“Lay back, sweet,” he said. “I think we’re both going to enjoy this.”

He parted her platinum curls with his fingers and began to savor her with his tongue, licking and tasting and teasing while Ariane writhed beneath him. He kept varying the rhythm, pushing her toward a shattering peak and then pulling her back, until her hands were fisted in the sheets, her back arched, and her soft gasps had become insistent moans.

“Please,” she begged, dizzy from being strung as taut as a bow for so long. “Damien, please!”

Then she felt it, a deep, throaty purr vibrating against hot, sensitized skin as he used his mouth on her. She broke apart in seconds, a wild cry tearing from her lips as she reared up against him, the orgasm slamming through her even harder than the last. Before she had finished riding out the waves of it, Damien slid on top of her, his face flushed, eyes gleaming, his purring still rippling through him and into her.

Ariane lifted arms that she could barely feel, stroking up his sides and back. She saw his mark, the cats, the crescent moon, and did what she’d wanted to the first time she saw it. She rose up and licked it, licked the salt from his skin, then kissed him on the symbols that had made Damien who and what he was. His breath left him in a single, startled rush that caught on a groan.

He entered her in a single hard thrust, driving into her all the way to the hilt. There was a brief, stinging pain as the final barrier between them tore. Then there was only the two of them, joined in the most intimate way possible. She could feel him throbbing deep inside of her when he stilled, looking down at her.

“I’m your first,” he said, his voice a reverent whisper.

“You’re my first,” she replied, reaching up to stroke his hair, his face. Then she rose to brush his lips with her own, trying to tell him without words that she wouldn’t have chosen anyone but him, that she gave him this small part of herself without regret.

He made a soft, broken sound and deepened the kiss, baring his emotions in the only way he seemed able to express them to her. Deep inside of her, he shifted with the kiss, and there was no pain, only pleasure. She lifted her legs, bending her knees to slide them up Damien’s back and biting her lip as the angle intensified the sensations rippling though her.

His eyes went blurry when he raised his head. “Gods. Yes. Like that, darling.”

Then he began to move in her, slowly at first, but more and more strongly as he lost control, until the bed rocked with every wild thrust. Ariane clung to him as he rode her, the sight of him coming undone intensifying her own pleasure until she felt everything in her gathering, coiling ever more tightly, begging for release.

The urge to sink her teeth into him rose, hot and strong as lifeblood. She had to struggle to fight it back, knowing that binding herself to him that way was a step she couldn’t take. But she wanted it, wanted her teeth in him, his in her. Joined. Eternally.

Then Damien reached between them to stroke her, and the need in his eyes, his voice, eclipsed everything.

“Come with me,” he rasped breathlessly. “Now, love.”

Then she shattered, seeing nothing but beautiful darkness, clenching around him as he cried her name.

Chapter Sixteen

CRAWLING AROUND in a dusty old shop full of moldy books and charming things like shrunken heads wasn’t normally Damien’s idea of a good time. Strangely enough, doing it with Ariane made it almost enjoyable.

Oh, hell, who was he kidding? It was enjoyable.

“I keep thinking that something’s going to crawl out from between the pages and bite me,” Damien grumbled, peering over the edge of a slim tome that had seen better days at Ariane, who appeared engrossed in a much larger volume. The owner of the shop, a squat troll of a man named Perkins, walked by them as he had done every few minutes since their arrival.

“I’m not a library,” he snarled, revealing yellowed teeth. “If you want something, buy it.”

Damien waved him off. “I’ve got plenty of coin to spend in here, Mr. Perkins. Leave us be, or you won’t see a dime of it.”

Perkins glared back at him in such a way that Damien wondered what, exactly, the man was. He was pretty sure he wasn’t a vampire, and the Shade who’d recommended this place, a Ptolemy half-breed named Yvaine, had been very adamant that Damien not ask. He found it was fairly easy to resist opening his mouth on that count.

Perkins looked like the kind of thing that, when biting, did not have a simple drink of blood in mind.

“I think we need this book,” Ariane said, walking over to him and pressing against his side to show him the pages she was interested in. It took him a moment to focus. Even after a week of sleeping—and doing a great deal more than sleeping—together, his physical reaction to her had, if anything, intensified. And the more he tried to warn her off, the more comfortable with him she seemed to get.

It was incredibly twisted.

He couldn’t seem to get enough of her.

“What do you see, kitten?” he asked. “This one’s got as little about your kind in it as all the others. I’m beginning to wonder why anyone ever bothered to write anything about the Grigori, if all they had was a paragraph’s worth of information.”

With Oren dead, no sign of the Grigori who had killed Manon anywhere, and complete silence from Sariel—according to Drake—he had decided to focus on Oren’s cryptic reference to Ariane about the Rising, whatever that was. It was a better focus than nothing, and he could tell it had been on Ariane’s mind. Tonight’s trip to this miserable little basement shop, a hidden place that Yvaine had informed him was only for the most serious collector of… whatever one termed these sorts of things… had pleased Ariane. She was as restless as he was in some ways. The discovery had surprised him.

And still, he wondered what she could possibly want with him. There was always an angle, always a catch. Everyone, he had discovered, wanted something. Everyone had a price. But she professed to want nothing.

A puzzle. And one that increasingly plagued him the more time he spent with her.

“Here, look,” Ariane said, pointing at a page of age-softened paper and an illustration. “I’ve never seen anything like this, not even in the Grigori libraries. But… he looks like us.”

Damien frowned down at the picture, a massive winged being that certainly looked like a Grigori. There was something even more ominous about this one, though. The wings had been blackened, and the face, though drawn in a fairly rudimentary fashion, was obviously contorted to reveal a great many more sharp teeth than the average vampire. Each finger ended in a claw. Scrawled beneath the drawing was a short description.

The demon Chaos, fallen from on high

Eater of souls, cursed angel

He sleeps in chains,

But when he wakes, comes the Rising

And the claiming of the world of night

He looked sharply up at Ariane, who was still staring at the picture, a slight frown creasing her brow.

“You really think this is what Oren was talking about? Some chained up soul-eating demon?”

Ariane shrugged, looking up at him. “Maybe. The ‘claiming of the world of night’ sounds like something you’d want to prevent, right? Oren made it sound like putting off the Rising was something he’d been involved with. And he mentioned my soul being the thing that would put it off.”

Damien made a soft, strangled sound. “Highbloods keeping a chained demon and feeding it souls. I wouldn’t put it past most of them, but, kitten, don’t you think you might have noticed in the last—”

“Nine hundred years.” She looked away. “And no, not necessarily. You’d be amazed by how quiet the ancients can be about things they don’t want you to know.”

Damien stared at her, momentarily startled into silence. “You’re nine hundred years old?” He had assumed she was younger, far younger.

Her cheeks flushed lightly. “Give or take. I don’t really remember anything from before I was sired. It… took me a while to adjust. It doesn’t matter.”

It didn’t really, Damien thought. But the fact that she’d been kept isolated for so long startled him. And she’d remained innocent of so much, whereas he’d been hopelessly corrupted well before his siring. Maybe it would have been different if he’d forgotten everything, too, started fresh.

Though he rather doubted it. And that Ariane’s memories were gone indicated a very traumatic transition. He looked at her a moment longer, finally beginning to understand the strength that lurked beneath the angelic façade. Fledglings born in the sort of violence that wiped memories clean often went mad. She hadn’t.

He found little in his world worthy of respect… until now.

Unsettled, Damien returned his attention to the book, studying a picture that seemed to grow more hideous the longer he looked at it.

“On the one hand, I want to say that even though we’re rather odd creatures ourselves, a massive winged demon chained in someone’s basement being fed souls seems like a stretch. But on the other hand…”

“On the other hand, this is the only mention we’ve seen of a Rising. And you have to admit, the thing in the picture does look kind of… similar,” Ariane asked. “Even if this isn’t exact, you have to admit that it’s a possibility.”

They looked at the book together in silence for a moment, and Damien thought back to the night at the Empusae compound, when he watched Ariane streak across the sky chased by her blood brother. He tried to imagine this particular fate awaiting her, becoming demon food. The thought filled him with sick dread. He’d known something was off about this entire deal. But this?

Damien kept his thumb in the page and flipped over the cover to look at it. “What’s the title, anyway?”

“Demons of the Ancient World,” Perkins’s gravelly voice answered.

Damien looked up, irritated that the man had been eavesdropping.

Perkins simply looked smug, shuffling over to slip the book from Damien’s hands. “This is a rare one,” Perkins said, looking curiously at Ariane. Even with her hair piled on top of her head in a loose bun and dressed simply in a flowing summer skirt and tank top, she was an otherworldly beauty. There could be no mistaking her for anything but what she was.