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Sajia thanked him and turned away from the counter just as a man entered the shop. At the sight of him her heart flip-flopped in her chest, seeming to stop and then race forward in wild abandon, torn between fear and desire.
He was mesmerizing. The face of a god—
Or a fallen angel like those painted on canvas, created in the imaginations of artists who’d lived well before mankind developed the technology to destroy the world.
Black hair and equally black irises. Carved perfection and carnal sin.
She wet her lips without being aware of it until his gaze dropped to them, hungry and fierce and commanding.
“Sajia,” he said, her name turned into a caress, into images of naked bodies stretched out on silky sheets, lips and hands exploring without inhibition, mesmerizing her until she forced the erotic pictures from her mind.
How he knew her name, she didn’t know. But unless he’d been sent by The Master to assist her, she had no time for him.
He blocked her exit, leaving her no choice other than to approach him. Sajia stepped forward, fear and desire both trying to cloud her thoughts and narrow her reality until it contained only him.
The rush of emotion nearly drove Addai to his knees. Thousands of years hadn’t prepared him for the reality of this moment.
Sajia. It was as though she’d stepped out of the past, her form and face exactly as he remembered them, her soul calling to his in haunting song and the promise of ecstasy.
H
ow the Djinn had managed it, he didn’t know and didn’t care. All that mattered was that she’d been returned to him.
Despite his fantasies of their first meeting, he felt no disappointment at the quick pass of fear from her eyes. The desire he saw in her expression, and sensed like a heated stroke along the length of his body, more than satisfied him.
His thoughts flashed ahead, mentally enfolding her in arms and wings and willing them to the mountain home he’d prepared for her. He reached out, expecting her to take his hand. “Come.”
Denial flashed through her eyes, exciting him until fantasy and reality collided with a single question. “Did The Master send you?”
A blink. A full opening of his senses and Addai recoiled in horror. She was human. Worse if the purposeful scarring of her arm read true. A servant bound to vampires.
Rage whipped through him at the betrayal—the same black abyss of fury that had once led him to send his brother into a slavery lasting thousands of years. And yet even in his fury, desire overrode revulsion and the call of her spirit to his had him grabbing her bare wrist and jerking her closer.
She reacted instantly, drawing a knife he hadn’t bothered noting and pressing it to his belly as if she’d gut him where he stood. His cock responded with a hard throb. His body accepting, craving her even as his mind rebelled.
The blade tip slid through the thin shirt he’d willed into existence, breaking skin. And the release of his blood undid a masking spell, revealed the ice blue sigils scrawled across her forehead like a thorn crown, and around her wrists like manacles. Angelic symbols of binding not visible to any mortal. A script placed there by one of his kind, the power necessary to turn flesh into a living prison the telltale signature of only one ally working with the Djinn.
Addai’s heart sang. She wasn’t human as he’d thought seconds before, but Djinn trapped in a human form, returned to him as promised.
His eyes noted it then, the thin, tight chain worn around her neck like a collar. Sigils etched into the gold and holding knowledge he could only guess at, the pendant, scorpion shaped. The mark of her Djinn House and symbol of a protector. The identification of her soul’s nature.
“Release me,” she said.
Never. But he held the words and complied only so he could better take her measure.
“Did The Master send you?” she asked again.
He fought the pulling back of his lips in a savage smile promising retribution. She would call no one else master. Only him.
Addai glanced at the scarring on her arm and recognized the sigil as a farmer recognizes a dung beetle before stepping on it. Tucci.
Not allies.
Yet, the voice of reason managing to suppress his urge to kill.
If he was to achieve his goal, seeing the return of the Djinn and the control of this world taken so he could live openly with Sajia and know their children would be safe, then he couldn’t afford war on another front, especially with vampires.
Addai suppressed a curse as the message delivered by Irial, the reminder from Iyar en Batrael that all things were part of the weave, took on new meaning.
