Most of my job consisted of watching others from a distance. Watching young men exchange joints of illegal Bane, a demon drug used to weaken the body, or watching a couple argue in the streets.
My purpose was to be a silent figure in the lower class. A figure to fear, a figure to keep them in line and to stay low. It was only when they stepped too far that I used force.
When I arrived at the Pit to walk Lex home, she wasn’t there, and Jackson said she had left early. As I opened the door to my apartment, I was welcomed by the sound of the shower running.
I had told her I would walk her home and the fact she left pissed me off.
More so that any fucker could have taken advantage of her.
I had taught her how to fight, but I still worried about her.
Too much, it was becoming a bad habit.
No matter what I did, my thoughts always came back to what she wanted, to what she needed.
Somehow in about a month, I’d started putting someone else’s needs before my own and I hadn’t noticed I’d been doing it.
It just happened.
And it made me anxious and agitated. She couldn’t keep staying here.
It was becoming more than what it had started out as. Whatever that had been.
I steeled my features and marched to the bathroom door, tapping it gently. “Lex,” I said, raising my voice so she heard me over the water.
When I tapped it a second time, the door wavered, opening slightly, and I saw her, a towel wrapped around her, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Her hair was wet, clinging to her cheeks and I gawked at her.
At the bruises lining her cheekbone and her trembling bottom lip.
I didn’t think before I moved into the tiny bathroom and crouched in front of her, taking her face in my hands.
“What happened?” I asked, my voice too thick, too coarse. If I spoke more, I would end up losing it.
Who had hurt her? What bastard would I have to beat back into hell’s shallow ground?
Wetness pooled in her soft blue eyes and tears escaped, rushing down her fingers and resting against my own, like a gateway of protection. That she could cry in front of me and I would protect her from anyone who dared hurt her.
“I went to a party and…he had files on me,” she managed to say, her voice shaky.
My fingers combed back stray curls of darkness and lifted her head higher so she met my gaze. “What? What files, Alexandra? And who?”
“Danny.”
That single name made my beast rage inside of me.
She sniffled. “He had files. Files on me…files on Dolores—” Her voice broke and she squeezed her eyes shut but that didn’t prevent more tears from falling.
I frowned, fury boiling inside me, but I pushed it down as best as I could. She needed comfort right now, not a violent, destructive beast.
“Did he do this to you? Did Danny touch you?” I seethed, breathing through my nose as I made sure to keep my grip light on her.
She shook her head. “He threatened me…but he had another friend in the room. A friend that I recognized.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, anger piercing my dark soul. Hatred flared like a white-hot flame. The fucking bastard.
“Recognized?”
She licked her dry mouth and kept her head low, avoiding eye contact. “He was the man who took me to the hunters. A demon selling demons to hunters.”
My hands shook, and I watched tears paint her cheeks. I didn’t need to be a souleater to feel her pain raw and thick in the bathroom, clogging my throat.
“Tell me about Dolores,” I whispered to take her mind off of it, trying to calm both of us down, to keep us balanced.
She bit her lip to hold back a cry. “She’s always been too kind for her own good.” She laughed softly at a memory. “She’s half blind and used to tell me she could see people’s true nature because of it. That she had a special eye. A gift.” She tightened the towel around her, sniffling. “She took care of me after Tensley rescued me from the hunters a few months ago. She liked to comb my hair at night when my self-deprecating thoughts were weighing me down too much to move. I was in a really dark place for a long while after what happened, Beau. Sometimes, I think I still am. I never really got out of it.”
My chest tightened at how raw her voice sounded and the image of her laying on that rotting apartment building floor, too depressed and damaged to move.
Alexandra Harvey was possibly the strongest person I had ever met.
She squeezed her eyes shut again and shook her head. “I don’t want to be weak. I don’t want to be useless.”
I shushed her, my fingers stroking upward and into her wet hair. I pressed my thumb to a tear just below her lashes and her eyes fluttered open.
The tear absorbed into her pale skin and she stared back at me.
“You’re not weak, Alexandra,” I whispered and kissed her cheekbone, allowing my lips to settle there. For once, I was thankful for being an incubi, to heal bruises and wounds. But… they couldn’t heal the kind of wounds that hurt the most, the ones that kept you up at night. I’d been a fool for thinking her weak when I’d first seen her at the Pit. Alexandra was many things, but weak was not one of them. “You are a tigress. A warrior. A survivor.”
I was the weak one in this moment, unable to remove my mouth from her soft skin, telling myself it was just to mend the bruises, the cuts.
It was when I felt her fingers trace my shoulders, my muscles flexing under them that I paused and shut my eyes.
I had been in hell once.
Like her.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever gotten out. What I did know, however, was that I’d recently discovered a new kind of hell. One where I imagined Alexandra waking up next to me in the mornings, tempting me, luring me in.
I couldn’t though.
I couldn’t repeat the past. I couldn’t allow myself to reach for another heart only to destroy it.
Instead, I held her, and she buried her head into my shoulder.
I would not fall again.
Tonight, I would hold her.
Tomorrow, I would confront Danny.