Total pages in book: 125
Estimated words: 117510 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 588(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 392(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117510 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 588(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 392(@300wpm)
“Good, good. I’m coming for a visit in the next few weeks.”
“Great,” she said, though she wasn’t convinced. He always meant to come, but he often got distracted by one thing or another.
“I’m going to take my baby girl and my grandson out for dinner.” He gave a long-suffering sigh. “You can bring the psychopath if you must.”
“Lucian.”
“Just because he hasn’t yet tried to kill you doesn’t make me wrong.”
“I’m hanging up.” Because there was no reasoning with him—he was determined to hate Knox, probably due to the simple fact that her mate had once called Lucian on his poor idea of parenting.
“When you find yourself locked in a basement where you’re routinely tortured for his own sick pleasure, you’ll wish you’d listened to me.”
“And I’m done.” Ending the call, she groaned. Lucian was a trial at times.
Knox took the phone from her and returned it to the bag. “I’ve said it before, Harper, and I’ll say it again: that demon is a waste of skin.” His mate believed that by raising her to not need anyone, Lucian had been trying to ensure that she wouldn’t be anything like him. Maybe that was true. Maybe it wasn’t. But it didn’t change that Lucian had let her down in a whole host of ways.
If Jolene was right, Lucian hadn’t been purely selfish in dragging his daughter around the world—he’d actually thought it would be good for her to be exposed to different cultures and lifestyle and, in doing so, he’d shared with her the only thing other than Harper that brought him joy. Even if that were true, Knox didn’t find it a justifiable excuse for Lucian’s emotional neglect.
Before she could start jumping to her father’s defense—something that would piss Knox off, since the bastard didn’t deserve it—Knox said, “Thought you might want to know I had a call from Elena. McCauley’s doing well.” The annoyance on her face faded, just as he’d hoped.
“Really? Good.” Little McCauley was a cambion who had been switched at birth with a human child by his late mother, a demon drug addict who’d been raped by a human. Oblivious to the switch, a human couple had taken him home and raised him, but they hadn’t done a great job of it. As such, McCauley’s inner demon had sort of stepped in and become the parent, which explained why the kid was robotic.
“It is indeed good,” agreed Knox. “Especially since he helped us by telling you that Nora had taken me into a portal. I’ll always be grateful for that even though he did it for a selfish reason.” McCauley had wanted Harper’s protection from Linda, a woman who had killed most of his maternal relatives and had also helped Nora in the hope that she’d get her hands on Asher. McCauley was now staying at a house with other demonic children who had no family to care for them.
“I think that—” Seeing a spark in her peripheral vision, Harper looked to see hellfire flaring in Asher’s hand. It winked away fast. “Did you see that?” she asked Knox.
“I did.”
Asher’s little face scrunched up, and then hellfire once more flickered in his hand. It wasn’t quite an orb. More like a spurt of fire. Again, it vanished quite quickly. He glanced at his hand curiously, and then his mind touched hers—there was a question there.
“I saw it, baby,” Harper told him. “Here, play with this instead.” She handed him his sieve and, bam, he was distracted. Which was good, because she’d rather he didn’t set his pool on fire. “It wasn’t an orb, but that’s not to say he won’t be able to shape the hellfire into a ball once he’s had a little practice, right?”
Knox stroked her arm. “I know you think it a weakness that you can’t conjure an orb of hellfire. Maybe it would be if you couldn’t produce hellfire at all, but you can. I don’t see your ability to only infuse it into objects as in any way a limitation. In fact, I’d say it’s more destructive.”
“Yeah, unless I need to throw a ball of hellfire. Then it’s a problem.” Glancing at Asher again, she asked Knox, “How old were you when your abilities first started to surface?”
“I’m not sure,” said Knox. “I don’t remember ever not having abilities. It wasn’t a question I’d ever asked my parents. I remember being excited whenever a new ability surfaced. My parents would always panic, though, and urge me to hide them. They didn’t want the other demons to know what we were.” As an archdemon, Knox would never stop growing in power. That was one of the things that made his breed so dangerous.
People believed that what was born in hell should remain in hell. His breed tended to live in hordes deep within hell itself. Despite that the children were born from the flames, the adults all shared in the care of them. Some adults “adopted” children, treating them as their own, just as his parents had done.