Page 28 of Lord of Bones

My hands idly twisted the covers over my lap. “So this is your room?”

“It is.” His attention returned to his book.

I breathed a sigh of relief. “I was afraid it belonged to the Lord of Bones.”

“Luckily for you, it doesn’t,” he mused. “He would have torn you apart by now. I’m simply a member of his court.”

His clothes were worn, but they still seemed a little on the fancy side for being a servant. “So are you some dead noble or something?”

“No. I am a native of this realm. A psychopomp technically. A kind of demon that ferries souls of the dead from your realm into this one.”

My brows shot up with interest. “You’re the ferryman, then? Like Charon from Greek mythology?”

“Something like that, yes.”

The tension in the room was so thick, his dark magic radiating from him like noxious gas, filtering into my lungs and making my head spin. I waited for him to speak, but he continued reading his book.

I got the feeling he was enjoying the suspense, the way it had started to eat at me from the inside like a parasite.

“Why did he put me in here?” I held my breath, waiting for an answer. None came.

The only sounds to fill the silence were the crackle of the fire and the rustle of parchment as he turned another page.

Swallowing down the lump in my throat, I turned my attention to something dark in the corner of my eye. A set of black leather gloves sat on the pillow next to mine. My brow furrowed as I tried to remember if they’d been there before I’d fallen asleep.

I looked back at Belial. “Are these gloves yours?”

I couldn’t see his expression, but his surprise was so palpable, I could feel it bleeding into the room’s warm atmosphere. His surprise morphed into irritation by a flippant page-turn in his book. “Everything in this room belongs to me.”

A deep pang pulled under my gut and buried into my bones at his hard-as-steel voice sheathed in velvet. “Are you trying to say the Lord of Bones has given me to you?”

“You ask too many questions.” He snapped the book closed and placed it on the table beside his chair, shoving to his feet and whipping his gaze in my direction. Slowly, he strode toward the bed.

Holy.

Fucking.

Shit.

I hadn’t noticed it before because he’d been sitting. But now that he was standing, I saw it. The bulge in his pants was huge. His cock had to be so big, I wouldn’t be surprised if it came with its own gravitational pull.

My breath turned sharp and short as I watched him tug at the laces of his shirt. All the breath crystallized in my lungs when he pulled it off over his head and revealed a chiseled torso.

He had an athletic build, with heavily scarred, death-pale skin encasing powerful, lean muscles. Tossing the shirt over the footboard, he kicked off his boots and started for me.

“W-wait.” I scooted backward up the mattress until my back hit the headboard. “What are you doing?”

“Preparing for bed.”

My mouth went dry at the thought of sleeping next to this stranger. Holga might as well have rolled me up in toilet paper for how much the nightgown concealed. It would be so easy for this man to tug it off, to strip me bare.

My brain was a whirlwind of thoughts. The Lord of Bones seemed so possessive of me, yet now he was handing me off to some random member of his court? Why?

“You’re going to sleep here?”

“Itismy bed.” There was no missing the smirk in his voice.

I flung the covers off my legs and stumbled out of bed, the chain falling to the floor with a heavy clink. “I’ll just sleep on the lounge chair by the fire.”