CHAPTER TWELVE

Avis wasn’t certain how much time had passed before he woke up, but he didn’t think it could have been too long. For starters, he wasn’t hungry and a quick hand movement to his left told him Clarise still had yet to return, so it wasn’t nightfall. Her side of the bed was still made up. Or maybe she’d come back and left again.

That dark thought crept in from nowhere, and once in his head, it took up permanent residency. Maybe he’d been out a lot longer than he thought. He remembered Frash’s dirty knockout trick and immediately lifted his arms to stare at the faint pair of red marks on the insides of his wrists. He’d been bitten by enough things over the years to recognise a pair of matching fang marks when he saw them. Bitch poisoned me!

Gnashing his teeth together in a snarl, he slammed his clenched fists into the mattress on either side of his body. Oh, she was going to pay for that. He rolled to one side and surged to his feet with every intention of hunting her down. But the room spun the moment he was upright, and his knees suddenly gave way, crashing him back onto the edge of the bed.

One hand shot out for the bedpost on his right. The other clung to the mattress. He bowed his head and closed his eyes, willing the nausea that bombarded him to leave. This didn’t make sense. He’d done the Walk. He should have been back to full health, yet he didn’t even have the strength to stand.

When he opened his eyes, the furnishings of the room held their positions. The floor stayed under his feet and the mats didn’t move. The pounding in his head subsided to a moderate rumble and he breathed out a small sigh. Okay, he conceded, twisting on his backside and lifting his feet off the floor.

Maybe he wasn’t up to charging through Hell with murder on his mind. But what he couldn’t understand was why not. Maybe it was a side effect of the poison. Avis rubbed the marks on his wrists again, wanting very much to believe that so he could add it to Frash’s list of crimes against him, but the reality just didn’t match. Frash was Clarise’s servant, and he knew his beloved wife would never hurt him. Whatever was going on with him, they had nothing to do with it.

He needed answers. He also needed to find his wife. He had yet to convince her to come with him when he and Cora left, and he needed to do it before any of her family could get to her first.

As he wondered how in the realm he was going to do this, both Frash and Tilu appeared in the doorway. He made no acknowledgement of them, but as soon as they knew he’d seen them, the pair bowed and came forward, separating at the foot of the bed in a fluid flanking motion. Avis sank back into the mattress and curled his lip in repulsion, his dirty scowl shifting from one to the other like a cornered animal as they approached him.

Unperturbed by his surliness, one lifted his shoulders while the other fluffed his pillows. Then they both worked in unison to straighten the sheets across his body and tucked the edges under the mattress. “Until you have fully recovered, Milord, you must abide by Lady Clarise’s decisions regarding your well-being,” Frash explained as Tilu silently bowed and withdrew from the room.

Avis bit the inside of his cheek to avoid cursing as darkly as he was thinking. Who in the realm did they think they were, telling him how it was going to be? He was the one to tell them! That was the natural order of …

He caught himself as it occurred to him they were exactly what he needed to get out of here and find Clarise. Not that they would be willing participants and they may very well be punished afterwards, but a seclusion ring only protected them from his bending. There were plenty of other mind games he could play. Avis just had to think outside the box, and he knew exactly how to do it.

As a child, he’d been forced to learn the art of verbal trickery. Everyone feared his father, but the right turn of phrase backed up by a moderately sincere expression had their adoring mother stepping in on occasion to protect him from that bastard. Not all the time, but often enough that he and Amaro could plan and eventually execute their escape from the Nexus.

Despite the immense passage of time, manipulating someone with word games when all else failed was something he’d never really forgotten how to do. The trick was to make the changes too subtle for the target to notice. A word here and there until things were aligned the way he wanted.

Chance, the youngest of his brothers, was by far the most competent player of this game—but Avis was not without his own level of capability in the matter and these two were … female.

First things first. Learn the existing parameters.

Avis waited until Frash left his bedside before he relaxed the muscles in his face and removed all hints of frustrated tension from his neck and shoulders. He had to make it look as if his mood swing was because of the breathing space he’d been afforded and not because he was up to something.

Both women returned a few moments later; Frash with a platter of diced fruit pieces while Tilu carried a goblet of chilled fruit juice for him. The sight of the meagre meal caused bile to creep into the back of his throat and a muscle to jump along his jaw.

For nearly two days he’d eaten nothing but fucking fruit cubes and he was really growing sick of them. How in the realms was he supposed to be getting his strength back, if all he was fed was stupid fruit cubes? They could at least bring him some ambrosia laced fruit juice. Then he’d be too drunk to care.

He suddenly shut down that train of thought hard, not wanting to travel down memory lane to the last time he’d been at the point of too drunk. He never wanted to go there again. Focusing instead on the plan, he breathed through his frustration and forced himself into a state of outer calm.

He accepted the goblet and took a tentative sip under their watchful gaze, ignoring the way they were ready to pounce if he appeared to be under any strain. His head dipped in appreciation of the sweetness, but behind those dark eyes, his mind was working overtime.

Frash knelt at his side and held out a forkful of watermelon pieces which he ate, showing just enough petulance at their nannying to be believable. If he lost all of his bad attitude, they’d be suspicious. He continued to look between the two sisters, trying to ascertain which of the pair was the weaker link. He settled on Tilu.

She’d hardly said a word in two days and almost always took her cues from Frash. Taking another sip from the goblet, he met Tilu’s eyes and sent her a soft smile that Frash wouldn’t notice. “I know you’re both only following orders,” he said, though the fake sincerity tasted like acid on the back of his throat. “So, perhaps things would go more smoothly between us all if I knew what my wife’s instructions on my recovery were …”

Tilu looked at Frash.

“The Lady Clarise wishes you a speedy recovery, Milord,” Frash replied, on behalf of her sister.

It almost killed Avis not to show any of the inner rage he felt at the woman’s interference, but he took solace in the fact his instincts hadn’t let him down. Tilu was indeed the weaker of the two. “I appreciate that,” he purred, allowing Frash to feed him another forkful of fruit pieces though his eyes remained on Tilu.

After he swallowed the pulp, he added, “… but surely you must understand my frustration at being kept in the dark. If I knew what the rules regarding my well-being were, then I’d have no reason to be upset when those boundaries became off-limits.”

By the realms, he was talking a lot of shit, but just like his mother, Tilu was swallowing it whole. He could see it written all over her face.

Yet it was Frash who answered again. “Lady Clarise has said you are not to leave the bed, and we are to see to your every need until you have fully recovered. No one is permitted to bother you.”

That was the information he needed and his mind whirled as he tried to make the most of it. To buy himself time, he cast a slow gaze along the length of the bed to feign compliance and sighed defeatedly.

The demon Lords would never have bought his act for a second, but fortunately they weren’t here.

“Did she say who would be the one to decide who was a bother to me?” He tilted his head as if he hadn’t meant any offense by the question and looked at Frash out of the top corner of his eye.

“Your agitated state told us Lady Columbine was bothering you,” she answered primly.

Avis stared at the wall behind the foot of the bed, drew a deep breath through his nose and released it in another heavy sigh. From the outside, it would have looked as if he were sighing in agreement, but on the inside, it was an entirely different matter.

Avis was absolutely seething, and he had to breathe through his soaring rage until he could trust himself to open his mouth and not ruin what he was carefully cultivating by telling them what he thought of their brainless fucking assumptions. It was a close call, but he managed to rein it in by reminding himself of the prize.

He lifted his eyes to Frash, and with a smile that galled him to procure, he asked calmly, “And you know that much about Mystallians that you recognise the difference between agitation and excitement, do you?”

Frash gave him a condescending look that made him wonder if she was on to him. “You were not excited when you were shouting at Lady Columbine,” the demoness declared, snootily.

So that was the part she was calling him out on? Wow. She really was as dumb as she looked. As his youngest brother Chance would say, Time to double down. “You sure of that?” he asked, arching his eyebrow sharply and shifting his shoulders in silent mockery of her claim.

He knew he had her when Frash broke eye contact to look at her sister before answering. “As certain as I can be in these circumstances, Milord, and as Lady Clarise left you in our care …”

“Then perhaps you should learn more about your patient before making such assumptions on my part,” Avis cut in, though his lips were curled in a non-aggressive smile. Inside he felt every bit the predator, circling his prey and moving in for the kill. “Because you are hardly seeing to my needs, if you aren’t taking the time to learn what they are.”

After an hour of bantering, Avis convinced them to let him sit on the edge of the bed with his feet firmly on the floor. It was a baby step, one that left him breathless, but he had persuaded them to believe he wasn’t technically breaking Clarise’s rule of not leaving the bed if he was still sitting on it.

That then led into him standing with his hand on the bedpost for stability and the back of his legs leaning against the mattress. Still touching it. The next feat of persuading them to help him step away from the bed was a little trickier, but he managed it by weaving a careful tale of how many people leave their loved ones and move far away.

From there, he circled back to lovers who, so long as they were in the same dwelling, were still considered together. As in, they hadn’t left each other, even though they weren’t in the same room.

It took four gruelling hours of see-sawing through a hundred different comparisons for them to see the logic of his bullshit, but by the end of it, they were helping him shuffle through the caverns of Hell in search of his beloved wife. Chance would’ve had them eating out of his hands in five minutes flat, but he’d take the win for what it was.

The Highborn Hellions they passed in the corridors treated him with either utter distain or mild amusement at the way he shuffled along like a crippled old man with the aid of two servants; one under each arm. Fuck them all! He wasn’t of the Damned anymore.

Clarise had claimed him as her husband, and that meant more than something to all of them. It meant everything! He rallied against his recent conditioning and forced himself to meet the demonic glares that were cast his way. Own the space, his father had always said. It was the only thing that bastard ever did right.

Avis eventually found Clarise in the same place he had seduced her all those years ago—in Hell’s equivalent of a conservatory on the upper level not far from the High Court. The gardens were unlike anything found outside of Chaos. No two leaves were the same shape, colour or consistency, yet together it all worked. Too bad he wasn’t there for the plant life … or whatever it was that passed for plant life here in Hell.

His entire focus was locked on the single demonic figure perched on a stone bench in the middle of the chamber with her head tilted to the ceiling. Drawing on every vestige of strength he had, Avis pulled his arms free of the two women and squared his shoulders, using his stance alone to indicate their assistance beyond this point would not be tolerated.

It was a huge bluff on his part, but he felt more sure-footed now as he shuffled away from the servants than he had been hours earlier when he’d tried to jump to his feet after being bed-stricken for who knew how long. Thankfully, the females must have agreed, for they bowed as one and retreated to the edge of the chamber without argument.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he edged his way forward. He breathed through the wooziness that came and went and tried to ignore the pins and needles in his hands and feet. His pride couldn’t handle taking a header right now and he seriously hoped he wouldn’t. “Clarise,” he called, when he was almost upon her.

Clarise whirled, startled, but when she recognised him her demeanour became a mixture of pleasure and parental dissatisfaction. “You should not be out of bed, beloved,” she said with a strong hint of reprimand as she rose to her taloned feet with her arms outstretched to support him.

Avis waved her down. A few seconds later, he reached the bench on his own and locked his fingers into the stone back for support. The stupid surge of satisfaction at having completed such a menial task was as annoying as it was unavoidable.

He bent at the waist and braced his upper bodyweight on his forearms, hoping she didn’t notice the thin film of sweat that prickled his entire body.

“I’ve done a lot of things I shouldn’t have, sweetheart. I shouldn’t have gone out of my way to find you out here that night. I shouldn’t have slept with you outside of wedlock when I had no intention of marrying you. I shouldn’t have done what I did once I had. This …” with great difficulty, he shifted his balance to just one arm and pointed to himself, then waved in general at the gardens around them. “… is just a minor shouldn’t when one compares it to all the others.”

Clarise slid along the bench to give him room. “At least take your weight off your feet, beloved. You have not eaten nearly enough to be out of bed.”

Avis smiled his gratitude and stepped around the bench, almost falling into the seat beside her. For the next few moments, he stared out at the gardens without really seeing them as he tried to get his thoughts in order.

Having busted his ass to get out here, he really had no idea what to say now that he’d made it. How did you start a conversation that has you admitting you were the greatest asshole in existence, and that the second you could, you wanted to leave Hell and take both her and your children with you?

She began to shift back into her Mystallian form, but he placed his hand upon her forearm and shook his head. “If this is the form you wanted to be in before I came out here, this is the form you will be in, sweetheart. Don’t ever change what you want, just to please me. Not anymore.”

Clarise returned to her demonic form. “It is a beautiful evening,” she said, gesturing with a tilt of her leathery skull to the prismatic lights which exploded in colour over them. “I love colours, especially during the evening break. The spontaneous nature of them is truly uplifting.”

Avis blinked in surprise and looked up, seeing the kaleidoscopic light show for the first time. The flashes of colours as they burst to life might have been pretty, if they didn’t then collide into each other and explode into even brighter colours, giving him the start of a headache.

“I’ve never really taken much notice of them,” he admitted truthfully. But then his lips curled into a lurid smile and he lowered his gaze, tilting his head in her direction. “I guess something far more beautiful and spontaneous down here consumed my full attention that night.”

If she were in her Mystallian form, Avis knew she’d be blushing. That adorably shy blush that coloured her cheeks for a few seconds before she hid her face behind a raised hand and tried to turn away from the attention. Instead, his precious, precious wife looked down at her clawed hands and fidgeted nervously.

For some reason, he found the sign of weakness in her just as fucking adorable. “That was what I was doing out here the night you came to me, beloved. I was admiring the colours, and to be honest, I was still admiring them even during our love-making. When we came together, they seemed to explode just as often as I did, and it made that night perfect. Magical.”

There was a time when Avis would have taken offence at not being her whole existence while they were having sex, but that time was long past. However, she did raise an interesting point; something he hadn’t really thought about before.

Most celestials were at their most fertile for their first coupling. Especially the female. Somehow, the combination of breaking virginity and carrying sex through to completion almost always procured an offspring of some nature.

But demons and those further up their hellish hierarchy were exempt from that rule. It was their choice when to become fertile, and when not to. Avis ran a single finger up and down Clarise’s upper arm, wanting more but not certain how to proceed. “Why did you take my seed that night, sweetheart? I refuse to believe that night was a mere coincidence, knowing how your kind can become fertile at will. Why’d you do it?”

Clarise looked across at him; her eye ridges arched in sorrow and regret. Two emotions he never wanted to see on her face again. Then she took the hand that was brushing her arm and placed it against her exposed cheekbone. “I was a foolish Highborn Hellion female who thought you would have been happy to possess a well-bred wife that upheld your every desire, and a family to love you.”

Avis could hear the sincerity in her words. His heart splintered and bled out all over again at his subsequent treatment of this precious creature. She was all that was good in his life, and he had abused her horribly and thrown her away.

Refusing to shed the tears that were quickly building in his eyes, he placed his free hand on her opposite shoulder and drew her into a heartfelt embrace. “I should have been, but I was an even greater fool,” he whispered, his voice on the verge of cracking.

Avis held her for a long time, not wanting to let her go, or even loosen his hold. Right now, in this very instant, he had perfection in his arms, and he was scared that if he so much as blinked, Clarise would be whisked away and he would have to go on without her. He was no longer sure he could.

He licked his lips and pressed them to the dry skin of her head, immediately calling himself on the lie. It wasn’t a question. He knew he couldn’t. He had no right to this proposed happiness, but he was going to go for it anyway. If that made him a lovesick fool, he’d wear the club badge with pride.

A distant memory of a conversation he’d had with his twin brother Amaro replayed itself in the corner of his mind and he snorted to himself, then pressed his lips to the leathery crown of her skull.

“What pleases you?” she asked.

Her breath brushed lightly over his pec, causing him to shiver. Then a wry grin tugged at one corner of his lips and he lowered his eyes until he could just make out the edge of her head snuggled under his jaw. There was no way that flirtatious move had been an accident.

Despite his best intentions, he couldn’t quite eradicate the pang of jealousy as he wondered who’d she’d been with since their last time together, until he forced himself to accept it didn’t matter. He’d be a flaming hypocrite if he held her need for a lover over her after what he’d done and it wasn’t as if he’d been faithful in the interim either. She was his now. That was all that mattered.

Besides, she’d asked a question and he’d deny her nothing. “After all these years, I’ve finally admitted Amaro was right and I was wrong. I’ve never done that before—ever. He’s even made a point of telling me that from time to time.”

Clarise snuggled closer to him and curled her right wing around his shoulders. “Perhaps you have never had cause to be wrong before,” she murmured against his throat.

Avis snorted and rolled his eyes behind half-closed lids. Yeah, let’s go with that bullshit theory, he mused to himself as he tightened his grip on her. “I don’t deserve you,” he admitted, dipping his head to rub his cheek against her head. “Of all the gods that could have treated you right from the word go, why did you settle for a spoilt, troublesome bastard like me?”

“Because you were right when you called me a seductive slut.”

Avis’ sense of tranquillity shattered into a million pieces and he stiffened with a hiss of denial, but Clarise’s long claw over his lips prevented him from replying.

“We seduced each other that night, beloved. It was only our reasons that differed. I loved you from the moment you entered father’s court and announced yourself and your family to him. I could not explain it at the time, but I knew somehow that I wanted to be with you for the rest of my life. When you began to express a similar interest in me, I thought you would be pleased to discover you were about to be a father. It never occurred to me that the words you whispered to me that night in these very gardens were words you had said a thousand times to a thousand other women. I was heartbroken when you departed without so much as a goodbye, but I took solace in the knowledge that you were a busy god and sometimes little things like farewells get overlooked when you are trying to run an entire realm.”

Avis hated himself all over again. He almost didn’t want to go on. “But then?”

“I could not hide my state from my family—at least not for long. They knew I had another life inside me and where she had come from. Uriel was furious. He wanted to march on you that minute, but Father restrained him and said he would settle it himself.” Steam began to pour from her chest cavity and her voice climbed another octave.

“But I swear on all of Chaos, I never knew he was willing to take our realms to war if you refused to comply. My brothers and my father deliberately kept my sisters and I ignorant of that fact. He simply told me that you had agreed to marry me. I was so excited. I thought it was because you loved me, yet I knew when I saw the look on your face on our wedding day that all was not as it seemed. I could not understand why you would be so angry, when that was to be the greatest day of our lives.”

He felt her head roll downwards. “It was not until I moved into your home that I learned why you had agreed to marry me. I was shattered. Frash and Tilu would come to me at night and comfort me as I cried myself to sleep. And then there was you—the bigger I grew with your child, the angrier you became. Yet still, I stayed, because I thought I could change it. I thought, if I tried … if I really tried, I could make you see past your hatred and bitterness. And then Cora was born, and I thought a child of your own blood as well as mine would make you see I meant no harm.” The steam intensified. “But that was not the case, was it?”

Avis slammed his eyes shut and sank his teeth into his cheek so hard the tang of blood spurted into his mouth. “I’m so sorry,” he finally said, meaning every word of it, no matter how weak it’d make him look in the eyes of his family.

“I swear, by all I hold dear, I wish there was something I could say or do that’d make what happened be alright for you, sweetheart. But I can’t. I was an absolute idiot. The worst possible kind of absolute idiot, because I hurt you and Cora in the process. I had it all, and I threw you both away because the idea of becoming a family man hadn’t been my own.”

As he pulled away from her, his body moved of its own accord and he slid to his knees in front of her. He was going to beg. He knew it. He—a Mystallian formerly of the Nexus who’d been raised to put nothing above his pride, was about to be reduced to begging by choice. He looked up at her, powerless to stop the tears that streamed down his cheeks.

“But if you were to come back with me, I swear it’ll be different. It’ll be so different. You’ll be my queen, sweetheart. Please, rule at my side. Be my voice of reason when I have none. I love you so much, it’ll kill me to leave you behind and I couldn’t bear it. I have never begged for anything in my life without force, but I’m begging you now, Clarise. Please. Let me take you and the girls back to Mystal to be treated as you should have been from the very beginning. You belong there.” He paused. “We belong there.”

Clarise’s shape blurred and a few seconds later he was kneeling before his Mystallian wife. His beautiful, perfect, Mystallian wife. And as she stared down at him, her tears flowed just as freely.

“Yes,” she said, so quietly he almost thought he’d misheard her. She placed her hands against his cheeks and ran her thumbs along the bottom of his eyes to remove the spent moisture for the sake of his Mystallian pride. Even now, she was looking out for him. “For you, my love, I would risk everything.”

Avis’ heart soared and forgetting himself, he shot up and captured her lips with his. His body swayed and his head spun with the sudden movement, but he was not ending that kiss until he had to.

At some point, he realised soft padding supported the lower half of his body from all sides and he broke away from her to see what she’d done. Half of the stone bench he’d been sitting on was remoulded into a solid blob that supported him from the stomach down, but she’d also added a soft cushioned lining to prevent skin abrasions.

He broke into a broad grin as he tested the support by flexing the muscles in his legs and feet, feeling the cushioned lining on every part he moved. Even the gaps between his toes. She’d really thought of everything! His wife smiled at him knowingly. He framed her face with his hands and pulled her face to his, kissing her deeply. “I am never letting you go again,” he declared against her lips.

“Who is to say I would let you?” Clarise teased.

Avis laughed. Oh, how he laughed! He laughed loud and long—until his chest hurt and he had to bow his head into her shoulder as his body spasmed out of control, and he’d never felt better. He was leaving the bowels of Hell, and she was coming with him. His beloved wife and their two beautiful girls. That, all by itself, made the two years he’d spent in the Nine Levels worth it.

By the Twin Notes! We’re going home!

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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