Another quiet rumble, but after a few seconds, the beast nodded, chains barely allowing the movement. Oh thank god, he could communicate. Or maybe that was a bad thing? If it turned out he wasn’t some horrible monster, doing her best to break him and make him obey her would be a lot harder.
But if he was willing to communicate, she had to. Just like all those times David would obsess over something, Mia knew she’d obsess over this, too. She had to know about this creature she was supposed to subdue.
“Your name is Vinicius? Zel hasn’t been lying?”
Nothing for a moment, as if the dragon was considering communicating after all. But a second later, he nodded.
She smiled, and did her best to not start bouncing in place. As the excitement surged through her, her heart or whatever plucked at the strings, and sure enough, the aura changed into one of excitement. Not good. She grabbed hold of her heart, her inner fingers, whatever it was plucking the strings, and did her best to stop them.
She managed. Like palm muting a guitar, or putting her fingers over the exit hole of a wind instrument, she quietened the way her heart affected the waves of whatever it was around her she touched. Okay okay, learning learning, maybe not learning what Zel wanted, but learning to hide the weird aura thing was still a very valuable skill. Somehow she doubted she’d be able to do if… when aroused, but still.
“Um… Did you really try to kill Zel, a long time ago?”
Another nod.
“Decades ago?”
He tilted his head to the side. Damn those were big horns, and a lot of them.
“… centuries ago?”
A nod.
“You’ve been locked down here for centuries?”
A nod.
Fucking hell.
“Okay, um…” Time for tough questions. “I heard you were a killer. You killed a lot of people, a lot lot, more than needed. You… went around, fighting for violence’s sake, and… I suppose if I was going to say it like Zel would say it, with a hefty coating of bombastic language, you ‘reaped a harvest of death and slaughter’. Is that right?”
Another pause, but eventually he nodded. Either he knew he had no choice but to tell the truth, or he was the honest type.
“And you probably want to kill Zel, right?” A dumb question. She knew the answer.
A nod.
“Do you want to kill me?”
He shook his head. Mia squinted up at him, forced herself to make eye contact, and came closer.
“Even after what I did to you? You’ve been resisting Zel for years, centuries, and I came along and undid some of that in minutes. You don’t want revenge?”
He shook his head again, and followed it with a quiet rumble. She’d have an easier time reading the mind of a literal lizard than trying to figure out if the ragarin demon was lying. But because she was a stupid, overly empathetic person, no matter how many times it bit her in the ass, she wanted to believe him anyway.
“Do… you think you deserve to be locked up like this?”
No answer. He did tilt his head to the side a bit, but nothing else.
“Do… you think you’d try and take back this spire, if you got out?”
He nodded. Okay, that was definitely a bean on the truth side of the truths-or-lies scale. Maybe she should ask some questions that weren’t directly about him?
“Do you think Zel will… hurt me if I don’t do what she wants?”
He nodded.
“And worse…”
It wasn’t a question, but he nodded anyway.
Sighing, she paced back and forth in front of the titan, a few feet away from his legs.
“Do you have any idea about me? Why I’m unmarked, and can make auras and read the ancient language? Have you seen any other unmarked souls before?”
He shook his head. It’d been a long shot, but it was nice to put another bean on the truth side of the scale. He could have lied so she’d find a way to release him.
Sighing, she ran her fingers through her red hair as she stared at her bare feet.
“You have to understand, okay? Just a few weeks ago I was a regular human, living on the surface, doing my own thing. I was nobody, nothing important, nothing. I spent over two weeks hanging around as a ghost, doing absolutely nothing. Then I went to Heaven, and Hell scooped me up, right out from under me, right at the Gates of Heaven! Dropped me off here in Hell, me and… I almost died the first five seconds after I landed here! But some demons noticed I was unmarked, so they took me to Diogo, then he took me to Zel, and the whole time I had this weird aura thing affecting people and demons and I can’t control it and apparently I can read the ancient language that Lucifer him… themself used to write with, and… and…” She threw up her hands, stomped around a few more times, and marched up to Vinicius, right up to him so she had to look almost straight up to keep eye contact. “You’re a child of Belial, one of the Old Ones! You’re centuries old! Multiple! You have to know at least something!”
Silence. A heavy rumble. A slow shake of his head.
Sighing even louder, she pressed her right hand against his left leg. Yeap, that was borderline steel. His skin wasn’t quite as dark as Diogo’s, but nearly, and the titan was twice as thick as the brute.
And, wow, she was really close. It didn’t dawn on her just how close, until she looked at where her hand pressed against his leg, halfway up his quadriceps. After a heavy gulp, she forced herself to look away from the giant leg literally bigger than her entire body, and back up at the bound colossus.
“You don’t know anything?” she asked, her hand still on his leg.
Another head shake, and another quiet rumble. But something else, too. As he stared down at her, something changed, something in his skin. It got a little redder, and just a little softer under her touch.
She took a step back. “Um… I…” What the fuck, she hadn’t been putting out a sex aura! Had she? No, no she hadn’t. For the first time in days, she’d stopped thinking about sex and thought about something else, something she absolutely loved: trying to figure a person out, figure out how they worked, figure out what made them tick.
But the colossal demon in front of her felt differently. His skin was getting redder, and his eyes were locked on her.
“No no! No. Nope. We’re not doing that.” She turned around and hugged her silk tighter to her body. There was no way she could be horny. She’d been getting fucked quite thoroughly lately, and living some pretty ridiculous, extreme fantasies. She was the opposite of pent up. She was sexually drained. Or at least, she should have been sexually drained, exhausted, depleted, dried up and done.
But she wasn’t. How much of that was because of her sex drive, or because of the demon heart she’d eaten, she didn’t know.
She groaned and rubbed her face with her hands. A succubus. She was a succubus! Except, she wasn’t. She’d seen succubi, and she was not that. And yet here she was, picturing it, picturing what it’d be like to be picked up by the bound monster, and used like a toy. Maybe Kas and Adron would join him, and she’d have to pleasure them all at the same time. Maybe–