by Cate Corvin
“I don’t like to speculate on impossibilities,” I said, refusing to look away from his bronze gaze.
He didn’t smile again, but the corner of his mouth quirked. There was something inherently unfair about how handsome he was; every angle of his face seemed carved by a loving hand, and he had the almost glossy texture to his skin that all gargoyles had. No amount of money could buy that beauty for a human. “What if you could ask a suspect a question and know the truth the moment it left their lips?”
I held back a sigh. “Again, impossibility, even though the Diamond Order offers their services in court… which I’m sure you already know.”
The elevator was taking far too long to reach its destination and his line of questioning was making me uncomfortable. Whatever he wanted to show me, I was ready to get it over with.
“I do know,” he said. The elevator finally slowed to a halt. I studiously avoided looking out at the city sprawled below us. I didn’t do heights, and losing my beer on his shoes wouldn’t be a great way to end the night. “I’m curious what your true thoughts on gargoyles are, Officer Sterling. Do you find any redeeming qualities in us?”
Like I was really going to answer that honestly while at the top of a skyscraper. If I told him that I thought gargoyles were a menace to society, he could easily toss me off the roof and I’d be powerless to fight him.
We stepped out of the elevator into an entryway that could have easily been mistaken for a vault where a new gargoyle awaited us. I gulped as I looked up into pitch-black eyes in a hard face, but full lips softened his granite features. A pair of black horns curled over his skull, and a massive pair of bat-like wings, studded with a pebbled texture, were folded neatly behind his massive back.
This guy was built like an NFL linebacker, thick arms crossed over his chest. He wore nothing but a pair of sweatpants that somehow managed to look as sexy as Damien’s suit. “Who’s this, D?”
“Zara Sterling, meet Gio Onyarai, my head of security.” Damien’s hand pressed against my lower back like he was laying claim to me.
“Pleasure’s all mine,” the Onyx fullblood purred, leaning against the wall and scanning me up and down. There was a wariness to his gaze under the blatant interest that made me think he was scanning me for weapons as well. “Damn, you’re gorgeous. Unfortunately, I prefer my women a little less… breakable.”
That little statement really drove home the predicament I was in. “Wish I could say the same, but I prefer my men a little less… obvious.”
I gave him a saccharine smile and a surprised grin broke across that hard face, and my heart fluttered a little. “Touché, Zara Sterling. Hope I see you around sometime.”
Against my will, I rather hoped he would, too. He opened the door to the penthouse, and Damien ushered me into a wide anteroom.
Every surface was covered in matte black granite, and dark, foot-long alcoves were built into the walls. As we walked in, lights flicked on, and a rainbow of brilliant covers burst to life.
The alcoves held podiums, each one topped with a bed of velvet, and a stoneheart nestled in each like a precious egg in a nest. I blinked as the brilliant refraction from a Topaz left blinding golden streaks across my vision.
Without thinking, I stepped closer to the nearest podium. Everyone knew the general theory of stonehearts, but gargoyles guarded them fiercely. I’d always envisioned a jewel shaped like a cartoon heart.
An Emerald stoneheart gleamed up at me, shaped like an anatomical human heart, but the deep glassy green of a gem. Spiked crystals grew from the arteries and veins. Vivid light gleamed deep in its depths, illuminating the brilliant green.
Amazing how something so beautiful could be so dangerous.
I realized I hadn’t answered Damien’s question when I felt the weight of his eyes on me.
“I’m sure many gargoyles have redeeming qualities,” I said, realizing I was reaching out to touch the stoneheart. I lowered my hand. “On an individual basis. I’m a cop, Mr. Viridios. We get to see the worst of it every day, and it’s not just human fallibility. When a single gargoyle can cause the same level of destruction as a natural disaster… it’s hard to see past that.”
“You think we’re a menace,” he said smoothly. He was right at my elbow, watching me watch the inner pulse of the stoneheart.
Weird how he’d chosen the exact word I’d had in mind.
“In some cases.” I moved onto the next podium. The Topaz was as beautiful as the Emerald, with the warmth of honey and amber. The Topaz Order was gifted with offensive magic: I’d seen a Topaz in action up close once before, a gargoyle who’d fractured what remained of my family… it wasn’t a sight I’d ever forget, nor the feeling of knowing you were totally helpless in the face of their might.
I ignored the soft glimmer of blue and violet on the other side of the room as a new shade took over my thoughts. The next podium was different: surrounded by a metal frame and tempered glass. A dark, bloody Ruby gleamed on the velvet, and my mouth went dry at the sight of the pulsing magic within it.
“What about those of us who live for the greater good? I’m aware that your precinct has worked with the Onyx Order in close quarters several times, and the Garnets have funded several clinics the city needed in the last year.”
I knew the glass surrounding the case must’ve been rigged with sensors, but I wanted to touch the Ruby, badly. Something in that bloody gleam called out to me. The muscles in my chest seemed to tighten and relax in time with that internal pulse.
“Mr. Viridios, look. I’m aware there are plenty of gargoyles I’d probably be happy to call a friend. My distrust of your kind isn’t personal. It’s a sense of self-preservation.” I tore my eyes away from the Ruby, my body locked up tight. “Would I like to be Supercop? Sure. Who doesn’t want to be able to make a difference, or stand between your loved ones and certain death? But the fact is, that’ll never happen, and any one of your people could walk into my precinct and wreak havoc if they felt like it.”
Damien nodded, his eyes going distant. “Have a drink.”
“What?” The word was barely out of my mouth when a waiter appeared at his shoulder, holding a tray. I blinked and took a glass of wine automatically, and the waiter vanished just as quickly as he’d appeared. “Um, wow, thanks.”
“Guy is entirely human, but he possesses stealth an Amethyst would kill for.” Damien sipped his own wine. I followed suit, vaguely annoyed to find it was just as delicious as I’d expect coming from a gargoyle of his means. He’d probably never had a ten-dollar bottle of wine in his life. “Come.”
He didn’t stop to wait for an answer, but touched his hand to my lower back and guided me further into his domain. Oddly enough, the disquiet I felt at following him wasn’t because I was obeying his order, but because I had to leave the pulsing scarlet light of the Ruby stoneheart behind.
I shuddered and took another gulp of wine. It was far too easy to fall into the allure of power.
“Very few humans are invited to view our stonehearts,” Damien said, guiding me down a long hallway. “They usually aren’t on display, either. Stonehearts require a host body to live, or they weaken and lose their magic over time.”
“You make them sound like parasites.” I spoke without thinking, loosened up by the wine and the magic of the Ruby still shimmering in my mind.
“More like a symbiote.” He didn’t seem upset by the comparison. “Did you see the crystalline structures growing from the ventricles? They bond to their host completely and become part of the system, rather than a separate entity feeding from the main body.”
“How are they made?” I might as well ask now, while a fullblood gargoyle seemed willing to impart knowledge very few humans had of his kind. “Do you… I don’t know, carve the stonehearts out of natural caverns or something?”
Damien was as warm as a human, which was welcome with his arm still around me. His steps slowed in front of a wall that was made entirely of glass, revealing the entire city.
My stomach did a slow roll and settled. There were only inches of plate glass between myself and an ugly fall.
“Stonehearts come from fullbloods,” he said. “If one of us is destroyed and the heart is still salvageable, we take it from their rubble and pass it on to a new host.”
I looked up at him, wondering if I’d gotten that right. “All those stonehearts came from living gargoyles.”
“Yes. It keeps their legacy alive, in a way. The only way new stonehearts are formed is when an infant fullblood is born, and there are few enough of those now. Maybe one or two every few decades.”
I clutched my empty wine glass and stared out at the city. The Opal infant was literally the lifeblood of House Aerithor, possibly the first infant in generations, and I’d brushed it off like it was no big deal. I cringed internally at how insulting my comment must have seemed.
The baser part of me churned over a cruel idea. If every fullblood gargoyle and their Order’s stonehearts were eradicated… there could be no more. They’d eventually die out.
He had to know I would’ve come to that conclusion. Gargoyles had obviously kept their origins a secret for a very good reason.
“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked, wondering if this was it. Fuck, I should’ve stayed with Sawyer. Now that I knew the secret of the stonehearts, if I didn’t do whatever it was that he really wanted from me, he’d throw me off the roof and call it a day. “How many humans have this sort of information?”
Damien arm tightened around me, leaving me a little more breathless than I really should be. “Very few. It’s generally on a need-to-know basis… but something about you, Zara, tells me I can trust you.”
Maybe part of me was gunning to be dropped from a great height, because I twisted my head to look up at him. The sheen of his inhuman skin and bronze eyes were even more pronounced in the moonlight. “You don’t know me. What makes you think I’m trustworthy?”
He smiled, tilting his head down. “For all your talk of distrusting gargoyles, you risked your life to save one. You came alone into my penthouse. And remained here with me, when you were free to walk out at any time.”
“When I was free?” Oh shit.
He took my empty wine glass and set it on a marble end table. Hands that could snap me in half slid gently around my waist. “You’ve come this far. Might as well stay the night, don’t you think?”
Chapter Three
I blamed the wine for my lack of inhibitions.
Not the fact that I found Damien wildly attractive and had been fantasizing about the feel of his lips all evening, not the intense curiosity about what being with a gargoyle would feel like.
Nope, it was all because of the wine.
Even knowing Gio was down the hall, that Sawyer was waiting down in the ballroom, or that there were probably security cameras recording us right that second, I turned into a ragdoll kitten the moment Damien’s fingers found the zipper on the back of my dress.
He unzipped it slowly, warm fingers trailing their way down my spine, and then the Emerald was kissing me. Leisurely, like he had all the time in the world to savor this moment.
That was when the kitten became a tiger. Hunger for him roared to life inside me, after months of self-imposed celibacy, and suddenly, it made no difference to me whether he was a gargoyle or human. The only thing that mattered was he was all man.
His lips were soft, despite being stone. I ran my tongue over his lower lip, tasting faint minerals under mint, the glassy velvet of his skin strangely irresistible. He had the same give as a human male, the same hunger when he sucked my lip into his mouth and nibbled it.
My hands moved over him of their own accord. I found his horns, traced the stony sheen into his thick hair, and moved down over the carved planes of his face until I reached his shirt buttons.
Damien smiled, his lips curving against mine, and just yanked the sides of the shirt apart. Buttons fell to the floor as he expertly stripped my dress off and lifted me up like I weighed nothing.
A second later, I was pillowed in a massive and very cozy bed, like sinking into a cloud despite the heaviness of the man arched over me.
He could crush the air out of my lungs if he dropped himself over me now, but Damien propped himself up on one elbow, his lips roving over my jaw and down my neck. Goosebumps rose on my skin where he touched.
Every worry slipped out of my head. All I could focus on was that the gargoyle above me kissed like he wanted to devour me alive, but I felt no fear of what he was doing.
Damien’s tongue trailed between my breasts, lips leaving burning marks where he kissed my stomach, and my back arched when his tongue slid between my folds. I was already wet, amazed at my reaction to a gargoyle, and desperate to just feel him inside me already, but he had other plans.
I gasped, uncaring of the volume of the sounds I made up here while he feasted on me, tongue swirling around my clit and making my legs jump. The heat between my thighs filled my abdomen, a hunger I suddenly regretted ignoring for so many months. I’d forgotten what it was like to feel this way.
I shivered beneath his ministrations, so close to coming, when he kissed the inside of my thighs and moved over me. I reached down, trailing my fingers over the silky skin of his cock, which he pressed against my pussy. I lined him up with my entrance in anticipation and arched my hips up to spur him on.
He pushed forward, slowly driving himself into me. Damien could tick another box after this: the billionaire philanthropist gargoyle also the perfect cock. The most exquisite length and thickness, filling every available millimeter of me and just shy of being painful.
“Harder,” I rasped, gripping the arms braced beside my head.
Damien let out a soft laugh. “Not too hard. You’re breakable.” He compounded this by thrusting forward again, which was the wrong way to make me back down.
There was no way I could’ve flipped the gargoyle over of my own initiative, but he felt me push and complied, rolling over and taking me with him. I straddled him, running my hands over the perfectly sculpted chest and abs, wondering if gargoyle-kind had sprung into existence this perfect or if some creator had carved them with a careful hand.
His bronze eyes flared in the semi-darkness when I started riding him hard, my clit rubbing against the tapered V of stony muscle at the base of his stomach. Hands tightened on my hips, giving me leverage as I took my pleasure.
It didn’t take me long to start shivering, heat exploding through me. Damien grunted when he felt me clench around him and picked me up, nudging me onto all fours. I gasped when he plunged back inside me, pumping his cock while his lower stomach slapped against my ass.
He lowered himself over me, careful not to crush my fragile human body, and reached around to rub my sensitive clit while he rode me. I arched my hips back against him, letting the heat fill me again while the utterly taboo sensation of being powerless drove me to fuck him harder.
The second time I melted, screaming my climax into the mattress, he tensed over me. His cock pulsed, spilling himself inside, but I wasn’t worried about pregnancy. It was impossible for gargoyles and humans to procreate. Damien stayed there for a long moment, stroking my back and planting kisses along my spine.
Finally, he collapsed next to me, reaching out to pull me into an embrace. There wasn’t so much as a drop of sweat on him despite the sheen covering my own body.
The way he cradled me, running his fingers through my hair, it was almost easy to imagine I was in the arms of someone who cared.
“Go to sleep, Zara,” he murmured. His deep voice rumbled through his chest, vibrating softly against my back while he stroked me from shoulder to hip.
“I should be down there,” I whispered, but I didn’t really mean it. I felt wrung out in the best possible way, like I’d taken out all the pent-up frustrations of the past year on an unbreakable punching bag… that had a perfect cock.
Damien buried his face in my hair, kissing the shell of my ear. “No. You don’t h
ave to give a damn about them.”
In a weird way, I felt like hearing someone else say it aloud was like giving myself permission to finally not care for one night. I didn’t care if the precinct captain or assholes like Jake Selter saw me disappear into an elevator with a gargoyle and not come back. I didn’t care if Sawyer was going to be disappointed with me in the morning, or if every investor in that room knew that their cardboard hero of the day was screwing their host’s brains out, or if Josh was rolling in his grave, or that there’d be new rumors about me by Monday morning.
I didn’t give a single flying fuck, and it was such a relief.
With Damien curled around me, I closed my eyes and fell into a blissfully dreamless sleep.
My eyes snapped open. The room was muzzy, and a soft clinking noise sounded like it came from miles underwater.
Something silver caught the light.
Every one of my muscles immediately tensed, but I didn’t go anywhere. My body was a dead weight, lying on the cool softness of the bed with silky sheets draped around my legs.
I blinked, my heart racing as I fought panic. A small point of pain stung in my arm, but the rest of me was numb, a slab of rock. I could move my eyes, though. Thank god for small favors.
Damien Viridios sat on the edge of the bed, still completely nude and flawless. He held a scalpel.
“Ah, I’m so sorry you’re awake. You were supposed to sleep through this. Please don’t struggle, Zara. It’s a mild anesthetic combined with a temporary muscle relaxant. You won’t feel a thing.”
I struggled to speak, but my tongue didn’t move, lips glued shut against my will.
Not even a whimper escaped.
“You’re the one.” Damien laid his palm flat against my chest, but I couldn’t feel it. “I knew it the moment I saw you, long before you ever saw me. So many of my kind choose humans for superficial qualities: beauty, strength, humor. But this one deserves the best, and you are the best, Zara Sterling, both in character and form.”