Look what I found,” Azazel says, using the collar to haul me bodily to my feet and march me across the flagstones. As we come the foot of the bed I can see why Egan doesn’t leap up to face us. There’s a ring bolted to the oaken footboard of the bed and he’s tethered to that by his genitals. Leather thongs loop around his scrotum and are knotted about the base of his tumescent cock. Azazel laughs under his breath. “You’ve an impressively filthy imagination, Milja.”

I want desperately to deny that this is my doing, but I can’t. I furnish my own dreams. The men downstairs—their judgment and their condemnation—are all my doing. I brought them here. They were what I deserved. What I wanted. So is this room.

And I’ve never seen Egan look so conflicted. Half-a-dozen emotions are fighting it out in his face, but rage and shame are currently tied for victory. “Milja!”

“Oh Egan…”

A jerk on the leash orders me to my knees again, and as I sink down and clutch at Azazel’s leg I realize that he’s lost his only garment somewhere along the line and he’s proudly naked. His cock is on a level with my face; not truly erect yet, but a fat curve of self-satisfaction. Egan doesn’t know where to look.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to him.

“Don’t be.” Azazel stokes the top of my head like I’m his favorite house-bitch. “He has thoroughly enjoyed watching you.”

That’s when I see that the mirrors don’t reflect the room. Or not all of them. Some show footage of me in the chapel, walking through my leering audience, the sassy shake of my jewelry makes me look like I’m taunting them even as shame flames in my skin. Others show the footage of Azazel stripping and groping me in public; one shows a fine shot of my ass, framed by the glittering black diamond webwork, wiggling from side to side as I crawl up the tower stairs. Mirror-eyes linger on the inappropriate peek of my nipples, on my burning cheeks and parted lips, on the dusky tear-drop of my sex and the sheen of moisture painting my inner thighs. It’s like I’ve been followed by dozens of hidden cameras—only I know that in this dream cameras aren’t necessary.

I’m mortified, but I’m not so surprised now by that first evidence of Egan’s shameful arousal.

“You gave her up to me, remember!” he rasps.

“But she came back,” Azazel answers. “She sold herself back to me. She’s my slave now, to do with as I wish.” He touches my cheek and I lean in to kiss the proof of his mastery while hot waves of shame flow over my skin from head to core. “But if you don’t like that,” he adds, “stand up and fight me for her.”

Egan can’t, of course. Jacob might have wrestled the Angel of the Lord back in Genesis, but if Egan tries to stand here he’ll castrate himself, so he can’t stir an inch from the end of the bed. I find myself staring even as my lips pay homage to Azazel’s hot flesh. Egan can’t bring his hands from behind his back, and he can’t stand, and he can’t hide the fact that he’s far from flaccid. His thighs and his upper lip shine with sweat.

“Fuck you,” he snarls.

Azazel laughs. “I think she’d enjoy watching me fuck you,” he says, and I only hope he’s not aware of the things knotting in my belly at those words. “Maybe later. Right now… She’s mine, you understand. Mine first and forever.”

“No other God before me—check,” sneers Egan, with a breathtaking instinct for exactly the wrong thing to say to Azazel. The demon is upon him before I can blink, hand around his throat, pushing him backward until his spine arches, naked body almost touching naked body.

“You might regret baiting me,” he hisses.

“Catholic, remember?” Egan manages to rasp through his constricted throat. “I pretty much regret everything I’ve done my entire life.”

“Funny. Funny guy. Is it his sense of humor that you fell for, Milja?” Azazel glances over at me, but something he sees in my expression seems to give him pause. He releases Egan as roughly as he seized him and stalks away. “You have a cruel streak, leaving him bereft of any satisfaction like that. Give him a kiss, my little harlot.”

I crawl the couple of yards to Egan and look up from between his thighs. My hands part his scarred knees. He’s staring at me like I’m going to kill him, and his shoulders are shaking with strain.

He’s so beautiful.

I bestow my whole-hearted kiss upon his frustration and he arches his spine, the breath trapped in his chest. The taste of him is salty and eager.

“You can leave, Egan,” I murmur fiercely, lifting my lips a fraction. “Just wake up.”

His eyes widen but his erection jerks, seeking my mouth.

“He won’t go,” Azazel chuckles. “He’s not going to leave you here all on your own with the big bad wolf. Not when you’re about to get the fucking you truly deserve. He’ll want to watch that.”

Egan’s groan threatens to break my heart. My white knight cannot save me from this. He has only one choice: he stays and watches, or he leaves.

I’ve offered an escape but no, he doesn’t take it, and I swirl my tongue around the tip of his cock in apology.

And is Azazel right, I wonder? Is Egan bound by his own worst instincts, as much as by those cruel restraints? Do you want to watch? Is that it? Do you want to see me being ravished? Which will you cherish more—the sight or your own righteous rage?

With a hiss the leash detaches itself from my collar and falls to the floor. Azazel flicks the tip stingingly across my ass. “On the bed now.”

I bow my head so I can’t see the pleading in Egan’s eyes as I withdraw, and I slip to the side and mount the high, hard mattress. The tapestry drape feels silky under my hands and thighs. The night is a wet sigh between my open legs.

“Hands and knees,” Azazel orders, walking around to survey his property.

I roll onto all fours and lay my face against Egan’s shoulder from behind. I can smell the sweat of his anguish. He can’t look at me directly from here, can’t twist to follow the action. But it’s all visible in the tilted mirrors around and above us; Azazel kneeling up behind me; the black diamonds sparkling as they hang from my breasts; even a merciless close-up between my splayed thighs of my hairless porn-star pussy as his fingers search me out.

“Oh how wet you are, little harlot. See? My scarlet woman.”

Oh yes yes yes. The hot darkness rises in me, fogging my mind. Feeling takes over from thinking.

Egan’s head tilts back, searching out the mirrors above. He can’t not watch. Not even when Azazel pushes into me. Every thick, dark, glorious inch of him.

I cry out. This is the first time I’ve seen this too. How can it be possible? I can hardly believe that there is room for such a bulk; his girth looks likely to split me in two. But I can take it, as I’ve taken it before. Yes, this hard; yes, this deep. Azazel’s invasion is unhurried and ruthless. I dig one hand into Egan’s arm, gasping and keening against my master’s thrusts. I’m bracing myself against Egan’s strong back, using his strength and his intransigence. I bite the nape of his neck to stop myself crying for mercy.

This is wrong this is wrong I am such a whore…

And I’m so aroused that I come right then upon the length impaling me, muffling my cries on Egan’s shoulder. My nails score ragged lines on his skin and he groans out loud. Feeling my spasms, Azazel quickens and unloads too, with a grunt of triumph.

Then he plunders me a second time just to make sure, hard and fast this time, the first ejaculate spurting out with every thrust to fleck his clenched balls. Egan’s wrists are roped with crimson silk; I tangle my fingers in his own, moaning incoherently as my need swells again like some impossible monster that grows bigger the more it is battered. “Yes yes yes,” I hiss. “Oh please. Oh please.”

But my demon lover is not so kind to me this time around. He pulls out of me to finish off all over my pussy and back—and oh that gush is one hell of a sight: up against my glistening and wide-open sex and over my parted cheeks, and running in dollops down between them into the puckered rose of my ass.

“Ahhh,” says Egan.

But I’m left seething and bereft of my release.

Azazel dismounts the bed and walks around to face us both. He cradles his own erection, stroking it. As if he needs that, I think. Sweat is dripping off his balls onto the stones, but the ire still burns in his black eyes.

“Are you not satisfied, my sweet little harlot?” he says with a nasty grin. He knows I’m not.

I shake my head, mute. Egan has his eyes closed for the moment and is swearing—or maybe praying—under his breath.

“You need to sit on his face, Milja,” Azazel says, and a quake runs through my whole body. “I think he’d like that. You can see just how much he enjoyed watching me fuck you.”

“Oh God,” groans Egan.

Azazel’s grin is slow and soft and cruel. “I think he’d like that a lot. Lie down, little priest.”

“Don’t do this to him,” I whisper. “Please.”

“Any way I want, remember?” He’s recalling my words on the stone over the lake. “Do what you’re told.”

Humbled, I scoot to the side. It’s my hands, not Azazel’s, that press Egan so that he falls over backward; he’s got no leverage to resist of course, but it doesn’t feel like he’s even trying. He’s still tethered, so he cannot move any higher on the bed and his spine is arched over his hands. His chest is deep and his stomach is hard and his erection would not shame an angel. I stare at him with such wild hunger that it feels like my belly is full of lava. I stroke him and feel him throb against my hand. His face is twisted. I want to save him from the agony of his arousal, but it thrills me to my core to see him like this.

What am I doing? This is evil. This is beyond cruel.

He’s beautiful. I want him. Now. Like this.

Before I can think better of it, I swoop down and kiss his lips tenderly. As if I can kiss away all the anguish and the twisted complications between us, as if a kiss can undo knots of misuse and betrayal.

His lips don’t want to let mine go.

“Please,” I whisper. Please forgive me, Egan.

“Mount.” Azazel’s hard hand claps my ass, making me gasp. The command is implacable, and I cling to that certainty. He is ordering me to do exactly what I want; to ignore my conscience and to take what I desire. So I move to straddle Egan’s head, braced above his torso, facing his legs. I don’t look up at the mirrors now because I know what he’s seeing and I don’t dare see it myself. I’m looking down at his engorged cock instead, and the clear, viscid drip strung from it to his stomach. His cock is so aroused that it’s weeping.

Azazel always did have a keen instinct for these things.

“Eat her,” the fallen angel orders, louder. “Make her scream.”

I feel Egan’s tongue on my clit and it’s so exactly what I need that I can’t help myself. I sink down on his mouth. All my misgivings are in shreds now before the howling tempest of my lust. I might smother him, I think, but that only feeds my black appetite and encourages me to grind down harder. It’s not as if he’s unenthusiastic, anyway; he sucks me greedily. My brain spits out Bible verses: Take, eat; this is my body. Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.

Egan looks good enough to eat too, but with my arms braced and my knees splayed wide as I can make them, I’m too intent on what’s going on between my legs to take advantage. The magma in my core is gathering to eruption. I’m going to come, I think, fucking his face. While Azazel watches.

I am a harlot. Father Velimir was right. I’m nothing but wet pussy and spread ass and the aching need to be filled. I’m the Scarlet Woman; a fornicating slut; the Whore of Babylon. I understand suddenly that lust is a roaring amoral fire, and that given the right burner it will feed on any fuel at all.

My guilt. Egan’s helpless humiliation.

I lift my gaze to meet Azazel’s black eyes.

Azazel’s jealousy.

It’s like he’s been waiting for my acknowledgment. He steps in close and gathers a fistful of my hair in a tight grip, taking control of my head. He knows the effect that inevitably has on me. With his other hand he grasps Egan, who utters a muffled grunt and nearly pulls his arms out of his sockets in his spasm of protest. With firm, easy motions, my dark angel jacks that captive flesh, and at the same time he forces my head down over it. I open my mouth to the inevitable, submitting to an invasion of my lips and mouth and throat that nearly chokes me. It’s too much; the fire in me heaves into a huge detonation, and now Egan is erupting too so that I am burning and drowning all at the same time, both thrusting and being thrust into, ravisher and ravished in an ouroboros of orgasmic flame.

Azazel pulls my head back before I’m done swallowing and I gasp wildly. Then he lets me go. I slither off Egan’s torso and right to the edge of the bed, fleeing I-don’t-know-what. When my knees hit the floor I cling to the top edge of the coverlet like I’m a spy peeking over a wall. My heart hammers like it’s trying to break my ribs.

Egan’s got his eyes screwed shut, his head flung back, his throat stretched taut. Azazel looks down critically at his victim and slaps his still-pulsing cock hard enough to swing it.

“Again,” he says. “Harder.”

Somehow, Egan’s flesh stiffens obediently. That’s when I see the deadly little tethers snap and writhe loose from the bed. They stay knotted around his cock and balls like bizarre Christmas streamers, but at least he is free from the iron ring.

“Get further up the bed.”

Egan opens his eyes. He seems to realize slowly that he’s no longer tied down, but when he does he shuffles on his back away from Azazel with pitiful alacrity, as if he somehow thinks he can escape that long reach. He casts me a wild, shamed look.

“That’ll do,” Azazel decides. “You’d like to ride that now, wouldn’t you Milja? His rod and his staff will comfort you…here in the Valley of the Shadow.”

Ride that? Yes, always.

What is he planning?

I climb back onto the bed, nervous now. Egan is looking from me to Azazel and back again as if we are conspiring assassins. His lips are swollen.

“And I will fasten him as a peg in a firm place; and he shall be for a glorious throne,” quotes Azazel, wandering around to slap my ass in encouragement. “Get up on your throne, little harlot.”

“Stop this,” says Egan, his voice sounding gluey. “Leave her alone.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I’m enjoying this far too much.” As I straddle Egan’s hips, Azazel reaches between our legs, seizes him at the root and guides him inside me.

All. The. Way.

Oh he’s big. Wonderfulwonderfulman. I whimper as I sheathe him, and run my hands up his abs and over his chest. I can feel his heart under my hands, his blood racing. I can feel the delicious rub of those hard thongs against my mound as I grind down on him. And I can see the desperation in his eyes.

“You’ll need your hands for this,” Azazel remarks, hunkering up behind me. “Hold her steady.”

Suddenly Egan’s hands are free. He pulls them out from behind his back with a groan.

“I love you,” I whisper—not to comfort him, not for his sake at all, but because my heart is full to the brim, fuller even than my sex, and my words are spilling out beyond my control. I speak to Egan now, and to the Azazel bound in the cave of my memory. They are one and the same.

“She does,” growls the fallen angel behind me. “You’d better be able to rise to that, because I will not let you disappoint her.”

His fingers trail up the cleft between my cheeks—up, then down, then probing in. I’m already full of Egan, but that’s not the entrance he’s looking for and shock makes me gasp, “I can’t!”

“You can. You will. And if you want both of us, you’ll have to.”

I pitch forward onto my braced arms, making a nervous noise as he presses my clench.

“Hold her,” he growls, shifting in close, scouring me with his rough thighs. He’s blunt like a battering ram at my closed portal, but thankfully he’s taking it slow—and my ass is already slicked from his earlier eruption.

“Christ.” Egan jams a hand against my breastbone, his fingers and thumb lying either side of my throat. I’m grateful, even though it constricts my air; there’s no way I’d be able to hold myself up over his chest otherwise. My arms are already shaking.

“No, please, oh God—”

“Yes. Yes.”

Oh God oh God oh God. My vision is blurring and my breath is so fast and shallow that my head swims. All my consciousness is focused down behind me. There’s sweat running down the declivity of my spine and into my bum-crack.

I’m so full already. He can’t fit! How can he fit?

But he does, and his triumphant entry is like the entrance of a king into a city, accompanied by trumpets and flags and applause. I’m stretched like I’ve never been stretched. I writhe my hips and ass, trying to find ease, trying to make more space for him, grinding up against Egan without even thinking about it.

“Can you feel me, priest?” Azazel asks, and even he sounds breathless. “Because I can feel you. Can you feel me inside her with you? This surely must be a mortal sin, father.”

“Ah,” is all Egan’s strangled answer. He’s rocking beneath me, very gently. I don’t know if it’s deliberate, but from my perspective the stimulation helps a lot. The more Azazel pushes and the more Egan rocks, the more space I seem to be able to find inside myself. I’m unfurling like a rose. There’s no resistance left; I’m falling apart in their embrace. When I look up to the head of the bed I see us reflected in the mirror there, Azazel dark as a thundercloud behind me, his hands biting into my bejeweled hips, Egan a supine block like a fallen marble titan. Almost all the motion is in Azazel’s thrusts and the shudder of my breasts and the toss of my head. I’m tiny in contrast to them; outmassed and outflanked and overshadowed. It looks like I will be crushed between them.

“This is what you want, isn’t it, my little whore?” Azazel grunts as he slowly pumps me. “This is what you’ve wanted all along, admit it.”

“Ahhhh,” is all I can answer.

Then Egan’s other hand moves to my breast and captures my left nipple, and I see fireworks. The spitting coruscation runs down my skin, chasing the pattern of my jewelry like it’s tracing the ley-lines of my flesh. It meets the shivering plume of pleasure rising around Azazel’s invasion and the great solid burn of Egan’s impalement.

Oh yes oh yes OH YES.

I am flying apart with every sparking thrill of sensation. I’m helpless to resist. The vision in the mirror strikes me with witless wonder. I am caught between hammer and stone; between black and blond; between darkness and light. They will destroy me. They will tear me apart.

There’s a part of me that wants that.

But they don’t; as I disintegrate in my final orgasmic firestorm and I start wailing, it is my implosion that pulls them in. I hear Azazel’s thick grunt at the same time as I see Egan bare his teeth and arch, digging his heels into the bed. And I feel them both inside me; I feel the fire and the storm, I feel Hell and Heaven meet and become one.

We come together. There’s no distinction between Egan’s climax and mine and Azazel’s.

And there, on the falling edge of orgasm, as we sag and sway and our sweat runs together and Azazel’s lips are in my hair and Egan’s fingers brush my lips as if to check that I am still breathing, still alive—there, for a moment, is true bliss. They’re not pulling me apart; there is no rivalry any more. I’m holding them both, deep inside me, my whole body an embrace and a chalice.

Oh, that stillness, that peace—I wish it could last forever. Egan’s hooded unfocused gaze drifts across my face and up to Azazel’s over my shoulder, and I see no resentment in his eyes and no dread, just exhausted acceptance. I hold my breath as if I can keep that moment in suspension. I never want to leave. I never want it to end. I am the eye of the storm; I am the fulcrum, and in me my lovers are in perfect balance and perfect unity.

But the eye of the storm always moves on. My limbs are shaking so much that it’s only Egan’s braced hand holding me up, and with a sigh Azazel slides away to let me fall to the side, stretching my cramped thighs. He’s being merciful, but the loss makes me cry out. I slump into the hollow of Egan’s arm, my head falling against his heaving chest, and he drapes that arm about my shoulders. The action is automatic, I suspect. His own gaze is on the mirror overhead, where graphic highlights of our tryst are being played out. He looks dazed.

“Well taken, Milja,” says Azazel, kneeling up and shaking out his black hair. “Beautifully done.” He runs his fingers over the curve of my hip. I can see his face in another mirror; his eyes have gone back from black to opaque silver. His smile is crooked; for the moment he is mollified, satisfied even—but there’s no delight in his expression like there should be after we’ve made love; like there was in the past. He looks haunted and he sounds sad. “Just…beautiful.”

I miss his simple, innocent lechery so much that it hurts.

Pulling myself up out of my nest in Egan’s embrace, I lay my hand on Azazel’s breastbone. His heart is still pounding hard. He feels wholly human.

It’s not fair, what we’ve done to you. We’ve made you all complicated and confused and screwed-up, like we are. “If you want beautiful, Azazel, you should have stuck to Heaven.”

He tips his forehead against mine. “But then I would not have loved you.”

My heart pangs. “Do you…” I start. “Can you…?”

“I love you as I have never loved any other mortal, Milja.” He kisses me softly. “World without end.”

You mean that? His breath is tangled with mine and his salt sweat stings my lips. “Oh Azazel,” I whisper.

Then he reaches down past me to grab Egan by the neck. Egan doesn’t fight the hand around his throat, but the tiniest growl comes back into Azazel’s voice nevertheless: “You. Keep her safe. Make her happy.”

He nods, mute, and Azazel’s mouth moves into a smile. The Watcher’s eyes, however, do not join in.

* * *

I woke up in Egan’s bed with a feeling of impending disaster. It took a few moments for the dread to take shape though; a few comforting moments of rumpled white sheets and soft pillows and daylight filtering under the curtains.

Then I recalled everything.

Oh crap. Oh crap. My recollected dream unspooled behind my eyes, just like those action replays in the gilded mirrors. What the hell have I done?

I’d tied Egan up and let my demon master abuse him, was what. I’d joined in avidly, for all my protestations. I’d let my white knight see all the twisted lust I sheltered in the depths of my soul. I was no damsel in distress—even he must see that now. I was more a Belle Dame Sans Merci. A sorcerous harlot, just like the Bible warned.

Egan is never going to talk to me again.

Floundering out of the quilt, I raked my fingers through my mussy hair. There was a small mirror on the dresser and I caught sight of myself, white-faced and wild-eyed.

Oh you’ve screwed up this time, Milja. You’ve blown it up and burnt it down.

I was wearing an old T-shirt of Egan’s—I’d asked for something clean to sleep in last night—but there was no sign of my own clothes that I’d discarded on the floor. On the bedside table was a mug of black coffee. I touched it tentatively, wondering how long it had been there, and found it tepid. Better than nothing though; I drank it gratefully.

I pictured Egan bringing in the mug and standing there, watching me as I slept. Had he felt angry? Sickened? Horny?

I’d climaxed in my sleep, of course, because—well, because I could. Unless Egan had taken matters into his own hands this morning, he’d have been pumped up with frustration. It could only have made him angrier with me.

Shrugging on an old toweling robe that hung on the back of the door, I walked on tiptoes through to the living room, dreading the moment our eyes would lock. The television was on, tuned to a news channel, but no one was watching. The room was empty. I looked through the open door into the kitchen.

Egan was sitting at the little oak table. He’d been keeping himself busy since waking, by the looks of things; the washing machine was humming and there were two plastic shopping bags on the kitchen counter. He had an elaborate henge of stacked toast cooling on a plate in front of him, but he didn’t seem to be eating it. He leaned back in his chair, face blank and his gaze downturned, focused somewhere far away.

My stomach rolled over.

“I went into the village for bread and toothbrushes and stuff,” he said. His tone was flat.

I walked in, pulled out the other chair and sat down opposite him, my back to the open door. He didn’t look up at me. “I’m sorry,” I said hoarsely, knuckling my hands together. I’d sworn off apologizing, but this time it was different. “I’m really sorry, Egan.”

“For what?” His voice was as colorless as his face was expressionless.

“For what happened. Last night.” I cleared my throat as my voice croaked with anxiety. “For what I did to you.”

His gaze was light but impenetrable. “Sure, I could have left if I’d wanted. Just like you said.”

I rubbed at my lips, my fingers cold and clumsy, the flesh beneath them weirdly numb. I sniffed hard. “I shouldn’t have… That’s not an excuse. I shouldn’t have done those things.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said, gaze flicking to the margins of the room. “Your man’s a bit on the overwhelming side.”

It would be easy to blame Azazel, of course.

I was having trouble breathing. I cleared my throat again, but my voice came out husky. “No. It wasn’t him. It was me, Egan. My dream. My fantasy. Everything.” My hands on the tabletop were all twisted; they seemed the only things I could focus on comfortably. “My fault.”

“Yours?” he said at last, his voice sliding over the top of my bowed head.

“Those dreams are mine.” I had to tell him. He deserved to know the truth about me—the awful truth. It was too late to pretend to innocence. “Tying you up. Hurting you. It’s me. It’s what I like.”

When he didn’t respond I risked a glance. There was a very faint crease between his brows. “Pardon?” he said softly, as if he wanted to be sure of what he’d heard.

“It turned me on.” My lungs were almost failing. “A lot. Crazy turned me on.”

“Tying me up and hurting me?”

“I’m messed up, Egan. I know. Oh God. You don’t deserve this.”

“Don’t I now?”

“Whenever I see you bruised or whatever… The monastery, handcuffed. Cutting your casts off. Oh God. Even when you were ill in Ethiopia.”

“And there I was under the distinct impression that you liked your men dominant.”

“I do.” I forced a deep breath. “Oh yes. But I also like my big, scary dominant men tied up. Frightened. Raging. Helpless. It gets me… You can see why, can’t you?”

His face was a mask again.

“The cave, I guess,” I said miserably. “What you said; imprinting. What happens to us as children makes…scars. They don’t go away. I was seven. That’s how I first saw him, that’s exactly how I knew him until I was eighteen. So it’s still there inside me and it got all mixed up with sex as I got older. As I fell in love with him.”

Silence.

“Sometimes I wish we didn’t have to ever be kids. It would all be so much simpler if we didn’t have to go through growing up—if we were just made as adults, ready for life. Full-on human beings. Everything inside our heads would be so straightforward!” I tried to smile. “We’d be like the angels.”

Silence.

“Although,” I added because I had to fill that horrible void with something, “even they have massive Daddy Issues.”

But I was thinking; He’s going to walk out. He’s going to stand up and walk away, because that’s what he does when things get sticky and intimate. Only this time it’ll be forever.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “I was sexually abused.”

If he had reached across the table and slapped me it could not have shocked me more. But when I stared at him his face had not changed. It was still eerily calm. He hadn’t raised his voice, and there was no emotion in his measured tones.

I was the one who flushed in shame.

“Between the ages of twelve and fifteen,” he clarified. “Pretty much every day.”

“Oh God, Egan…” I wanted to grab him and hug him, but that might have been the worst possible response—I didn’t have a clue. I put my hand to my mouth. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

He went still again, the words locked away behind his lips.

“Was it…a priest?”

“No.” His lack of affect was unnerving. “Why do you people always assume it’s a priest?”

“I’m sorry, I just thought…”

“It was my older sister. Mary.”

Mary? My hands flew up over my face without conscious volition, so that I was peering at him over my fingertips. “The one who…?” Committed suicide. “…Died?”

“She took to sneaking into my bed at night and…” He lifted a hand and made a sketchy gesture as if stroking the air. “She got a kick out of getting me off. I never tried to stop her.”

“Oh hell, Egan. You were just a kid.”

“So was she.”

“It wasn’t your fault!”

“I enjoyed it.”

That shut me the fuck up.

Cracks were appearing in his façade of inscrutability; his voice suddenly sounded grim. “I never, never initiated anything, I swear—but I’d lie there every night and wait, and hope. It was the best, the most amazing thing I could imagine. It was our wonderful secret.”

Hormones. Adolescent juice. She was older than you; she should have known better. I shook my head. “You were a child.”

“Bullshit. The age of reason is seven, under canon law. Oh, I knew it was wrong, alright. I knew it was shameful. I never told my mother, I never told my friends. I never took it to the confessional.” And there it was, oozing through the cracks in his voice: an awful self-loathing, black as tar. His shrug was savage. “She just lost interest in me when she got a real boyfriend. It simply stopped. She never said anything. I was fecking devastated.”

Oh God, Egan. Oh God.

‘He’s got love and guilt more confused than you can imagine,’ Uriel had told me.

No wonder you ran for a foreign country and a father you hardly knew, the first opportunity you were given. No wonder her suicide wrecked you.

No wonder the breakdown, and the clinging to a God of eternal law. The self-discipline and the self-denial.

No wonder your remorseful, obsessive chivalry toward women.

No wonder you always fall for the ones you’re not supposed to have.

No wonder Penemuel had you by the balls.

No wonder you’re so scared of love, and of lust. No wonder you gladly gave up control of those things to the Church.

You are even more messed up than I am.

“That’s my childhood,” he said with a sickly smile. “My scar. Now you know. Apart from Father Giuseppe, you are the only person in the world I have ever told.” He reached out and pushed the toast fortress with his fingers, so that it collapsed across the table.

I stretched into the gap and grabbed his hand between both of mine. It was icy cold despite his apparent calm, as if all his blood had retreated from his extremities to fuel a fight or flight response. I wondered at how much courage it must have taken for him to trust me with a confession so awful.

“So what do you think of me now, Milja?”

Maybe I should have weighed my words before I spoke, but I had no idea what the right answer was—what he wanted or expected or needed from me. Sympathy? Forgiveness? Condemnation?—‘I see you were right from the start, Egan; you are a worthless piece of shit’? I was miles out of my depth. “It makes sense,” I said weakly.

“Makes sense?”

“Why you don’t have any trust in your own feelings. You know they’re just lying to you when it feels so right to love someone, to want someone. That’s what you think, don’t you?”

He snorted down his nose, and I saw the ghost of a nod.

And maybe he’s right. Maybe I’ve been wrong all along, following my heart.

“So you see,” he said, his voice back to that scary calm. “I get that you’re kinky, Milja. It sort of showed. But it’s no biggie compared to what’s in my head. And if you think I wasn’t getting off on every evil thing you did to me last night, then you really, really weren’t paying attention.”

My thoughts were a whirling maelstrom of tattered pages torn from our conversations. I snatched at one. “Your Father Giuseppe gave you absolution, didn’t he?”

“Of course.”

Oh Egan. I tried to grasp what his flat, closed gaze was telling me. “But you don’t believe him, do you?”

He shivered.

Too easy, was it? Divine Grace too freely given? You’re the one who won’t forgive yourself, Egan. I pulled the hand I held up to my lips and I kissed it; his palm, his knuckles, his fingertips. He let me, for a while, and then he made a fist and tried to withdraw, curling his bicep. I had the choice of letting him go or letting him pull me, so I held on and somehow ended up crawling over the table, crunching on the toast and scattering it to the floor, until I knelt over him and my unbound hair fell down around his face.

Egan uncurled his fist. His eyes were wide and wondering. “That’s a terrible waste of toast,” he said.

“We can always make more.” I stooped and kissed his mouth, putting my hands on his shoulders for balance, but he fell back against his chair like I was pushing him and I had to follow, my weight on his shoulders pinning him. There was heat billowing between us. A hot wet desperation.

“You cannot fix me this way,” he warned.

I bit his lips in rebuke. “I don’t want to fix you.” His mouth tasted of yellow fruit on a forbidden tree. “I’m not a therapist. I’m not God.” I slithered off the table, straddling his thighs, and reached down to grasp the thick, hard root of all his woes through his khakis. “I want to fuck you,” I breathed as I kissed him over and over again.

“Ahh,” he said, eyes glazing over; “yes.” His hands slid up my bare legs under my robe, grasping my ass and circling my waist. “Oh, Milja…”

I could feel what I wanted; so close, so strong, only fabric between my hand and his burgeoning length. That denial fed my fire. I pulled at his belt but it resisted my unpracticed fingers and I had to break from his sweet and hungry lips to look at what I was doing, embarrassed by my gracelessness but determined that nothing was going to stop me.

He froze, quivering. “Hold on. Wait.”

God damn me, but I answered, “No.”

His cock surged under my hand and his groan was thick with lust, but when he got words out they were, “Milja. Stop.”

You’re killing me, Egan! I looked up, but he wasn’t even focused on me. His gaze was on something over my shoulder, beyond the living room door. He stood up under me, setting my ass back on the table and detaching my hands, still staring.

“Shite.”

“Who is it?” I twisted my neck.

“Look. Look at the TV!”

Seriously? I wriggled around and followed as he stalked off into the living room without a backward glance. “What is it?”

It was the BBC playing shaky cellphone footage that had come from somewhere in the American Midwest. Somewhere flat and grassy. A huge streak of twisting flame tore at unimaginable speed across the field of vision, obliterating a farmhouse, then vanished into the distance. “Reports from several points all over the globe,” the newsreader said, sounding urgent, and “possibly some unknown natural phenomenon.” Then “meteor storm” became “weapons misfire,” and “military alert.” The footage looped.

Egan grabbed the remote and froze the digital picture. I saw a twisted helix of crimson plasma, a suggestion of serpentine scales or maybe flaming feathers. My blood ran cold.

Azazel.

In the background of the frame, fainter plumes of flame were falling from the dawn sky.

‘There fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp,’ I thought. ‘And the name of the star is called Wormwood.’

“He’s kicked off,” Egan said incredulously. “It’s started. Armageddon.”