Page 59 of Prince of Demons (Demon’s Mark #2)

Georgia

G eorgia came to on her knees.

The air was hot. The ground beneath her was hotter; fractured marble that steamed where it still held the imprint of her body.

Her legs shook. Her hands trembled. One of them was closed in a fist without her remembering how, the smooth curve of the stone Suzanne had given her back in Maine pressed tight to her palm, still pulsing like a second heart.

She couldn’t hear anything, and her vision blurred at the edges with the bright light thrumming all around her. Her skin screamed in places—her neck, her wrists. Her thigh. She looked down.

The shackles were gone. Melted. Only the burns remained—rings of scorched flesh where gold had seared against her skin.

Her wrists were red and blistered. A raw mark ringed her throat like a brand.

And across the tender skin of her inner thigh, a single raised line burned furious and sharp, where the leash had swung and branded her.

There was… a power pulsing through her body. Bright and dull, like pressing on a bruise that ran the length of her veins. Woven through every cell of her body.

The stone in her palm thrummed in time with it, as if synced in perfect, volatile harmony. She blinked down at it, mind still slow. Where had it come from? Last she saw it had been… Kesh’s penthouse. Before…

Images flooded her: the heat, the agony, the need. Kesh, as wild as she. On top of her. Inside of her. The broken hollow in her chest at his rejection. The courting ceremony, Mallorn, Europe. Despair.

The leash. The fight. Kesh.

Terror lanced through her. Her head snapped up, eyes desperately scanning…

And there he lay.

In the center of the ruined arena, among rubble and dust and smoke.

His body. Half-buried in broken marble and streaked in soot and the charred remains of the demons who had taken him down, blood drying in the cracks of his armor, skin death-pale beneath the grime. His chest didn’t move. His eyes didn’t open.

The world dropped out from under her.

“Kesh.” Her voice broke in her throat. “Kesh!”

Her legs moved before her mind could catch up.

The stone clutched in her hand burned hot, pulsing harder now.

Light broke from her skin, shooting down her arms and legs as she stumbled toward him across the debris.

The air around her thickened, power bleeding off her body in radiant waves.

She fell to her knees beside him with a sob, light pooling from her chest, her hands, forming a shimmering cocoon around them both.

A shield. A ward. A desperate prayer. The magic bled from her veins, pulled from nothing but raw instinct to keep his broken body safe.

Her prince didn’t move. His mouth was parted, his body slack. There was so much blood…

“No,” she whispered, and the bubble tightened, sealing them inside. “No, no, no— Please. Don’t leave me. Please, please…”

She reached for him, tears already spilling down her cheeks. He couldn’t be gone; he couldn’t.

Please, please no.

Georgia gripped his face with shaking hands.

One palm cradled his bloodied cheek, the other pressed hard over the wound at his side where the armor had split.

Light, from the deepest parts of her she hadn’t even known existed before he stood in that arena, before he came to lay down his life for hers, curled between her fingers.

It was right there. She felt it—the thrum of power far beyond her mortal comprehension, but she didn’t know how to use it.

“Please.” Her voice cracked apart. “Please don’t leave me. Not again, not like this. I can’t—” Her mouth trembled. “You don’t get to do this! You’re mine, you bastard— mine!”

The tears came harder. Her forehead dropped to his, lips brushing the bridge of his nose. His skin was cooler than it had ever been before, the fire in him nearly gone.

Her power didn’t build. It broke. Crushed open under the weight of her grief and poured into him without direction or shape.

Not a spell. Not skill. Need. Her love. Her terror. Her hope, ragged and bleeding and still somehow alive. It poured from her chest and her hands and her tears, spilling into his wounds like molten light, threading through torn muscle and shattered bone.

Something inside her cracked wide open. Not breaking—connecting. To him.

A tether pulled tight between them, so sudden and fierce it stole her breath. A current of knowing that split through the fog of panic. Like lightning. Like it had always been there. Dormant. Waiting.

Now, it surged.

Magic rose around them in a spiral of light. His body jerked, and she felt him in that primordial current flooding every part of her being.

He was still with her.

The bond pulsed once. Then again. And she clung to it, to him, with everything she had left.

“Come back to me. Come back,” she whispered, forehead pressed to his as her trembling hands smoothed over his body and arms, again and again, the light in her filling him until he radiated with it.

Slowly, his skin warmed. Then his breath hitched beneath her hands. A pull of heat beneath her palms, subtle but sure. She choked on a sob and gripped him tighter.

Then his eyes cracked open, just enough for her magic flooding him to shine through his black eyes, turning them molten charcoal.

“Stop,” he rasped, voice torn and ragged but his. “Georgia, stop. I’m here. Don’t… don’t give me any more. You’re pulling… from your life force.” His fingers, weak but steady, lifted to cup her cheek. “I’m here.”

She let out a broken, gasping sound, half-sob, half-laugh, and leaned into the warmth of his touch. Her whole body shook. Her light flickered wildly around them, dimming and surging without rhythm now, the bond still pulsing between them like a third heart. He was here.

“I thought I lost you,” she whispered.

“You brought me back,” he rasped. His thumb brushed her cheek, reverent. “My beautiful, strong female. I always knew… from the first time I saw you, I knew…”

His other hand reached up slowly, gingerly, pulling her down. Their lips met, the kiss a tremor, not passion. Fragile and slow and sacred.

Kesh pulled back, eyes clouded with regret as he searched hers. “Georgia, I?—”

“Kesh!” The voice cracked across the crumbled arena like lightning. Georgia whipped around just in time to see a swirl of smoke and shadow stop, materializing into a figure.

Kirigan stood where the auction platform had once been, eyes wide and face drawn. His mad gaze swept over both of them, hands trembling before he clenched them into fists. His face turned ashen as his eyes lingered on Kesh.

Behind him, Kain and Selma followed, she glowing with the same golden light still flickering around Georgia, he with the full power of his demonic force billowing like a cape around them both.

Selma moved first. No hesitation, no fear.

She stepped into the center and took up a stance in front of Georgia and Kesh, the Stone of Power raised in one steady hand.

Light flared from it, golden and sure, echoing the pulse of light from Georgia’s stone.

Kain followed her, one large hand on the small of her back as they stared down the few remaining European lords. A united shield.

“The old royals are dead. Your king is ash. The last of their princes is gone.” Kain’s voice boomed through the wreckage, his power swirling dark and solid around him.

“We control two of the Stones of Power. If you bend the knee now, you’ll retain your territories.

If you resist…” He let the sentence hang, sharp and terrible. “You’ll join your false king in death.”

A long moment of tense silence followed as the lords looked from the powerful demon and his magic-glowing mate to the half-vaporized, half-gutted remains of the lords killed by either Kesh or Georgia before the American King and Queen even arrived.

One by one, they dropped to their knees.

Kain began issuing orders. Georgia didn’t pay attention to what he said.

Letting the knowledge that they were safe, that there were finally no more battles left to fight, settle in, she turned her full focus back to Kesh.

His eyes hadn’t left her face since he first opened them.

He drank her in as desperately as a thirsting man who has finally knelt by a fresh stream.

“The power of you…” he murmured, voice hoarse. “I have never seen anything so beautiful.”

She smiled softly at the reverence in his tone, her thumb brushing instinctively across his cheekbone. “You always did say you wanted me to grow a spine. I think this might count."

His eyes darkened, this time with guilt.

“I’m… so sorry. For everything. For how I treated you, for…

for letting you go. I thought I was saving you.

I thought… anything would be better than eternity bound to me, to my darkness.

But the truth is… I was such a coward, I nearly—” His breath hitched with pain.

“Because of me, you were hurt.” His hand reached toward her neck, slow and shaking, and hovered just beside the burn there.

Not touching, just near. “You were always meant to be mine, and I knew. In the most foundational parts of me, I've known since the first moment I saw you, and I let my cowardice hurt you. I will spend the rest of eternity on my knees for you. I will never stop begging for your forgiveness. Even though I know I don’t deserve it. I know I can’t ever undo?—”

She kissed him before he could finish. A press of lips, light as breath, trembling as she cupped his face.

“You came for me,” she whispered against his mouth.

“You gave up everything to try to save me, and in doing that… You unlocked the strength in me that everyone else has always tried to stamp out. Including me.” She pulled back enough to look him in the eye.

“Your love unlocked this power. Your love saved me.” She touched her forehead to his. “I choose you, too, Kesh. Still.”