Page 64 of Tempt

Malice obliges and refuses. Resting the back of his skull against the shelves, he lifts a finger and rubs it back and forth across his chin. “Sounds like you really did a number on that mate. He must have been one hell of a temptation.”

“I loved him,” Wonder says.

That finger halts. “What about now?”

“The heart doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t just stop—not with him.”

“You sure it was love? One, we didn’t grow up in a sappy world where deities provided monogamous examples for us to learn from. Two, we were raised to believe that deities can’t feel love anyhow. Three, you never shared a tangible moment with him. The admiration was one-sided and from a distance, so how do you know what you felt back then?”

“I justknow,” she defends, prickles darting across her cheeks.

“Then it must have been excruciating, seeing your library-god-slash-sweetie-pie hauled off like that, sent to some loony bin.”

“Don’t call it that.” Wonder wraps her arms around her upturned limbs. “I’d have taken his place if I could have.”

Malice scrapes his tongue across his teeth, testing the weight and depth of one million plausible replies. At which point, he nods. “So then what happened to me?”

You died.

But he knows that now. That’s not what he’s asking.

He wants insight into the asylum and what befell him there. Dismissing the details of his untimely death, he wants access to the years of his detainment.

What happened to Malice in that place?

Wonder doesn’t know. She feels, rather than hears, herself tell him that. She endures the dull ache in her stomach and the floppy movements of her tongue.

Technically, her response is the truth. Because she’d been caught by the Fate Court, and because she’d been heavily monitored until her assignment in the mortal world, she hadn’t been there to see what they did to him behind those walls.

Not the extent of it, at least.

But she does know how it ended.

“You were reincarnated,” she says. “You became…”

Malice jabs a thumb at his chest. “I became this.”

He was reborn as a deity, yet his past traumas came with him, cursing him in a new way. Whatever monstrosities that befell Malice in purgatory, they continue to plague him in the afterlife, slithering into his nightmares and strapping him down.

So instead of turning into a god, he has morphed into a demon.

There’s a rubbery texture to his words, but it lacks accusation. Does he blame her for his fate, the way she blames herself? Does he mourn the life she’d poached from him?

If he does, he’s not showing it.

“Hmm,” Malice hums. “Can’t say any of this jogs my memory, except for the bits and pieces that crawl through dreams. Now it’s clear why I became a fan of the Archives and then parked my ass in the Celestial City’s library. They both felt safe—the only places that made sense, where I felt most like myself.

“When the Fates banished me, and I found my new home, away from home, away from home, I conjured my saddlebag, the rocking chair, and the antique telescope, and I used them to outfit the library vault. I thought making replicas from the flashbacks would help me figure things out in my head, connect the dots—not that they did. I must’ve been channeling my mortal roots without realizing it.

“Ah, and the envelopes. Those were easier to conjure, not so easy to fill in the blank pages. It took a while to replay the nightmares and recall each sentence you wrote, but when a deviant’s got eternity to transcribe—” he flings up his arms “—what is time?”

Wonder curls a lock of hair behind her ear and notices his own waves scattered around his face, mussed and just as slow to dry as her tresses. “If I’d known what would happen, I would have never written to you.”

“I guess you found the bibliophile in me irresistible. Back atcha.”

“So you’ve chosen sarcasm.”

“You want me to have an episode instead? Just say the word, and you’ll get a sample of what’s going on under my skin. If I were you, I’d take a compliment over the alternative. Compliments are complimentary. And I wasn’t being sarcastic. As enticing as I find your hips, it’d be lazy of me to salivate over your beauty instead of your intellect, which is more delectable. I’m pretty sure that’s the key to your heart.”

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