Raini gave him a quick glance over her shoulder. “Well, you have fun chewing on that.”
“Your demon issued me a warning last night. It basically indicated that you could kill me if necessary.”
The fuck? It took everything Raini had not to whirl around in shock. Why the hell had her demon done that? To tweak his curiosity? To communicate that it wasn’t weak, hoping to lure in the predator that he was? Right then, her demon only sniffed, not seeing a need to justify its actions.
Slowly turning to face him, Raini pointed out, “Everything can be killed. Except maybe for water bears. Also known as moss piglets. They’re eight-legged micro-animals that can survive just about anything. Radiation, extreme temperatures, starvation, dehydration, air deprivation, extreme pressures. You can find them in all kinds of places—volcanoes, Antarctica, rainforests. Some even survived a trip to outer space.”
One corner of his mouth quirked. “You don’t have to tell me about all the skeletons in your closet, Raini.”
“Why? Because you respect my privacy?” she mocked.
“I have no reason not to respect it.”
“And yet, you don’t. As evidenced by your final ‘condition.’ And you can’t deny that you also dug into my life and found out everything there was to know.”
Seeing no reason to deny it, Maddox shrugged and slowly stalked toward her. “I was curious about you. I wanted to find the answer to the puzzle.”
“What puzzle?”
Coming to stand in front of her, he replied, “Of why you’re my psi-mate. There’s never been a descendant whose anchor wasn’t a fellow descendant.”
Those lips he wanted to bite parted on a soft gasp. “Never?” she asked.
“Never. So discovering that a succubus is my anchor was … unexpected. But I haven’t yet found anything that would explain the phenomenon.” He was beginning to think there was no explanation. Some things just were. “As for my final condition … that wasn’t about invading your privacy.”
“But it does traipse all over it.”
True. “I don’t like that that bothers you, but I won’t undo what I’ve done.” And he’d be lying if he said that he had any regrets.
“Oh, I know that. And I’m not going to ask you to. I made a deal with you, and I won’t renege on it. But there’ll never be a time when what you did doesn’t bother me.”
“Even though you know I only did it because your safety is important to me?”
“I don’t believe it was only about my safety. I mean, knowledge is power, right? When a person has power, they can also have control, and that’s kind of your thing. Digging up all sorts of info about me and then finding a way to monitor my every move? That’s a whole lot of knowledge.”
It was, yes. And it did soothe his need to be in control. That same need rode his inner entity. “I’ve told you before, I don’t want power over you.” Which, of course, was a lie. He wanted to have some influence over her. Wanted to have a handle on the anchor situation, just as her demon had sensed.
She gave him a look that called him a liar. “Yes, you do. That’s part of the reason why you want to be my go-to person. The one I most rely on. But you can’t be that for me, Maddox.”
His demon narrowed its eyes and slinked closer to the surface. Maddox hiked up a brow. “I can’t?” he asked, sounding dangerous even to him.
“You already have the best of both worlds. Be content with that. Don’t push for more. You won’t get it. I’ll never feel I can fully rely on someone who’s singularly focused on their own wants. You do things that incidentally help or benefit me, but you don’t do them for me. You do them because you want to; because you don’t want others stepping on your ‘rights.’ Like a kid who’ll keep a toy they don’t much like rather than give it away to someone who’ll want it, because they quite simply don’t want anyone else to have it.”
Maddox felt his jaw harden. There was a whole lot there he did not like. “I don’t think of you as a toy.”
“You don’t think of me at all,” she said, sounding somewhat … sad, yet resigned. “Everything you do is about you. And I’m not condemning you for that. You are who you are, and I think a lot of it comes from being what you are. But that doesn’t change the situation.” She sighed. “I guess it’s a good thing we’re not officially anchors. It would never be an equal relationship, would it? You don’t fully respect me.”
All right, now he was getting pissed off. “Bond or no bond, you are officially my anchor,” he stated firmly, leaving no room for argument. His demon couldn’t agree more. “I have no idea why you’d believe I don’t see you as my equal, but that is not true.”