Page 44 of Drawn to the Demon Duke
“Say the word, Haures?” she whispers throatily, stroking the cords in my thick neck. “Please.”
The last of any restraint I might’ve had simply snaps.
Bowing my head, I kiss her again. It’s on the mouth this time, swallowing her cries of pleasure mingled with slight pain as I feed my cock into Susanna’s hungry cock. There is resistance. I won’t pretend there isn’t. I go slow, easing my way in. I don’t push. I go achingly slow, pausing when she bites my lip, the pain echoing down our band.
“This… this is enough,” I tell her. “I can give you my seed and we will be bonded.”
Susanna shakes her head, dark hair splayed against the bedding. “No. I… you were right. I can take it. Just…” She scoots a little beneath me, adjusting her position. Panting softly, she grins up at me. “Okay. Keep going. I’m ready for you to fuck me.”
Fuckme.
It’s a human word for ‘mate’, and it hits me in this moment: this is the first time I have ever done this, but it is the same for Susanna. No other male has touched the inside of her cunt as I have.
The need to possess her completely overtakes her demon. I am not rogue. I do not lose all of my senses. And yet… it seems like I do as I pull out of her body, returning my cock to its grip before it can cool down again.
The more I thrust into my mate, the warmer she is. Her body is acclimating to mine in all ways. She is stretched around my length, taking me beautifully. Immortality is settling over her as well. She feels no pain now, only pleasure, as our temperatures slowly begin to match.
We are one. In every way that counts, we are one, and the mating vow has made it so that it will be forever.
And not even an ashbalm flower nor my powers will be enough to snap the bond that I have with my mate.
Thank the gods.
EPILOGUE
SUSANNA
FOUR DECADES LATER
The ashbalm flower works.
You would think that, after living by Haures’s side for all these decades, I would’ve seen him use it. Not so. He might project himself as the ruthless, powerful, haughty ruler of our world, but I know better. There is no one in Sombra who understands the sanctity of the mate bond like our bondmaster.
True, there have been times that Haures sent some of our subjects into the shadows, searching for the flower. There was a young demon who thought he made a mistake, bonding a Soleil demoness to him before his journey through the dark left him realizing how much he would risk to return to her. And, of course, there was Hope, a human woman—and Sammael’s one true mate—that was sent on the same mission to repair their bond.
That was Sammael’s fault. His innocent questions about the human world were not as innocent as they seemed, and hiswayward obsession only grew until he managed to get his claws on theGrimoire du Sombra, casting the matefinder spell on his own, and becoming a phantom for a time in my old realm.
The other human-mate pairs had their own unique troubles. Before I managed to convince Haures to let me go back for the spellbook—and he never did, sending Sammael to retrieve it instead… which, in hindsight, probably wasn’t the smartest plan—another mortal read the spell.
My eight-year-old niece, Amelia.
All these years later, I still feel awful at how I reacted, though I wouldn’t have changed a thing I did. At twenty-eight, I was more than ready to accept a demon mate. Ateight? Amy was a child, and at my urging, Haures eventually gave Nox my old cell in the dungeon. By the time we knew that my young niece was the mortal mate that Nox was going off-plan to visit after she summoned him, Amy was twelve. Still way too young, and if I’m being honest, I don’t know if I would’ve agreed to his release fourteen years later (when Amy was twenty-six) if Nox hadn’t staged a dungeon-break himself.
That was, oh, two decades ago now. They are as happily mated as Haures and I still are, though Amy’s path took a different direction from mine. I stayed in Sombra. Ever since Nox broke free to save her in a similar way that Haures once saved me, the newly bonded pair chose to stay in Connecticut, in my old house in Madison.
I gave it to her. I didn’t know, then, that Mindy was still paying my mortgage on top of hers, as though she was sure I’d one day come home to it. My inheritance had paid for most of it, so the fee wasn’tthatmuch, and by the time Amy was an adult, it was paid-up. Now it’s hers, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that my niece is happy living with her mate in my old home, and Mindy? She’s having a great life, even after all of the hardships she got dealt.
It wasn’t just me disappearing all those years ago, or how Haures’s first law means that I could never let her know that I was okay. Mindy’s not a mate. Amy is, so I only hope she found a way to ease my sister’s sadness, but I wasn’t the only one that vanished.
According to Amy, her father followed in her grandfather’s footsteps. Within a year of me summoning Haures and going to stay in Sombra, Mindy and Dan were divorced. Her husband took off, quickly becoming estranged to both Mindy and Amy.
I didn’t know then what caused it. Discovering recently thatDanwas the ‘something important’ to me that Yelios kept in his keeping while waiting for my firstborn? During the final confrontation, when Haures, Amy, her mate, and I arrived in the shadows to help rescue a stolen child, it was Dan Dillon that was spit out of the shadows in exchange for Shannon and Malphas’s infant.
I had no idea. Hearing him babble about how he went to my house after my disappearance, plotting to steal my spellbook and sell it for cash before Yelios’s shadows found him, snared him, and used him to do his bidding for nearly forty years… I should’ve felt remorse.
I didn’t.
I never thought Yelios would be able to hurt me. In the last four decades, I’ve never left Mavro. Haures refused to allow it, and I wouldn’t want to leave even if he did. I believed he couldn’t reach across worlds—and, yes, Iwaswrong about that—and that by staying here, I was keeping everyone I cared about safe.
