Page 10 of Monster's Naughty List
The three of them barked out laughs, as if that was so beneath them.
“Try again,” Oz purred. “I’ll reward you if you guess correctly.”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes, “No thanks.” I felt like a brat playing this power struggle with him, but a part of me reveled in pushing his buttons.
His eyes burned into the side of my head, but I refused to make eye contact, instead motioning to Rez, “Please, continue. I’m sure you’ll answer the rest of my questions in time.”
But the usually calm leader of the bunch wasn’t looking at me. Instead, his hands unclenched from his sides and lengthened into obsidian daggers as the vein in the middle of his forehead bulged. His voice came out deadly calm, but in a way that suggested he was a millisecond from completely blowing his lid. “Ozaman,” he growled. I knew if he was using his full name, Oz was really pushing buttons. It was like a parent yelling at a misbehaving child.
“If you make one more pass at her without it being a part of solving her reason for us being here,” he seethed, “I will personally send you home and put you on probation without a feeding in sight for far longer than you’d be comfortable with.”
It was kind of hot seeing him exert his authority, and part of me felt satisfied at seeing the cheeky bastard put in his place by someone.
Del whistled lightly, “Damn, Rez. You’re the only leader who has never punished a subordinate before. I never thought I’d see the day.”
He was doing this for the first time because of me? I’d known what I was doing pushing Oz’s buttons, and it wasn’t fair for him to pay the consequence for that.
“It’s okay,” I soothed, sitting up and patting the seat next to me. “Come sit, Rez. I want to hear the rest of your history.”
When he didn’t move, refusing to break the stare-down occurring between himself and Oz, I snapped, “Quit it. I am perfectly fine and capable of handling my own issues if I have them. While I appreciate you trying to assist, Rez, I don’t mind the flirtatious banter with Oz.”
Oz smirked in victory, but I was quick to smother that as my mind settled back on the pressing matter at hand. “But right now is not the time for such things. My whole life has been turned upside down, and you are being a detriment to my understanding right now, Oz. So, with all due respect, shut up.”
Silence followed, stretching between us all before I huffed and folded my arms in my lap.
“Can we keep her?” Del rumbled, breaking the tension with the last question I expected after my outburst.
“I’m not a pet,” I grumbled back, but I pulled my blanket up to cover the smile I couldn’t wipe from my face.
He wanted to keep me around?
Neither Oz nor Rez responded, but they did blissfully cease their stare-off. A small smirk tilted the edge of Rez’s mouth up as he made his way to sit on the love seat next to me like I had offered. Turns out that might not have been the best idea because he wasn’t small enough to comfortably fit there with me half lying down.
I rushed to pull my feet off, but he was quick to halt my movements—thankfullyafterhis daggers had finished retracting into his body. “You don’t have to move, sweetheart,” he reassured me as he lifted my feet and the blanket to slide underneath them. Sitting down, he brought them into his lap and began stroking my leg above the blanket.
Why were pet names so damn heartwarming? I swear he could have called me a sex kitten, and I still would have found a way to make it feel sweet to my brain.
I snuck a glance at Oz and Del to gauge their reactions to what was going on and wasn’t disappointed. The lustful monster was pouting like a fucking toddler, his thickly corded arms crossed against his chest as he turned his gaze from me at the last minute to look at the ceiling.
Del’s glare could melt a glacier. The way he tracked Rez’s hand as it glided all the way from my ankle to mid-thigh was so hot. Like he wanted so badly to be the one doing that to me.
Dare I hope that, if they all did, in fact, want me—which seemed increasingly plausible, if what Oz said about never having been drawn to a charge before was true—that maybe something could come from this?
Rez shifted on the seat and cleared his throat, picking back up on the explanation of their kind, “So, yes, there are quite a lot of us. We were birthed from Penthos, the god of grief and sadness. Although, that was a long time ago, and our kind has mutated since the creation of the first Algeah.”
Rez’s left hand flattened on my thigh as his right came up to rub the sole of my foot. “Algeah were originally created solely for feeding off of the pain and suffering of the demons in Hell, but over time, we have bred and adapted to what was needed of us to survive all of this time. We began to have a broader spectrum of emotion feeders, and we came topside to spread our practice into the human realm.”
So that was why they’d laughed when I had asked if they were demons. They were bigger and badder than demons and could have a quick afternoon snack off of a demon’s emotions if they wanted.
I bit my bottom lip sharply to stop the small moan that tried to escape as Rez dug his finger into the lower part of my foot. It was damn near orgasmic. I had never had anyone care to rub my feet before, except the people I paid for pedicures. Something about this felt so intimate though, in comparison.
His sapphire eyes sparkled with mischief as he noticed my hitched intake of breath at the movement, and he dug in further while continuing the history lesson. “We found that it could be of equal benefit for humans and our kind to work together. Rather than only feeding on negative emotions, we began to use our powers to understand the psyche of a human, rooting down deep to the core of what makes them tick. It’s how we’re able to assist them, by reading them.”
I smirked softly, “So you guys are like therapists from Hell?”
Oz groaned like he was pain as he recalled, “One time, we were summoned by a therapist, and it was the most torturous charge we had. She was so detached from her own feelings and intent on trying to analyze herself that it just ran her in circles, and she doubted everything we were telling her.”
My other two monsters chuckled at the memory. Wait, they werenotmine. Why the hell had I referred to them as that.Fuck shit damnit.
