City of Thorns (The Demon Queen Trials #1)(23)

Damn it. He could see right through me. I could feel myself blushing, and I shook my head. “There’s nothing wrong. I slept fine, just had some weird dreams.”

“About what?”

You, kissing me all over. “Just, um, monsters. What are you reading?” I took a sip of my coffee.

Orion’s eyes gleamed, and he lifted the book so I could see the cover.

Fifty Shades of Grey.

I choked and spat out my coffee, then wiped the back of my hand across my mouth.





He sat across from me in his living room, arms folded. I was getting the impression that he was losing patience. “You meet the king tomorrow, and your body is still full of tension and nerves. Do you see how you grimace when you’re nervous? How your neck muscles are tight and strained?”

I sighed, trying to focus on relaxing the muscles around my mouth. I took a deep breath. I couldn’t help but wonder where Orion had spent the last two nights, and where he’d been at dinner.

“Let’s see the Mortana walk you’ve been practicing,” he said.

I rose from the chair.

It wasn’t any of my business where he went when he wasn’t here. But I’d been learning his patterns—a very early wakeup, as soon as dawn broke. Coffee, fruit in the mornings. Sometimes he dove off his balcony straight into the sea for a morning swim. He spent half the day trying to teach me how to act like Mortana—how she spoke, how she held herself, the kind of jokes she’d make. One afternoon, he’d told me to swim naked by myself, and I was supposed to think about how it felt to undulate under the water, how beautiful I was.

The other half of the time, he’d leave me by myself. I ate all my meals, delivered by Morgan, alone on his balcony. Once I’d eaten, I’d pull out Orion’s smutty romance novels. The books that filled his shelves ranged from literary classics and Greek epic poems to full-blown modern fuck-fests with whips and spanking and lots of mind-shattering orgasms. Which, let’s face it, couldn’t be that good in real life. In the interest of learning, I chose the fuck-fest books to read over my dinners of scallops or salmon. And they were educational.

I did wonder, though—who was he eating with when he wasn’t with me? And where was he sleeping?

Not that it was my business.

From the sofa, he arched an eyebrow. “You don’t seem like you’re focusing.”

I straightened the way he’d taught me, then flicked my hair over my shoulder. I curled my lips in a smug smile.

He cocked his head. “Good. You’ve got the facial expression.”

“I’m mimicking that smug ‘I think I’m better than everyone’ facial expression you always have.”

He shrugged. “And now you need to believe it, too. You need to believe that you’re the most beautiful person in the city, that others are privileged to be around you. That’s what Mortana would think, that she blessed others with her presence. That she’s a gift to the world.”

I lifted my chin a little higher, just as Mortana would. A gift to the world.

“Let me see how you walk. This time, try keeping your footsteps in a single line, like a cat. Shoulders back, hips forward.”

I straightened my back and lengthened my neck, and then I started to move the way he’d told me to, one foot directly in front of the other. I found that my hips swayed as I walked, and I strutted around the room in my new little black sundress. I could feel his eyes on me, watching the way I moved—or rather, the way Mortana moved.

“Shoulders back,” he said quietly. “You need to look and act like you’re thinking about sex at all times.”

I pivoted, walking across the room again.

With his instructions, I found myself walking like a total sexpot—tits out, hips swaying from side to side. Maybe I was uncomfortable in my body, but Mortana was not. Mortana had done all the things I read about in those books—fucking men against walls, dragging her nails down their backs, biting the headboard while someone banged her from behind.

I twirled, thinking of how Mortana would feel swimming naked in the sea, or how she would feel with Orion watching her. Mortana would want his eyes all over her naked body. She’d get turned on, and she’d want him to know exactly how turned on she was. She’d want to torture him, tease him.

I spun again and decided that Mortana wanted to sit in Orion’s lap. So I did that, wrapped my legs around his waist, my hem riding up to my hips. Instantly, his eyes turned dark as night. With a low, appreciative growl, his hand moved from my lower back all the way up to my hair. He threaded his fingers into my curls, pulling my head back a little. “Good girl,” he said quietly. “Very good.” His low voice rumbled over my skin.

But this was going too far, wasn’t it?

I cleared my throat and jumped up from his lap, smoothing out my dress, tugging down the hem. “There.” I exhaled slowly. “See? I can be Mortana. I don’t have to do it all the time.”

Orion’s eyes were still pinned on me, filled with primal shadows. “Of course not.”

Tomorrow night, I would meet the king, and that should be the scariest thing in my life right now. But truthfully, what scared me most was Orion.





Chapter 14





Today was D-Day.

I wasn’t actually clear what the D stood for in the World War II version, but for me, it stood for demon, and possibly disaster. It was the day I’d be entering the demon world for real, leaving the safety of Orion’s apartment. Most terrifying of all, it was the day I’d meet the demon king who’d severed his father’s head and stuck it on a gate.