BETWEEN DESTINY AND DESIRE

Damnation is John Severne’s inheritance, and stalking the accursed his legacy. Kat D’Arcy has her own ill-starred birthright. The strange gift that runs along her maternal line dooms her to a life trapped between daemons and those who pursue them. But Severne is unlike any daemon hunter she’s ever known. The Brimstone in his blood arouses every fiber of her being.

For Severne, Kat is the key to his salvation...until she becomes much more than that. As the ultimate danger closes in on them both, Severne must decide if he can abuse Kat’s trust—and betray his own heart.

She was familiar with temptation and resistance, but surrender?

That was a new possibility for Kat. She was afraid if she spent too long in John Severne’s company her limits might be tested. He was a daemon, but he had taken the guise of a very attractive man. She was drawn to the burn beneath his control. She was drawn to what he might hide beneath the hardness he cultivated for the world. His penchant for sugary kisses and his reaction to her cello music gave her a glimpse at what vulnerabilities he might hide.

He wasn’t a forthright man. He was a daemon.

His every move seemed to scream those truths to her even though his words and demeanor were enigmatic.

BARBARA J. HANCOCK lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where her daily walk takes her to the edge of the wilderness and back again. When Barbara isn’t writing modern gothic romance that embraces the shadows with a unique blend of heat and heart, she can be found wrangling twin boys and spoiling her pets.

Brimstone Seduction

Barbara J. Hancock

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Dear Reader,

Music brings them together. Damnation threatens to tear them apart.

It’s been a decadent pleasure to create the lush, dramatic world of the Théâtre de l’Opéra Severne—from the haunted frieze on its walls to the dance floor of its grand salon where masquerade masks disguise darkly passionate motivations. Against the backdrop of a daemon revolution, the shadowed Baton Rouge opera house echoes its master, John Severne, and the heated mark of Brimstone he carries in his bartered blood—beautiful, cursed, standing the test of time and tide. To save his soul, Severne must betray the ray of light he longs to possess. But Katherine D’Arcy will not be easily betrayed. In fact, she might be the only one who can save him.

Confession: Severne, the man and his dark world, still linger in my imagination long after I typed The End!

In my first full-length Harlequin Nocturne book, my love of music and gothic shadows combine to create a high-stakes Faustian romance where the burn of forbidden desire triumphs over the darkness.

Welcome to l’Opéra Severne... I hope you’ll enjoy a dance with Severne in the pale moonlight.

Barbara

For Lucienne Diver...a hell of an agent and the ultimate finishing kick when the race has been long.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

Dear Reader

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

Chapter 1

She was used to being followed. Sometimes she lost him. Sometimes she didn’t. It was those times she feared. Father Reynard wasn’t her enemy, but as she cut down the familiar side street that formed an alley between the auditorium and her apartment, she knew what he was to her was more complicated and more frightening than if he was something she could fight.

The Savannah, Georgia, air was muggy in July, and her efforts to evade Reynard had left her damp with a sheen that was more humidity kissing her skin than sweat. But she didn’t pause to set down her cello case so she could mop her forehead with a lace hanky like a flustered Southern belle. Instead, tendrils of her thick chestnut hair curled around her face as strands loosened from the diamanté clips the salon had used when she’d been cool and collected and air-conditioned that morning, preparing for the afternoon’s performance.

She heard his footfalls behind her. She knew his step. Others from his Order often hunted as well, but Reynard considered her his own.

Her faltering steps had brought the sound of his relentless pursuit closer. A desperate instinct to run, to hide, rose up in her chest, squeezing her lungs so that she breathed more quickly than her current exertions required. It was fear, plain and simple and stark.

Because there was no escape.

The soft blanket of gloaming draped the city in a muted haze. The muggy haze had dimmed to purple with the setting of the Georgia sun. In the distance, she could hear the traffic and the hum of people on the sidewalks of the historic district preparing for ghost tours and streetlight-lit carriage rides. But here, on the leftover cobblestones of a distant time, she was alone...except for Father Reynard.

His whistle began as it always did, with a lilting trio of notes that led into song. She recognized it as a Verdi piece she’d played that afternoon. Gooseflesh rose on her arms in spite of the oppressive heat from the summer day trapped in the narrow alley. The whistle meant he had her. It meant there must be a daemon nearby that she’d been drawn to. Her affinity had reliably led Father Reynard right where he most wanted to be. Again.

She did stop then.

Not giving up. Never that. She only paused to brace herself for what might be an ugly, dark and dangerous evening more from the violent monk who dogged her steps than the daemons he hunted. Although there was danger there, too. Certainly.

She was trapped in the middle of a war that would never have a winning side.

Katherine saw the daemon then. A woman. The glow of the horizon narrowly visible at the end of the alley cast her stiff form in stark relief. She stood poised for a fight. Her arms akimbo. Her knees slightly bent. It was going to be one of those times when the daemon didn’t go quietly. This was no hopeless soul longing to be sent back home. Katherine could see determination tense every muscle in the figure she faced.

“A female. Good job, Katarina. It’s so important to banish these before they breed,” Father Reynard said as he came up behind her. She kept her focus on the daemon, but she was totally aware of Reynard’s movements. The same way she would be if she were a hiker who was suddenly forced to skirt a mountain ledge over a steep precipice. Her footing was just as precarious. One wrong move with the deadly daemon hunter and she might be dead herself. She could feel the suck of gravity as if she was on the ledge, inches from death. His steps were slow and steady. Not rushed. He was confident. His voice was already smug with success. She was the one who was in danger. She was the one who might slip and fall.

Kat cringed at the utter contempt Reynard had for the daemon as a living, breathing creature, whether it was human or not. And at his total disregard for her and her disgust for his bloodthirsty quest.

Kat fisted her hands, but the woman leaped before she could decide how best to give her a chance to flee. The alley was too wide, an access point for delivery trucks to service the buildings on either side. She dropped her cello case and jumped but had no chance to keep the hunter and his prey apart. Not when the prey was determined to get around her. Kat was pushed to the side. She slammed against solid brick, and all the air left her lungs in a painful rush.

The daemon attacked Reynard with a fury Kat had never seen.

He was the one with the drawn blade, but Kat was as much a weapon as the bloodstained blade in Reynard’s hand. She didn’t deserve to be bypassed. The daemon should have attacked her first.

The sight of the deadly knife always repelled her. But it was Kat’s ability that had led Reynard and his weapon here. Like deadly magnets with a pull she couldn’t resist, daemons called and called to Katherine.

She was inexorably drawn to daemons, and Father Reynard followed with crimson death across all their throats.

“Stop,” Kat choked out as her own throat empathetically tightened—to the daemon or to Reynard or to the family gift she hadn’t asked to receive.

It was too late. Grizzled and gray, Reynard had fifty years of experience in killing. An extension of his wiry, muscled arm, the long knife gleamed red in the last hurrah of sunset on the horizon. Then it dripped a much darker stain from the daemon’s blood. Kat shuddered and backed away.

It was always the same.

The body went up in flames, consumed from the inside out, eyes and mouth and the gaping wound across the daemon’s throat gone to glowing with an impossible heat of coals in a fiery furnace. It was the freed Brimstone that did it, an otherworldly fuel that flowed through a daemon’s veins. Reynard said it was a little bit of the hell dimension they took with them wherever they roamed.

Kat always forced herself to watch until there were only curls of smoke where a daemon had been, but this time there was a sound discernible beneath Reynard’s triumphant chants.

To the left, behind a Dumpster, there was a shuffle of rubbish and gravel. There was also a sob. A small face peeked from around the refuse container. As the embers died, Kat could see chubby wet cheeks and eyes widened in shock and fear.

By then, the sun was gone and the sky was dark. It was only the glow of the daemon’s banishment that lit the scene. The light flickered and faded, but the daemon’s last dying illumination caused an eerie spotlight on the cowering child.

This time, she wasn’t too slow to react. While Reynard was occupied with ritual, in those few seconds it took for him to finish with one daemon and turn his attention when he realized there was another, Kat was the one who leaped. She wouldn’t let the mother’s last light aid Reynard in his hunt.

The child tried to get away. After all, Kat was part of his mother’s murder. Or so it seemed. So it felt. Regardless of what Reynard said about the daemons rematerializing in their own hellish dimension.

Kat was faster than the child. He was young. No more than five. And the mother’s desperation had transferred itself to Kat’s arms and legs. In those moments, Katherine D’Arcy was fit, fast and nobody’s bloodhound. Not anymore.

She grabbed the reluctant boy. He balked, planting his small feet on the pavement as if he planned to remain a statue in the alley, a fierce little memorial to his mother forever. He wouldn’t run with her. She had to pick him up. She tucked his squirming limbs against her side and bolted, deciding to base jump instead of fearing the fall. She’d never openly defied Reynard. Her grandmother’s fear had been passed to her mother. Her mother’s had been passed to her and her sister, their legacy darkened by his long shadow. His surprise at Kat’s action gave her precious seconds to get away with the child.

But even if she was faster than the small boy, Reynard was faster than her.

She’d long since realized his obsession drove him to superhuman lengths. His madness gave him strength beyond that of a mortal man.

Her only hope was to get back to the crowded street with the boy, where a blade across his throat would be too bold a move even for Father Reynard. The trench coat he wore like a monk’s robes flapped as he ran, great dark wings on either side of his lean body.

He seemed supernaturally unstoppable. As if he would never need rest. Her back. Her arms. Her shoulders. They all screamed under the squirming boy’s weight. Far too mortal in comparison to Reynard. She didn’t look back again.

“Hold still. Hang on. We’ve got to get you away from him,” she said into the boy’s towheaded curls.

The strands smelled like baby shampoo against her face. The simplicity of that impacted her even harder than the sneakers kicking her side. The daemon woman who had attacked Reynard to defend her child had also lovingly washed his hair like any human mother would. Kat couldn’t let Reynard kill him. She couldn’t let the boy die because of her gift.

She heard booted footfalls catching up behind them as she flew from alley to street to sidewalk, trying to get back to the main thoroughfare where people would be.

If the boy had been a few pounds lighter or a few years younger or less panicked in his struggle against her, she might have made it.

“Katarina!” Reynard boomed close behind her. His pet name for her grated on her nerves as always. Now it was a proclamation of her guilt. She had betrayed him.

Resignation softened the muscles in her legs as adrenaline deserted her. She would never beat him in a foot race, even if she wasn’t carrying the child. Her only hope was to reason with a madman. No hope at all. Fortunately, the lack of hope made her more determined to try. Though she stopped to turn and face him and his blade with a pounding heart and ice in her veins, she couldn’t help noting his giddiness was gone. He was raw anger personified now. The guise of his righteous joy had burned away as surely as the daemon’s human form.

The boy had stopped his efforts to wiggle out of her arms. Perhaps between the man who had cut his mother’s throat and the woman who held him, he chose her.

Being the lesser of two evils didn’t seem a triumph at all.

“I won’t let you kill him, Father,” she said.

She held the boy close. She wrapped him tighter in her arms. She could feel the frantic beat of his heart against her chest, an echo to the thud of her own. She placed a hand on the back of his shampoo-scented head and pressed him even closer.

“I banish. I don’t kill, Katarina. You know this. I send them back to hell where they belong,” Reynard said. He stepped nearer. One stride. Katherine took the same stride back and away. He had always refused to call her by the name her mother had given her. It was as if he attempted to erase her true identity and replace it with one he had created.

But she had nowhere to run. She could still hear traffic and people in the distance. So close and yet so far away. The hum of the city mocked her efforts to defy the man who had dogged her steps from the time she could walk.

“So you say. All I’ve ever seen is the blood. The suffering. The pain,” Kat said.

The boy trembled in her arms. At some point, his small arms had twined around her neck.

“They are deadly. They manipulate us with trickery and deceit. Have you forgotten your mother?” Reynard asked.

Her mother had been killed by a daemon. It was true. They were dangerous. Deadly. But so was the human being she faced.

Reynard held his long blade in a steady hand. She could see the muscle and sinew standing out in his right forearm where his coat had fallen away. He was ready to slit the throat of a child...or her throat if she got in his way.

“A daemon killed my mother. But you were using her to hunt him when it happened. Would she be dead if it wasn’t for you?” Katherine asked.

“She would never have been born if it hadn’t been for Samuel. He gave his last breath to resuscitate your grandmother, a stranger he met on a train. He passed his ability to detect daemons hiding among us to your family. And this is the legacy you spurn.” Spittle flew with the accusation, and then several sudden steps brought Reynard much too close.

There was nothing she could do. Her back was pressed to the grungy brick wall. Only decades of faded graffiti would mark her grave if she continued to fight him. She had nowhere to go, but then again, she never had.

“It’s you I spurn, Reynard,” she said.

Slowly she lowered the child to the ground and pushed him behind her legs. Her body was the only shield she had to give. Her cello case had been dropped back where his mother’s smoke still swirled in the air.

“Your sister has evaded me for a long time. Too long. I begin to wonder if she spurned me only to be killed by a daemon, too. Perhaps your family legacy is one of failure,” Reynard said. The glee was back in his voice, lilting his words.

She thought of her cello, of her mother’s and sister’s singing. They had turned to music to buffer the bloody killings and to mute the daemon’s call. Had they failed, after all? Had all the years of practice and performance been for nothing? Her fingers tingled and ached, reminders of how many times she’d played until the tips bled in order to thwart Reynard.

The boy clung to her legs. She could feel the damp of his tears soaking through the chiffon of her concert gown. It was no suit of armor. No barrier to Reynard’s seasoned blade. She was no match for a killer.

When her sister Victoria had flown to Baton Rouge to take the role of Faust’s Marguerite at l’Opéra Severne, she’d told Katherine not to worry. She’d been gone for months, but she’d kept in touch at first. Kat hadn’t heard from her sister in a few weeks, but with rehearsals and the rush of preparing for performances, she’d hoped all was well.

“Give him to me, Katarina. End this. Embrace your legacy. Do not embrace a daemon,” Reynard coaxed, edging closer.

The idea that Reynard might be right about her sister hollowed out her insides until she echoed. Hollow or not, alone or not, she wouldn’t give up. She didn’t have a parachute to count on. She could only jump and try to fly.

“My name is Kat,” she replied, pressing her hand against the boy’s back and lifting her chin. Whether he accepted it or not, she would claim autonomy. She would follow her heart and her instinct to protect the trembling child behind her.

A sound of disgust erupted from Reynard’s lips and he brandished his knife. Would he slice her throat or stab her through her pounding heart?

Either way, if Reynard had to deal with her, it might give the daemon boy a chance to run.

She braced to push the child away, but before Reynard’s blade descended, an eerie mimicry of his earlier whistle began in the alley behind them. It stayed Reynard’s hand and caused Kat’s breath to catch in her throat. The boy against her leg lifted his head and turned his face to see.

There were few streetlights nearby. Most had been busted. Barely mitigated darkness enveloped them. Only one flickering holdout, the ambient light of the city against the sky, and the humid atmosphere gave them illumination to see. It was light pollution, but it mimicked fog. Through its violet haze and the floating of particles that were probably Brimstone ash, a figure stepped toward them.

The whistle and the posture of the man were casual. Exaggerated ease. He must see the confrontation he’d interrupted. He must see a woman and child threatened by a larger, stronger man, but he acted nonchalant, as if he was only out for a stroll. He must see the knife Reynard hadn’t bothered to hide away.

Man?

Kat’s gift wasn’t one of sirens and flashing lights. She was pulled toward daemons. It was subtle. The tingle, the thrill that shivered along her veins as the man approached was probably only shock that he would stroll past Father Reynard with barely a glance in his direction. A daemon wouldn’t dare approach them.

Closer, she could see that the stranger’s tall form was clothed in evening apparel. The flash of white from his shirt contrasted with the inky darkness of his suit or tuxedo. But closer still, she noted his bowtie was undone at his neck and hung on either side of his collar. So easy. So debonair.

It wasn’t until he stopped at her side that she knew she’d been fooled. He wasn’t relaxed. The tension in his body transferred itself to hers when his arm brushed her elbow. Hard. Prepared. Ready.

He might wear formal clothes, but beneath them he was all warrior. Molded body armor would have been more appropriate to the purpose inherent in every flexed muscle and the energy he exerted to hold himself in check.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Reynard asked.

The blade of his knife had dipped. He preferred an audience of one for his performances. Her. And her alone. Or her sister in turn. Their mother and grandmother before that.

“A bystander who finds himself unable to stand by,” the man said.

For her ears alone he added, “I’m John Severne.”

Memories of the opera house in Baton Rouge teased her mind, but she pushed them away.

She had no time for nostalgia. Worry for her sister wound tighter until her insides were pulled like cheap strings on an instrument’s bridge, stretched to the breaking point. One clumsy finger would cause her to snap.

Severne reached for the boy, but she stopped him. It only took one hand on his hard arm, but touching him felt braver than that. Almost as brave as opposing Reynard. His cultured Southern tones seemed as incongruent to him as his evening apparel. Beneath the polish, he was a man to be reckoned with. She couldn’t see his face...only a suggestion of angles and curves, but as he drew his arm back, she felt what it cost him. He forced patience with her interference. A thrill of cool adrenaline rushed down her spine at his stiffness, his anger. It shored up her nerve...barely. The boy trembled against her, not oblivious to the forces at work above his head.

“You are making a mistake,” Reynard growled.

“I would say the same to you,” Severne replied.

Then he pulled Katherine against him. She’d been right about his tension. She could feel the planned action in his body everywhere it touched hers. Muscle. Energy. Strength. And more adrenaline rushed because she was fairly sure the warning in his words, just like his name, had been for her, not Reynard.

He was warning her it was a mistake to resist his help.

But she didn’t snap like the cheap strings she imagined. She held fast. Unbroken.

“Let me take the boy,” he said for her ears alone, the flow of the Seine even more apparent in an intimate whisper than it had been in his louder speech. He had a Southern accent, but it was old-fashioned, formal and touched with a hint of Paris. Clenched teeth and a hardened jaw and the iron of his body against her offset the softness of his accent.

He was no French-kissed delta dream.

He was real. And the potential for danger radiated off him in heated waves.

“Hell, no,” Kat replied.

She finally recognized Brimstone’s fire. She’d felt it only a few times in her twenty-two years. Normally she avoided touching daemons. Pressed close to him, the simmer his body contained couldn’t be ignored. He had seemed so cool and collected in his initial approach. He wasn’t. Beneath the surface, he burned.

Her rescuer was a daemon, and she was damned for sure because she still refused to join forces with Reynard against him.

“We need more time to negotiate,” he said as if they sat at a boardroom table. “I can arrange that.”

She’d seen Reynard fight before, but when the energy she’d sensed in Severne erupted, the ferocity of his clash with her lifelong tormentor took her by surprise.

Reynard was in trouble.

Severne used only his body—fists, feet, arms and legs—but he used them in a graceful dance of martial arts moves meant to be deadly. The tuxedo he wore was revealed inch by inch as his coat was shredded away by Reynard’s blade.

John Severne was in trouble, too.

When a particularly vicious slice cut the fabric away from his muscled chest to reveal a hard, sculpted body, she blinked the sight away, but not before she cringed at the dark rivers of his blood.

After Reynard, there was always the desperate flight and the need to hide again. This time she’d flee for two. For the first time, she imagined what it must have been like for her mother to protect them from the obsessed monk. It had been a lost cause. But she had never stopped trying.

“We have to go,” she said to the boy. The fight was the diversion they needed to get away. She pulled him up into her arms again and ran. He clung to her this time, wrapping his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck, subdued by all he’d seen.

* * *

The absence of her cello made her ache. It wasn’t a missing limb. It was a missing chamber of her heart. There was nothing to be done. She couldn’t go back for it. She had gone to her apartment for a few necessities, but had sought shelter in the house of a friend who was out of town rather than risk Reynard knowing her current address. She moved often. It never mattered.

He always found her eventually.

While the boy slept, she looked up driving directions to Baton Rouge. She couldn’t ignore her concern for Victoria any longer. They’d been out of touch too long, and Reynard’s appearance only confirmed her fear. Urgency pounded in her temples to no avail. She couldn’t fly because she had no papers for the child. He wouldn’t even give her his name. If Reynard defeated the daemon, he would hunt her down. She didn’t have much time to save the daemon boy and find her sister. She’d called Victoria’s phone again and again. The cheery voice mail greeting became more ominous with every repeat. And what of John Severne? Had he ended up with his throat slashed and Brimstone-burned back to wherever he’d come from, or did she need to fear him as well as Reynard?

“Let me take the boy,” he’d said.

But every fiber in her body had resisted. It was her fault Reynard had found the boy’s mother. It was her responsibility to protect him.

The boy had refused to talk, but he’d seemed to understand everything she’d said. He’d also refused to let her out of his sight until he finally fell asleep. His dark lashes against his chubby cheeks gave him an angelic mien against his borrowed pillow. She’d smoothed his soft hair back from his forehead to kiss it, finding the extra warmth beneath his skin pleasant instead of frightening.

After that, the loss of her cello didn’t matter.

She’d curled her legs under her in a nearby armchair, determined to watch over the boy through the night.

But a noise outside interrupted the tea she’d made to calm herself. It had been cooling untouched anyway. She’d been replaying every word Severne had spoken. She’d even closed her eyes to remember the song of his voice, to gauge what was the truth about the daemon—his drawl or the deadly way he’d used his whole body as a weapon. His anger or the way he’d restrained his impatience with her resistance.

At the sound of a step on the front porch, she rose from the chair beside the boy’s bed.

She didn’t know whom she most feared to see.

It was ridiculous to feel gratitude to a stranger for his help when he might have his own daemonic designs on her family. The name Severne couldn’t be a coincidence. She hadn’t heard from her sister since Victoria had gone to the Théâtre de l’Opéra Severne in Louisiana, and Kat had felt the heat from Severne’s Brimstone-tainted blood.

She’d been desperate to defy Reynard, and for the first time she had, openly and with no regret, but she’d been successful only with the stranger’s help.

The shotgun colonial had creaky floors and high-ceilinged rooms. Kat moved along the edge of the hall where the boards were more firmly nailed to diminish the sound of her feet on the floor. The peach chiffon of her soiled and torn gown swirled around her legs. She hadn’t wanted to leave the frightened boy alone long enough to change, and now she padded downstairs on bare feet, pausing only long enough to pick up a bronze statue. It was a cherubic angel.

Her friend’s decor held an irony she was too tired to appreciate.

“Did you know your ability to detect daemons works both ways? They’re drawn to you like moths to a flame,” a familiar voice said. Her memory recalled the exact inflections and the intimate way he drawled certain vowels, low as if in a register she felt more than heard. Musical. His voice was musical.

Severne.

He came through the front foyer painted by shadows and soft light.

The door had been locked, but that fact seemed distant. As if she’d expected the bolt to be nothing to him. She feared him. She feared what his intentions might be. But there was a song in his accent she couldn’t help appreciating. His voice called to something deep inside her, making her fingers itch to play.

All the lamps had been extinguished. The light from an open laptop and the streetlights outside still didn’t fully reveal the daemon’s face, but they did reveal the familiar shape of her cello case in his hand.

He came toward her with no hesitation, completely undaunted by the statue in her hand until he was only inches away...until she could feel his Brimstone heat. Again, the heat wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, in the air-conditioned chill of the unfamiliar house, she could almost lean into Severne’s heat if she allowed herself to be lulled by his song or relieved that she wouldn’t have to fight Reynard to protect the child...yet.

“Judging by body temperature, you’re mistaken about which of us is the flame in that scenario,” Kat said.

She’d never had a conversation with a daemon. It was wrong. Against everything she’d ever been told or taught. The trouble was, it was also exhilarating. Part of her was still all adrenaline from the way the night had played out. She should have been shaky and over it. Ready to hide behind Tchaikovsky and Wagner as safe excitements she could easily handle.

Instead, a part of her wanted to jump off a ledge again with this flaming parachute she’d been given and enjoy the burn all the way down.

Could he sense her exhilaration? How it barely edged out fear? Could he tell she trembled when he moved a little closer?

“I could have taken the boy away from danger,” he said, so close now that the statue pressed between them was even more useless than before. He didn’t make her put it down. He ignored it. As if he knew she wouldn’t give in to fear. As if he expected her to be braver than that.

She would have to be braver, because the real danger was Severne and her reaction to him, and there didn’t seem to be any escape from that.

“I don’t trust Father Reynard, but I don’t trust daemon manipulations, either,” Kat said. “Did you kill him?”

He paused. Hesitated as if her words had stopped him. Maybe she shouldn’t have spoken her suspicions about him and what he was...but the thought disintegrated when he lifted a hand to touch her face.

“No. He isn’t dead. Only slowed down for awhile,” Severne said. “I’m sorry.”

She let him touch her. She didn’t cringe away. As his warm fingers lightly trailed across her skin, Kat suddenly thought of the graceful but deadly way he’d dealt with Reynard in the alley. He was a daemon. It didn’t matter that he had helped her. She wouldn’t trust him. She hadn’t even fully seen him yet in a night of shadows and flickering light...

She could tell his hair was dark. Not whether it was black or brown. His eyes were dark mysteries. They could be any color. They held all his secrets in depths that appeared onyx in the night.

When he leaned down to press his lips to her temple, then to her cheek, then to trail them along her jawline as if to trace her face in the darkness...she didn’t protest. Was he comforting her? His lips were warmer than they should have been. The heat caused a responsive flush to rise on her skin. Her affinity kept her from reacting the way she ordinarily would if a man she’d just met had been so bold. It was a secret pulse between them, heightening a natural flare of chemistry, drawing them closer, sooner, than it should.

“Don’t be sorry,” Kat said. “I think he can’t be killed. He’s like Death himself, a Grim Reaper I can’t escape.”

He was all relaxed grace, taking the statue and placing it on a nearby table. She was all adrenaline and trembling sighs, but when both hands were free, she kept them at her sides. Not pulling him closer. Not pushing him away. Only refusing to hold on with all her might. He warmed her in ways that went beyond mere physical heat. Her usual affinity was magnified by his touch. It rose up and rushed through her veins almost as heated as Brimstone until she had the crazy urge to surrender to it and press herself closer into his arms. She saw it again in her mind, the way he’d braved Reynard’s deadly blade.

Those images held her still for his kiss.

Or did they? Her body mocked her need for an excuse. This—the heat, the masculine aura drawing her in, the night-cloaked scent that clung to his earthy skin and his hair and clothes—wasn’t he enough?

Right now, he was everything.

Because by then his soft, tracing lips had discovered her mouth in the dark, and a more intimate exploration of it had begun—lips, teeth, tongue. So velvety and alive with tremors and gasps and the sudden moist dip of his tongue.

A hot coil unfurled in her abdomen, her nipples peaked and her knees grew weak.

Then Severne pressed the handle of her cello case into her right hand. Her fingers curled around the indentions they’d made over fifteen years of constant companionship to the leather-bound grip.

“Never trust a daemon bearing gifts, Katherine D’Arcy. There’s always a price to be paid,” he murmured into her hair when she slumped loose-limbed and faint against the firm wall of his body.

“No,” she protested. But it was too late. She’d accepted the cello like a long-lost love. The Order warned against communicating with daemons. Hell was structured around a complex system of negotiating. She could feel daemonic power like static in the air as some unspoken bargain physically materialized around them, beginning with her acceptance of her case from his hand.

He lifted her and the cello easily. He cradled her against his chest, but she couldn’t make her body resist or her hand release the cello. He carried her and the instrument upstairs and placed her beside the boy on the bed with the cello case cool and lifeless on the other side.

Then he made the trade.

He picked up the daemon child.

Kat couldn’t move. He was no longer touching her, but his heat had remained, leaving her lethargic and weak.

Somehow she had agreed without meaning to. The cello for the child. The daemonic bargain held her in place. She couldn’t fight its power.

“Come and play for me in Baton Rouge, Katherine. We have more bargains to make. I can help you find your sister,” John Severne said.

“Never trust a daemon,” Kat promised her pillow. She refused to let her tears fall. Or maybe it was daemon manipulations that suspended each perfect droplet on her lashes as Severne walked away.

Chapter 2

He could hear the siren song that sounded when her heart beat, when she inhaled and exhaled. But that wasn’t what called him to her. It was the subtle scent of her, beneath soap, blended with a hint of verbena perfume. Like cotton warmed by the sun, but cooled by the breeze on a spring day, there was a freshness, a goodness to her, untouched by Brimstone.

Untainted.

And she thought he was a daemon.

He settled the boy with the costume matron, Sybil, who had been at l’Opéra Severne almost as long as he had. She’d always appeared as an older woman with that particular blend of sternness and maternal habits that made everyone defer to her in case she should decide to box their ears or swat their behinds. She looked no older than she’d looked the day he’d been ushered into her care when he was about the age of the boy he’d brought from Savannah.

Katherine D’Arcy was wrong.

No surprise that his Brimstone-tainted blood had fooled her. He wasn’t a daemon, but his grandfather had inked a deal with the devil in Severne blood. The Brimstone had come after, scorching their veins with its invasive mark.

He was only an heir to damnation, but Katherine D’Arcy was associated with the Order of Samuel, and in such a woman’s eyes there could be little difference.

Once he’d settled the boy with Sybil, he made his way back to the suite of rooms that made up his apartment several stories below and behind the grand opera stage for which the house was famous. The seemingly endless levels of basement beneath the opera shouldn’t have existed in a city that itself was beneath the flood plain of the mighty Mississippi, but nothing followed natural law here.

The opera house was a universe unto itself, influenced by its damned denizens and masters.

Its gilded mahogany columns and highly polished boards held ground against elaborately carved wainscoting more baroque than anything else you’d find in the river city. The carvings seemed to gambol and change as you passed, often reflecting your own experiences and thoughts back to you as if some long ago sculptor had chiseled out premonitory dreams in a laudanum haze. And all the shadows were draped in heavy layers of black-and-crimson satin and velvet curtains, which in spite of being impeccably maintained always ended up seeming shabby chic in the candlelight.

Time, distance, reality were softened inside l’Opéra, but the softness didn’t mute the cruelty of an eternity in the luxurious chains of candlelit opulence you couldn’t escape.

His rooms were more austere, but still overly filled with the detritus of centuries. His prison was made even more claustrophobic by books and art and textiles from too many years and fears to count.

Resisting the oppression of time had helped to harden him as much as his constant training had.

Only his bedroom reflected his true taste for simplicity. In it, the only furnishings were a large black cypress bed and a matching trunk bound with cracked leather straps and a heavy iron padlock.

He opened the trunk with gloved hands, carefully removing an iron cask. Even with the gloves, the heat of the metal fittings of the cask was uncomfortable to his hands. Without the added protection of the Brimstone in his blood, he would have been horribly burned.

He placed the cask on the hardwood floor, noting the scorch marks from it having been placed there before. The trunk was lined with lead or it would have turned to ash. Good thing his task wouldn’t take long.

He opened the iron lid, a habitual move that was still momentous every single time.

Inside the box, on a bed of coals, lay a rolled parchment. A curl of smoke rose lazily from one end, but there were no flames. He picked it up, ignoring the prickle of burns to his fingertips.

Slowly he unrolled the scroll.

The first names on the list had been marked through years ago. Their glow had faded to smudged black. But the second-to-last name on the list still shone like an ember in his dimly lit bedroom. It brightened even as he watched, and suddenly a line of fire scratched across the name. The blazing line flickered, flared and then went out.

In time, the name of the boy’s mother would fade as the others had before her.

Lavinia.

It would blaze in his mind much longer than that.

This time there was no corresponding pain as a slash of black was added to his scarred forearm like a grim tattoo. He hadn’t actually dispatched Lavinia himself. But there were many more marks from his shoulder down to beyond the crook of his elbow. A torturous tally he couldn’t ignore. One appeared each time he sent a daemon back to hell. Sometimes he wondered if the black marks reached deep, all the way to his heart. Marks that would stay with him forever even after he was free.

There was only one name left on the list.

Michael.

After centuries of damnation’s shackles, he was almost free. More importantly, his father would be free before he died. They’d suffered under the burden of Thomas Severne’s lust for success. The only way they could regain their souls was to hunt down the daemons on the scroll.

A being had to be extremely evil to wind up on hell’s blacklist. Or so he told himself when the nights grew long.

The boy was sleeping. He’d been reassured by the familiar warmth of Brimstone and by Sybil’s welcome. Severne was suddenly fiercely glad the old monk had been the one to dispatch Lavinia. The gladness stung. It was a weakness he couldn’t afford. Not now when his father’s soul was almost within his grasp before it was too late. He had always been as hard as he had to be. He’d grown even harder over time. His father needed him to stay strong.

He’d sent thirty daemons on the list back to hell. Usually a name was enough. Younger daemons were horrible at incognito. They always revealed their secret at the wrong time, in the wrong place. They shared their true name out of passion or pride, and then he was inevitably there to catch them. Because he didn’t rest. He’d watched those thirty daemons consumed by the very fire he feared as a corruption in his own veins. The boy here in his home would be a constant reminder.

Severne allowed the scroll to roll in on itself. He replaced it in the cask and then set the cask back in the trunk.

Only one name left... Michael.

But he might be the one that got away if Severne failed to use Katherine D’Arcy the way he intended. Michael had proved illusive. He was one of the ancient ones. They were much more experienced and discreet and much harder to find.

He rose from the trunk, but stood in the dark for a long time with the glow of the scroll still gleaming behind his eyes. He fingered the network of fine white scars that he’d received over the decades from daemon bites and claws or whatever weapons they could wield against him. Those marks were also reminders. Of what he had done. Of what he still had to do.

Hard.

Katherine’s skin had been perfectly smooth. So very soft to his touch.

He didn’t touch the tally marks. He suspected they’d scorch his fingers as badly as the scroll. If not literally, then figuratively, because of the guilt each mark represented.

She was coming. He could feel her approach, a distant tug on his senses that was both anticipation and... Her lips had been sweet, flavored by a vanilla lip balm and the champagne she’d been given after her performance. He hadn’t had to kiss her to influence her. The Brimstone in his veins gave him heightened powers of persuasion. A touch would have sufficed. He’d tasted her because he’d had to, but he hadn’t expected the taste to linger on his tongue. Most flavors were burned away before he could even enjoy them.

She threatened to soften him. He could feel the seduction of what it would be like to ease into her arms. Instead, she was the one who had to be seduced. He needed her to complete his task and end his imprisonment. The contract Thomas Severne had inked with hell must be fulfilled before Levi Severne died.

He left the bedroom to pass into a room that looked more medieval torture chamber than exercise room. He’d crafted most of the equipment himself to test his limits and push his body to become as iron as it could be though still flesh and bone. He began what would be hours of training with one thought burning in his mind.

When he was finished with Katherine D’Arcy, she would be scarred, as well. His seduction and betrayal would irreparably mark her heart.

Chapter 3

When Kat made it to Baton Rouge after driving the rest of the night and into the next day, she couldn’t shy away from her memories any longer. The city was a blend of modern glass and steel from the present and neo-Gothic architecture from times long past. It wasn’t hard to find the opera house because it sat on Severne Row, a street time had forgotten to touch. While much of Old South Baton Rouge had been claimed by poverty and, later, revitalization, Severne Row had stayed the same for decades.

They’d been to l’Opéra Severne as children accompanying their mother on tour. Even then, the theater was infamous for being devoted to a darkly Gothic version of Gounod’s Faust, its most popular draw. Their mother had been a contralto Marthe for several nights while they’d watched in awe on velveteen seats of pale, faded scarlet.

She pulled up to the theater and parked the nondescript sedan she’d rented with a friend’s help so her name wouldn’t be on the paperwork. Later the rental company would come to claim it. Kat was an old hat at traveling quietly and lightly. She had only a couple of suitcases in the trunk.

She carried them to the side entrance, where Victorian-style signs directed employees away from the main portico. She did pause to look up at the grand porches with their arches and massive stairs. The curving style of the rails was both beautiful and intimidating, oversized to denote the palatial quality of the building they pointed to.

When she moved to the side door, it pressed inward easily, and the shadowed interior sighed a welcome to her travel-weary senses.

The scent of the place evoked sudden visceral memories: swinging her legs clad in white tights, her feet tucked into polished Mary Janes, the scratchiness of her ruffled tulle skirt with its wide satin belt far too fancy for fidgets, and Victoria humming along, lost in rapt enjoyment of their mother’s inspired performance.

She could sense again the hush, the thrill and the music swelling until it claimed her to the marrow of her bones.

That night she’d known she would never sing.

It was the polished maple that called to her, the hollow reverberations coaxed to fill an entire room—lofted cathedral ceiling and all—in spite of humble nylon and steel beginnings.

Dust. Lemon floor polish. Wax and powder. As soon as she breathed the air in the two-hundred-year-old opera house again, she knew she’d missed it. She’d been in thousands of auditoriums, theaters and even more magnificent venues.

But it was the Théâtre de l’Opéra Severne that had shown her the way in which she could hold Reynard at bay.

She’d been fascinated by the orchestra pit, but especially the stringed instruments. The sound and movement of the musicians had transfixed her, and when they had plucked at the strings, they had plucked at her soul.

Her first cello came soon after. Then lessons. Then obsession. Her calloused fingers, the muscles in her gracefully bowed back and her well-shaped arms all because of Severne’s opera house.

Had she recognized its echo in him? The interior of the whole building was as expectant as John Severne was coiled and prepared. The same ready-for-what-was-about-to-happen filled both the theater and the man.

The daemon, she corrected herself. Lest she forget. The residual heat that still made her movements languid and slow—it mocked her.

Kat walked through the side mezzanine with her cello case, though she’d left her suitcases in a pile by the door at the usher’s urging. Now the same usher led her through the building to Severne’s offices.

Compared to the humid outdoors of Baton Rouge—more moistened by the Mississippi River than cooled by it—the interior of the opera house was shadowed and cool. The atmosphere was close down the columned corridor with almost too many details to make out in the scant light of midafternoon, when no candles were lit and few lamps glowed. She could see the rough texture of carvings on the wainscoting, but she couldn’t pause to make out exactly what the carvings were about. It was only her imagination that made it appear as if hundreds of faces rendered in the wood turned to follow her movements as she walked by.

She was escorted. It was formal and old-fashioned, but she didn’t want to be rude to the eager-to-please uniformed young man. Whether he strived to please her or his employer, she couldn’t be sure. But she thought the latter because there was an urgency to his steps slightly more colored by fear than a young woman in a sundress would inspire.

As she followed, his mood was contagious. She thought maybe her old tulle and satin would have been more appropriate for a job interview in this vintage setting than the light cotton dress she’d worn for travel between one hot Southern city and another even hotter. She recalled with perfect clarity John Severne’s hard, deadly form beneath his shredded evening attire, and as she did, she also recalled the velvet tease of his tongue.

Her arms and legs might be gauche and exposed, but she’d already been more intimate with the daemon than she’d been with another man. It was impossible to forge relationships when your lifestyle was one of running, constantly running. She couldn’t trust intimacy. She avoided it at all costs. Oh, she’d had hurried kisses in moments when her guard had fallen, but she’d never allowed herself to fall fully, to indulge fully in desires to touch and taste.

And now was probably not the best time to wonder why a daemon had been able to breach her usual defenses.

The usher opened the double doors of what she supposed to be John Severne’s office. With a flourish and a bow, he stepped aside. Her wedge sandals on the Persian carpet didn’t fit into this sudden 1863 in which she found herself.

She wanted to play her cello. She could make music that would fit, music that would fill, no matter the time or place or her attire.

“The boy is fine,” Severne said. He walked into the office from another room. The desk, the polished cabinetry and gleaming glass, the dark cherry floor covered in luxurious woven rugs no doubt created decades ago in the Middle East—none of it prepared her for this John Severne.

She’d thought his evening clothes had given a false impression of sophisticated ease. She’d been more right than she could have known. She’d felt the hardness of his form, his energy and his heat. She’d sensed his preparedness.

Now she saw what she’d only sensed before.

He wore a pair of low-slung shorts; all else was bared to the lamplight and her stunned gaze. She’d been to gyms. She’d seen people ripped for appearance or for health. This was so obviously not that.

Severne walked into the room wiping his chest and arms and the back of his neck with a snow-white towel. He came around a beautiful desk that would have looked at home in a French palace, and Kat instinctively placed her cello case on the floor in front of her. She didn’t hide behind it...exactly, but she blushed when Severne saw the move for what it was. Defense. His gaze flicked from her face to the case and back again. Green eyes. Deep, dark green that had looked black when she’d seen him before at night.

“I want to see him,” Kat replied, looking at John Severne during the day for the first time.

He was still shadowed. There were few windows to let in outside light. Those that existed were heavily draped in black and red satin. But she could still see him better than before. What she saw confirmed what she’d already supposed. He was no polished gentleman. Almost nude, his hard, muscular body was too seriously honed to be called athletic.

How had she ever supposed him to be human?

She wasn’t a sculptor, but if she had been, she would have wept because Michelangelo was dead and a master should memorialize John Severne’s body. Yet the leanness of him, the lack of one ounce of spare flesh, was as painful as it was beautiful.

He took not one second of ease.

His tension was absolute.

She knew this about him as surely as she knew how to coax the perfect note from a string.

His pale skin, so harshly honed, was marked by more than exercise. There were faded scars across his chest, abdomen and back. She tried not to trace them with her eyes. Whatever suffering he endured—or courted—wasn’t hers to see. The black slashes of numerous tattoos down one arm from his shoulder to his elbow were almost as sacrosanct as the scars. Something private. She tried to look away, but the marks gleamed darkly like his hair and his eyes.

“He’s having his lessons right now. I thought a semblance of normalcy would help him adjust. He seems bright. He’s definitely had schooling in spite of his unusual circumstances. But he’ll join us for dinner. Later tonight,” Severne said. “I’m glad you accepted my invitation.”

The fine-cut lines of his lips stood out, or was it only the memory of the taste of them that made them seem noticeable to her?

She could feel his Brimstone heat even at this distance. It prickled her skin as if she was in the same room with a roaring fire.

How could she have stayed away?

With the boy involved, it wasn’t a choice to her at all. But deeper parts of her had to acknowledge the pull of John Severne had influenced her decision to come to Baton Rouge as much, or more, than the child.

He stood across from her, but he wasn’t even pretending to be relaxed. Not like before. His energy was there for her to see, barely contained. As if he might take her in his arms again if she said or did the wrong thing. Or the right thing. Depending on how you looked at it.

The thought made her stand frozen, a rabbit who sensed a predator and feared to twitch a whisker in case the movement would lead it into a leap for the fox’s mouth rather than standing idle and waiting to be devoured.

“What about Victoria? Where is my sister?” Kat asked.

“I travel often,” Severne began. “Various business interests require my diligent attention. I wasn’t here when your sister disappeared, but I’m told she was—is—a brilliant Marguerite. The first performance of the season is two weeks away, and...”

“She’s gone,” Kat said, as any hope that Reynard might have been wrong evaporated.

“I came to you in Savannah and invited you here because there’s no evidence of foul play. She was performing under an assumed name, as I understand she often does. She told us she has a stalker. My manager was more than happy to accommodate her wishes to engage her stellar talent under an alias. I’m assuming I met this stalker last night? He seemed completely ignorant of her whereabouts. The only hope of finding your sister is in the clues she might have left among her life and friends here at l’Opéra Severne. If you follow in her footsteps...” Severne suggested. “I’m afraid there’s a distance between me and my employees that prevents me from discovering more about her disappearance.”

He was a daemon. He couldn’t be trusted. And yet she was so conditioned to fear Reynard that this seemed better. Not safer, but better. He’d asked her here because Victoria had disappeared. There was more to it than that. There had to be. But walking away wasn’t an option. Not when the last place her sister had been seen was this opera house.

“I might vanish without a trace, as well,” Kat said.

“No. That won’t happen. I’m here now,” Severne said. “I won’t be called away again. You’ll have my undivided attention.”

As if his mere presence would keep her safe. He was a daemon. Not a bodyguard. He might look like he could take on an army of Reynards, but it would be a mistake to trust him. Why should he stand at her back and protect her from the Order of Samuel and other daemons while she tried to ascertain what had happened to Victoria? He couldn’t have perfectly altruistic motives. He was a daemon. They weren’t known for noble intentions.

“Play for me. Let me see what I’ve done in offering you a seat without an audition,” Severne challenged her.

His bare muscular body stood out in stark relief against the polished antiques of his office. On the desk, several deep purple calla lilies sat in a crystal vase. Like Severne, the lilies stood out. A hint of passion, life, color...but their petals were stiff and perfect like Severne’s physique.

Kat hesitated. She should walk away. Where better to leave a daemon child than with a daemon? But the memory of the boy’s angelic face and the hope of finding clues to her sister’s whereabouts held her in place.

And pride.

There was no denying the frisson of need that rose up in her when he said “Play for me” in his deep voice, smoothed by a creole accent less influenced by modern inflections probably because it had been influenced by Parisian émigrés decades ago. Daemons weren’t immortal, but they lived a very long time. If she played for him, she would be playing for someone who had heard celebrated masters play.

Now he reined in his energy to appear more casual. He moved closer. She could detect a hint of smoky sandalwood, sweat and a lightly concentrated scent that was the heated air of the opera house itself settled on Severne’s hair and skin. The sensual impact of that recognition made her knees turn soft.

She loved the theater scent. To breathe it on him messed with her equilibrium.

He couldn’t be trusted. He smelled like heaven, but his veins flowed with the fires of hell.

“Play for me, Katherine,” he repeated, and this time her eyelids closed against the compelling drawl in his words.

“I’ll play for Victoria,” Kat said to cool whatever charge there was between them.

Severne sat on a straight, tall-backed chair as if it was a throne. He’d placed the towel around his neck, and it hung there like a gentleman’s scarf. He waited for her to sit on a chair arranged across from him and open her case. She took out her cello and her bow. The familiar motions were a meditation even under Severne’s watchful eye.

This was her best defense against the fascination building in her for this daemon she couldn’t avoid. She’d always used music to fight the pull that drew her to daemon blood. Maybe it would help her against the pull she felt for lips and lean muscled heat, for the musical history he’d lived through.

But she couldn’t dismiss the fascination of centuries or the ears of a connoisseur.

When she sat, when she played, it couldn’t be for Vic...not with Severne in the room.

From the first note, she could feel her affinity vibrating the air between them as if the strings of her cello also invisibly existed between her body and the inhumanly hard body across from her. Whatever drove him to discipline his body, inch by inch, sinew and tendon and skin as taut and smooth as untouched steel, didn’t stop him from feeling her song.

She chose Victoria’s favorite concerto. The first she’d learned all those years ago. A simple Beethoven piece that was nonetheless lightly intricate when played by an expert. She meant to keep it light and airy, but it deepened with Severne as its audience.

The music wasn’t a barrier between them. It was a conduit for the electric connection that was already there.

She closed her eyes and remembered the flash of his bare chest when he’d fought Reynard and the heat of his arms around her when he’d cradled her and carried her to bed. Betrayed, but with a tenderness that didn’t seem possible from such a hard creature.

She played every note perfectly...for him. She infused every movement of her bow with emotion...for him. Years ago, she’d decided the instrument had called her to play at l’Opéra Severne, and now she played it as it had never been played. The striated maple and polished spruce were more a part of her than they had ever been, and the music twined between her and Severne’s Brimstone blood only a few feet away.

While she played, the water around the calla lily stems rippled, though the perfect petals remained calm.

She didn’t.

Her skin flushed.

Her thighs tensed.

Her breathing and heartbeat increased.

This was no audition. It might be a test for him or for her, but it was no audition.

Music had always been her protection. Now instead of sheltering her, the sound rose up and filled the room, swelling out to envelop a creature who obviously held himself apart as if she would embrace him and seek to soften his iron edge.

In spite of his obvious discipline, Severne was touched. She could feel his response. Could see his chest expand and contract.

She wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t. His tenderness had to be a lie. The truth was in the muscle and tendon there for her to see and the fire in his blood she could feel.

She told herself that this was a bargain. He would offer her a place and she could search for her sister while being close to the daemon child if she played well enough to pass muster. But she didn’t want simply to perform well. Always before, when Reynard found her, she fled, she hid. Not this time. This time boldness had led her here to help the boy, to find her sister.

And to John Severne.

Something was different in her. She could feel the blood rushing in her veins as if she’d come alive for the first time.

She wanted to touch him.

Though her hands were on the neck of her cello and the bow, it was Severne she tried to reach. His cheeks above his perfect, angular jaw darkened with some emotion she couldn’t name. His eyelids lowered to half-mast over his deep green eyes. His hard chest rose and fell as if he needed oxygen to cope with what her music made him feel. His response was heady. More so than a theater full of patrons. Her life was about hiding. Subsuming herself in the music of her cello so she couldn’t be found. But, here, now, she played to be felt, seen, heard, and her music was a call for the intimacy she’d always avoided.

“Enough,” he ordered, and her hands faltered. The bow dropped from the strings and her fingers stilled. But her body continued to tremble. She wasn’t used to reaching out. She moistened her lips. It was as if they’d been in a heated embrace and he’d been the one to break it off and push her away. “Enough,” he repeated, and he stood abruptly.

Katherine stood in response. Again, it was more adrenaline that came to her rescue than courage. She wouldn’t slump defeated in her chair. The rush she experienced in his presence wouldn’t allow it. Her best defense had failed because of that rush. She lifted her chin. She held her cello to the side so she wouldn’t seem to cower behind it again.

Severne’s gaze froze her in place in spite of the heat she could feel from the Brimstone. He looked angry. She had played for him just as he’d asked, but he looked like he might want to throw her out of the opera house.

Never mind the boy.

Never mind Victoria.

She couldn’t let that happen.

“I’m not leaving,” Kat said.

Severne met her wide-eyed stare. He didn’t soften. He didn’t ask her to leave or to play again.

“A bargain, then. You’ll stay. You’ll...play. But only in the orchestra pit with the other musicians or for personal rehearsals. Not for me. And I’ll help you find your sister,” he said.

He crossed the room until they were side by side, but it wasn’t until he walked away that she realized his nearness had distracted her from the calla lily he’d dropped into her open cello case. Its deep purple bloom looked almost black in the dim light.

Never trust a daemon.

But the lily wasn’t a gift. It was only a payment for her song.

Her playing hadn’t displeased him. He had liked it. More than that, he’d been affected by it.

He’d paid for her performance because the music had touched him.

Kat sat again before her trembling legs could give out beneath her. The cello she gripped in one hand wasn’t nearly as comforting as it usually was. Her best defense hadn’t only failed against this particular daemon. It had become something else between them...a seductive promise. He didn’t want her to play for him again because her song breached his defenses. Her inhalations still came quicker than they should. Her skin was heated though the fire had left the room. She shivered in the sudden chill. This was a mistake. But it was one she had to make. For the boy. For her sister.

She had to brave John Severne in order to find her sister even if her music was no shield against him.

Quietly she slowed her breathing and calmed her heart. She vowed never to play for him alone again and to guard against her fascination with the daemon master of l’Opéra Severne.

Because the calla lily hadn’t only been payment for her song. It had been a last-minute substitute. Her lips tingled. He’d been as hungry as she was for another kiss.

Chapter 4

Her bags were taken to a room off the corridors that surrounded the opera hall itself. They wound in concentric circles with the apartments set like the spokes in a giant wheel. It was dizzying, the walls a kaleidoscope of rich cherry wainscoting filled with elaborate carvings like the first hall she’d traversed to reach Severne’s offices.

Her passage was lit by flickering sconces that made her wonder if the almost subliminal hiss her ears detected was air conditioning or gas to fuel primitive lamps. The dancing light made the carvings gambol around her in tumbling shadows. But it was her playing for John Severne that had upset her equilibrium. The music echoed mockingly in her ears. Too. Too hungry. Too evocative. Too needy of his reaction. Any reaction. The uncertain light made her path waver, but she wouldn’t have been firmly grounded even if there had been bright runway lights.

He was hard. Both physically and mentally. To touch him with her music, even for a second, had been too heady for her own good. He wasn’t a man. He was a monster. He was a being all human souls had been taught to fear for centuries. But as the night deepened, the flutter in her stomach didn’t feel like fear. Not exactly.

Her room was beside her sister’s. Supposedly Victoria’s room had remained untouched. When Kat tiptoed hesitantly in, not wanting to disturb the dust and silence, the room taunted her. It wasn’t empty. Seeing the normal, everyday mess her sister was prone to create—silk slippers tossed to the side, smudged tissues on the vanity table, the pale ivory stockings from her costume rinsed out and long since dry on the bathroom rack—tightened Kat’s lungs until each stale breath hurt. The air tasted bitter on her tongue.

If Victoria had been free to sing and build a reputation under her own name, she would have been a much bigger star than a regional theater would hope to hire, but Vic loved to perform. It didn’t matter how or where. She could almost feel her sister’s anticipation for performance in the air.

Gone.

She’d known it. But seeing it was too final, too real. She sniffed the faint, weeks-old hint of Victoria’s perfume, and tears prickled.

She stopped in the center of the room and willed them away, widening her eyes. She was not going to hide behind tears. She was here for a reason, and grief wouldn’t help her sister now. Katherine waited until her eyes were so dry they hurt. Then she forced an inventory of every detail.

What had happened?

There was no evidence of violence. All was painfully normal and undisturbed. Victoria could walk in at any second complaining about the lack of honey for her tea. But as the seconds ticked by, Katherine knew waiting for her sister’s familiar tread was in vain.

Gone.

On the bed, nestled on Victoria’s pillow, was a pair of opera glasses. They were the only item in the room that seemed out of place. Kat walked to her sister’s bed and picked up the binoculars. The opera glasses were white porcelain with gilded edges. The handle she used to flip them over and hold them up to her eyes had a grip on the end of a brass extension that matched the porcelain around the lenses.

The lenses were meant to bring the action onstage closer to the viewer’s perceptions. They distorted her view of the room.

She lowered the opera glasses and opened her hand on the grip, where she could feel a brass plate. It was engraved with a letter and a number corresponding to the box and seat from which it came. Each seat in every private box at l’Opéra Severne had a slot in the right armrest where the opera glasses rested when not in use.

It wasn’t normal for one of the company to have taken a pair back to her room.

Suddenly, fatigue was a more solid barrier to press through than emotion. She’d been driving for hours. With her travel-fogged brain, she would surely miss important clues if she tried to ransack the room tonight.

Other than removing the opera glasses that were an intrusion of the room’s hushed normalcy, she couldn’t go through Victoria’s things yet. She couldn’t snoop in the closet or the drawers. The room waited for her sister’s return. She would let it wait one more night. It wasn’t rational, but she had a sudden fear that if she disturbed the room’s silent vigil, her sister would never come home.

* * *

Her room was as perfect as Vic’s was messy. And much more ornate. Decorated in French rococo style, the whole space was full of white and gilded furnishings and etched glass. Butterflies, thorny vines and rose petals decorated the mirrors in white, only to spring to vibrant, noisy shades of color on the walls in one large continuous design. Plush creams and pale pink with splashes of scarlet and lush green were echoed in the heavy damask bed coverings and carpets on the floor.

She told herself she’d return the opera glasses to their rightful place in the private box high above the auditorium when she had the time. For now, she placed them in the drawer of her bedside table.

She was startled again and again as her movements were reflected in the glass wall panels in jagged interrupted pieces because of the etchings. She showed up as a disjointed leg or arm, a flushed cheek, or a quick glimpse of shadowed eyes. Her equilibrium might never right itself in this place. She couldn’t find her footing, mentally or physically. Every thought, every move needed to be carefully calculated. Which meant the evening was going to be a test. Severne threw her balance off even without the aid of strange surroundings.

Finally she was unpacked and changed for dinner.

She’d brought no tulle and satin this time, but she did wear pearls with a pink shell of shimmering crushed silk and a long ivory pencil skirt with matching heels. The boy might be afraid to see her. He might instinctively fear the woman responsible for his mother’s death. Dressing for dinner might be inadequate preparation to face him, but it was the least she could do in this aged atmosphere.

She unclipped her hair and let it fall in heavy curls around her shoulders, hiding the pallor of her cheeks behind chestnut waves.

It was stalling and she knew it, but curiosity was a good excuse to pause in the quiet hallway and step closer to examine the wainscoting. In the dimly lit corridor of l’Opéra Severne, the elaborate carved murals were a jumble of faces and forms. From the grotesque to the sublime, on the walls beautiful angelic figures embraced mystical beasts and monsters, all entwined. The artist had been both mad and brilliant. So lifelike were the figures, Kat blinked against the feeling that they peered into her face as she tilted it closer to examine them.

Around her, all was silent. The whole opera house was expectant and still. The building along with everything and everyone in it waited for noise to rise up and fill its grand salon with music.

But something pricked at her senses...

Kat held her breath as she pricked up her ears to pick up a distant murmur. There were likely hundreds of rooms and chambers in l’Opéra Severne. Closets and offices, attics and catwalks, scaffolding beneath the stage for trap doors to allow entrances, exits and costume changes. This must account for the murmur. Not gas or air conditioning, but people. Many people going about some manner of business, but respecting others who slept at odd hours to accommodate schedules kept during the opera season.

The great swirl of carvings was still and silent. In spite of the trick of her eyes that brought it to life as she stepped closer, it was as immobile as it should be. Hundreds of faces were frozen in wood even as they cried for a hundred years. Cried or screamed. She could also discern lovers embracing amid the chaos of passionate battle. Murder, kisses, tears.

So many tears.

The mural in front of her was filled with weeping. Why hadn’t she seen that at first? Face after face contorted by poignant emotion. Kat moved even closer, drawn by the pain. Why, she couldn’t say, but she was compelled to see, to...hear?

The distant murmur was no longer a hollow echo from the dark reaches of the opera house. There was a whispering quality to it now. A sibilance. Gooseflesh rose on her bare arms. The close, still, dusty air of the theater had gone suddenly chill. The hallway darkened and then lightened in turn as if a shadow passed in front of light after light. The dimming and lightening progressed closer and closer to where she stood.

There must be a thousand eyes in this mural. And suddenly they all shifted their focus to her. Staring. Beseeching. Drawing her closer.

Kat lifted her hand, ignoring the strange behavior of the lights and the tremble in her fingertips. She would touch the mural. Prove it was nothing but inanimate art created long ago. As one shaking finger neared the closest face—a masculine angel perfectly captured in the gleaming shine of carved wood—a very real and immediate noise superseded the whispered murmur.

A low growl sounded behind her, and Kat dropped her hand to turn and face its source.

Adrenaline warmed her goose bumps away as a flush of blood flowed to her extremities from the sudden leap of her rapidly beating heart.

The murmur had stopped. Her pulse rushed in her ears.

A black dog stood with its feet braced apart and its head down. Though its teeth weren’t bared, a growl rumbled from deep in its chest again, and its bushy black hair stood on end at its hackles, showing paler pewter beneath.

The dog was out of place. The opera house around her—while vintage—was all slumbering opulence. He was a nightmare hallucination from a dark fairy tale where wolves appeared larger than humanly possible.

“Okay,” Kat soothed. The shaky syllables scared her more than the growl. Instinct warned her not to show weakness to this angry creature of shadows come to life. Its eyes gleamed yellow in the gaslight flicker as she tried again. “I was only looking at the mural. Nothing to get upset about,” she said.

The dog didn’t relax. But it didn’t growl again as she edged away from it toward the west wing, where she’d been told dinner would be served.

“No one warned me about you. I’ll have to talk to Severne about that oversight.”

The dog disengaged from the shadows of the adjacent hallway, but as he stepped into the light, he brought clinging darkness with him rather than leaving it behind. He was black, but there was a gray, sooty quality to every hair on him as it shifted over his muscles, remnants of a dark fog roiling around him as he walked.

“I’m on my way to dinner. Perhaps there’ll be a bone for you there,” she suggested.

Preferably a bone not attached to me.

The animal was as tall as her waist, and its snout was long and broad. Its muzzle indicated a powerful jaw, a deadly bite. It couldn’t come to that. She had to keep it from coming to that. She couldn’t afford an injury now when Vic depended on her to stay strong. The dog was no longer growling. She’d willed her breathing to slow. She forced herself to walk slowly, as well. Now that she’d stepped away from the mural, toward the dining room, the dog padded with her, silent and slightly calmed.

It was an odd escort to have down hallways that must have seen much fancier processions. Kat was reminded of Little Red Riding Hood in a black forest with a giant trickster wolf at her heels. The dog was more German shepherd than wolf, but his size was twice that of any wolf, and there was no woodcutter in sight. She saved herself, step by step, refusing to show her fear to the tense animal looming beside her. They came to the entrance of the dining room. She paused to smooth her skirt.

It was good that she’d had to calm herself before entering the room. Truth was, the beast at her heels was no more frightening than the man she prepared to face.

The table glittered with crystal, china and silver, but it also welcomed with more intimate warmth than she’d expected. Half a dozen candles glowed in the jeweled centerpiece at the table’s heart, throwing off colored shadows of ruby, emerald and sapphire. The boy was already seated, drinking from a large glass of milk held in both hands. He greeted her with big dark eyes and a white moustache.

“Ms. D’Arcy has found us, Eric,” Severne said.

Their host reclined at the head of the table in a large, straight-backed chair with red velvet upholstery and a scrolled wooden frame, very throne-like and fitting to his authoritative demeanor. And yet, the tilt of his finely shaped mouth drew her eyes. She thought about soft silken petals he’d given her. She’d imagined them a substitution for a kiss. Had she been correct? Had he wanted to kiss her because her music had moved him? She’d been certain before, but facing him now she was no longer sure she could read him at all. She noticed the swell of his lower lip was fuller and more sensual than she’d first imagined, a hint of softness in an otherwise hard line.

Now that she’d tasted it, she couldn’t forget it was there.

The dog showed itself behind her and Severne’s smile disappeared, interrupting her thoughts. He went from indolent royal to intimidating man in seconds. He stood as the semblance of a lazy royalty fell away.

“Grim,” he said. There was no doubt it was a warning.

Katherine hadn’t relaxed with the monstrous dog, but she had convinced herself it was safe. Now, with her intimidating host reacting to the dog’s presence, she wasn’t so sure.

She moved to position herself between the boy—who had obviously felt comfortable enough with Severne to share his name—and the dog. Severne stepped forward, but not before his glance took in her brave move with a slight shift of eyes that gleamed in the candlelight from the table. All the green she’d seen before was lost. His eyes were black in this light and, if possible, his jaw firmed before looking back at the dog.

He stared the dog down, and its eyes widened and flared. Her body tensed. Every muscle quivered as she prepared to react to the result of the unspoken communication between the dog and his master. It was so ferociously tense that it might lead to blood.

But if it was a challenge, John Severne came away the victor. How had she doubted for a second he would? The dog’s head dipped, and he stepped back several paces before turning to disappear the way he’d come.

“Good boy,” Kat said. Her voice was an adrenaline-soaked quiver. That sign of fear was embarrassing, but she stood tall. Her body might have been a poor shield, but she’d offered it to Eric one more time.

The child at the table lowered the glass he’d held frozen to his lips during the confrontation. Severne stepped back to the table and held out her chair. Still not as relaxed as he’d seemed when she came in the room, but pretending to be. He met her gaze as she moved to take the proffered seat. Met and held, his stare giving away nothing of why the dog was banished from the room, but not the opera house. His eyes were still dark in the candlelight, without a hint of green. She had the sudden urge to edge even closer to him to rediscover the softer moss hue around his pupils that she’d seen before.

“Grim? Isn’t that the name of a mythological hound that’s a portent of death?” she asked, though it was Severne’s nearness she truly questioned. Why he lingered near her, why she cared, why an invisible force tingled across her skin when the mere cuff of his suit brushed against her with his movements to help her sit. Better to turn the subject to the large dog, even though it and the death it represented didn’t seem nearly as urgent as the scent of smoky candle from Severne’s skin. “They’re supposed to frequent places of execution in England.”

“And crossroads. They traverse ancient pathways. They’re seen as guardians in many cultures,” Severne said. “Grim is actually a hellhound, and he takes his job too seriously at times. He’s the protector of this place and of me since I was a child.”

She hadn’t felt protected by Grim. More like he was protecting someone or something from her. But what threat did she pose to the master of l’Opéra Severne? What secrets did Severne’s Grim guard?

Severne moved back to his seat and sank down. But this time he didn’t recline. He appeared hard against the velvet, as if its decadent softness couldn’t entice him to relax ever again. Eric watched one of them and then the other silently.

“I wonder, was Grim guarding me from something in the corridor outside my room, or...?”

“Protecting something from you?” Severne finished. His eyes shifted to take in Eric’s stare, and he seemed to stop himself from saying more. Out of consideration for the boy’s feelings and his recent loss? The loss that she’d played such a horrible part in?

Her own chair swallowed her. She didn’t feel like royalty at all. Now she felt like Little Red Riding Hood staying for dinner in the wolf’s lair. No mention was made of putting the dog outside or what she should do if she encountered him again.

Several servants brought in the courses in silver tureens and on shining platters as the evening progressed. They were dressed in immaculate uniforms of black and white, their pristine shirts starched, their trousers pressed.

During the meal, she saw the boy put several scraps in his pocket. She wondered if they were bribes for Grim. Safe passage through the elaborately carved corridors of l’Opéra Severne didn’t seem possible. Could he buy it from the giant dog with honeyed buns and cake?

They consumed exquisitely seasoned pheasant and savory gravy. The meal was presented as if John Severne was a restaurant critic, yet he ate with no relish or apparent discernment. Rather, he watched her eat as if every bite was performance art. When she nibbled the edge of a puff pastry with pleasure, his eyes widened, then narrowed in concentration, as if he wasn’t chewing the same treat but only tasting through her reaction to the dessert, which failed to impress his palate.

Her cheeks warmed beneath his scrutiny. How could such perfect food fail to catch his attention?

Eric ate with more enthusiasm than both adults. He gobbled. She noted his place setting was simpler with a more colorful napkin. Who had gone to such consideration for him?

“I’m sorry about your mother, Eric. I’m sorry I couldn’t save her,” Kat said.

The boy didn’t look up at her. He stared at his plate. But then he spoke. “Her name is Lavinia. She’s glad you saved me.”

Eric was obviously still processing the loss of his mother. He’d referred to her in present tense as if she wasn’t gone.

The conversation was stilted after that, with “More, please” being the predominant phrase until an older woman came to the door.

Her tea-length skirt was perfectly pressed and flared but fifty years out of fashion, its tiny polkadot print and lace trim a style reminiscent of black-and-white television.

Severne rose, and Kat followed suit. She was jumpy. In spite of the fine meal and beautiful table, she wasn’t at ease. Because of her guilt over Eric’s mother, her uncertainty with Severne and the confrontation with the hellhound, she waited on a razor’s edge for disaster to happen. For all she knew, the woman in polka dots might have a machine gun under her skirts.

“Matron,” Eric greeted her.

“Bath and bed, young sir. I believe you’ve had your fill,” the woman said to the young daemon boy after a curt nod to Severne. She seemed to see nothing different about the child. She didn’t act nervous about babysitting a daemon. When Eric smiled at the woman, Kat finally relaxed about his being at the opera house. He was welcome. Cared for. Her chest tightened with emotion, thinking about Reynard’s blade cutting into his mother’s throat.

The older woman glanced at her, but instead of looking away again to her new charge, her gaze held. It became a penetrating stare.

“You are like her. Very like. The same eyes. Same hair,” she said.

Kat’s heart leaped to her throat, but the woman wasn’t referring to her sister. She and Victoria were as unalike as could be. Vic was taller, her hair auburn and her eyes the palest blue. She’d taken after their father, a man they’d barely known.

It was her mother the woman referred to. It had to be, though twenty years had passed since her mother had performed here.

“She was lovely. And talented. Drew them like a flame. Her voice was an angel’s voice. But...” Her eyes narrowed as she looked closer at Katherine. “She wasn’t as strong, I think. You are the strong one,” she concluded. She toyed with an iron ring of keys that dangled from her belt as she spoke.

Kat clenched her napkin in her hand. Strong? Was love strong? It was the only weapon she had in the fight to find her sister.

“Yes. Definitely stronger,” the woman noted.

“Sybil has been costume matron at l’Opéra Severne for many years,” Severne said.

She hadn’t come into the room or approached them as she spoke. She held herself apart. The soft candlelight didn’t fully illuminate her face. She must have been older than Kat had first assumed if she remembered her mother that well. The keys hung beside a small sewing pouch with a pincushion full of needles incorporated into its design. A bit of measuring tape peeked from the top of the pouch. Altogether, she seemed a woman used to taking care of business, one who didn’t need a machine gun to do so. Was she the one who had set a special place for Eric at the fancy table?

Eric had paused near her chair, and now he flung himself at Kat’s legs in a tight hug reminiscent of last night, when they’d fled from his mother’s killer. His move distracted her from Sybil. Her chest tightened as she felt his ferocious hold again.

“He won’t find you here. You’re safe with Severne,” she said.

Their host heard the exchange. He stood straighter as if she’d surprised him. His whole hard body stiffened. Eric let her go after a fierce squeeze that made her eyes burn. He went happily with “Matron,” his pockets bulging with pilfered food.

And then they were alone.

Severne didn’t reclaim his seat, so she remained standing, as well. She forgot her pastry—in fact, she forgot everything—as he suddenly moved. He came toward her in a slow, steady approach very like a stalk, as if quicker movements might scare her away. Did he consider her strong? How soft she must seem to him. How mortal and easily broken.

She tried to convince herself she was stronger.

Her heart beat faster in her chest, an urgent pulse she could feel in her whole body. The heat in her cheeks flushed hotter and spread until she was sure the low neck of her silk blouse revealed her consternation.

She was frightened. But she didn’t run.

He was a daemon.

Dangerous.

And so inhumanly hard. He was dressed in a modern, fitted button-down shirt that hugged his chest. Its white fabric was only slightly paler than his skin, but the candlelight caressed his skin to a golden glow, whereas his shirt was left stark in shadow. Or maybe Brimstone caused the color, a more subtle tan than sunlight? He also wore straight-legged black pants that were tight against muscular thighs. Suddenly the idea of feeling his form like perfectly sculpted marble beneath her hand invaded her thoughts.

Could he be made to blush? Or sigh? Could his heartbeat be quickened? Would his breath catch as hers did when he stopped millimeters from where she stood?

With Grim, she’d mastered a calm that Severne shattered.

“You can see I’ve helped Eric. Just as I intend to help you find your sister,” he said.

His voice was a vibration on her skin. His face tilted toward her. There was the green she’d wanted to seek, but it glittered. Dangerous, not soft. Getting close enough to see the colored striations in his dark irises was a compulsion she should have been sure always to deny.

There was bold and there was crazy. Severne inspired mad impulses she should have resisted.

She imagined it for only a second—her hand fluttering softly over the plane of his chest, his stomach and his thighs—but the vision was undoubtedly braver than one she would previously have had. The flush her vision inspired spread more intimately until her knees grew weak.

Again, she could feel his heat. Maybe he would blame Brimstone for the blush he could see in the candlelight? The candles’ glow was cruel, causing more warmth and intimacy in the room than she was prepared to handle.

She drew in a quick breath when he reached out toward her, but his hand went past her to the table. She held the sudden gasp in her lungs because to exhale might cause her body to brush his reaching arm. And one touch might betray her. The air filled her chest, tight and unexpressed, as he lifted a tiny pastry from her plate and brought it to her lips. When it was so close to her mouth that the scent of vanilla cream teased her nose, she exhaled softly, meeting his eyes over the proffered treat.

It was a confession, that exhalation. And his eyelids drooped over his eyes in response.

“You didn’t enjoy your own pastry,” she said.

His gaze dropped from her eyes to her lips and back again.

“I’ve eaten them a thousand times a thousand. But you chew as if nothing so perfect has ever touched your lips and tongue. They’re dust to me. Watching you enjoy them is delicious.”

Katherine’s head grew light as blood rushed to her lips and the tips of her breasts. He knew. He must. His jaw relaxed, and he brought the pastry to her mouth. He touched the pursed bow of her lips with a light, teasing tickle of sugary cream.

She licked out, instinctively dipping into the residue of icing with her tongue. He watched as she tasted it once more. It was even more decadent when combined with the intensity of his attention.

“I’ve tasted cream a thousand times a thousand, but I’ve never tasted it on you,” he said.

Had she known? Had her head gone light because she knew her nibbles of delicate pastry had overwhelmed any decision on his part to keep his distance? Or on her part to stay calm and controlled?

Earlier in the evening, he’d given her a calla lily instead of a kiss. The lovely flower had been no substitute at all. Its soft petals were nothing compared to...

He sucked the sweetness of cream from her lips. He sought its remnants on her tongue. He pressed into her until her bottom was on the table and his impossibly muscular body was between her legs. The pastry was forgotten as his mouth took its place, a much more decadent treat. Forbidden. Bad for her. Crazy. She tasted sweet cream and pastry and fire and a wicked hint of wood smoke that must be the never-before-tasted burn of Brimstone heat on her tongue.

She opened to him. She didn’t resist. Their tongues twined. Their bodies melded as closely as clothes would allow. He tasted her completely, plundering every gasp, every sugar-sweetened sigh.

And when he finally pulled back, as she clung to him so she wouldn’t fall, she finally saw the flush of pleasure on his face and neck that the pastry alone had failed to give him. Heaven help her, but she instantly ached to give him more. It wasn’t his marbled perfection she wanted to caress; it was his vulnerability. She wanted to explore the chink in his armor that had allowed him to taste her.

“Good night, Katherine. You heard Sybil. It’s time for bed,” Severne said.

He backed away. She straightened. In his deep, smoky voice, the suggestion of bedtime was much less utilitarian.

It had been only a kiss.

Only.

She walked by him on quaking legs. He let her go. But between them was so much more heat than could be blamed on hell’s fire.

Her whole life she’d hidden in music. Perhaps being excellent at hiding made her also long to seek. Severne hid many things behind his mystery and his muscle. His hardness was his armor. But he was capable of softening. He’d softened tonight. For one stolen moment, his mouth had softened on hers. She couldn’t risk losing herself in the search for the softness he hid from her and from the world.

Victoria was missing, and she couldn’t afford to lose herself in John Severne before her sister was found.

Chapter 5

The next day John left the opera house as much to escape the memory of Katherine’s taste as to fulfill his duties. The house he visited was small, but neat, in a row of older bungalow homes in Roseland Terrace, a part of Baton Rouge’s Garden District that had been carefully maintained. The elderly man inside the historic Craftsman was happiest in a home with few rooms and big windows to let in the sun. The navigable home kept him from being confused as he moved from room to room with poor eyesight, failing legs and a cane in a stoop-shouldered shuffle.

And the big windows kept the shadows at bay.

He didn’t like shadows.

He didn’t remember why.

At first John Severne had tried to correct his father’s failing memory. He’d consulted the best doctors. He’d experimented with homeopathy and modern medicines. But then he’d seen the grace in Levi Severne’s forgetfulness. The relief.

His grandfather had been killed by one of the daemons he’d been charged to hunt. He’d died a doomed man. He’d known hell had come for him. Though only a young teen, John had seen him consumed by Brimstone’s fire until nothing was left but dust. His father had seen it, too. He’d taken John’s hand, helpless to prevent for them both the same fate unless they were successful in their task.

Down to the last name on hell’s most-wanted list.

John Severne had visited with the father who hadn’t known him for decades. Every time he came, they met for the first time. A nearly immortal man with Alzheimer’s was a pitiful sight. But it was also a respite. They spoke of other things. The hydrangeas were blooming. Levi Severne liked blue. The big clusters of blooms made him smile.

Severne had left his father on a chair in the backyard, where the flowers swayed in the breeze. The nurse would collect him in time for an afternoon siesta. No more killing. No more strife. He had no memory of the damnation that had once plagued him with nightmares.

“We’ll beat it, John. We’ll beat it. I promised your mother before she died I would see you saved. I promised her my father’s terrible contract wouldn’t damn you.”

How many times had his father repeated that pledge to him?

How many times had he stood watching the frail old man he loved and quietly vowing the same pledge back to him?

“I’ll beat it. I’ll save you. You have my word,” Severne said.

The burn in his throat wasn’t Brimstone.

The evil old man who had been his grandfather had deserved the agony that had devoured him. He’d brought it on himself. His father had been an innocent child when Thomas Severne made his deal with the devil. John had been sacrificed to the Council when he’d been barely old enough to survive the burn of Brimstone that had claimed his blood.

* * *

He had been playing with jacks when his grandfather came for him. It had been his favorite game, to bounce the ball and swipe up as many metal crosses as he could before the ball came down. He’d wiled away many a lonely afternoon in solitary play, too grand of parentage to be approached by servants’ children or the children of performers. He was often alone while his father was away on hunting trips.

He’d been too young to imagine that his father hunted monsters. But he’d often wondered why his father hunted when their cook visited the butcher for all the meat that went into his oven and pots.

He bounced his ball, and Grandfather caught it before it came down. Only then did he notice the shiny boots that had crushed the tiny jacks he’d not scooped up in time. His grandfather hauled him up roughly with his other hand, and the jacks John had managed to scoop fell from his fingers, prizes he would never come back to retrieve.

His time of childhood play was over.

He was five years old.

His grandfather had taken him down several flights of stairs too quickly for him to follow safely. He’d fallen several times. Skinned both his knees. His arm had felt almost ripped from its socket each time his grandfather had pulled him to his feet.

“It’s past time. The Council grows impatient. Your father should have done this well before now,” the old man had growled.

He’d had a booming voice up until the very end, when its deep resonance had morphed into high-pitched screams.

He’d done his best to keep up. His father had always warned him not to anger Thomas Severne. With his bushy brows and wild hair over ruddy cheeks, the old man had featured in many of John Severne’s nightmares even before that night.

More than once, in fevered dreams, his grandfather had picked him up and tossed him into a roaring fire.

John didn’t dare cry even when his knees bled. He didn’t dare protest even when his elbow popped out of joint from a jerk too hard and sudden to anticipate. Agony flared, but he didn’t cry out loud. Instead, he hurried as fast as he could, all the way down to where his father had always forbidden him to go.

The secret catacombs beneath l’Opéra Severne.

These dark, endless caves were filled with chill shadows his father warned him might not be as harmless as they should have been.

The giant door protested when Thomas Severne pushed it inward and open.

John had mindlessly held back. His instinct to fear the catacombs was greater than the order always to obey his grandfather when he couldn’t avoid him.

Thomas Severne jerked even harder on his arm. The dislocated joint screamed. He bit through his lip to keep from crying out at the pain. He stumbled after his grandfather, knowing he was in great danger, and his father couldn’t save him.

“It’s a good thing your mother is dead, John,” his father always said. “She would weep to see what has become of us.”

But John prayed for the angel of his mother to save him from his grandfather that night. They’d practically run through the catacombs to answer the Council’s call.

“You will serve them, as your father serves them and as I have served them. It is the price we must pay for our success and longevity,” Thomas Severne said.

His grandfather’s shadow was thrown crazily onto the walls by the lantern he’d taken up in his other hand.

John thought his legs would give out before they reached their destination. He’d thought he would pass out from the pain. He knew his grandfather would continue to drag him on the hard, uneven ground of the catacomb’s floor. He’d run his first marathon that night, his legs pumping, his scuffed boots flying. His knees would hurt worse if he didn’t stay on his feet. His arm might actually be ripped from his body. He focused on those two horrors rather than shadows and his grandfather’s crazed urgency.

Finally Thomas Severne stopped in front of what John thought at first was a door as black as pitch. Only there was no door. Instead, there was only an opening made of flat, solid darkness. He never would have tried to walk through it if his grandfather hadn’t tugged him roughly into the black.

But it was the pause before the tug that made his stomach fall away. This was the first time he’d seen his terrifying grandfather afraid. Thomas Severne squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. His fingers tightened around John’s fingers.

Then they stepped through the doorway.

His arm was a white-hot agony most adults couldn’t have endured.

His knees bled.

But in those moments, as he passed through the doorway with his grandfather, every cell in his body screamed in pain.

They came out on the other side, into a high-ceilinged chamber that had no end to his child’s eyes. His grandfather pulled him forward to a long pathway that stretched far out of sight between two rows of stadium seating filled to capacity with a silent, faceless crowd. John felt the weight of thousands of eyes. His grandfather ignored them. He pulled the tiny child at his side along.

But they walked beneath those stares. Calm and slow. With only his grandfather’s tight grip to show that the calm was a lie.

Thomas Severne was still afraid.

To John, the dais they finally reached with its massive table was made for giants. But the men who sat along its intimidating length were normal-sized.

They spoke.

His grandfather replied.

And then he was grabbed under his armpits by Thomas Severne and lifted high off the ground. He cried out at last. The move cruelly wrenched his arm, and it was almost a relief to shout. His grandfather didn’t care. The man at the head of the table came to take him. As he was lifted even higher, he saw the bronzed wings hanging on the wall above the Council.

He’d thought of his mother and of angels, but not for long.

The other men at the table rose and came to where their leader held him. They wore plain black clothes, but when they rolled up their sleeves and drew blades across their wrists, their blood was brilliant flame.

He screamed and screamed.

The Brimstone entered him though every opening in his skin. His pores. His nose. His mouth. That moment supplanted his nightmare of being thrown into fire.

He choked on the hot coals of his breath turned to embers.

That’s when he knew the men were not men. As he choked, he heard Thomas Severne laugh.

His father had wept when he’d come home. But his training had begun. Grim came soon after, a dark gift that nonetheless soothed his pain.

Levi Severne hadn’t saved him. But he’d tried. Where Levi had failed, John was determined to succeed.

* * *

His grandfather might have deserved to be completely consumed by Brimstone’s fire, but his father didn’t deserve the torture that lurked, waiting to claim him if his son failed to fulfill the contract before he died.

He wasn’t sure how much time he had. His grandfather had signed his deadly deal just after the Revolutionary War. Levi Severne was only five at the time. Such a small boy. Innocent. But condemned by his father’s greed. His mind had started to fail when he reached two hundred twenty-five years old. The Brimstone prolonged their lives, but it didn’t hold off the price of age forever.

Severne clenched his fists against the damnation looming so close to his father. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and Levi Severne had called for his nurse in a small voice that seemed to come from the boy he’d been so very long ago.

He’d done his part. He’d hunted daemons for decades. He’d taught his son how to fight. He’d shown him how to handle the terrible burn of Brimstone in his blood. He’d taught him to look away from the walls of l’Opéra Severne as the burden of years and souls began to weigh him down.

He’d tried to teach him how to hope. Levi had always been an optimist. He’d met and married a beautiful Southern belle, thinking he’d be free from the contract before they had a child.

He’d been wrong.

She’d died in childbirth believing his promise that her son would be saved.

Severne didn’t believe in hope. He’d never allowed the softness of hope. He believed in perseverance, determination and pain. He would need all three things to save his father before his mortal body failed.

And maybe one day he’d be graced with the ability to forget all he’d done.

The nurse had come to check on her charge. She must have rushed out as soon as she’d heard him call. John was pleased by her quick response. The best that money could buy. Her tone was kind and patient as she responded to Levi’s fear of the darkened day and the shadows that stretched toward his seat from the bushes, which had given him pleasure only moments before.

The nurse helped his father up with the aid of his cane, and the two slowly made their way toward the house. He resisted the nurse, though, forcing a pause beside the hydrangea bushes. Severne watched his father reach out and take a cluster of blossoms in his hand. Levi Severne pressed the bloom to his face and inhaled, but then he dropped the crushed flowers, and John could tell by the nurse’s consternation that the old man cried.

The nurse urged Levi to come with her. She soothed him with soft assurances of safety. Severne knew from experience that inside, many lights and lamps waited to be turned on. All Levi’s caretakers knew the house needed to be aglow during a storm.

His father’s fears would fade. His tears would dry.

To be sure, John waited and watched until light after light came on. Even as fat droplets began to fall and sizzle on his skin, he waited. His temperature dropped, but he ignored the chill. He paid no attention to the wet seeping into his hair to run in rivulets down his face. He waited until he was sure the house was lit and his father snug inside before he turned and walked away.

* * *

Kat should have known she couldn’t be quicker on the draw than John Severne. She’d thought she would return the opera glasses before anyone missed them. But the next day when she climbed the stairs to the third-level balcony and quietly approached the box corresponding with the number on the porcelain handle, she found the opera’s master in the seat she searched for.

She tried to halt her entrance in time to go unnoticed, but he rose to turn and face her. He’d heard her steps, or he’d felt her approach as she suddenly felt him. She’d tried to tune out the pull of his Brimstone blood, which followed her wherever she went in the opera house, but rather than helping her avoid him, it had placed her in a compromising position.

He was both everywhere she walked and here, where she least expected to find him.

“Where did you find those?” Severne asked.

The box was small. It held only two seats. And the opera glasses were obvious in her hands.

He didn’t seem to mind the close quarters. As the curtains she’d parted closed with a whoosh in her wake, he moved even closer while she tried to think of what to say.

Was this his box? Were the glasses his? Why had they been in Victoria’s room?

All those questions assailed her along with his nearness and the unusual appearance of his rumpled clothes. He wore a white oxford shirt and black pants, but his jacket was missing, his sleeves were rolled up and his tie was loosened.

“They were on my sister’s bed. Left on her pillow,” Kat said. “I thought I should return them. She must have accidentally carried them away. I assume they belong to this box.”

Below, dancers practiced for the ballet often omitted from performances of Faust by other opera companies. At l’Opéra Severne, the ballet was a favorite of fans. It represented the temptation of Faust by the greatest and most beautiful women in history that had been offered to him by Mephistopheles.

So far, from what Katherine had seen of rehearsals, this version was suggestively choreographed while still seeming subtly playful in its eroticism.

“This box is like the other boxes in the house. Elite patrons own them all. Some families have kept them for generations. Politicians, celebrities and foreign aristocracy all float in and out in relative anonymity. To be honest, I thought this one was abandoned. Many seats are kept by the elderly and passed down to heirs who prefer sports arenas or video games,” Severne said. “I’m here only temporarily. Captivated by the view.”

So she’d found the stoic yet sensual master of the opera house looking down on his lithe dancers? Her cheeks warmed. “They are captivating,” she agreed.

The dancers practiced with an old stage piano more suited for vaudeville than opera, but they were talented. Once their moves were paired with costumes, lighting and the full orchestra accompaniment, the ballet would be sublime.

“I’m proud of every aspect of the show, but I do enjoy this dance—the temptation, the resistance, the surrender,” Severne said. It was almost a confession. He was a daemon professing his fascination with the dance of damnation.

He leaned toward her and her breath caught, but he was only reaching for the opera glasses. She released them from her fingers at the same time as she released a—she hoped—unnoticeable sigh. He didn’t turn back to the dancers. He held the glasses and continued to look down at her.

“These levels are closed until performances. Performers don’t enter the boxes or wander around. I’m not sure why your sister had these,” he said.

“You don’t know who owns this box?” she asked.

“There are records you could search, but they haven’t been computerized. I’m afraid our offices are Victorian by today’s standards,” Severne said. “Decades of papers and dusty files are an immortal’s prerogative.”

Behind him, several stories below, the dancers writhed and undulated for Faust’s pleasure as Mephistopheles pretended to hold their strings like they were marionettes. Kat felt a little bit like her strings were being tugged by a fate that would have her dance for John Severne.

How would she ever find her sister in the purposefully ambiguous atmosphere of l’Opéra Severne? The owner of the box might have nothing to do with her sister’s disappearance. In spite of what Severne had said, the boxes were curtained, not locked. Anyone might have slipped in and out of them unseen.

Severne had stepped lightly to the side. He was offering her a seat. Because she didn’t want to seem intimidated or afraid, she took it, and he sank down beside her. Thankfully, the dancers were now separately working on individual elements of the ballet so the overall suggestive effect of the piece was lost. Unfortunately, the only suggestion left was the full force of her affinity for Severne, closed in the curtained-off box where her seat and Severne’s were so close that his arm brushed hers.

He moved to place the opera glasses back in their slot. He had to lean across her body to do so. She couldn’t will the affinity away. This close, it was impossible to ignore. Even if she could, his natural magnetism would have called to her with or without Brimstone in his blood.

It was the end of the day. Whatever he did in his Victorian offices, he’d literally rolled up his sleeves. The hair on his arm brushed hers. The tattoos she’d seen before peeked from beneath his white sleeve. This was his leisure—overseeing rehearsals, pondering damnation and torturing her.

He sat back from returning the opera glasses to her chair, but the scent of smoky sandalwood still teased her nose. She wouldn’t meet his penetrating gaze. He hadn’t looked back at the dancers since she’d arrived. While she avoided his eyes, she noticed the longish black waves of his hair were slightly damp and curled against the open collar of his shirt.

She was familiar with temptation and resistance. Surrender was a new possibility. She was afraid if she spent too long in John Severne’s company, her limits might be tested. He was a daemon, but he had taken the guise of a very attractive man. She was drawn to the burn beneath his control. She was drawn to what he might hide beneath the hardness he cultivated for the world. His penchant for sugary kisses and his reaction to her cello music gave her a glimpse at what vulnerabilities he might hide.

He wasn’t a forthright man, but a daemon. His every move screamed those truths to her even though his words and demeanor were enigmatic.

“Your music will make this dance impossible to resist. The audience will be captivated,” he said.

And yet he also made raw confessions at every turn.

She lifted her gaze from the dancers below to Severne’s eyes. The shadows were too deep to see any green, but he tilted toward her as if to accommodate her search, and a shaft of stage light fell over his eyes. The rest of his face was still shadowed, but his eyes were fully illuminated and as green as she’d seen them before.

His eyes and his shadowed mouth drew her.

But she quickly rose before she fell further under his daemon spell. Or his masculine spell. Or both.

She wasn’t here to be seduced. Surrender wasn’t an option.

“I enjoy the music. I appreciate the dance. I don’t want to captivate. I just want to find my sister,” she said.

She mumbled to excuse herself as she tried to navigate gracefully past his long, lean legs. He stood, but he didn’t try to stop her. She pushed through the heavy curtains behind their seats, but as she did she heard him reply.

“As do I, Katherine. As do I.”

He said he wanted to help her find her sister, but she wasn’t certain what he wanted most. He was a bottomless pit of wants and needs she couldn’t quite ascertain.

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