My Way to Hell

by Dakota Cassidy

  Catalina’s lips fell into a sneer of revulsion. “Not a frickin’ thing, but I’ve got all sorts of feelers out,” she remarked, an odd, faraway look shadowing her face for a moment then clearing. “I’m not at all afraid to say I think Carlos has something Armando wants and he doesn’t want anyone to know he wants it. He hasn’t checked in to Hell after his imposed sabbatical. Satan doesn’t like that. Means he’s rogue. So wherever he’s hiding, you can bet once Lucifer gets hold of this info, it’ll be an all-points bulletin.”

  Shit, shit, shit. Just what they didn’t need. “Have you seen anything strange going on at Carlos’s place?”

  She snorted. “Just his mother. I hate saying it, but what a piece of shit.”

  “Meaning?”

  “What kind of mother stays out all night and sleeps her boozing off all day? She’s been dropped off at that apartment by more slime than you could fill a maximum-security prison with.”

  Kellen’s concern jacked up a notch. “Mrs. Ramirez said something was going on with her since the death of her husband. Something she didn’t understand because, according to her, Solana’s a good girl. Grief can do that to a person—change them.” He knew that firsthand since his mother’s death and the chaos with Vincent.

  “Uh, does it turn them into whores?”

  He winced in sympathy for Mrs. Ramirez. “Harsh assessment, my friend.”

  Catalina slapped her hands against her thighs. “I speak nuthin’ but the truth. I don’t see her during the daylight hours at all, and when I do see her, it’s only her back end because she’s on her way up the stairs after a night of boozing. I can’t say I’ve even seen her up close, she’s gone so much. My focus is Carlos. I can tell you, she spends more time plastered up against the side of a building, with some man feeling her up, than a bricklayer. I don’t know when she has time to even bother with the kid, but I haven’t seen or felt any suspicious activity in the way of the supernatural. Though, I feel like shit for the kid.”

  “So we’re no further along than we were when this started. Fuck,” he muttered, dragging a hand over the stubble on his chin.

  “That we are, and I gotta blow, but do me a favor before I hit it.”

  “More bat shit?”

  Catalina chuckled. “No. No more bullshit. Lay off Marcella, and if you confront her about this, do it without stomping all over the situation with those size elevens. She hurts. Even after all this time. You can trust me on that.”

  Kellen fixed his gaze on her, hoping to stare out of her what she wasn’t telling him. “That sounds like it comes from experience.”

  “Never mind where it comes from. Just take heed. Later,” she whispered low, wiggling her fingers to vaporize into the now darkened store.

  Kellen sat on a stray chair and ran his fingers over his hair. He’d been so brutally wrong about Marcella, it left him exhausted just thinking about the energy he’d expended behaving like a total shit to her.

  Marcella had once had a child. A baby. His chest tightened at her sacrifice. Going back over some of the words he’d snarled at her, the shitty things he’d accused her of, made him want to go back and eat every one of them. But there were no do-overs.

  Why hadn’t she ever told them?

  Would you have believed her? He heard Catalina’s succinct, cutting question ring in his head. God, he’d been a fuck of the worst order, and he had to make it right, but first he had to hear the words from her lips. Not only that, he had to find a way to keep her here.

  With him.

  Just yesterday and totally out of the blue, that notion had hit him like a Mack truck. Kellen Markham wanted Marcella Acosta to stay here with him. He wanted to know the person she’d been hiding with all of her sharp words and the flirtatious sway of her hips. Because she was a hell of a lot deeper than she was letting on.

  And he wanted in.

  “You rang?”

  Kellen’s head popped up when he heard Marcella’s voice, smooth, weary. Definitely weary. He’d added to that burden. One so heavy, he felt the weight of it. Now it was time to ease some of it.

  Rising, his legs moved like lead as he held out his hand to her, his expression solemn. “Yeah. I rang.” Reaching for her, he pulled her to him, curving his hands over her back, smoothing away the tension while she floated in his arms. Marcella’s first reaction was to tense, but he figured she sensed the change that had overcome him, and she relaxed.

  It was time to clear the air between them. She was fiercely proud. She wasn’t going to like admitting why she’d sold her soul. But the time had come.

  Let the games begin.

  eleven

  Kellen gripped her as if he would never let her go, with a force that was both gently forceful and determinedly persuasive. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to breathe before she tried to push away from the delicious pressure of his hands on her back, but he remained firm in his hold. “Are we hugging something out I’m unaware of?”

  “We need to talk.” His words were quiet, calm.

  Her defenses went on high alert. Talk. No one ever wanted to talk to her. Suddenly she had a line of people wanting to talk that was longer than a line to get into an Oprah taping. “I’m not here to talk about finding a way to keep me here, if that’s what you’re interested in. Or didn’t I make that crazy clear when I stomped off like a teenager who couldn’t talk her dad out of the keys to the Maserati?”

  “That’s not what I want to talk about.” The hushed tone to his words, the firm but gentle ring to them, made her bristle.

  Anxiety clenched her rapidly beating heart. She fell back, resting her waist in the circle of his arms and her hands on his thick biceps. “Is it Carlos?”

  “That has something to do with what I want to talk about, but there’s something more important. Here’s the deal. I want you to promise me you’ll hear me out.”

  Kellen’s eyes frightened her—so intense—so full of something she didn’t understand. Why had he changed so much in just the course of a couple of days? She didn’t understand this Kellen. “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “I know why you killed Armando, and I know it had to do with your child. What I don’t understand is why you never felt comfortable enough to tell even Delaney you had a child to begin with.”

  Immediately, she was irate. Fear sprung her into action. “Who told you about my son?” It was a struggle to keep a spray of spit from accompanying her words.

  “Does it matter?”

  “You’re goddamn right it matters. It’s no one’s business but mine!”

  He rubbed his thumb against the corner of her mouth. “Look, I get why it would be painful to talk about, but it’s been a long time, Marcella. A long time since this went down. Didn’t you ever want to at least let some of it go? Wouldn’t talking to Delaney about it have helped?”

  “What will ever help this, Kellen?” She swept her hands in the air with helpless defeat. “Telling someone what happened won’t change what is. It wouldn’t change the fact that I was a demon—it doesn’t change the fact that I’m now a ghost. Ask yourself this: would you, Mr. Pious, ever have believed how I’d become a demon? I doubt it, Kellen. I don’t know what’s suddenly changed your mind about me, but if I’d come to you and Delaney with my heart on my sleeve, before all the stuff with Clyde went down, you’d have been the first one screaming bullshit.” Her resentment for a persona she’d created became a whirling dervish of hot anger.

  Kellen cupped her cheek, brushing a light kiss against her forehead. “You’re right. I was wrong. I was an asshole. But I’m trying to make that right, and I’d really like to understand. Just talk to me.” His perplexed look said he wasn’t sure where to start. “So let me get this straight. You sold your soul to the devil for your son?”

  Bitter resentment welled in her gut. Yeah. That’s exactly what she’d done. “I did.” And she’d done it without pause—with no hesitation—and she’d never regretted it.

  The momentary silence he took made her fi
dget. She wasn’t sure if he was winding up, or letting his brain wrap around what she’d just admitted. “So it’s really true?”

  Her eyes swayed toward the floor. “What’s the point in lying now? I gain absolutely nothing from lying, Kellen. Yes, I sold my soul to save my son, who was nothing more than an infant at the time.”

  Kellen’s hands stopped moving on her back. “Why would you let us—”

  “Believe that I was nothing more than a greedy, vacuous, bed-hopping good-time demon?” Her shoulders shrugged. She was too tired to keep it in any longer. The exhaustion of seventy-six years of secrets was becoming a mind fuck she was no longer up to.

  Scrunching her eyes shut, she ran a finger over them to ease the tension. “By the time I met you and D, I was probably bitter more than I wasn’t. I didn’t get attached to humans because they die and go away. Delaney was the exception to the rule. She made me love her, invited me into her world. I don’t know why I was compelled to keep coming back to the store. God knows I wanted to yark every time she ate wheat germ and spewed her holistic views, but she just wouldn’t take no for an answer. I realize that if I’d been human, death would have been a part of my world anyway. But the hardest part about being a demon is eternal life, knowing I’d never die. I just couldn’t get over how fucking unfair it was that I had to live forever with no escape.

  “So I spent a good many of my demonic years having a mid-unlife crisis. There wasn’t much that wasn’t available to me—so I decided I’d just enjoy the material things earthbound privileges had to offer and bury my pain in shopping trips to Paris. I’m sure you have some scientific reason for why I did that, but the emotional reason is, I just wanted to forget. And yes, I did it to the extreme, but if you took those things away, it wouldn’t crush me. Losing someone I loved would—has.”

  Kellen brushed a strand of her hair out of her face with a gentle finger. “I’m sorry. For all the time you missed with your son, I’m so sorry. There really are no other words, are there?” The solemn depth of his tone made Marcella fight to catch her breath. His eyes held years’ worth of regret she just couldn’t handle.

  Madre santa, the tears again. With a deep breath, she smiled. “It’s no big deal. I can’t grudge on you for being disgusted by someone like me, Kellen, when I’m the one who nursed your opinion of me to begin with. I mean, really, when you’re a demon, how do you change the myth behind what they’re associated with? It just seemed like one more battle I wasn’t up to. So I stopped fighting it and went along for the ride.”

  Cupping her cheek, he caressed it with a callused thumb. “Because you were tired.”

  It felt so good to finally admit it that she felt boneless. “Yeah. Really tired. It’s work to convince someone not all demons made the choice to join Hell’s ranks for nefarious reasons. Years of bad press don’t help, either.”

  His gaze was thoughtful, penetrating. “But not so tired you couldn’t save Delaney and Clyde?”

  Waving a hand at him, she dismissed that night. She wasn’t in this for a pat on the goddamned back. “Delaney has a future that has limitations. I didn’t then. I did it because I think maybe somewhere in my subconscious I just wanted to stick it to that fuck Lucifer for all the misery he creates. In sticking it to him, I almost hoped there was some way out I knew nothing about. That maybe there was a loophole I’d missed and in taking alliance with Delaney, I’d end up anywhere but still kicking.”

  “You risked the pit, Marcella.”

  “Guilty.”

  “I’m an asshole.”

  “Do you want me to argue that point?” she teased, hoping this wouldn’t go any deeper. Having feelings that you actually had to share out loud was fucking work.

  His face held such regret, it hurt to look at him straight on. “Nope. That’s just the truth. I didn’t bother to get to know you because I lumped you into the pile with that sick fuck Vincent. I just didn’t get Delaney’s friendship with you. I didn’t understand how she could possibly befriend someone who represented the bottom of the barrel, especially after what happened with Vincent. I never saw the gray in your situation. I just judged you. Which just goes to prove Delaney’s a far better person than I’ll ever be.”

  Marcella shook her head. “Vincent was a horrible person in life and in death, Kellen. You had no reason to think any other demon wouldn’t be the same.”

  “But I didn’t bother to ask.”

  “Neither did Delaney,” she reasoned.

  “Ah, but the difference is she didn’t need to. She believed, and she’s never stopped,” he somberly shot back.

  “She was a good friend to me.”

  “And in the end, you were a good friend to her.”

  Looking down to the floor, she fought the myriad emotions plowing through her. The cleansing understanding that forgiveness brought her rocked her core. “It’s over. Now you know the truth. It’s all good.”

  In a sudden gesture, Kellen pulled her to him, not in the heat of the moment the way he’d done earlier, but in a tender embrace. It felt so amazingly good to rest her head on his muscled shoulder, to feel the warmth of his skin beneath his old college sweatshirt. “No,” he whispered huskily. “It’s not good, Marcella. None of this was good, or fair, or right.”

  She’d speak, but words wouldn’t come. To have this man she’d yearned for, with an ache, offer her absolution, in his arms no less, stole anything she might be capable of articulating. But more than just the ten years she’d known Kellen welled up inside her. Decades of frustration, of fear, of loneliness swept over her, and she was unable to escape the sob that fell from her, lips unbidden and deep. Burying her face in his shoulder to savor the moment for when she’d have no moments left, Marcella fought the rain of tears and sucked in more air.

  Hookay. No more weepin’ and wailin’. Pushing off his chest, Marcella found the resolve of steel she’d once worn as her overcoat. “No more. What’s done is done, and there’s no taking it back. Though, maybe now that you understand who I am, we can at least try not to yank each other’s short hairs, which you suck at lately, BTW, and we can try to figure out what’s happening to Carlos and why.”

  But Kellen wasn’t letting go. It was crystal clear in the determined set of his mouth. “You still haven’t told me the details about why you sold your soul.”

  Her resolve shook. No. No. No. “And I’m not going to. It’s something I just don’t want to relive out loud.”

  “Are you afraid to tell me? Does it have to do with a pact you made with the devil to protect them? I’ll kill that fuck.” His protective tone, the one she’d heard used before only concerning Delaney, made her heart thump faster.

  “No!” she yelped then took a breath to calm herself. “No,” Marcella repeated with purposeful steadiness. “It has to do with me not wanting to relive the kind of pain you feel when you hand over your child to someone else to raise. It’s the kind of pain you can’t express when you think about all the things you’ll miss. I just . . .” Her head fell to her chest and she squeezed her eyes to fend off the anguish so tight in her belly it wanted to explode. “Please, could we not do this? I can’t—can’t . . .” And suddenly, she really couldn’t. She couldn’t hide the heart-wrenching agony of losing David.

  Oh, Jesus, just thinking his name ripped another hole in her heart, constricting it until the flood of tears she’d been fighting won, falling down her face in batches of salty drops.

  Everything.

  She didn’t want to, but she remembered everything about him as though what had passed had happened only yesterday. His sweet smell after a bath, the joy he’d given her with his gummy smile. The fist he jammed into his mouth when he was fighting sleep. The dark thatch of hair on his head, silken and springy, pressed to her breast while he fed. The way he’d wrapped his hand around a length of her hair while she rocked him to sleep in the rocking chair her parents had given her upon David’s birth. His deep green eyes, so like her own, wide and alert, smiling up at her when she’
d held him for the last time. Trusting. How he’d gone so willingly, innocent and beautiful.

  And knowing.

  Knowing she’d never see him again. Never touch him. Never press butterfly kisses to his rounded belly while he giggled. Never knowing who he’d grow up to be.

  Never.

  Marcella’s hand went to her chest when she doubled over. Sobs so deep they hurt to expel wracked her, ripping her apart. The years fell away and a once dull ache tore open, fresh and oozing unspeakable pain.

  Kellen grabbed for her, finding a chair and pulling her to his lap, cradling her. Rocking her while she sobbed at the injustice of losing David. The long nights when she’d done just this—cry herself to sleep. The nights when she’d longed for her baby with an actual physical ache. The endless years of fighting the yearning to find him—tell him who she was and end their parting. The battle she’d fought with herself to keep from just taking one peek at him to reassure herself he was all right. The kind of trust she’d had to hold on to, praying she’d placed him in the right hands.

  The fear.

  Oh, Christ, the fear that he’d be found. That Armando would get out of that damned box she’d put him in and find David.

  Kellen murmured words that meant nothing and everything. A jumbled mix of soothing endearments laced with his deep consoling tone. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” He cleared his throat against the top of her head. “So sorry,” he rasped.

  Hours passed or maybe it was only minutes, but they left her bereft. Bone dry, yet the ache, the infernal ache, burned brighter. Marcella kept her cheek pressed to his chest, hearing the steady rhythm of his heart, letting it ease her grief.

  Kellen’s sweatshirt stuck to his chest, and she wiped at it with a weak hand, but he caught it, bringing it to his lips to press a kiss to it. “Just rest,” he whispered, low, soothing.