Page 9 of Stolen by the Gargoyle (Gargoyles of the Underworld #1)

I had seen tears before, and they had always confounded me.

Tears when men died and begged for their lives, the fear living in their eyes because they knew they would find no mercy in me.

I had not understood them, their necessity.

They had known cruelty and shaped their innate selves into monsters and yet could not endure to face what they reaped into the world when their time finally came.

But her tears, my wife’s tears? I’d given those men no remorse and relished in their cries, but I found I could not bear hers.

She looked at me like they did. Like I was… like I was ripping her apart, slowly dismantling her body and soul and finding joy in it. And she could do nothing but beg for mercy with her eyes.

I could not stand it. Nor could I understand why she felt that way, when I had done nothing but prove my devotion to our union. She did not say. Instead she just lay upon the nest of pillows I made for her and fell asleep.

Even in her dreams, she wept.

The tears kept pouring out and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

A restlessness stirred inside me, needing to move, to do something to put an end to the tears. I shadowed over her body, moving my claws softly through her hair, stilling when they snagged in the coils, trapping themselves there.

I let out a rumbling curse and pulled my hand back, but her hair kept me trapped. I yanked a fraction harder–

Her body jerked away from me, and the action pulled at her strands. I let out another curse as they came apart in my claws. Winding strings of hair that made her whimper, but she otherwise kept her body angled away from me curled into herself.

Almost as if she were afraid of me.

Fool , I told myself.

I just yanked her hair out. An accident, and yet I had still hurt her.

After pulling the hair from my claws and laying it gently back in her nest, I backed away. I drank her in, recalling the words she had said before she burst into laughter and tears.

“I’m a person. A human. I have needs.”

But of course .

Oh, but I was a fool .

In my own eagerness I had nearly forgotten. My wife was human, and therefore her way of living was entirely different from my own. Humans had needs, and she’d been here for quite some time and I had not yet nourished her.

Yes, that must have been it. My mate hungered and thirsted.

And so it was time for her to be fed.

I skewered the beast with my claws and horns.

It went down easily enough, and I gave thanks over its bleeding corpse.

It was one of the more gentle demons, the kind I knew did not contain acid in its blood or venom in its body.

Something safe for my mate to consume that would not harm her fragile, human body.

After gutting it and cleaning it, I set a blaze against the mingling scents so that no demons would follow me into my den.

Once inside, I was saddened to find my mate in the same position I had left her in, lying on the ground with her back to me. Though I could tell that she was awake by the hitch in her breath, and the uneven thumping of her heart, she chose to ignore me.

I frowned at that, but hurried and put together a small fire at the far end of the cave, away from her so she would not burn, and used my magic to set it to a blaze.

I placed the carcass of the beast over a spit and let it cook, rotating it on its sides, the juices of its body spitting and sizzling against purple fire.

The entire time, I watched my mate, my wife, hoping she would turn to me. Acknowledge my presence.

Had hunger made her too weak to turn, to speak?

Another frown graced my expression. I knew very little of humans except what I’d gleaned from my time above, which had been rather short. But surely this behavior was not a normal thing. She had been so vivacious before. Content in filling the silences with her lovely, melodic voice.

No, I decided, it definitely was not.

I had witnessed her thriving in the human world. I had learned her laughter and observed her jumping through puddles of water in a gleeful manner that had infected even me.

None of that was to be found now.

I rotated the beast more, letting the fire I compelled grow hotter until the meat spit and sizzled.

When I was sure it was done, I let the fire die to embers that glowed amongst charcoal black. I tore off a hind leg, blowing my breath on it to let it cool down. When it was a temperature I hoped would not burn her, I finally made my way towards where she lay.

With the meat gripped tightly in my hand, I used the other to grasp her and pull her into a sitting position.

She tensed when I touched her, but mercifully did not pull away from my hold.

“Eat,” I whispered encouragingly.

When she stared blankly at me, I sighed and used the tip of my claw against her chin to pull her mouth open.

She complied when I put the meat to her lips, breaking off a small piece and chewing slowly.

I had hoped she would compliment me for the meal, perhaps even smile, but she ate dutifully, without even a word.

It was with great sadness, and that blasted pinching in my chest, that I realized we were completing one of the rituals that would mark her as my wife.

And yet there was absolutely no joy in it.

When she ate her fill, I sat back, watching as she lay back down amongst the nest I made for her. I felt unsure of how to proceed or what to do next.

All I knew was that I had her words, her essence, for the shortest time, and now that I had lost it, the silence felt choking. Worse than any pit of hell, harder than any torture. I wanted it filled with the sweet melody of her voice, and even that seemed so far now.

So to fill the silence, I spoke instead. “I have two brothers,” I told her.

I could feel her eyes travel to me, her lids lowered but attentive to my words.

“We were born from shadows of pain and torture and carved from rock and fire.” My claws dug figures into the ground.

“I remember my origins. We have no ancestors, no mother birthed us, but were born from agony regardless.” I knew I had her attention.

She was enraptured. And something about her gaze on me made a fire build low in my belly, and it roiled with something that felt like nerves.

A sensation that was foreign and welcome.

“We were taught to be darkness, fire, and pain. We have tortured and murdered, because it was asked of us for centuries. But we knew that pain was not all there was in the world. There had to be more. And so we craved a world we did not know. A sky we had never seen. And love, the likes of which we could not feel.”

I stared at her, and I could feel my body warming with the fire that lived inside me. I did not know what love was, but I knew I could learn it for her.

“I do not know what it is to love, wife,” I whispered.

“But I know what it is to crave. To want what is out of my grasp. And when I saw you for the first time, I knew that my future would be nothing but despair if I could not have you. For I have never wanted anything–not love, not the sky, not companionship–more than I wanted them with you .” I wanted to reach out for her.

To touch her, but I feared my touch, as repulsive as she found it, would not be welcome.

“And it is agony knowing you do not feel the same.”