To Enthrall the Demon Lord Read online

  To Enthrall the Demon Lord

  A Novel of Love and Magic

  Nadine Mutas

  Contents

  Cover Copy

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Also by Nadine Mutas

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To Enthrall the Demon Lord

  A Novel of Love and Magic

  Book 4

  * * *

  Nadine Mutas

  * * *

  Warning: Contains a hero who’s Tall, Dark, and Possessive, and may melt your heart as well as your reading device. Handle with care and a bucket of ice water nearby. And maybe some tissues.

  * * *

  His hunger for power knows no bounds…until she binds his heart.

  * * *

  To keep an ill-fated bargain, witch Maeve MacKenna surrenders herself to the scheming Demon Lord Arawn. He’s dangerous, arrogant, ruthless, and dominant—everything she should despise in a male, especially after the torture by another demon left scars on her body and soul. She should tremble with terror in Arawn’s presence. So why does he make her shiver for entirely different reasons? And awaken parts of her body she believed numb after her assault?

  * * *

  Arawn gets what Arawn wants. But when the witch he’s been coveting—for the ancient magic bound inside her—walks into his lair, what should have been simple and straightforward becomes uncomfortably complicated as his interest in her…shifts. A dance of power and attraction begins amid a looming outside threat—because Maeve is not the only one with an age-old force stirring inside her, and the Demon Lord’s rivals are all-too eager to seize that kind of power…

  Dedicated to every single reader who asked me about Maeve.

  And to all survivors.

  Chapter 1

  Maeve’s hand trembled as she picked up the pen. The first lines she scrawled looked as jittery as the fluttering in her chest, but she kept writing, and her hand steadied as she went. She couldn’t stop. Had to get this down on paper before courage deserted her.

  A last line drawn under her name at the end—done.

  The pen clicked on the wooden desk, and her hand shook once more as she read the note she’d written to her sister, to her friends.

  I know about the baby. I know you didn’t want me to find out, but I’m glad I did. Merle, maybe you don’t want to put me in this position, but it is where I need to be. This is my choice, my responsibility. I never wanted you in that position, never wanted you to have to make these tough decisions because of me. You’ve already done so much for me, risked so much, and I am so, so thankful. Which is why I can’t allow you to risk anything else—anyone else—on my behalf.

  I’m surrendering myself to Arawn, so he will stop using your magic. Your baby will be safe.

  Please, don’t come after me. By the time you read this, I’ll be well on my way to his lair. It’s long overdue, and it’s what I should have done weeks ago.

  Merle, I love you. You deserve to be a mom, and I’m so happy for you.

  Rhun, I would have enjoyed getting to know you.

  Lil, I love you, too. Please hug Baz and Hazel for me when they get back. I haven’t known Alek long, but I’m so glad you found each other.

  I’ll keep you all in my heart. Maybe one day I’ll get to see my niece.

  — Maeve

  The room resounded hollow with silence as she stared at the paper. The house was quiet, too. Alek and Lily were still asleep, had only gone to bed two hours ago, when the approach of morning turned the sky that special shade of indigo. Being duhokrad demons, Lily and her mate preferred to sleep during the day, since their kind was vulnerable to sunlight.

  No one else was at home, Basil having gone off to Faerie to search for his lost adoptive sister Rose, his mother, Hazel, having gone right after him, and Merle and Rhun wouldn’t come over this early. It was the perfect moment to leave—in part also due to the fact that now, with the morning sun gilding the frost on the grass, the demon sentinel keeping watch over the mansion for Arawn would be replaced by a shifter whose powers weren’t bound during the day.

  It shouldn’t matter, considering what she was about to do, where she was going, and yet…the thought of approaching a—with her luck, male—demon to take her to Arawn’s lair curdled her stomach with this cursed, instinctive fear she hadn’t been able to shake in all these months. She was okay around Alek after a rocky start, and even around Rhun, though it took her the better part of summer to be able to breathe freely in Rhun’s presence, that insidious panic clawing at her simply because he was a bluotezzer demon, same as the one who—

  She blinked, shook herself. But a complete stranger? A male demon she didn’t know?

  She’d rather try her luck with a shifter. Might help keep the panic down. And, who knew? Maybe the sentinel on duty today would be a female. She didn’t dare hope for that, but it would be the best option. Alek worked for the Demon Lord, and based on what he had said here and there, the enforcers keeping watch over Arawn’s “asset”—i.e. her—were a mix of males and females. Physical strength wasn’t quite as important a marker among otherworld creatures, what with magic being the true edge for most, and magic didn’t differentiate between sexes. The Demon Lord’s ranks thus featured males and females alike, as Arawn valued power above all else—and wasn’t so shortsighted as to exclude great power based on gender.

  Time to go before doubts had a chance to creep in after all.

  She laid the note on her four-poster bed, on top of the neatly arranged blue comforter, and straightened one of the pillows again. A duffel bag packed with a week’s supply of clothes, a few toiletries, her cell phone, and a framed picture, sat next to the door, waiting for her.

  One last look at the room that had been her refuge for the past six months, had given her peace and comfort after she was freed from that place drenched in darkness and pain, and her heart hurt at the thought she’d never get to see this house again. Or the people who’d filled it with life and laughter for her, who’d never given up on her, even when she was little more than a broken shell hiding in her bed, staring at the wall for hours, for days.

  Picking up the duffel bag, she went out the door, her breath hitching, her eyes burning.

  A quiet voice inside her spoke up, a hopeful part of herself that not even blades dripping with her blood had been able to kill. Maybe she would get to see them all again. Maybe this was not the walk into darkness and more torture that she made it out to be. She didn’t know what awaited her. Maybe the Demon Lord wouldn’t—

  A shudder whispered through her, and her stomach cramped. Insidiously, despite that part of her that clung to hope throughout a storm of nigh
tmares, another voice grated across her nerves, slipped pervasively into the darkest corners of her mind, filled it with images of the worst that could happen to her—and it shook her to her foundations precisely because it had already happened.

  You know what that feels like, the voice hissed. You know you’re powerless to stop it when it happens again. Don’t pretend you don’t know what you’re walking into. You know.

  That voice…that voice… Spots of light danced in front of her, her breath so shallow she might as well have been choking. She barely made it to the bathroom down the hallway in time, heaved her breakfast into the toilet until her chest ached, her throat burned. Sniffling, she clutched the porcelain bowl for a moment before she got up, rinsed her mouth, gargled, and brushed her teeth with quick efficiency. Chucking the toothbrush and toothpaste back into her duffel bag, she crept out into the hallway again.

  The fact she’d never hear that voice again in real life was too small a consolation. It was branded into her memory with the freshness of a bleeding cut, and she could still recall the sound of it after months, as if he’d just spoken, as if his breath still warmed her skin yet chilled her soul, making her tremble with impotent fear…

  It wouldn’t fade. It just wouldn’t fade, no matter how hard she tried…because it had become the voice of every dark doubt inside her, whispered through her when she least expected it, froze her thoughts and dragged her back under, until she found herself emptying her stomach into the nearest bowl.

  Rhun might have ripped him to shreds, but no one could slaughter the memory of his voice.

  She quietly descended the large, curving, marble staircase leading down into the foyer. The morning sun shone through the huge window in the wall above the front door, glinted off the massive crystal chandelier dominating the room. She dropped her duffel bag at the entrance and headed to the kitchen, crossed to the French doors opening to the backyard, and walked all the way to the rear fence. To the spot where—according to Alek’s inside knowledge as a former sentinel—Arawn’s guards liked to keep watch over the property. Over her.

  Nerves prickling, she stopped just a few feet from the fence. Cleared her throat. “I want to surrender myself to Arawn.” Her heartbeat thudded so loud in her ears, it drowned out the early-morning birdsong. For the rest of the world it would seem like she was talking to air. And even though nothing indicated anyone’s presence, she knew the sentinel was there, listening. “I’ll be waiting at the front gate for you to take me to him.”

  And with that, she turned on her heel and marched back to the house, through the kitchen, the foyer, grabbed her duffel bag, and walked out the front door, making sure to close it quietly behind her. The last thing she needed was to wake up Alek or Lily now.

  She came to a halt at the front gate, remaining within the perimeter of the magical wards protecting the property. Her pulse still raced as she dropped her bag on the gravel driveway, crossed her arms, and waited. Minutes ticked by. The sun rose higher. Where was that sentinel? She threw a nervous glance at the house looming behind her. Please let them keep sleeping…

  Would she have to go back to the yard and tell the darned sentinel again? She bit her lip and suppressed a frustrated groan. I don’t know if I have the guts to say it a second time. The more time passed, the more her thoughts turned to the myriad ways why this was the most suicidal thing she’d ever done. Besides moving out of the protection of her witch community. Which had led to her being kidnapped and… Nope, not going there.

  Merle’s image flashed before her inner eye, and just like that, her spine locked, her shoulders straightened, and she lifted her chin. No, she had to do this. For Merle, for her unborn baby, for all the ways her sister had protected her until she bled—literally—and restructured her life around Maeve’s needs. No more. Merle would have to suffer no more on Maeve’s account.

  A scuffle at the front gate snagged her attention. Breath stalled in her lungs, she waited.

  “I mean it,” she called out to the spot beyond the gate, where the tiniest flicker in the air hinted at a concealment spell of Arawn’s making. “Take me to him now.”

  A second, a heartbeat, then—as if melting under heat like a desert mirage, the air shimmered, changed, and revealed the bulky form of the sentinel on duty. Maeve’s stomach turned. Her fingers curled into her palms.

  Of course. Of course it had to be a male.

  She closed her eyes briefly, willed the anxiety scratching under her skin to quiet down. You can do this. What’s a little terror compared to the safety of Merle’s baby?

  The sentinel cleared his throat, brows drawn together over light brown eyes in a rugged face, his skin a dark tan. “Just to get this straight” he said. “You want me to take you to the Demon Lord?”

  “To complete the bargain my sister made with him. Yes.”

  “Are you sure? He hasn’t…called it in.”

  “I know. But I am.”

  Because if she didn’t, if she stayed in the protective bubble her sister had built for her with tears and blood and magic, if she kept living on stolen time, time Merle paid for by loaning out her powers to Arawn so he wouldn’t come claim Maeve…her sister’s baby would die the next time Merle had to uphold the balance of magic. As head of her family, as the oldest living witch of her line, Merle had to pay back to the Powers That Be for the magic she used, and with Arawn demanding she put her powers at his disposal, Merle had to pay back a lot. And the last time she did, she almost lost the baby.

  Chest aching, Maeve picked up the duffel bag, opened the gate, and stepped through the wards onto the sidewalk, in front of this male she didn’t know, whom she now had to trust to deliver her to the Demon Lord in one piece. Breathe. He won’t hurt you. He’s not allowed to hurt you. She had to rely on the probability that he wouldn’t risk Arawn’s wrath by touching her, had to repeat to herself, over and over, that she was safe from this male—because the Demon Lord wanted her for himself. Presumably unspoiled.

  Not that she wasn’t already the very definition of damaged goods. Heat flushed her neck, her cheeks. Her shoulders hunched forward, and she angled her head so the ginger strands of her hair would partially cover her face. That nasty scar running from one temple across her nose to the other side of her chin would still be visible, but…well.

  The sentinel nodded to her and gestured down the street. “Car’s parked around the corner.”

  Bag clutched tightly to her chest, she followed him, doing her best to ignore the fear snapping at her heels. Focused on the sound of his boots thudding on the sidewalk, the brilliant patterns of shadow and light on the ground from the sun shining through a dancing, lacy lattice of near-bare autumn trees.

  At the car, he opened the passenger side door for her. She slipped in before her anxiety would root her to the spot. The slamming of the door made her jump, hug her bag even closer.

  Too fast. She was breathing too fast.

  It’s just a car ride, damn it. Pull yourself together.

  She stared straight ahead as the driver side door opened, and the car dipped a little when he got in. Another flinch when he shut the door. Even with her dull human senses, his male scent—condensed in the tight space of his car—pressed in on her.

  He fastened his seatbelt, and she felt his eyes on her. “Buckle up.”

  “No.” Choked out between her teeth. “Just drive.”

  To be in any way restrained in the presence of a man… A cold shiver rolled through her, iced her very bones. As ridiculous as it was, she couldn’t even strap herself in while riding in a car with a guy.

  An assessing glance from the sentinel, then he started the engine. “Name’s Warrick, by the way.”

  A nod. That was all she was capable of.

  Her heartbeat wasn’t even thundering in her ears anymore. No, it had almost flattened out, the rhythm so rapid, so irregular, it could have been a hasty Morse code sent out during times of war. And what raged inside her was a battle after all. A struggle for control over he
r most basic functions, her body, her mind…control that had been wrenched from her during days of torture and humiliation, until the simplest tasks and situations would trigger an avalanche of panic, burying what was left of her.

  The car’s vibrations as it rolled along the street sank into her, and the next second a flash of memory short-circuited her brain. Another car, another time, another male… Maeve panted, sitting in the front passenger seat, too weak to fight him even if he didn’t hold her immobile with his telekinesis. He’d taken so much blood—too much—and she was dizzy, her head lolling from side to side with the movements of the car, her eyelids drooping despite the fear burning like corrosive acid in her veins. Up ahead a warehouse loomed in the darkness, a single lightbulb illuminating the wide garage door as it opened, ready to swallow her whole.

  She couldn’t breathe. Chills rattled her, made her tremble. The world spun, spun, spun, everything lost color, became lighter, yet a weight pressed down on her chest, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t move, couldn’t—

  The car screeched to a halt. She rocked forward from the sudden stop, her duffel cushioning the impact as she hit the dashboard. She couldn’t see, the world leached of all color, whited-out. The sound of a door opening, but it was dulled, as if filtered through cotton, far away. Fresh air streamed in, cool on her sweat-coated skin. Choking, she clutched her bag. Her legs tingled. Like a fish on land, she gasped for breath, that weight on her chest pressing in.