25. Double-Crossed Soul At a Crossroad

Ash shoved aside his need to know what the hell she’d been thinking. Her whispered admission in the hall had fractured him. Her limp wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be.

A silver lining, he supposed. He waited a moment before he followed her. Steam drifted off the water like spectral hands.

Liora stood beside the tub, top half bare of leather. Her scars were on full display. Her topographic map of centuries of survival.

Ash lingered in the doorway, cataloging each mark. The claw slashes marring the small of her back were from a werewolf in Prague. The bullet groove in her bicep was a parting gift from a hunter in Cairo.

Her braids were a nest of unspooling copper hair. His fingers ached to pull apart. The bite on her neck—his bite. Permanent.

“Control your urges, little bat,” she said, back turned.

He smirked. “I thought your kind enjoyed being lusted after?”

Wrong move.

She growled. Slicing her claws through her leather pants to cut them off. She cursed, jolting, as she aggravated the wound in her hip. His mouth snapped shut as she revealed more creamy flesh.

Fuck. She was stunning.

She stiffened, shadows coiling like serpents. “Get out.”

Ash’s mind raced. Another trigger to add to his records.

References to “her kind.” Correlated with increased aggression (89%) and—

“You did this,” she hissed, whirling abruptly. “You and your... your notions.”

If he had a beating heart, he’d be incapable of hearing over it now. He stepped closer, brow arched, mouth free of smirks and taunts for a change. “My notions?”

“Of whatever this is!”

She gestured between them, claws glinting, eyes fracturing, and her voice shook. Lips buckling.

“You think I’m some—some project. A riddle to solve.”

He searched her face. Noted the twitch in her eye, the darkness blooming beneath them.

Ah, it was as if he’d dunked his face in a pile of slushy snow. Of course she wanted more than to be lusted after.

Liora wanted love, worship, and loyalty most of all. She needed someone to look at her and see more than a cursed cunt. She just wouldn’t admit it.

So she picked another fight. Such a human response. It was almost sweet.

“No.” Ash unzipped his tactical vest, letting it drop with a slap off the tiles before tugging his long-sleeved shirt off, too. “I think you’re a wildfire. And I’m the idiot who likes the heat.”

She watched him undress, suspicion limning every curve and hollow of her naked body. As if his bare skin were a trap.

To her, it was. The thought made his stomach twist. He stifled the urge to groan. She wasn’t just a warm body for him to lose himself in.

She meant more than that. His mind filled with all the little details he’d collected about her.

He couldn’t find a way to tell her now. He’d hoard more and show her later.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Get in the bath, Liora.”

“Or what? You’ll—”

He scooped her up, her curses echoing off the tiles as he stepped into the tub. Water surged, lapping at his shins.

“You’re insufferable,” she said, voice snapping at him, thrashing and almost knocking them both over.

“And you’re exhausting.” He sank down, dragging her with him. “Now shut up and let me fix what I broke.”

His hands were calloused and purposeful. He washed the blood from her hip, her ribs, the crescent marks on her thighs—his fingerprints from a day earlier.

“Stop fussing,” she muttered, but her dark tendrils curled lazily, betraying her.

Ash ignored her, fingertips grazing the gash along her hip. She jumped; it was like a white-hot branding iron pressing into the wound. It was much too deep.

Too slow to heal. Her death threat was a brittle, empty noise. He treated it like the static it was. She shouldn’t have interfered at the theatre.

What did she do it for? Why him?

The same questions haunted her. Endlessly.

“This needs blood,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

He chuckled, frigid breath slinking down her steam-warmed skin.

“Liar.” He bit his wrist, her lips parted slightly, hearing the crunch of tendon, black welling. “Drink.”

She recoiled. “I don’t want your pity.”

“It’s not pity.” He hauled her back against his chest, arm locked around her waist. “It’s interest.”

She huffed, stilling, tensing herself so thoroughly her bones cracked with every breath. He wouldn’t let her escape. Her magic refused to whisk her out of the bathroom.

“On what? My debt?” Bastard. He had some nerve.

“On keeping you alive to hate me tomorrow.”

All the fight rushed out of her in a single bedraggled exhale. Her eyelids grew cumbersome. Brows furrowed, heart pounding off her ribcage.

His blood hovered at her lips—bergamot, iron, Ashton. Her eyes flickered everywhere but at his wrist. Her body wanted to melt into him. No, stop it.

Right now.

This was dangerous.

This was stupid.

“Take it,” he murmured, cool lips brushing the shell of her ear. “No strings. No fucking. Just... take it.”

She hesitated as a fluttering sensation soared in her stomach. The steam clung to her eyelashes, weighing them down. Why? Most men just took. Even the women—

“Liora.”

Her shadow fangs sank in.

It wasn’t the frenzied, starved bites of previous feeds. She sipped slowly. Reluctant. A shiver tore through her as his blood hit her tongue. Cool and electric, like swallowing a winter storm.

Ash’s groan vibrated against her spine. “There you go.”

His cock didn’t harden. His hands didn’t wander. They held her, steady and quiet as the heartbeat she’d never hear. Why bother when she’d heal without it?

What was the point of this? She didn’t deserve it. He’d see it one day. She was ruin. She was rot. She was— Mine, his grip seemed to say.

And I’m yours.

Ash noted her uncharacteristic silence. She always had to try to have the last word.

Her pulse spoke for her. A thudding she couldn’t glamor. Her shadows bound around his ankles underwater. They weren’t restraining. It felt like anchoring. More progress.

When she pulled away, her lips were stained black, and his fingertips traced the smooth, healed scar on her hip.

“Satisfied?” She said, sounding anything but.

“Not even close.” He nuzzled her steam-damp hair as she turned back around, facing the wall. “But it’s a start.”

She scoffed, but didn’t move. She sat perfectly still as he plucked the pins out of her braids. Fingers unravelling them one by one.

The silken strands slipped through his hands, shimmering despite the blood mottling them. She didn’t shift an inch, but her darkness languidly swayed atop the scalding bathwater.

She didn’t even make a move to stop him when he soaped her hair. Her leery eyes tracked his hands.

He did not risk taking too long. Ash hadn’t tried to coax the wariness from her face. He’d gradually twisted her to face him, into an awkward straddling position, as he worked.

She let it happen. Her heart started racing when she realized he could observe her reactions.

Her stubborn nature kept her there.

Good. She won’t run then.

And she never attempted it.

Even as he traced the VII brand now glowing faintly on her collarbone, she stayed.

“Stop that,” she muttered, batting his hand away, and drawing in a tight breath.

“Stop what?”

“Pretending I’m,” she said, then paused, “fragile.” Her expression darkened. Her knuckles bleached white, eyes narrowed, and her upper lip curled into a pale imitation of her snarl.

“I don’t think you’re fragile.” He kissed the brand, fangs grazing it, recording the way her breath hitched. “You’re precious.”

She stiffened, leaning back, and shaking her head. “Don’t.”

“Too late.”

Ash’s words hung in the steam, sharper than any blade, sharper than anything she’d suffered over her tenure as a succubus. Liora’s claws flexed underwater, scoring the porcelain. Precious.

It was a word for jewels or children, for breakable things. Not for entities forged in hellfire, spite, and betrayal.

She surged forward, claws pricking his throat as her fingers wrapped around his neck, water sloshing over the rim. He didn’t even twitch.

“You think a bath and blood makes you my keeper? My priest?”

“Priests preach.” His thumb brushed the VIII brand, the new notch still hidden from his focused gaze, its glow refracting in the droplets on her collarbone. “I prefer to debug.”

She exhaled, huffing every whisper of air from her lungs as her muscles stiffened. Face screwed into her practiced veneer of hate, but it became flimsier every time she plastered it on.

Ash just watched her. Calm and immovable, nothing she could say or do would chase him away from here.

She understood that now, but the why of his stolid care nipped and itched like a midge at twilight. What did he want?

What was he hoping to gain from this? Power? Control?

Or something worse that she wouldn’t see coming? She had no answers. He never acted the way she thought he should.

Her shadows draped them both, at ease with themselves despite the morass of emotions roiling within her. The water stilled around them.

The slow drip from the faucet crashed loudly in the hushed atmosphere; the electric hum of his blood flowing through her veins was the only other sound. Rage, that primal imperative, the fear of what it all meant—it had all drained away.

Leaving behind a new quiet that made her want to tear her talons through someone’s innards, mouth drying, and fingers trembling underwater. This was an intimacy she couldn’t understand.

Sex, giving him her body, letting him feed from her. That was normal. That hurt like it was supposed to.

This—this felt like he’d found the fastenings to her glamor and stripped her bare before she knew what was happening.

The urge to flee still murmured. She shouldn’t stay here. Her eyes darted around, shadows flicking as they caught wind of her shifting emotions. Ash broke the silence before she could gather the strength to phase away from him.

And she knew his question was a deliberate distraction from the enormity of all they’d just done. The knowledge didn’t stop the spike of fiery heat in her chest.

“So,” he said, thumb stroking an absent circle on her waist. She hadn’t even noticed he’d touched her again. “Fancy telling me your demon name, Red?”

Liora’s eyes snapped back to his, brows knitting, as she clasped her hands together to keep from separating his head from his body.

“Why?” She asked, glamor flickering and eyes bruising with ribbons of violet. “So you can bind me? Chain me?”

He didn’t flinch. A slow, wicked smirk touched his lips. His gaze dropped to her furled mouth. “No. I just want to know what I should scream when I’m buried in you.”

The audacity. The sheer, infuriating, utterly unrepentant...

Him.

Her voice held a note of nuclear winter as she said, “Careful, leech. Some questions flay better than claws.”

“You don’t have to tell me, but I’m asking.”

She moved as though to leave, water splashing as she struggled to get her knees under her. His hand on her waist dragged her back down.

Even her shadows refused to help. She yelled at them in her mind, but they simply curled around Ashton’s throat like a collar.

His hand left her side and caught her wrist, thumb pressing into her rabbiting pulse. His words were so soft, she almost didn’t hear them over the racket of her demon shrieking at her to tell him her true name.

“You’ve got five hundred years of secrets. I’ve got five years of bad luck and even worse decisions. It’s not exactly a fair trade.”

She tried to yank free of him, but he wouldn’t let go. The impulse to maim him rode her harder than it ever had. The need to protect him spoke louder. Killing him meant killing herself.

That’s not the full reason, little martyr. Be honest!"

Shut up.”

Ash laughed softly. Had he heard it? Probably. She was past caring as he spoke again.

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours, Liora. I promise I won’t use it against you. It’s just a name.”

She stopped trying to pull her arm free, but she couldn’t look at him as something inside her shrivelled and crumbled to dust. Something that made her mouth open and her most wretched mistake tumbled out.

“You want to know why I don’t share it? Fine. Once, I let a warlock fuck me for months. Handsome thing. He smelled like bergamot and hubris.”

Ash let out a mocking gasp. “Bergamot? Scandalous.”

She ignored him. “I was young. A babe by my kinds measure. He’d whisper sweet nothings,” she spat the words like poison, “and I lapped them up like a starved hound. I let him tie me with hexes. Bury me alive to test my devotion.”

Her inhale shook as he watched her drag it in. His grip on her wrist tightened, and a cold, black thing scraped its talons in his chest at the mental image her story had provided.

“I clawed through six feet of soil and his ribcage. Left his heart in his mistress’s bed. It was still warm.” She finished sounding as if she’d run a marathon.

He didn’t feel like joking. No, he felt like finding a necromancer to bring the warlock back just so Ash could kill him again. But he sensed her need for distraction.

“... Kinky, Red. Bet that got her blood going.”

She snorted, eyelids drooping, but she covered it with a hiss. “It was pathetic. I was pathetic.”

He shook his head, releasing her wrist to wrap his hands around her waist and drag her closer. She allowed it. He held eye contact, tongue working overtime to soothe the raw nerves jumping under her skin.

“You survived. That sounds badass to me.”

Her head shook again. “Surviving is what cockroaches do. I am more,” she said, but there was none of her usual conviction in it.

He hummed, nodding. “Yeah. You are.” He lifted a hand out of the water to run his knuckles across her cheekbone.

She went rigid again. Her eyes turned to flint, braced for the pity that never came.

“I won’t ask again. But if you ever wanna... y’know, scream your true name while I fuck you, I’ll listen.”

Liora stared woodenly at Ash. Her shadows swelled, slamming the door shut. The light flashed on and off as she bared her teeth at him.

That name. The one she’d guarded for centuries, kept locked in a vault within her, and hadn’t heard spoken since she was a youngling, rose in her mind.

Her demonic title was a shield and a weapon both, it wouldn’t stay down. She never meant to think it.

Never meant to offer it to him. But it was a thunderclap in the abrupt quiet of her own skull; the mental wall between them still lay in rubble. A piece of rusted, broken invisible armor had crumpled with it.

Velthara Nyxarrah.

She held her breath. Trying not to think of its meaning in plain English. If he wanted that, he could find it himself. Her shoulders slumped, mouth twisted to the side as her chest grew too tight.

Ashton had gone preternaturally still. His smirk vanished like smoke on water.

The oxygen seemed to leave the room, vacuumed out by some unseen force. For a brief moment, there was only the resonance of that name in the space between their minds.

The syllables carved through her like a shard of her own shattered soul. Bloodied and brutally beaten by her own hand. The name’s weight settled in her marrow—a birthright she’d buried with the warlock centuries ago.

Her pulse hammered, and it wasn’t what she had anticipated. She expected it from fear of Ash wielding it, but it raced because of the terrifying, life-altering truth.

She wanted him to.

Wanted him to taste it, twist it, make it his. Wanted to see if it would crack him open the way it cracked her now. What a daft thing to want. She hadn’t learned.

Now he had the power to cage her. It was a new torture, handing him the weapon, knowing he could unleash it at any moment. Gift wrapped in a foolish hope that he never would.

Intertwined with her hope he’d balk and bolt, break the pulsing bond tying them together.

Prove me right.

Prove me wrong.

Her mind couldn’t decide which outcome would be worse. But Ash never so much as blinked. His silver eyes darkened, storm clouds swallowing moonlight.

When he finally spoke, his tone was a low, dark promise that sent a prickling shiver down her spine. His pupils fractured. “Velthara.”

Her shadows flailed, lashing the walls, and collaring her throat now too. The way he said it, as though it was both a curse and a caress, sent a tremor through every sore muscle she’d earned.

She didn’t care. Her thoughts ran rampant as he defied her every expectation and past experience yet again.

He should run. He should beg. Should do anything other than sit there looking at me like I’m the answer to some question he’s too afraid to ask.

His fingers found her collarbone again, drawn to her brand as if it were a magnet. Her eyes snagged on his own branding.

The one that mirrored hers, silvered and thorned on his wrist. He caught her staring at it and sighed. He grimaced, caught silver-handed.

I don’t know how or why it happened. So don’t gut me for something your venom caused.

His thought struck her in a place she’d long since thought dead. She laughed. A genuine, throaty laugh.

It died faster than a spider under her heel, but his lips twitched, eyes softening a little before he caught himself.

“I’ll keep it safe. But a promise is a promise. My name’s been collecting dust for years. Someone might as well have it.”

She affected a disdainful expression, but the heat was gone. “Your human name? How precious."

He only chuckled. He leaned closer, face a couple inches from hers as he said, “Ashton Elias Voss. Had to kill three people to bury it. Now it’s yours.”

She froze.

Head emptying. Lips parting as her breath caught, a sensation like her own stuck claws in her lungs.

Voss.

The fates, the universe, the damned Shroud.

Whatever it was, it had a horrible sense of humor.

Voss. Her alias. His mortal name. A shared lie that neither of them had planned. Her mind returned to full power as the shared covenant fluttered through her.

He gave me his corpse name. The one he graves.

And I gave him my beating heart. The one thing I swore never to give away again. Stupid.

Reckless, stupid mortal.

Her inner succubitch sighed; but he’s not mortal anymore. He’s delightfully durable.

She didn’t know how long she had stayed mute. Lips tingling, mouth watering, hands curling into fists to keep from grabbing and kissing him.

Oh, no.

This wasn’t in her plans. None of this was.

Ash observed her struggle, listening for any thoughts that seeped through her head into his. Her fragmented emotions made it hard to grasp them.

He pushed her further. If this was all he got for the foreseeable future, he’d gain as much as he could.

“You’re still terrified.” He dug his fingers into his waist as she opened her mouth to deny it. “Don’t. I know you’re not scared of me. You’re scared of this.” His palm flattened over her sternum, where her furious heartbeat drilled against his hand. “You’re afraid of us. Of wanting.”

“I want nothing.”

He smiled and gave a single nod. Her predictable response only solidified his notions.

“Another lie,” he said, refusing to allow her to escape his gaze. “You want everything. You just hate that it feels like kindness.”

She jerked back, but the tub trapped her. Water rippled between them, stained black with their mingled blood. “Kindness is for the weak.”

“And yet.” Ash cupped her cheek, forcing her to meet his gaze. “Here you are. Allowing me to touch you. To see you.”

Her growl faltered. He heard her pulse ratcheting higher. The VII brand throbbed scarlet, searing any denial she might have tried to ash.

“Why?” he pressed.

“Stop.”

Not a fucking chance, sweetheart.

“Why, Liora?”

Her shadows tightened around his throat.

“Because you’re persistent,” she said in a sibilant tone. “A cockroach. No, you’re a glitch.”

“Glitches crash systems, Red.” His grin was feral. “Admit it. You’re curious what happens when I burn yours down.”

Silence. Only the soft lapping of the bathwater as she breathed rapidly echoed off the tiles.

Then she sank back against him, water swallowing her choked laugh. “You’ll regret it.”

“Already do.” His arms locked around her, chin resting on her damp crown. “But damn if it isn’t pretty.”

Her shadows slackened, draping over them like a weightless, protective blanket. Her heart rate slowed down as she melted into him. His nose was full of her singular scent.

Their scent. Glorious and eternally entwined. Ash pressed a kiss to her temple—chaste, if such a word could live in their world. “Rest, wildfire. I’ll keep watch.”

“As if I’d trust you.” But her eyes closed.

He knew she hadn’t meant to sleep, but the long day and night they’d had bore down on her. Bore down on him too.

She soon went limp. Ash held her until the water cooled and he was sure she wouldn’t wake if he moved her.

He carefully rose from the bath, cradling her bridal style. Her dark snakes wound like vines around them. Dawn loomed mere hours away as he trailed water through the hall and into her bedroom.

He saw almost nothing. Too focused on his worries that she’d bolt before he woke and make him pay for all that had transpired tonight.

If she did, he’d take it. And give it right back. But the mortal part of him still prayed she stayed.

The vampire relished the hunt. Relished the challenges she threw him and how he overcame them faster these days.

One day, she’d stay. One day, she wouldn’t run away. For now, she felt safe enough to fall asleep in his arms.

It was enough.