Demon Marked

a demon in the first place? You didn’t know it when she killed Rachel, and you haven’t seen her since that night.”
    No, he hadn’t. “I spent a lot of money.”
    “Oh, really? How did that help? Is there a code printed on the back of a thousand-dollar bill, like something out of a Dan Brown novel?”
    Was she irritated? He couldn’t be certain. She didn’t show enough emotion to categorize her response as snippy, but with just a little more heat he might have. A little drier, and it might have been sarcasm. Either way, she obviously didn’t appreciate indirect answers—or attempts to evade an answer.
    Interesting. Demons were all about wordplay and obfuscation. They loved to twist words or give them double meanings. Ash didn’t. At least, not in any way that Nicholas recognized. Every word from Madelyn’s tongue had dripped with sweet poison, killing his father before she’d turned it on Nicholas. Yet even now, when he thought Ash might be irritated, she didn’t attack him. Had she forgotten how to do that, too?
    He could easily find out. “She and Rachel vanished. Poof! Gone. For a while, I’d wondered if I’d snapped. Even my therapist thought I might have had a psychotic break—”
    “You have a therapist?”
    And she’d jumped right on it. What would come next? Telling him that he possessed a weak mind and spirit? That he wasn’t a real man?
    He hoped she’d try. He’d better know how to deal with her if she began responding like every other demon.
    “Yes,” he confirmed. “With a mother like Madelyn, I needed one.”
    “For how long?”
    “Since I came to the States at fifteen.”
    Thanks to his father, he’d had dual citizenship and enough money to escape Madelyn’s influence. He wouldn’t take the same way out his father had, however—and from the moment he’d stepped off the plane, he’d been planning how to return and destroy her. But Nicholas had also known that Madelyn had already managed to poison him with her words and her neglect, and that if he didn’t seek help digging out the rot, he’d end up like his father, anyway.
    Madelyn would have called his reliance on a therapist weak ; he saw it as defiance and another form of vengeance. Despite everything she’d done, Madelyn wouldn’t break him.
    “You’ve had the same therapist for twenty years?”
    “Yes.”
    “And he—Or is it she ?”
    “She.”
    Only by mistake. At fifteen, he hadn’t wanted a thing to do with women, especially not someone the same age as his mother. So he’d picked Leslie Sinclair out of a directory, but when the appointment came, had discovered a woman with a man’s name. Good manners had kept him on the couch, but by the end of the session, she hadn’t had to twist his arm to return.
    Now, Nicholas believed that Leslie hadn’t just saved his life—she’d probably nipped some nascent misogyny in the bud. Just as well. According to many people he’d worked with or whose companies he’d ripped apart, Nicholas was already enough of a dick. No need to add woman hating to his list of sins.
    “Does she know you’re obsessed with revenge?”
    “Of course.”
    Although the reason behind that revenge had changed over time. As a fifteen-year-old boy, it had been born from a sense of betrayal. His mother had forsaken him. Madelyn hadn’t even attempted to stop him from leaving England, and he’d wanted her to regret that, and to regret every careless or razor-edged remark she’d ever made.
    After months of talking to Leslie, he’d recognized exactly why he’d wanted revenge so badly: He’d wanted Madelyn to feel sorry, dammit. He’d wanted her to notice her son, to acknowledge the pain she’d caused him.
    Within a year, he no longer cared whether Madelyn regretted anything, but he hadn’t lost the desire to ruin her. Recounting every detail of his childhood to Leslie had shown him that his mother wasn’t just thoughtless and neglectful—he’d realized that she was a sadistic, evil bitch who’d destroyed his father and tried to do the same to him. He’d been determined to destroy her in return by taking away the only thing she’d ever nurtured: her business. Nicholas had formed Reticle with that single goal in mind, putting Wells-Down and his mother in the crosshairs, and he hadn’t let anyone stand in his way.
    Then he’d discovered that Madelyn was a demon, that she’d likely killed his true mother and murdered Rachel, and everything had changed. He’d been driven