by Olivia Waite
Happily Ever Afterlives
Olivia Waite
Also by Olivia Waite
The Best Worst Holiday Party Ever
Generous Fire
Hearts and Harbingers
Happily Ever Afterlives
Copyright © 2016 Olivia Waite
ISBN 9780997333220
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the author.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Damned If You Do
* * * * *
Chapter One
Hell, 1815
Idared was trained in the use of all the torture implements proper to a demoness of her rank, but with the whip she was an artist of unparalleled caliber. She favored a long black leather bullwhip, lovingly oiled and finished with a cracker made of her own jet-black hair. With this, she could kiss the earlobe of a damned soul standing twenty paces behind her, eyes closed. She could also land a blow that would rend flesh from chin to chestnuts on a body in front of her. The mere sight of her lithe arm with its dusky olive-green skin drawn back in preparation for a strike had been known to make hardened, centuries-dead souls weep with childish despair.
Now, whip coiled and docile in her hand, she stood before her latest assignment. Until today all her work had been practiced upon groups, most often the spirits of former pirates and roving thieves who quite naturally came down to Hell in bunches. The vicious earthly wars of the past decade had swelled the hosts of the damned even more, so there were advancement opportunities for ambitious demons at every level. Hard work and dedication had paid off: Idared’s rank had recently been raised from Great Marshal to Knight, a rare and coveted promotion that separated the undistinguished, lesser demons from those with greater glories in their future. Henceforward, she was expected to devote her days to the punishment of one notably wayward soul.
“You are Benjamin Davis?” she asked the damned man standing before her.
“Lord Lambourne,” he corrected her. He certainly seemed aristocratic enough, with his inflexible bearing and the merest hint of an arrogant smile. He was completely naked, as were all the damned and every Hellish inhabitant beneath the rank of Princes. But somehow this particular man looked more than simply naked—he seemed especially naked, naked in a way that rebounded back and reminded the demoness that her own body was just as bared to his sight. Maybe it was his broad shoulders and brawny arms or his sturdy chest and powerful thighs. Maybe it was the knowing gleam in his eye, the unmissable beauty of his hands, the way that a smirk still played at the corner of a pair of lips that God’s own angels would have envied.
In short, Lambourne was beginning to drive Idared to distraction.
She let her eyes fall again to the scroll in her hand. “It says here that you were damned for the sin of lust,” she said.
“Primarily for lust,” said Lambourne. “With just a soupçon of murder.”
“Murder?” Idared frowned. There was nothing about that on the dossier.
He inclined his head, a humble motion, the sincerity of which Idared instinctively doubted. “I may have only taken part in a single battle, but seven men went down to their death by my hand.”
“Ah,” brightened Idared, realizing the man’s error. “Battle deaths aren’t counted as murder.”
He blinked. “But surely they count as sins?” His gaze turned hard and a muscle jumped in that chiseled jaw of his. “I assure you, the things I saw men do on that battlefield trump anything I’ve seen here in Hell.”
“And no doubt those men will have those acts tallied in their debit,” Idared explained, “but even in Hell, you will not be punished for killing in self-defense. If you’d killed innocents, it would have been marked down, but it seems the brevity of your time as a soldier prevented you from attaining the full corruption possible in warfare. Such cases are few indeed,” she admitted. “We tend to err on the side of assuming more sin rather than less.”
“Oh.” Lambourne appeared surprised. “Perhaps, then, consigning me to Hell was a mistake?”
“With this much lust in your past?” Idared pursed her lips at that section of the scroll, which was unusually extensive. She couldn’t imagine where he would have found the time to set foot in a church, much less confess. “Did you ever repent?”
“Hardly,” he said at once. “Wait. If I say I repent, will I be released?” Idared shook her head. “Then no, I don’t. No point really.” He shrugged.
It was the shrug that did it, all those lovely muscles moving under all that lovely skin, making her mouth water and her blood heat. Idared was not supposed to be the one in torment. It was time to reassert her authority. “Let us begin your endless punishment,” she declared.
With a powerful snap, her batlike wings unfurled and she leapt into the air. One beat of those wings kept her suspended long enough to bring her arm forward and last the bullwhip around one of his ankles. Another beat sent her driving upward, her momentum and inhuman strength pulling Lambourne off his feet to bob though the air behind her. His inarticulate cry of terror delighted her as she climbed ever higher above the warm-winded, lava-laced, volcanic plains of Hell.
This was the tricky bit—she had to fly fast enough to make sure the friction on the whip kept it tight around his leg, or else he would fall. Of course, any injuries he sustained would heal—eventually—but simply picking him up and letting him go lacked a certain flair. Lambourne had already impressed Idared as the type of man for whom style was at least as vital as substance, so if she wanted her lesson to stick, she would have to make it dramatic. She powered upward on a helpful thermal, her tail extending behind her for balance, and arrowed homeward.
It was only a minute or so later that she spotted the distinctive circular crater with its small house and off-center bubbling pool, a luxury to which her new rank entitled her. She plunged downward, Lambourne still trailing behind her like the naked, flailing tail of a sinister comet.
Thirty or so feet above the ground, she tilted her wings up and came to an abrupt halt in midair. Lambourne kept traveling, still held by the whip, arcing first down to almost scrape the rough ground with his aristocratic nose and then curving up, up, and up a little more. As he reached the nadir of the curve, Idared moved forward just enough that the whip loosened and slipped free of his ankle. For one brief instant, his nude lordship was poised, unsupported, above the crimson plains of Hell. A swift motion of Idared’s arm and the crack of the whip—the leather wound around Lambourne’s wrist as he plunged earthward with a very undignified shriek.
Idared’s grip tightened and the leather stretched, but she had judged her distances perfectly. Lambourne’s feet touched the ground with all the force and violence of a timid virgin’s first kiss.
The demoness dropped to the earth beside him with a smile. His lordship’s eyes were still closed and his face was more than a little green. Before he could take in the fact that his body was still in one piece and not smashed to bits on the ground, she had chained both his hands above his head to the gallows-like spar of rock in the crater’s center.
Lambourne opened his eyes as the second heavy manacle clicked into place. The smirk had vanished and his expression at present was a gratifying mixture of reverence and panic. He tugged frantically at his wrists but the chains held firm. Idared grinned at him as her wings furled and her tail wound around her waist and then disappeared— they tended to g
et in the way when she wasn’t in flight, so she normally kept them tastefully hidden in a pocket dimension. With Lambourne’s arms pinioned above him like this and the rock spar a good three feet from his body, her whip could reach any part of his anatomy that she deemed fit to strike.
She winked at him.
His mouth thinned mulishly.
Idared then proceeded to get singularly carried away.
In theory the torments of Hell were perpetual, but in practice they happened in twelve-hour shifts, with a further twelve hours between for the supernatural healing and mending of the damned. This was so the souls might be revitalized and prepared to bear the full weight of the next day’s castigations—and so the demons who punished them could also rest and regain their strength. By the time the distant rumble and brief flare of light from Mount Seek-no-further signaled the end of the infernal day, the demoness’s whip had picked out the image of Lambourne’s inner skeleton in angry red marks on his golden skin. A thick red strike traced the length of his strong thighbone, slashes marked the locations of his broad ribs and his long fingers bore a series of delicate, painful, anatomically precise wounds.
The whole time, Lambourne had uttered not a sound.
The cries she’d startled out of him earlier had been a rare lapse, it seemed, but the challenge had only spurred her talent to new heights. Faced with his stubborn muteness and the strength and perfection of his body, Idared quite simply had been unable to help herself—it was like offering Michelangelo a perfect block of untouched marble, or taking Turner for a casual walk by the bay at sunset.
These tortures were more than he had earned.
It was, therefore, with a slight air of apology that she began smearing the customary healing ointment onto her charge’s wounds, while the volcanic twilight glinted on the gleaming blades and twisty spikes that Idared neglected in favor of her whip. Lambourne grimaced briefly—the ointment itched like…well, like Hell—and leaned on one hand against one of the stone walls inside Idared’s home. The chains around his ankles clinked gently as he shifted.
“There’s something I’ve been wondering,” he said. “How is it that I can have a body for you to wound? Wasn’t my physical form abandoned when I died?”
“It was,” Idared replied. “This is your metaphysical form, which has solidity because Hell itself is more metaphysical than physical.” She passed her hand over the muscles of his shoulder, secretly enjoying the strength and steel beneath her palm, the glide of the ointment between his skin and hers. “Is it much different from your old body?”
“Not noticeably,” said Lambourne. The angry red whip marks on his back were already fading into smooth skin. The last of them vanished as he stretched and flexed.
He turned around and caught her staring.
Idared flushed at his sly grin and busied herself by putting away the salve and straightening the bedclothes on her small sleeping pallet. When she finally glanced back at him, he was sitting there with arms folded, watching her movements. “Does that mean you are metaphysical as well?” he asked.
“Mostly,” admitted Idared. “I can control my own shape and size, to a certain degree.” To demonstrate, she unfurled her wings and tail, then made them vanish again. Lambourne blinked in surprise as she continued speaking. “And, like many demons, there have been times when some sorcerer summoned me to the mortal world. Once there, I took on a physical form, albeit one that is not subject to your human weaknesses of age and death.”
And now Lambourne’s smile turned impudent, his stare bold and irksome. “And what exactly did you do with that physical form?”
The lurid suggestion beneath his words pushed her over the edge. She struck in the blink of an eye, pulling a long dagger from the wall and taking him down to the floor in one seamless motion. Her strength and the manacles held him prisoner while she set the blade’s edge against the pulse hammering in the base of his throat. Lambourne gaped, stunned, and Idared leaned forward and with careful enunciation answered his question. “In my physical form? I wreaked havoc.”
He trembled beneath her. She was pleased to see the signs of revived fear in his quickened breath and whitened eyes. But she was also pleased that he did not cower or look away. She did not need him terrified—though she wanted him wary. It would be easier to keep her distance if she forced him to keep his.
She rose casually to her feet as Lambourne stayed prone. Satisfied, Idared put the dagger back in its place and slid into bed. Lambourne’s breathing remained harsh and hurried even after total darkness claimed the house.
Eventually, they both fell asleep amid the whispery, slithering sound of the night patrols enforcing Hell’s quarantine, the damned lord on the harsh dirt floor and Idared on her comparatively luxurious pallet.
The next day Idared amused herself by playing games of noughts and crosses— each mark a slash of her whip—on Lambourne’s newly healed skin. She even compelled him to join in on the last game, played last across the whole of his expansive chest. Surprisingly, he won.
The third day, in a truly diabolical move, she refused to break his skin. Instead, she used the most agile and delicate strokes of her whip to tickle him, unmercifully and into unconsciousness, over and over.
“You are astounding,” Lambourne gasped at the end of that day, exhausted and sitting slumped against the wall for support.
“Hmm?” the demoness responded. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground, carefully replacing the cracker of her whip, which tended to bear the brunt of the instrument’s wear and tear.
Lambourne continued unabated. “I’ve been in Hell for, good Lord—”
Idared flinched.
“Over a year now, yet I’ve never had someone torture me quite like this before.”
“It’s all within the prescribed boundaries of your damnation,” Idared hastened to assure him.
He nodded his head. “I’m sure it is. It’s not the level of pain that astonishes me. There was one demon, Alfriston, who was much more interested in causing pain than you are. But he was very crude about it—it was all red-hot irons and spikes up the fingernails, blunt objects, things any idiot could think of. Things that make the mind go totally blank and wipe out any thought or memory. And maybe that’s what Hell is supposed to do. But with you...” His angelic mouth quirked, as though he were tasting something he liked. “The body is tortured but the mind is engaged. One is never able to forget that one has earned every stroke, every lash. Every time that whip sears across my body, it seems connected to one of the millions of kisses or caresses that got me damned in the first place. It feels...intimate. I wonder how you do it.”
Idared, to her dismay, blushed a slightly darker shade of green. It was rare that she received compliments on her craftsmanship—and rarer still for one to come from the victim.
His eyes flicked to her mouth and back up. “Is it possible to sin while in Hell?” Lambourne asked.
She stared at him as desire stirred to wakefulness inside her. He still bore that tiny, seductive smile, and his languorous posture emphasized the length of his legs and the elegant lines of his naked body.
He smiled to see her looking at him. “How are new demons made?” he asked in the same tone.
“In the usual way,” she replied, glancing at his mouth despite her wiser judgment.
Those lips tilted in amusement. “Hmm.” His gaze swept her body and, for the first time in her life, Idared felt the shame of nakedness. It was mostly—but not entirely—unpleasant. There was a novel sense of risk to it, a danger that called to her reckless side—but she could not afford to be anything less than perfectly in control, or this man would certainly take who knows what kind of advantage and jeopardize her future in Hell’s competitive hierarchy. Deliberately, she turned her back to him.
This was a mistake.
The next time Lambourne spoke, she found he’d moved so close that his breath feathered the back of her neck. “Sometimes I wonder if my true sin was not lust, but curiosity,”
he murmured, making Idared shiver. “For instance—what does it feel like when I do this?”
He pressed his lips to the back of her neck.
Idared shivered again. His mouth was hot and softer than she would have thought. It would be so easy to give in to him. It had been so long since she’d been touched...
“Have you ever been kissed before?” he asked.
She whirled to face him, furious that he thought her reluctance was the result of mere inexperience, but before she could muster a retort he had slid one hand into her hair and then his mouth was opening hers.
Hellfire was chilly in comparison.
His thumb caressed the same spot on the back of her neck that his lips had touched, while his mouth demanded her surrender. Idared allowed herself one brief instant to bask in the sheer pleasure of him. Then she put one hand on his chest and, with all her preternatural strength, flung him back into the rough stone wall.
She thought he might have cracked a rib, from the shallow way he was breathing. He never took his eyes from her mouth, although he scowled fiercely.
“You are not to lay another hand on me,” Idared hissed. “I am not an instrument for your enjoyment.”
Lambourne’s gaze flicked down to her body and up again before he ghosted up a smile. “Again, my lady, you astound me. This is torture like I never dreamed existed.”
Idared took far too long to fall asleep that night. She was charged with lust’s punishment, not its satisfaction—and she certainly was not supposed to suffer it herself.
For a place so devoted to justice, Hell could be monstrously unfair.
Due both to the demoness’s anger at herself and her charge, as well as her ill temper at a night without rest, the next day’s torment was the most intense yet. Idared thought it only appropriate, as well as satisfying, to take her irritation out on the man who was responsible for it. Soon his back bore an image of wings very like Idared’s own, picked out in his own red blood.