Chapter five.

Mira found me on the back stairs the next morning, a tray balanced in both hands, steam still rising off the cup on it.

"You look terrible," she said, setting it down beside me.

"Thank you."

"Eat first. We'll talk after."

I ate while she waited, patient in a way nobody else in that house had ever been with me. When I finished, she sat down on the step below mine and folded her hands over her knees.

"Seraphine has people watching you now," she said. "I heard her tell one of the guards this morning. She wants to know everything. What you eat. How you walk. Who you talk to."

"I heard her say something like that a few nights ago too."

"Then you already know you can't keep going through the front gate."

"You know another way in."

"I work here, Amanda. I know every way in and out of this estate that isn't on any map they gave the staff." She said it lightly, but her eyes stayed on the garden wall a second too long when she said it, like she was checking something that wasn't there anymore.

"How does a servant girl know this house better than the family that owns it?"

She didn't answer right away. Something passed behind her eyes, careful, considering.

"I wasn't always a servant," she said finally. "Before I came here, I lived somewhere else. With people who weren't kind to me. I got out. Lucifer let me stay, on the condition I kept my mouth shut about where I came from." She glanced at me. "The mark on your collarbone. Don't let anyone else see it before you understand what it is."

I went still. "I never told you about the mark."

"No," she said. "You didn't."

She stood, picked up the empty tray, and left before I could ask her how she knew.

That night I used her route, a narrow door behind the kitchen gardens, a hallway I had never walked before, coming out one floor below his room. I climbed the last set of stairs with my shoes in my hand.

I stopped outside his door.

My hand hovered over the handle.

I had told myself I was choosing this. But my hands were shaking, and that was the part I didn't want to admit. I wasn't afraid because he'd threatened me. He hadn't, not tonight. I was afraid because I didn't understand why I kept coming back, why my feet carried me here on nights I told myself I wouldn't come at all. I was afraid that whatever pulled me toward this door wasn't entirely mine to choose.

And worse. I was afraid that if he opened it and told me to leave, some part of me would be relieved, and a bigger part of me would be hurt.

I took a breath and knocked.

He was already at the window when I stepped inside, one shoulder against the frame, a glass of something dark turning slowly in his hand.

"You took the servant's route," he said, without turning around.

"How did you know?"

"I know every sound this house makes. It's mine, every wall of it, every board that shifts under a foot that shouldn't be on it." He turned then, and his mouth curved, slow, nothing warm in it yet. "I like a woman who learns to disappear."

"I'm not trying to be liked."

"No," he agreed, crossing the room toward me. "That's exactly what makes it interesting."

He stopped close, tilted his head, studying me the way he always did, like I was a page he kept rereading and still hadn't finished.

"Your sister has you followed," he said.

"You know about that too."

"I know everything that happens on this ground." His eyes moved over my face, unhurried. "And still you keep coming back to this room."

"I don't have much choice."

"Don't lie to me in my own house." He reached out and caught a strand of white hair between two fingers. "You have a choice every time you cross that gate. You choose this."

I didn't answer.

"Say it," he said, and his voice had gone lower, gentler, which somehow made it harder to hold his eyes than the coldness ever had.

"I choose it," I said.

His shoulders dropped a fraction, as if he'd been holding a breath since I walked in and had only now let himself release it.

He reached for me then, unhurried, and this time there was no order in it, only a question I answered with my hands finding the front of his shirt instead of pulling away.

His fingers slid into my hair and pulled my face up to his. His mouth covered mine, hard and sure. I opened for him at once. His tongue pushed in, tasting me, claiming the space inside my mouth. I pressed closer, my hands flat on his chest, feeling the solid muscle under the fabric.

He walked me backward until the backs of my legs hit the edge of the bed. He did not stop kissing me. One of his hands left my hair and went to the buttons of my dress. He opened them one by one, slow, never breaking the kiss. When the last button came free, he pushed the dress off my shoulders. It fell to the floor around my feet. I stood in front of him in only my thin underthings.

He stepped back just enough to look at me. His eyes moved over my bare shoulders, the mark on my collarbone, the rise of my breasts under the soft cloth. He reached out and slid the straps down my arms. The fabric dropped. Cool air touched my skin. My nipples tightened.

Lucifer made a low sound in his throat. He put both hands on my waist and lifted me onto the bed. I lay back. He came over me, still fully dressed, and kissed the side of my neck. His mouth moved lower. He took one nipple between his lips and sucked. Heat shot straight down between my legs. I arched up into him. He sucked harder, then moved to the other breast and did the same. His hand slid down my stomach and under the last piece of cloth covering me. His fingers found the wet place between my thighs and stroked once, slow and firm.

I made a soft sound. He lifted his head and looked at my face while his fingers kept moving, sliding through the slick heat, pressing against the small swollen spot that made my hips lift.

"You are already wet for me," he said. His voice was quiet, almost rough. "Say that you want this."

"I want this," I answered. My voice shook.

He pulled the last bit of cloth down my legs and threw it aside. Then he stood and undressed. I watched every movement. Shirt first, then trousers. His body was hard and marked in places I had not seen before. When he was naked he came back to the bed and settled between my open thighs.

He took himself in his hand and rubbed the thick head of his cock against my entrance. I was so wet that he slid in an inch with almost no pressure. He stopped there, looking down at me.

"Look at me," he said.

I did. He pushed forward in one long, steady thrust until he was buried deep inside me. The stretch burned for a second, then turned into pure fullness. I gasped. My hands gripped his shoulders.

He held still for a moment, letting me feel every inch of him. Then he began to move. Slow at first, deep strokes that pulled almost all the way out before sliding back in to the root. Each thrust dragged against that sensitive place inside me. Pleasure built fast. I wrapped my legs around his waist and met every push with my hips.

His breathing grew heavier. He lowered his mouth to mine again and kissed me while he fucked me harder. The bed shifted under us. The sound of skin meeting skin filled the quiet room. I could feel myself tightening around him. My nails dug into his back.

"Lucifer—"

"I know," he said against my mouth. "Come for me."

His hand slipped between our bodies and pressed on my clit in tight circles. That was all it took. The pleasure broke open. My whole body clenched hard around his cock. I cried out into his mouth as the waves rolled through me. He kept thrusting through it, deep and steady, until my legs shook.

When the last tremor left me he pulled out, flipped me onto my stomach, and entered me again from behind in one smooth push. The new angle made him feel even thicker. He gripped my hips and drove into me hard and fast. I buried my face in the sheets and moaned with every thrust. He reached under me and found my clit again, rubbing it while he fucked me. Another climax rose almost at once. I came a second time, tighter, sharper, my body locking around him.

Lucifer groaned low in his chest. His rhythm broke. He slammed deep one last time and held there, pulsing inside me as he finished. Hot wetness filled me. He stayed buried for several long breaths, his forehead pressed to the back of my shoulder, his weight heavy and warm along my spine.

Only then did he ease out and roll to the side. I lay with my back to him, staring at the dark red wall, at the symbol near the ceiling I still had no name for.

"What happens when Seraphine finds out you knew all along," I said.

"She'll find out when it's useful for her to find out." His fingers traced a slow line down my spine. "Not before."

"That's cruel."

"I'm not a kind man, Amanda." He pressed his mouth briefly to my shoulder. "I haven't decided what I am when I'm with you. That should worry you more than anything else I've done."

I turned to look at him. "Is that a warning?"

"It's the truth," he said. "I don't give many of those."

We lay there a long while without speaking, the kind of quiet that didn't need filling. I let my eyes drift toward the window, toward the dark shapes of the trees beyond it, and that was when I saw him.

A man, standing at the edge of the garden wall, still as a photograph, watching the house.

"There's someone outside," I said, sitting up.

Lucifer was already moving before I finished the sentence, crossing to the window, his whole body going tense in a way I hadn't seen from him before.

"That's Kael," he said. "He wouldn't be standing there unless something was wrong."

"Who's Kael?"

"Someone who works for me. Someone who doesn't stand in the open like that unless he wants to be seen." He turned from the window, already reaching for his shirt. "Stay here."

"Lucifer."

"Stay here, Amanda. I mean it."

He was gone before I could argue, moving fast down the hallway, and I sat there in the half dark with my heart going hard in my chest, listening to a house that had suddenly gone very quiet.

I didn't stay. I know he told me to. I got up anyway, pulled my dress back over my head, and went to the window myself.

The man was still there, at the edge of the wall, but he wasn't alone anymore. Lucifer stood in front of him now, close, speaking too low for me to hear. Whatever the man was telling him made Lucifer go rigid in a way I had never seen, not even the night the black smoke found me in that bedroom.

Then Lucifer turned and looked up, straight at the window, straight at me, and even from that distance I could see something in his face that hadn't been there an hour ago.

Fear.

The door behind me opened without a knock.

Seraphine stood in the frame, still in her coat, chest rising and falling like she'd run the whole way up.

Her eyes went to the state of the bed, to my white hair, to the window I was standing at.

"You," she said, and her voice cracked in a way I had never heard from her before. "Do you have any idea what you've done?"