Nikodemus put his hands on his hips and chewed on his lower lip. “Not an assassin then.”
Palla started to answer, then checked himself, and that made her heart lurch. She didn’t know how to make this work. Not if Nikodemus was going to ask her to do something that would kill her soul.
“No.” Wallace watched both of them carefully. She couldn’t read either of them. “No, sir, I could not do that.”
“Let’s get clear. Fealty to me means if I tell you I need you to kill some asshole for me, then, Ms. Jackson, you are going to feel my need to have that happen.” He touched the center of his chest. “I’m going to feel what that does to you, and I can promise you, if it’s true that does you harm, I will suffer the consequences. To the point where you may no longer be bound by your oath.” His eyes flashed silver. “I have a team of people who can do that for me if I need it.”
Her tension ebbed. “You’d never ask, is that right?”
“No.” Nikodemus spoke with quiet regret. “That is not right. It means I’d never ask unless there was a damn good reason why you need to do the deed for me. It means the reason I’m making the request is worth losing you.” He held her gaze. “It does not mean I would never ask. I can’t promise you that.”
Nobody said anything for a long time.
“So.” Nikodemus clapped his hands. “You need a minute with Palla to talk about this?”
She looked away from Nikodemus to Palla. “Do I?”
“Stay,” he said, low and soft. He stared into her eyes. “Stay with me. So we can both bear witness.”
Wallace turned back to Nikodemus with a shrug. “All right then.”
Her oath to the warlord took about five minutes, start to finish, and at the end she was hollow, and the warlord took a step back and instead of the quiet, she had this sense of him in her head. And then Palla was there, steadying her while that whip of Nikodemus’s power flowed through her, and through that, there was a connection to Palla and all the others in the room.
“That is just—” During those moments, she’d gone from being alone to belonging. One of them. Palla slipped his arms around her waist.
“I am whole again,” he said into her head and along with that was a rush of his relief because all this time he’d been prepared to lose her. He didn’t mean he would not miss Avitas or stop mourning her loss. He meant he’d no longer be alone in that sorrow. “Whole. Only with you.”
She faced him. He was right. She steeled herself against crying. She walked into his arms. “Both of us.”
He drew her close. “Don’t you know it, Angel.”
About Carolyn Jewel
Carolyn Jewel was born on a moonless night. That darkness was seared into her soul and she became an award-winning and USA Today bestselling author of historical and paranormal romance. She has a very dusty car and a Master’s degree in English that proves useful at the oddest times. An avid fan of fine chocolate, finer heroines, Bollywood films, and heroism in all forms, she has two cats and two dogs. Also a son. One of the cats is his.
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MY IMMORTAL SERIES
My Demon Warlord
Book 7 in the My Immortals Series
A Demon Warlord Bound by Dark Magic…
Kynan Aijan’s centuries-long enslavement to a mage left him borderline insane and bound to Maddy Winters, a witch he intended to kill in horrible ways. Though he’s sworn the bonds they share will never be completed, their very existence feeds his desire for her even as he accepts that Winters will never forgive him.
…to the Powerful Witch He’s Desired for Years.
For Maddy Winters, the fight against evil magic users always takes top priority. But her bonds to Kynan give her intimate access to his thoughts and experiences, and she can’t always ignore their chemistry. Her insistence that she has no feelings for him is a deception she can’t afford to give up.
As Kynan and Maddy join forces to stop a rebellious and murderous witch, the dark magic that binds them locks them into forbidden passions and magic that could destroy them both. Will their fight for what’s right lead to a fight for each other?
Get My Demon Warlord
Books by Carolyn
PARANORMAL ROMANCE
My Immortals Series
My Wicked Enemy, Book 1
My Forbidden Desire, Book 2
My Immortal Assassin, Book 3
My Dangerous Pleasure, Book 4
Free Fall, Book 4.5, a novella
My Darkest Passion, Book 5
Dead Drop, Book 6
My Demon Warlord, Book 7
OTHER PARANORMAL ROMANCE
A Darker Crimson, Book 4 of Crimson City
DX, A Crimson City Novella
HISTORICAL ROMANCE SERIES
The Sinclair Sisters Series
Lord Ruin, Book 1
A Notorious Ruin, Book 2
Reforming the Scoundrels Series
Not Wicked Enough, Book 1
Not Proper Enough, Book 2
OTHER HISTORICAL ROMANCE
Scandal
Indiscreet
Moonlight A Regency-set short(ish) story
The Spare
Stolen Love
Passion’s Song
Anthologies
Christmas in Duke Street
Dancing in The Duke’s Arms
Christmas In The Duke’s Arms
Midnight Scandals
Novellas
A Seduction in Winter
An Unsuitable Duchess
In The Duke’s Arms
One Starlit Night
FANTASY ROMANCE
The King’s Dragon – A short story
EROTIC ROMANCE
Whispers, Collection No. 1
Excerpt
MY DEMON WARLORD
CHAPTER 1
Months of successfully avoiding Maddy Winters came to a swift end. She was hardly ever at the San Francisco house, but not only was she here, she was heading his way. His reaction to her was as predictable as it was unavoidable. His sworn set up a roar that shook him like some monstrous wave. All of them were dead. His last act as free kin had been to assimilate every one of the demons who had sworn to him. If he hadn’t, they would have spent eternity in torment.
Kynan Aijan abandoned lap number one thousand and hauled himself out of the pool. Water sluiced off him onto the concrete and the tile ledge. She walked out of the house and headed his direction. A beautiful woman who had every reason to hate him. He slammed down the reaction on his side of the bonds while she approached. Wouldn’t he know if she’d gotten caught up again?
When she was close enough, he said, “Do you need me?”
“I’m fine.”
He pushed wet hair off his face. Good. Good. She wasn’t suffering because of what he’d done while he was out of mind. “Out of your way in a sec.”
She didn’t deviate from her course. Fucking Maddy Winters. Hate her. Love her. There was never anything in between and sometimes there was both at once. He and Winters were too broken to fix. He wanted to hate her all the time, he really did.
“What are you doing here?” He’d done his part staying away from her; why wasn’t she doing the same? It was bad enough he kept sliding into her dreams. More than a dozen times in the past six months. Five of those times he’d been working for Nikodemus during the slip. He did not appreciate having his attention fractured like that. He doubted she liked it any more than he did.
Which was worse? Their bonds waking up and pulling them into unwanted connections when he was having sex or when he’d been sent to kill someone, and she ended up trapped in his violence? His greatest fear was that one day she’d be trapped in one of those wild, vicious links, and he wouldn’t be able to come to her in time. She’d be locked in with him, unable to escape
her dreaming state while his thoughts destroyed her.
For him, the sex was worse. Winters might as well actually be in his arms when that happened—not whoever he’d picked up, not one of the women he’d tried to love instead. Her. His savage ferocity was for her; that low growl came from his mouth close enough for his breath to warm her ear. The build of his desire was from her hands stroking him. Her body was eager for his touch, she melted into his caresses and rose hard against a too-firm grip.
She stopped by the diving board, and he took in the package. She wore jeans, a white tank top, and sandals with rhinestone butterflies. Her hands were behind her back, and she stood in the awkward position of someone doing a crap job of hiding something. “You don’t take my calls anymore. I had to ask around to find out where you were.”
He slicked his hands over his hair one more time. Never mind a towel. He took care of that. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yes.” She put a bottle of something on the diving board and smiled the way she almost never smiled at him. “Peace offering.”
He walked over to take a look. Twenty-five-year Macallan. “This’ll get you a damn fine peace.”
She put down two glasses and a box of shortbread. He lifted his eyebrows. She said, “Can we talk?”
Talk. Talk was never good, but he was fine with her bribe. “Why not?”
Winters looked back at the house. “Inside, if you don’t mind.”
Years ago now, but not long after he’d been freed from his centuries-long enslavement to the mage Magellan, Kynan had pulled memories of her from her best friend’s head—memories that had not been willingly given. At the time, he’d been more or less insane. The rules hadn’t been in place then, and he’d found her and fooled her long enough for them to end up naked and pretending, for a while, that they were both normal. That encounter had ended with him forging bonds between them that would enhance the sex, and her pain, and his ability to make both those things last.
Kynan had made his own mistakes that night. Every one of them began and ended with underestimating her. She hadn’t died, but the bonds he’d made, incomplete though they were, remained to this day. By now those bonds, having never been intended to last beyond a day or two, had developed a reality of their own. Practically sentient. They resented their unfinished state.
He and Winters ended up in the first floor office kept open for anyone to use. He took the couch, expecting she’d want the desk or maybe the chair, but instead she sat beside him. Not close, but not far from him, either. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked.
She opened the Macallan, poured them both a drink, then handed out shortbread. “I’ll wait until you’re in a better mood if you don’t mind.”
“I’m never in a better mood.” He didn’t usually see her in a tank top like that. The cotton clung to her, and he struggled to keep his appreciation of her curves from getting in the way of a clear head. Maddy Winters was wicked smart, and she knew things about him no one else knew. She was also one of the most powerful witches he’d ever encountered. Maybe even the most powerful.
Winters lifted her glass. “To fighting the good fight.”
He laughed and tipped his whisky toward hers. “Sure. I’ll drink to that.” Considering how much time Nikodemus’s inner circle spent together, fought together, and partied together, and especially considering everything he and Winters had been through, he actually didn’t know her all that well. Most of the time when they were alone together, they were fucked-up. He sipped his drink. “That is damn fine.”
“It is.” She curled her legs on the couch and faced him, but he didn’t look at her. She wasn’t looking at him. She broke a piece of shortbread and ate one of the fragments.
He stayed on his side of the couch but gave her a sidelong look. “Is the whole bottle for me?”
“Yours to keep.”
“Generous.” He drained his entire glass and shook his head hard. “Damn.” He poured himself another. He shouldn’t have knocked back whisky that fine so fast. This one he would savor. Whatever she was after, it wasn’t chitchat. “Let’s get to it. What do you want, Winters?”
She scratched the back of her head. Stared at the couch. Stared at her glass. Played with one of the rhinestone butterflies on her sandals. Basically, she was looking anywhere but at him. She had a great deal of power on hand, and that made her dangerous to someone like him. And alluring. Because she was a witch, and he was a demon, and there had always been an affinity between their kind. Sex with her was mind-blowing when it happened. “I’ve been thinking.”
“About?” There wasn’t enough Macallan in the world to get him through this.
“Us.” She reached for his hand, and he allowed the contact. There wasn’t a way for them to be more screwed up. The day he found her, he’d been teetering on the edge of functional for weeks. Everyone, including him, knew it was possible Nikodemus might have no choice but to have him killed. He’d been unstable and no good at following the rules Nikodemus was putting in place.
“What about us?” He didn’t like the direction this conversation was going. There was no them. Not in any normal sense of the word.
“My point exactly.”
He had no idea what she was thinking. At no time during their initial, disastrous, encounter had he managed to take control of her will or get full access to her mind the way he had her friend’s. He didn’t know about her family or whether she had siblings or whether her parents were still alive. Nobody who knew her seemed to know those things. If they did, they weren’t talking. All he knew was that she was from a California Indian tribe, was a lawyer, and had been working with street witches and mages for a very long time. Long before she met Nikodemus. Or him.
She ate more shortbread. “Maybe there should be an us.”
He saw her fingers flex on the glass she held. She smelled good, she always looked good, and right now that white tank top with all her beautiful black hair? She was smoking hot. She had so much magic that there was always a buzz with her. Between them. There was no way this was going where he hoped. They had sex when things were going to hell between them. Just once, he’d like to bone her when at least one of them wasn’t in some level of crisis. “I have things to do, Winters. Can we hurry this up?”
She curled in on herself, like he’d hurt her feelings. That wasn’t possible. Maddy Winters didn’t have personal, private feelings, except when she hated him. “I just meant we should talk more. We work together a lot.” She shook her head, still without looking at him. “Don’t you think it’s strange how little we know each other?”
“What are we going to talk about? The weather?” That little flinch of hers kept him from standing up and walking out. He didn’t want her to be unhappy, but he didn’t see what he could do to prevent it. Especially since he didn’t want to talk.
“I don’t know. Anything. We can discuss what’s going on with the mages.” She was going to break that glass, she kept squeezing it so hard. “I agree with Harsh.” Her words sounded normal, but there was tension in her shoulders.
“If you want to talk, you could at least look at me.”
She did, but it didn’t help a thing. Not even when she smiled, because he knew it was fake. “The Polynesians are causing trouble again.”
“Aren’t they always?” Things went on like this for some time. An awkward stumbling conversation because they never talked unless they had to. For good reason. Maybe they were just hot in bed and that was all. Maybe everything that went on in a normal relationship would be like this. Fucking painful.
Her voice sounded forced to him, but he wasn’t all that good at reading Winters. He did okay with other magekind and humans, but not her. “We should have dinner,” she said.
The air was getting colder. Thicker.
He glanced at the wall clock. Humans were the only reason he ever looked at a clock. They cared about the time. He didn’t. “It’s almost two in the morning.”
“I didn’t mean now.�
� She ran her hands through her hair, and he tried not to stare. She looked at him. One glance and, okay. There was something going on here that he didn’t get. “I meant generally. You know. The way normal people do when they know each other.”
“Right.”
She met his gaze. Her cheeks flushed.
“Come on, Winters. Just say what you came here to say.”
“I think we should have sex.”
He kept his cool. Barely.
“Sex that doesn’t happen because we’re messed-up. Normal sex.”
“Normal sex.”
“Yes.”
He took another long drink of whisky. “Don’t you have girlfriends to talk you out of bad ideas?”
She heaved a sigh as she dropped her head on the arm she’d stretched out along the top of the couch, and he suppressed the urge to touch her and tell her everything was going to be all right. If he did, it would be a lie. They would never be all right. “This was their idea. I told them it wouldn’t work.”
He considered letting this play out in whatever way she had stuck in her head, but that idea only lasted a few seconds. He put down his glass. He and Winters did not have the kind of relationship where talking would do anything but make things worse. He should’ve left the minute he saw her flinch. Then she’d have kept hating him in general instead of hating him specifically for this train wreck. “We have had sex. More than once. So what the do you mean, we should have sex?”
She looked at him through the veil of her eyelashes. “Not sex sex.”
Times like this, he wished Nikodemus wasn’t so big on integration with humans. “I don’t even know what you mean by that.”
She squared her shoulders, and he braced himself for something monumentally stupid. Which he got. She was so exactly what he liked. Strong and beautiful, immensely powerful. “I think we should make love.”
Dead Drop Page 14