Page 12 of The Demon’s Collar (The Bard’s Demon #1)

B?k: New Resolve

I don’t know how much time passed in the woods. I lost track of the number of orgasms I wrested from the bard’s writhing body before she went limp in my chains.

I crossed back to this side of sanity before she passed out.

I remember that much. Perhaps I should have stopped then—but I didn’t want to.

She was so swollen and slick and sensitive, and the rest of the night had been so horrific, I took what I wanted.

An unhurried taste of what she’d so unwisely offered.

Or…had it been unwise?

I marveled at the need to wonder. Not once while she was conscious had she stopped desiring more. Not when she cried out, not when she begged like she’d been driven to the brink of madness. Not even when her body showed signs of giving up. Through all that, she still wanted.

Now I listened to her soft shuddering cries as I removed the dampeners from her wrists. She curled into me. Terrible instincts. But I held her in my arms, glad she wasn’t awake to open her mouth.

In the silence of the night, everything that’d led to that moment caught up with me.

The ambush in the woods. The feeling I’d gotten right as it’d begun that we would not walk away from it.

Well— I would. I couldn’t help but walk away from it.

Immortal being, and all. But for a moment, I’d been certain I would be the sole survivor from the Fated camp, waking up alone to report the losses to Colonel Astrada.

A strange feeling nagged at me. By rule, I didn’t care about individual mortals.

But the thought of Brü—and even Tavish, Hammond, and Nigel—slain to a man filled me with something like…

was it frustration? I mean, fuck Fl?r. They could have done me a favor there.

But the others? People took getting used to. Starting over would be so tedious.

The bard moaned in her sleep. I paused, wondering if she would wake. She didn’t. Her flushed cheeks, stained with dry tears, glistened in the moonlight. Her pink lips parted to allow a few shaky breaths to escape.

My infuriating kitten wasn’t so bad like this.

Unconscious. Soft. Serene. I smirked. But my amusement faded quickly.

I knew the bard harbored some fascination toward me—a purely sexual desire that made her foolish.

What I hadn’t realized before tonight was how much she hated that part of herself.

Nothing I’d done to her body had hurt her nearly as much as the truths I’d told.

I traced my thumb over her cheek. To my vast irritation, my cock stirred. How did humans ever accomplish anything with bodies this needy? I couldn’t fathom.

The burning urge to pin her to a tree one last time, to relieve my ache with something sweeter than my hand, surged like a tide. I gritted my teeth and kept moving. My lines might not be godly enough for Aelith, but I had them. The bard had had enough—and she wasn’t in a state to desire more.

With a slow inhale, I looked up at the stars.

They glittered over the forest, embossing our path in silver.

I searched again for the Huntress in the whisper of the evening breeze.

I hadn’t been able to read her in the air before, and there wasn’t the faintest hint of her there now either—even in the silence and calm.

Had she learned to shield me out? Or was my mind somehow still too scattered?

I bristled. If the Huntress became a bigger problem for the Fated, it wouldn’t matter if I solved Finchton or not.

Austvix hadn’t traded a sliver of his eternal soul without contingencies.

Should he die at the Huntress’s hands, I would be obligated to offer her the opportunity to claim my contract—with the huge disincentive that she would negotiate her own rules.

If she accepted, Austvix would regain his soul, and I would be at the mercy of a new binding.

..with one less warlord on the playing field.

If the Huntress refused, I would be banished back to the Hells and have to face my problems there almost empty-handed.

A mere sliver of a demigod soul wouldn’t fix what I’d broken, even if it would allow me to torment Austvix for eternity.

No, I needed this deal to succeed . I needed the souls of Austvix’s siblings. Whole, complete souls. Demigod souls. A currency that would not only pay my debt but buy me a station so high above those I was indebted to that they would have to flee the Hells to save themselves from me .

I gritted my teeth. Everything moved slowly on the human plane.

That didn’t bother me when it felt like we were on the right track.

I was hidden here, unreachable. For now.

But the Huntress wasn’t even Austvix’s strongest sibling.

She shouldn’t be able to give us this much trouble.

Had I placed my bet on the wrong warlord?

A sharp intake of breath interrupted my self-pity.

The bard stared up at me through glassy eyes.

Her body tensed in my arms. A bleary fear spiked—nectar to my soul—and I watched her face contort as it raced from thought to thought like a hummingbird with an entire field of flowers.

I could only guess what she was thinking, but I supposed she was taking stock.

Making sure she was unharmed. Wondering if we were finished.

Despite the dark desire snaking through my lower belly that told me I could feed her fear and that I could tease joy from this, I didn’t want to give her the power to derail my contemplation further.

“You’re alright, kitten,” I rumbled. “Rest.”

Her quiet stare made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, though I looked straight ahead.

The desire emanating from her now had a new flavor.

It was almost enough to make me look again to see her expression.

She desired approval . Mine. Which was laughable, because I was certain that if I gave it, she would immediately make me regret it.

I had little time to consider this, though, because her body’s need for rest quickly eclipsed all else and she was once again asleep in my arms.

The blip—the fragment of need—had the unwelcome effect of pulling another bard from the depths of my memory. The fair one. The one whose song still haunted my dreams every single night.

She’d looked disturbingly like Aelith, but even gentler. There’d never been a spare scrap of fight in the woman. Only naivety and an earnest desire to save her family. A desire that a devil had taken advantage of. And then at his request, I’d tormented her.

I wove through the trees, indulgently watching the rise and fall of my new bard’s—of Ero’s —chest. Why couldn’t I have met her in Hell?

I could have made an art out of torturing her.

With the soft one, it’d been like trying to condense something that was already as small as it could be.

To tease emotion from her, I had to offer hope first. And then crush it.

Over and over. It felt hollow and forced and wrong.

Ero’s braid came partly unraveled. I ran a finger through the tangled tresses. She slept on.

On my final day in Hell—the day I’d ruined everything—I’d been given the soft bard and a set of instructions.

The devil was bored. The girl was a shell.

No one wanted to give him anything for her, but he couldn’t enjoy something so clearly devoid of life.

He wanted me to restore her. At least a little.

Enough for him to trade for something better.

My fingers closed around the tangled hair. Tightly. Ero whimpered in her sleep, but she didn’t open her eyes.

I’d tried my old tactics on the girl. I’d teased her with false promises to inspire hope.

But she had none left. I couldn’t make something from nothing, couldn’t stir up what wasn’t there to begin with.

So I gave her a lute instead, and we made a deal.

If she could remember how to play a joyful song—the only thing I’d ever seen her happy to do—I would give her a chance to run.

She didn’t believe me, of course. I had to make it real, and I had to prove it to her.

I made a deal with the keepers of the gate while she watched.

We signed in blood. All the soft one had to do was play her song, and then I had to let her go.

Give her a true path out. The gatekeepers wouldn’t stop her.

She would get a head start. If I caught her, she stayed.

If she made it out, no one from the Hells would ever find her again.

I reached the edge of the clearing. The fire had gone to embers. Almost everyone had gone to bed. Only Brü sat up, looking haggard and miserable with Aelith asleep on his lap.

I nodded to him. He nodded back, perhaps relieved, perhaps just tired.

I didn’t want to interact with Aelith, and Brü seemed just as keen to avoid that.

He jutted his chin at a tent at the edge of the encampment, and he waited to rouse his lover until I’d carried Ero inside it.

There was only one bedroll. I didn’t care to go back out and find Ero’s things, so I didn’t put her down. I simply crawled inside and held her.

I closed my eyes.

Like that would make the memories stop.

It didn’t.

The soft bard had remembered her joyful song.

And she’d been smarter than I thought. I’d mistaken her timidity for lack of wit.

She played the song with magic woven through so that it echoed in my head, unrelenting, making it impossible to think.

I never found the first trace of her. The chase was no chase at all.

I’d lost her the moment I made that deal—the moment I’d underestimated her—and I knew I would pay dearly for it.

So I’d fled. I scoured the planes for a soul to balance the scales. Instead, I found a warlord with a prophecy about a demon and a deal that outstripped my wildest dreams.

I don’t know what magic the soft little bard used. But ever since it got inside me, the faintest hint of bardsong has itched that scar deep in my mind that I’ve never been able to scratch.

I looked down at Ero. My kitten, with her sharp claws and her colorful tangle of magic and her warring desires to fuck me and drive me mad.

I longed to whisper cruel orders into her ear—the kind the collar wouldn’t let her refuse or play coy with.

To watch her crawl. To watch her beg. To watch the fantasy snap and genuine fear take hold.

To do everything the soft bard never actually deserved until she’d tricked me and left me to pick up the pieces.

I touched the collar.

Its power rose seductively and sang soothing promises, lapping at my finger like an eager pet.

I pictured Ero on her knees, taunting me with that little smirk, delaying my gratification just to show me she could.

When we made it to camp, perhaps I would order her to her knees.

Make her stay there for hours. Keep that mouth open wide and ready.

Use it over and over while she pretended not to love it.

Leave it until her lips cracked and bled…

or until her desire finally faded. Whichever came first.

The air in the tent grew so humid with my musing that Ero coughed violently.

It broke the spell. The cool night air rushed back in.

Fuck.

And that was why I couldn’t hear the Huntress. The bard was in my head.

I looked down at her, finally seeing the problem for what it was.

Even asleep, her colorful tangle of magic roiled with life, needling me.

The urge to work out how to break her tugged at a part of my mind that had been dormant for too long.

A part I enjoyed . Yes, it would be satisfying to play with her.

But if I wanted to focus, that wouldn’t help.

Tomorrow, I decided. Tomorrow, I would give my kitten to Brü to tend until we reached the base camp. Then I would get answers about Finchton and release the bard back to the wild where I’d found her—to remove the distraction from my path once and for all.

If that magnanimity didn’t balance the Fates in my favor, what would?