Demon Betrayed (Demon Enforcers Book 5) by Jenn Stark

Author:Jenn Stark [Stark, Jenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Elewyn Publishing
Published: 2022-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

15

Kat froze in place. She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t mean to, but she could no more ignore Hugh than she could stop breathing. Finally, she glanced up.

His eyes gleamed with a crackling purple fire. It was the same fire that had burned in the eyes of Hugh the Destroyer as Jeremy had imagined him for his miniature, the strange color not quite squaring with his angelic air. It was too hot, too intense. And he trained that focus squarely on her now, leaving Kat no room to escape.

“Your mind is filled with chaos,” he murmured. “How can you focus on anything?”

The question wasn’t meant as a rebuke, but of course she took it that way. Hugh wasn’t the first person to ask her that question, and she was sure he wouldn’t be last. Anyone she’d ever tried to explain her brain to eventually arrived at the same conclusion.

But for some reason, coming from him, the question didn’t sting as much as it normally did. He sounded genuinely curious, not judgmental or even pitying, and Kat found herself wanting to answer him. He already knew so much about her—and she wanted to believe him, desperately so.

Could she? Could she simply relax and…go with it? Tell him everything?

“The chaos sort of acts like an insulator.” She reached for a glass of wine, but bypassed it for one of the plastic containers of water. Who had stocked this kitchen? She certainly hadn’t expected to be here, and Sorcia, if she existed in real life, couldn’t have imagined she’d be having houseguests. But someone had to have chosen the specific cuts of cheese, the brand of bottled water. Someone had to think about whether Kat would want red or white wine.

Had she done all this?

And if so, had she really possessed these skills before now, as Hugh seemed to think, or were they only tied to the Dead End project? How much would she be changed after all this was done? She had a flash of her life returning to its same ordinary patterns—working in her apartment, delivering images to clients, drawing her next book in the quiet, nondescript block of her second bedroom. Was that what she would be faced with once Hugh flew away? And could she possibly survive the crushing reality of her ordinary existence when that happened?

Hugh was obviously waiting for more from her, some explanation that showed how she could have become a superhero with the world’s most boring life, so she shoved all other thoughts away and refocused on him.

“I used to try to fight through it, the noise. To stay fully present in the outside moment—school, sports, even walking around downtown or through the back streets near where I lived. I was lucky that way. My foster parents and my adoptive ones lived in white-bread suburbia outside of Philadelphia, and I didn’t look like much of anything to catch the eye. I didn’t get picked on, didn’t have enemies. But I didn’t have any friends either.

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