Savage Wings: Book Three of The Whitechapel Chronicles

Chapter 20

The rich, heady scent of cardamom and cloves was the first thing to hit my senses. The second, which came with that horrible jolt from blissful unconsciousness to pain-wracked awareness, was the sight of Lucifer himself, draped on a chaise-lounge opposite to where I lay, with a woman draped upon him.

He lay with one leg stretched out, and his arms resting on the gilded frame of the chair and his shirt was unbuttoned, revealing an expanse of hard, smooth pale skin. The woman, a curvaceous siren of a woman with long lustrous blue-black hair and wearing very little in the way of clothing, straddled his thigh and was running her long fingernails down his chest as he inclined his head towards hers, his tongue trailing light and slow along her full, glossy lips. She exhaled a soft moan and slid down to his bare chest where she grazed one nipple with perfect white teeth, her hand gliding further down towards his crotch.

I lay still, frozen by the scene played out in front of me, feeling uncomfortable that they were doing this right here, seemingly oblivious to the fact they had company. It wasn't until Lucifer shifted his gaze to look directly at me and smiled that I realised he clearly wasn't oblivious at all. In fact he was very aware that I was here, and more to the point, he knew full well that I had been watching.

I felt my cheeks inflame and shifted uncomfortably, sitting up quickly and soon regretting it when the nausea swept through me, my vision blurring for a millisecond.

Whispering low into her ear, Lucifer glanced in my direction again and his admirer shot me a look filled with more poison than Snow White's apple as she untangled herself from him. Sashaying across the room, revealing way more flesh than I cared to see, she kept her dark eyes upon me, only stopping to turn back and fix Lucifer with such a hot stare that I felt my own skin burning to be in such close proximity to both of them.

Once she had gone, I took a few moments to take stock of my surroundings and I had to say, that as far as Lucifer's realms went, this one was particularly impressive. The ballroom, despite the horrors I had witnessed there, had been beautiful. The endless gardens too had been breath-taking, bolstered by the fact it had felt wondrous to stand in the sunshine once again. But this place, this room, was quite simply, stunning to behold.

To my left was a huge fireplace that stood almost head-height, carved out of the blackest marble, with intertwined figures fashioned out of the stone and the flames flickering bronzed light over their forms. The chair on which I lay was a long plush red velvet sofa with gold gilded feet, matching Lucifer's chaise-lounge perfectly. Moroccan-style rugs layered the floor and the room was lit by a number of filigree and coloured glass lanterns.

All of this was food for the eyes, but none of it compared to the bookcases.

Surrounding us on three sides, tall bookcases lined the walls and as my eyes drank in the row upon row of leather-bound tomes in a variety of hues, I gasped to look up and see that the bookshelves seemed to stretch out above us at an impossible height. On and on they went until I thought I might never see the top of them as they disappeared into a starlit ceiling of perfect indigo night sky.

With my jaw practically on the floor, I looked back at Lucifer who now sat with one leg resting on the other, his arms still draped along the back of the chaise-lounge and a glint of sheer delight in his eyes.

"I knew you would love it," he said softly.

"How?" I replied, my tone laced heavily with suspicion. The problem was I did love it - no, I adored it - and it made me feel uneasy to realise that he somehow knew that I would, almost as if he had some wire directly connected to my brain, feeding him information I didn't want him to have. I didn't want him to know me. I didn't want him to think he had some deeper understanding of who I was and what made me tick. The idea of that seemed terribly dangerous, despite the fact he had, as yet, done nothing to threaten or endanger me.