guard it with her life, and Suyin had done her best, though she’d never fully understood its significance.

It may have been written by the father she’d never known, but to her, it was a bunch of gibberish.

The ramblings of a lunatic. Diagrams, graphs, charts, and formulas that didn’t make sense.

Spells that didn’t do anything. Sketches of human anatomy that weren’t accurate.

Pages of text written in the Sheolic language, the tongue of black magic that a witch was never to dabble in.

Suyin had never bothered to translate more than the first few chapters. The book was huge, and what she’d learned from those pages hadn’t made any sense to her.

But then the dream had come.

And now the book was gone.

“What does it mean?” she murmured to herself. “Why now?”

“Suyin?” Marie-Thérèse’s voice drew her back to the present. “What is missing?”

Suyin stood and faced her. “A grimoire. An old one.”

“Which one?”

“ The Book of Gamigin .”

Marie frowned. “I’ve never heard of that one.”

“It’s very obscure, and there was only one copy of it ever made.” And I just fucking lost it.

“It wasn’t scanned into the computer system? We were very careful when we updated the files last summer.”

Suyin blinked and then started to smile. “You’re a genius, Marie.”

Without another word, she headed over to the row of old desktop computers and fired one up. Of course, the damn thing took forever, the little Windows loading circle going on and on until she started mentally recalculating the coven’s yearly budget to make space for some new desktops.

“What would a demon want with that grimoire?” Marie-Thérèse asked.

“I have no idea,” Suyin replied. “But I intend to find out.”