“You liked it. The knife part, I mean.”
“Poppy.” My irritated tone causes her to flinch, and I dust apologetic kisses across her scarred fingers. “Respectfully, you’re being a little prick.”
“I know.” She huffs a breath, ruffling her fringe. “I don’t know how to describe any of it without sounding fucking insane.”
“Trust me,Petit Diable.You can’t sound any worse than I feel.”
Poppy casts her gaze to the city and the rising sun beyond. “When I woke up in the crypt on the pyre with my unconscious parents, Margot and Quinn revealed themselves. And then they told me a psychotic story I have yet to wrap my head around." She briefly speaks about a supposed curse her ancestor, Octavia, triggered incheating death thanks to the Devil himself saving her life the night she'd been destined to die. And the repercussions of that curse the longer it's left unresolved. "Margot also mentioned something about your family ring that I don't understand beyond it being a targeted object that she planned to steal from your brother all along."
"Putain," I breathe, raking an agitated hand through my hair. "What a fucking mess."
"There's more, Brontë. So much more."
I nod, bracing myself. "Let's hear it."
"Margot called herself a witch. I wouldn't be questioning the validity of that claim if I hadn't seen her literally conjure a ball of fire from thin air to light the pyre and subsequently cast what I can only assume was meant to be a ritual. As if that wasn't a hard enough pill to swallow, something else happened after you shot her. Something…" She shakes her head, her expression wan. "You're not going to believe me."
"Try me," I insist. Everything is making so much more sense now, even if the facts are too fantastical to contemplate being actually true.
Poppy lets her eyes drift shut, shivering even as I drape an arm over her shoulders. "Time didn’t exist. Or maybe it did, and it was paused? I don’t know. I felt something cold. It touched me. Not possessively, but tenderly. Adoringly. I felt its breath on my skin. First, it said,‘Filia.’ Then it opened its eyes. They were beautiful and monstrous and…" Her lips wrap the vape, and she inhales deeply, exhaling lavender smoke as her eyelids crack open. "They were that color—purple. But they were glowing, like they were made of fire. It saw my fear, and I swear on every star, it looked like it didn't want me to be afraid of it. Then it closed its eyes, kissed my forehead, and said,‘Occidere.’ That’s when the restraints came loose and time resumed.”
I drag on my cigar, breathing cherry smoke as I mentally digest the tale that feels more and more like fact than fiction. “Walk the path of insanity with me for a moment. Leviathan was remembered by your family as a cult, but the history of their founding father, Felix Aurelius, claims they were a coven of satanic witches. What if Margot is, indeed, a witch? That tracks with what we've learned about Leviathan thus far."
"Hai.But what about the creature that appeared?"
"Margot was on the side of Leviathan that believes Lucifer assisted Octavia in cheating death, which now has this insatiable hunger that must be satisfied in the form of Morgenstern blood—Lucifer’sblood. What you just described sounds like it wasn't a creature at all. To me, it sounds like it'd been Lucifer himself, and he rose from the deepest pits of Hell to save the last of his descendants, along with commanding you to kill Margot.”
Part of me wants to laugh at the outrageousness.
A larger part of me wishes my mother—an expert on all things otherworldly—was here to make sense of it all.
“If any of it was real,” Poppy says slowly, puffing purple smoke, “what does it change?”
“Either nothing…or everything.”
“Depending on what?”
“What you decide, I suppose.” At her quizzical look, I add, "Margot may have escaped, but that doesn't mean she or anyone on her side won't be back to finish what she started. You're still a Morgenstern. You're still her target, as are your parents. You can either tuck tail and run—or stand and fight. Either way, I'm with you. Whatever you choose."
Her expression falls, and I can almost see her tucking those thoughts in a dark corner of her mind before she says, "I don’t want to talk anymore.”
"Poppy, you need to—"
Faster than I can register, she fists my shirt and pulls me down to her sweet lips. Her open-mouthed kiss steals whatever argument I'd been about to voice, her tongue flicking mine in silent demand. A groan climbs up my throat only to be echoed by her. Blindly tossing my cigar out the window, I palm her waist and plant her ass against the glass, shoving her red silk yukata up past her hips as the need to be inside her overrides my brain and consumes every instinct.
“Brontë,” she warns, tugging the skirt back down. “Not here.”
“If not here, then where?”
Poppy grabs my wrist and tows me back to the empty library. She leads me through the stacks until finding a rolling ladder. “How is this?”
“Parfait.”
I lift her onto a rung and unbuckle my belt, ripping her skirt up to her navel and fitting my aching cock to her weeping entrance. She whimpers, rolling her hips and impaling herself on my dick. Her inner walls constrict around me, and I nearly come undone as her greedy cunt sucks me in.
I fight against the urge to let my eyes find new homes in the back of my skull and just rut into her. I want to savor this—her.
Gently, I rock my hips and work myself deeper into her tight, wet heat until I’m fully seated. Arms circling my neck to hold me close, she breathes little Japanese curses against my throat like love notes.