Her Wicked Angel (Her Angel Romance Series Book 6) (Reading Sample) - Felicity Heaton (rm book recommendations txt) 📗

me… bright and colourful… strange… unsettling.” He didn’t sound as if he liked it. “Hell is a black cavernous ceiling above a forbidding harsh landscape. Rivers of molten lava and lakes of fire provide the only natural light. It is… different to this world. You would think it bleak, desolate and dangerous.”

Everything Apollyon had told her it was.

She frowned and looked at Asmodeus. “Then you’ve never seen the stars?”

His golden gaze drew away from the world below them and rose to meet hers. “No.”

“Will you take me somewhere?”

He nodded. “Where?”

Liora bravely took one hand away from his neck and Asmodeus’s grip on her increased, drawing her closer to him, filling her with a sense of safety that felt strange considering he was apparently made of pure evil. She didn’t think a male with nothing but evil in his heart would care much about whether she fell to her death or not. A male who was only evil and nothing good would have laughed as she fell and ensured he was close enough to get a good view when she splatted against the pavement.

She pointed to the distance, to the darkness beyond the city boundaries. “Take me out there. Take me to the stars.”

He held her against him and beat his broad black wings, carrying them over the city to the outskirts and then into the countryside. The air grew colder as they flew and she moved as close to Asmodeus as she could get, seeking his warmth. His skin heated hers but it didn’t chase the chill from deep within her.

The Devil wanted her and Asmodeus wanted to protect her.

She didn’t want to think about the reasons why his master might want her or what would happen to Asmodeus because he had disobeyed him, but it ran around her head, taunting her, mingling in with her thoughts about the man holding her.

He hadn’t been lying when he had told her that he took pleasure from terrible things, and her initial reaction had been the one he had probably sought to evoke with his words. He had wanted her to feel she shouldn’t be around him and that whatever this was that was happening between them would never have a happy ending. She had felt that for a split-second before she had rallied and had seen beyond his harsh words and hard expression to the trace of fear in his heart.

She had grown up in a world filled with love and light.

Asmodeus had grown up in a world made of darkness and death. A savage realm where horror and bloodshed were a part of daily life. What was normal there was terrible in her eyes but it was all he had ever known.

He had no friends to speak of and no sense of home.

Apollyon had called him evil, but Liora could see the good in him, buried deep.

Hidden.

“Is there good in you, Asmodeus?” she whispered and looked at him. It was getting too dark to see him clearly now that they were beyond the city lights.

“No.” The bluntness of his reply didn’t surprise her.

“Are you lying to me, Asmodeus?” Liora shifted her right hand to his cheek and tried to make him look at her but he tensed, making it impossible. Refusing her.

She sighed and frowned at him, trying to make him out in the darkness, wanting to see whether he was lying to her or not. If she couldn’t get him to confess there was a seed of good in him, then perhaps she could get him to admit that he viewed it as a weakness. She suspected that was the reason he denied its existence.

“What do they do to good people in Hell?” She tried to say it in a light and conversational tone so he would answer her but wasn’t sure she had succeeded when silence greeted her for almost a full minute.

“You do not want to know.” He beat his black wings and swooped lower, carrying her over fields towards a low hill in the distance.

“I do want to know.”

He glanced at her. “We make them realise that it is a flaw. We… remove it for them.”

That sounded like a polite and coded way of saying that they tortured the good out of people.

“In the same way that the Devil removed the good from Apollyon… torturing him until he lost his mind and held only evil in his heart?” Her voice shook and then she shrieked as Asmodeus dropped her and she hit the grass a few feet below, the impact jarring her spine.

Asmodeus growled and his eyes glowed in the darkness, as bright as the pools of lava in Hell that he had mentioned. He landed and stalked towards her, until he towered over her, his power increasing and pressing down on her. Her own rose in response, coming to protect her from his wrath.

“Yes,” he barked and grabbed her by the front of her crimson short-sleeved gypsy top and hauled her onto her feet. “I torture the good from fools who think that side of themselves makes them strong. I show them how weak it makes them… and I relish it.”

He shoved her away from him and stalked down the slope, a dangerous immense shadow in the darkness.

“Would the Devil torture the good from you if he knew there was some inside you?” she said without a trace of fear in her voice even though her hands were shaking. “Would he punish you, Asmodeus?”

“There is no good in me. You only believe there is. You want to see it, and so you do.” He turned back to face her, his golden eyes verging on scarlet.

“So you’re telling me you’re all bad… and nothing good?”

“To be good or bad you must believe the mortal concept of right and wrong… there is no right or wrong in Hell, Liora, not in the way you think of it. It is a human belief.” He took a step up the incline towards her and clenched his fists at his sides. “In Hell, there is only strength… and that strength is measured by the blood we have spilled, the bones we have crushed, and the pain we have dealt and endured. It is not measured by the good we do. It is measured by what you mortals believe is bad. In Hell… bad is good… and I am second only to the Devil.”

Liora collapsed to her backside on the grass and stared down at him, her heart aching for him. He denied the seed of good in him and now she understood why.

The Devil had conditioned him to resort to violence without a moment’s pause if he felt threatened, to eradicate any shred of positive emotions in himself and in others, to torture and maim, and destroy, because in Hell that was what made you strong.

His master had probably beaten it into him from the moment he had been born into that dark world, moulding him into the powerful male before her, one worthy of being the Devil’s right hand man.

One capable of doing the Devil’s dirty work and strong enough to command the respect of every demon and Hell’s angel in that realm.

A king of demons.

He had to be strong or face losing his standing, and the gods only knew what would happen to him if that happened. What use would the Devil have for a right hand man who had a sliver of good in his heart and knew compassion and caring, affection?

The Devil would kill him.

Asmodeus was something he had created and he would likely view the tiny seed of good in him as a fatal flaw that made him a failure. If a manufacturer found a fundamental problem in one of their products, they simply scrapped it and began again, working harder to ensure the next one didn’t fail.

Asmodeus didn’t want to die so he denied the good in his heart.

Liora held her hand out to him. “I don’t want to argue with you about right and wrong, or good and evil, Asmodeus. If you say there is no good in you, then I accept that. Come, look at the stars with me.”

He heaved a sigh, stalked up the hill, and set himself down beside her on the grass, spreading his black wings. One stretched out behind her, shielding her from the cold breeze washing over the brow of the hill, and the other rested on the grass to his left. His hands settled behind him, propping him up, and he tipped his head back and looked at the dark sky.

She wasn’t sure what to say to him. She’d had a head full of colliding thoughts before she had learned more about him and now she had a whole new bunch of thoughts knocking around in her skull. Apollyon needed a better word than ‘complicated’ for his apparently evil twin.

Liora looked across at him and held her sigh inside.

He had said that Paris seemed alien to him but she had the feeling that it was more than the city that had him constantly on edge. It was everything, from his surroundings, to her, and to the things that she had said to him, that had him questioning himself and all he knew.

This entire world was alien to him.

She worried that it was too alien and he would find a way to leave her whether she wanted that or not.

Liora set her hands behind her to prop herself up and intentionally laid her left hand over his right one. He tensed beneath her.

She tipped her head back, stared at the stars scattered across the black velvet, and said a silent prayer to the gods of nature that Asmodeus would stay because she thought she needed him, and not only because her survival potentially depended upon him.

The gods had never answered her before.

She hoped they would this time.

They owed her for taking her parents.

Chapter 5

Asmodeus’s head was tied in more knots than ever and every inch of him felt tense, and he couldn’t convince his body to relax, not while he was drowning under the tidal pull of his thoughts. He wanted to get them straight and figure everything out, and come to understand this world and Liora, but the more he spoke to her and the more he saw of this realm, the more on edge and overwhelmed he became.

He hadn’t meant to lose his temper with her, and he regretted dropping her from even a short height and shouting at her. Another first for him. He couldn’t remember ever regretting anything before. He couldn’t remember experiencing guilt before he had met Liora.

Her hand covered his, warm and slight, her light weight pressing it into the grass. She had fallen quiet and he wished that she hadn’t. He liked the sound of her voice and the sharp note it had at times, a tone that told him she wasn’t going to just back down and let him have his way.

He had felt powerless to leave her and had wanted to convince her to leave him, because he feared that the Devil would force him to obey his command to bring her to him. He had tried to draw a line between them, hoping to force her into seeing that he didn’t subscribe