Revealing the Monster (Playing with Monsters #4) by Amelia Hutchins

“You have to not want him to take you,” he snorted. “You don’t get it, woman. If you die, I die. You claimed me as your fucking mate. If I die, everything I have ever captured or claimed will be unleashed onto this world you love so much. If that happens, it’s game fucking over. You are my fucking weakness, and if anyone figures that out, you will become a target for my enemies. From the moment of my creation, I have never been vulnerable until you. There’s another thing, but I can’t tell you what it is until you can stop wanting Lucifer to take you away from me. You say you love me, and I don’t question it, Lena, because you’ve proven your loyalty and love to me by sacrificing your life. But you are placing us both in danger. Do you get that?” Lucian adjusted beside me, pulling my body against his while peering into my gaze.

“My seal is a living thing, Lena. It’s one of the three furies within you, the one that craves chaos and destruction. The seal lives and breathes to execute what it was created to protect—me. The second fury is judgment and the protector of Pandora’s Box, which houses the essence of the seven sins. The third and final fury is the keeper of Abaddon. No creature has ever been strong enough to house all three of the furies at once. Nyx assumed they would fracture and attach to one of the others she brought back, like your brother. She failed to calculate how fucking strong and powerful you were or would become. You can unleash Hell and the seven deadly sins into this world simply by touching the locks. You’ve become the key, Lena. You locked one fury within you, attaching it to your form with runes. She slumbers, stolen from the other two furies within you. I need to know how you did that because we have to put the other two down.”

“I can’t do it again, Lucian. The cost was my soul and the sacrifice of our child. I had to give up our son to a primordial being and the one thing I valued most in life. It left me an endless void of nothingness. I am soulless and don’t have a spare to recreate the spell. Not that it would matter, because I have nothing else that I value as much as I did my soul except for….”

“Except?” he asked, watching me.

“You,” I whispered, observing the way he smiled while my heart pounded painfully against my ribs.

“Then we keep you safe, Lena. Asmodeus knows his furies are back, and you can be damn sure he’s aware of what they hold within them. At one time, he was my friend. Now he’s Lucifer’s bitch. It doesn’t matter what Erie thinks or what Asmodeus says. An oath binds him that he made to Lucifer, and the only way he gets out of that bond is by unleashing Pandora from that box and freeing the power she stole from him by placing it into her box as one of the seven sins.”

“You think Asmodeus will betray Erie?”

“I don’t think, Lena. I know. The moment he is free of Erie, Asmodeus will be forced to return and carry that news to Lucifer. When Lucifer learns how to release his one true love, he will seek to do so at any cost.”

“Great, and I am the key to unlocking that box.” I swallowed past the lump forming in my throat. “And you’re the one thing standing between Lucifer using me and unleashing an entirely new level of hell onto this world. Would now be a bad time to point out that with the Unseelie prison open, the one thing that could kill me is once more accessible?”

“I’m aware.” Lucian leaned forward to place a soft kiss against my forehead. “I have men inside the prison already. Spyder has his shadows searching every inch for that dagger. We’ll find it and figure out how to destroy the fucking thing.”

“Why didn’t you tell me how you felt?” I asked, and his lips jerked into a wicked smile.

“I told Katarina that I loved her, and she used it against me. I failed to see how selfish and vicious she truly was. I promised to never repeat those words for as long as I exist. They’re just words that hold no meaning. Actions show how people really feel.” He searched my eyes before continuing. “When you took your life, I knew how you felt about me. You sacrificed yourself to spare me pain, and that told me everything I needed to know about you. You’re selfless and pure, Lena. There’s no world where you’re not mine because I would destroy them all to get you back.” Lucian pushed the hair away from my face, smiling at the way I narrowed my eyes on him.

“I knew you were mine from the moment I saw you. Not outside your ancestral home. In Oregon, when you watched the waves rolling in to crash onto the beach. You’d pulled me to you, and you were the most exquisite thing I’d seen in a very long time. It wasn’t your beauty that called to me, though. It was the loneliness I saw in your pretty eyes that matched the same emotion within me. It was also the soft scent of darkness that beckoned me to play with it. Like seeks like, discovering what it craves most no matter what stands between it and what it needs. That’s why you’re mine. You’re the other half of me that I’ve spent lifetimes seeking and hadn’t found until you.”

“Is that it? I thought it was my sparkling personality and the first woman in history to tell your ancient ass to get bent.”

“That was part of it, and that you looked into the eyes of a monster, and you wanted to play. You weren’t afraid of me, even though you should have been.”

“Maybe you’re not as scary as you think you are, Lucian Blackstone.” I pushed him down and smiled as he settled back, placing his arms behind his head, watching as I slid onto his cock. “You owe me so many orgasms, asshole.”