Page 76 of Wicked Believer

Once she no longer needs the desperate reassurance of our scenes.

But perhaps I have to help her, guide her.

To be everything I know she can be.

I give a slow nod, tilting my head back and exhaling slowly. “All right, you win.” I am agreeable for her and her only. She’ll be the ruin of me.

She always has been. Right from the bloody start.

When I meet her eyes, my voice is gentler than I would ever dare use with anyone else, concerned even. I rub a hand over the back of my neck, making a signal to pause the scene. “Why didn’t you say something sooner, darling? I would never ask you to do anything that you—”

“I wanted to practice,” she says, her eagerness to please me, to show her love for me, only softening me further. “But I feel like I’m not reallygetting any better at it, so I think I’d like you to”—she bites her lower lip, worrying it between her teeth—“instruct me.”

“Instruct you?” I repeat, speaking low to not break the spell.

The charm she’s cast over me is a particularly brutal one, vicious and unrelenting.

She nods feverishly.

“And?” I prompt, sensing there’s more she isn’t readily sharing.

She blushes again, the color bleeding from her face down into her bare nipples. “And I ... want you to make me cry”—she swallows—“with your cock.”

I have to press my lips together to stifle my uninhibited crow of male pleasure.

Bloody fuck, woman.

Her eyes go wide, and she blinks up at me. Like she may now possibly be privy to my thoughts. “Did you ... did you say something?”

“Quiet,” I order, making our signal to resume the scene and shutting that mental door.

“Yes, sir,” she whispers, lowering her eyes in submission.

My obedient good girl once again. Thanks to my punishment.

If she recognizes what she just heard, she doesn’t mention it as I rise from my throne. A devious smile quirks over my lips at how readily she scurries to make space for me.

Even as I squash the internal sense of panic I feel.

No one haseverbeen privy to my thoughts. Not even my Father, nor His most powerful Seers. But there will be a time and place for that later.

A time to guard myself against the vulnerability she’s created in me.

Right now, she needs my steady hand. My guidance.

I look toward her, unable to give voice to all that I’m feeling.Could you ever possibly know how thoroughly I’m wrapped around your finger, little dove? How I ache for you?The love, the unhinged obsession I feel for her, is overwhelming.

A small, still-intact part of me wants her to hear it, the things I would never allow myself to speak aloud. I curse under my breath, ever the coward that only she can make me.

I’m the fucking devil, for Christ’s sake.

And yet, I can’t ever seem to find the right words to truly tell her all that she means to me.

So I must show her.

Get ahold of yourself, Lucifer. She’s just a woman,I admonish myself.

But she’snotjust a woman. Not any longer.