Page 8 of Craving Demons

“I don’t think so.” Grey shook his head. “I’ll let Harmonia handle things. She should be able to restrain the girl’s uncontrolled nature.”

“You’re no fun,” I said as I left, hearing his scoff of a laugh behind me.

I left the office floor and took the stairs two at a time returning to the club. I needed a drink.

A stiff drink.

Something hard.

So I could stop thinking about how stiff and hard my cock was.

Gods, that uninhibited daemon from earlier had really set me off. My blood was still boiling, and I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

It would have been bad, veryverybad, if I’d lost control in the elevator. There was a reason I’d learned to keep a lid on my chaos. I hadn’t lost control many times in my life, but when I had people had gotten hurt.

As the Lord of Strife, my job was to punish those who spread chaos and caused conflict for no reason. That’s why — in this modern age — I’d become a prosecutor. I loved a good courtroom battle. It wasn’t quite as good as using my fists to put someone in their place, but it was close, and I could put away those who were chaotic and harmful at the same time.

The only fist-fighting I did was in a ring — or better yet a cage — and only with other Empyreans and monsters. That was my outlet for my chaos, the strife that burned within me. I couldn’t allow it to come out any other way. When it did… empires fell.

But just seeing that woman had brought me to the brink, closer than I wanted to admit.

I ambled through the club and sat at the bar. Krystal was working, a fiery little Hestial. She winked at me and gave me a smile that would usually get my blood pumping. She was literally hot and a vixen in bed, but she couldn’t hold a candle to that woman from earlier.

Of course, Krystal was controlling her aspect, her fire. The wild power of the woman from the elevator had been like a drug.

I hadn’t felt anything like that in a long time. Luckily, it wasn’t Krystal who came to serve me. I wasn’t sure what I’d say to her if she wanted to go somewhere private. I was almost always in the mood, but today… not so much.

Thankfully, it was Maria who sidled up behind the bar. She was one of the few non-Empyreans who worked at Elysium, mostly because she was just so darned good at her job. She knew about us, of course, and that made things easier, but we didn’t reveal our nature to just any human. Most of the time they didn’t handle it well. Maria, however, had taken it in stride.

Unlike the woman in the elevator.

Stop thinking about her!

“Fire Whiskey,” I said to Maria.

“Single? Double?”

“Bottle.”

“Oh… rough day?”

“You could say that.” It occurred to me Maria might know that silver-haired woman. She didn’t have a daemon-sense, so she wouldn’t know what the woman was, but perhaps she’d know her name. “Do you know that silver-haired woman who left a little while ago?”

“The tall one?” She went to the back of the bar and climbed a stepladder to reach the top shelf, looking for a bottle.

“Yeah. What’s her name?”

“Anais.”

It was a good thing I didn’t have my drink yet or I probably would have choked on it or sprayed it all over Maria. It might be a huge coincidence, but the name Anais was derived from Anahita, a Persian goddess of fertility and healing.

“A goddess?” I spat the words.

Maria raised a brow as she stepped down and handed over a bottle of Helfyr Whiskey. The Norse stuff. Good.

“Goddess? Really? Working here as a server?” She shook her head slowly. “You Empyreans are strange folk.”

But that couldn’t be right. Someone must have just named her after the goddess, or even just named her after the famous writer: Anais Nin. She hadn’t known she was a daemon after all, so…

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