Screams ripped Calix from sleep, and he shot up from the chair where he’d drifted off himself.

“No! Don’t let them do this! Please! It burns! It burns!” Ava thrashed in the bed, her body twisting beneath the sheets with every kick and flail of her arms. “Help me! Calix! Help me!”

On instinct, Calix shot across the room, dodging the swing of her fist, and grabbed both of her wrists. “Ava, you’re okay.”

Her eyes were wide, crazed, her pupils dilated as she stared up at him, squirming in his grasp. “Let me go! Let me go! You don’t know what they’re going to do! The women! They’re dead. They’re dead!” The roundness of her eyes shrank into the sorrowful tip of her brow, and sobs ripped from her chest. “That’s what they want. To hurt me. Just like those poor … women.”

The chain tugged at her throat with each jerk of her body, and rather than risk her decapitating herself, he loosened the chain and slid it over her head.

“Let me go! I have to help them! They’ll die!”

“Who?” Calix brought both of her wrists together and held them against her chest. Stroking her hair brought her gaze to his once more, and still they appeared distant. Vacant. “Tell me who did this. I’ll punish him.”

Tears slipped down her temple. “You can’t.” Her body softened, muscles going lax in his grip. Limbs trembling, she curled into her side, and tucked her head into the blankets, still shivering.

As if she’d never awoken, she drifted back into dreams.

He made quick work of the buttons on his jeans, sliding them off, and tossed them onto the adjacent chair, then stripped out of his shirt. Once naked, he sank into the bed beside her and curled himself around her small frame. Within seconds, her shivering dissipated, and she turned into him, burying her face in his chest while she continued to sleep.

Everything about her felt right, and it pissed him off that being with her was so wrong. There’d once been a time when Calix had thought Ava was it for him, that he’d never need another. That everything he’d dared to dream about her might be real.

Calix sat on the edge of the bed, head hung in shame as the last five minutes replayed through his mind. A whisper of touch drifted across his back, and he flinched, turning to see Ava on her knees behind him. Her arms wrapped around his neck and she tipped his head to the side, exposing the scars that tracked the spikes of his collar. The moment her lips made contact with the scar, his eyes screwed shut in a bid to keep from wanting to tear himself out of his own skin.

“Don’t be ashamed.” Her whisper reached through his dark thoughts, pulling him back into her. “You are every bit as worthy as anyone else. Don’t ever think you’re not, Calix.”

As if on cue, her sigh of contentment brought a smile to his face—one that quickly faded with the sudden rush that swept through his veins. Muscles hardening, his heart beat faster, his breaths arriving quicker. Pangs of starvation beat through him, his groin hammering out the raging pulse of blood that fed his erection.

He needed to feed. Being close to Ava, taking in her scent, her body’s softness and curves, the sound of her sleepy sighs, it called to the primitive incubus inside of him—the one that yearned to feed off the sleeping innocent. His hunger would get worse—much worse—with the close proximity, so Calix slid to the edge of the bed, unraveling her body from his, and lifted his pants from the floor. He quietly slipped the jeans over his hips, while Ava continued to twitch in dreams.

Huffing out his frustration, Calix ran his hand through his hair and backed away from the bed. Touching her, feeling her skin against his, had penetrated to his very bones, and he needed some distraction. Something that would tamp down the desires that had him feeling like a cold-hearted bastard for whatever it was that she’d already suffered.

He exited the room, padding quietly down the hall, and when he reached the top of the staircase, he noticed Gavin’s office light on.

Down the stairs, he strode across the foyer and knocked twice as he entered his brother’s study.

Instead of finding Gavin, his muscles flinched when cascades of red drifted over the slim shoulders of his brother’s mate, Sabelle. Her gaze shot to his, while she sat hunched over papers scattered across Gavin’s desk.

“Sorry, Sabelle.” Calix took a step back toward the door.

“No, wait. It’s okay, Calix. You might be able to help.” She waved him over, inviting him to sit in the chair across from her. The female had become much more regal in Calix’s eyes since mating with his brother. Like the queen she was meant to be, if Gavin would choose his birthright as the ruler of all Wrath demons in Obsidius.

He knew Gavin would rather rot in Stygius, though, than take on the added responsibilities of royalty. Still, his mate held herself as something more than the courtesan status her birthright offered her. And just like royalty, Calix was proud to honor and protect her, would lay down his life for her and any one of her children, because that was the code that he and his brothers lived by.

Sabelle huffed and sat back in Gavin’s chair. “You’re an incubus.”

“Half.” Calix rolled his shoulders at the part of his being that he wished he could cut right off his bones. “Half incubus.”

“Right.” The warm and knowing expression on Sabelle’s face told him she’d been handed her own barrage of bullshit throughout the years. Being sex workers for the underworld sucked balls. “Your brother refuses to let me accompany him on his nightly crusade to find my sister. So I’m doing the next best thing—useless investigations that might offer a clue as to where she is.”

“How can I help?”

“Gavin seems to think she was taken and enslaved, based on visions he’s had. I’d … truly like to believe that’s not the case. But I’m preparing myself for just about anything. Are you familiar with the Seven-Level Club?”

The very word cast a shudder down Calix’s spine. Through no fault of her own, Sabelle’s question forced him back to the days of his youth, when he and his sister had been captured by the sadistic band of marauders who stole children, selling them off to corrupt high lords and royalty. Each child was trained for the seven levels of sadism—the worst being seven. Just like the seven levels of hell. He knew all too well about the club. In the underworld, it was a means of buying and trading supes beneath the radar of the authorities, like cattle at a steer auction. Incubi and succubi happened to be fertile as fuck, so whether for sexual slavery, or stud services, the auction served as an effective means of trading. And as they were virtually impossible to track down, the victims were never typically recovered. Calix had been among the very rare and select few who’d ever made his way back after being submerged in the darkness of that world.

His sister hadn’t been so lucky.

“How are you aware of it?” he asked.

“I actually stumbled upon it. A few wayward clicks, and you fall into a black hole.” Her eyes blanked as she stared off somewhere beyond Calix. “I can’t un-see some of those images. Those poor children.”

Frowning, Calix screwed his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose to stifle the horrific visuals from his past stirring inside his head. He couldn’t afford them. Not at that moment. “You think they have your sister.”

“Denya is … an anomaly. Virgin succubus.”

Jesus. Anomaly wasn’t the right word—more like something of a mystical unicorn of succubi. Most lost their virginity at fourteen, fifteen years old. The slaves, even younger.

“If she remains a virgin, I’m afraid she’ll be one of the most sought after slaves in the underworld.” Fear glossed her eyes. “And then what, when she’s no longer virgin? She’s discarded? Left for absolute death?”

He sat forward, entwining his fingers. “They won’t de-virginize her immediately. She’ll be worth far too much. Fucking princes will pay to have her.”

Running her hands through her hair, she let out an exasperated breath and cupped her face with both hands. “Is she worth enough that they won’t hurt her?”

“Perhaps. It depends on her handler. If he happens to be a money hungry piece of shit, he won’t touch her. But if he becomes obsessed …” Even if the woman didn’t possess the ability to read minds, Calix still lowered his gaze for fear she might see right through him, into the dark and desolate parts of his soul that he couldn’t bear to look inside himself. “What makes you certain they have her?”

“Nothing makes me certain anymore. I’m grasping at possibilities. If I can accept what I deem the worst, then I can accept anything.”

“Absolute death isn’t the worst?”

“No. Where there is slavery of any kind, death is only a means to an end.”

The scars at his throat suddenly itched, and Calix shifted in his seat at his surmising that Sabelle thought her sister better off dead than subjected to slavery.

Perhaps she was right. The horrors never truly disappeared. He never stopped seeing them in his mind’s eye. He’d been offered a chance, by another very powerful incubus, to erase those memories, to completely blank out the first centuries of his existence.

Most incubi could only affect the short-term memories, but Sirius had powers no other possessed. With one wave of his hand, he could’ve taken the tortures, the starvation, the life Calix had lived shackled and used for the twisted amusement of his mistress, all of it could’ve disappeared like ash on the wind.

But that would have included his sister, Calypso, who’d perished in hellsfire trying to save him.

For that reason alone, Calix had refused. He vowed to remember her. To honor her sacrifice. Even if the memories he kept locked inside his head could one day destroy him.

“Death isn’t the only means to an end of slavery, Sabelle. Hope is just as powerful.”

Her brows flickered as if to frown, but at the same time a fine mist covered her eyes, her lips thinning as she nodded. “You’re right. Sometimes hope is much more powerful. Thank you for reminding me of that, Calix.”