Free Deviant Knights by Alexandra O'Hurley Page B

ensured
he’d lived through hell, she’d reveled in his torture.   Since Paloma , no
woman had ever gotten close.
    Kadence was the acceptation, although she still wasn’t past his walls.   He sensed she was already much further under
his skin than he allowed.   Her simple
presence brought him a peace he’d rarely felt, even in the midst of their
passage to safety.   His nerves were shot,
but he still sensed a completion to his soul and that unnerved him.   But the questions in his mind made him want
to push her away.   He didn’t know what
and who she really was.
    Thus far, she’d shown no outward appearance of
working with his enemies.   But neither had Paloma .   He’d sensed a problem when it was already too
late.   He always trusted his gut, except
for when it came to women.   Especially a woman like her.   She had the potential to hurt him more than Paloma ever did.   She made him feel things that
even Paloma had not, and so she posed the biggest
threat to him.   That is, if he allowed
himself to let her in.
    Gabriel flanked one side of Kadence ,
escorting her to the waiting limo.   Michel was at her other side, his black duffel over one shoulder.   They ran toward the car, in a hurry to
finally be done with the trip and in a safe home.  
    Michel paused, a sensation running through
him.   Something was not right.   Sensing they were not alone, he turned to the
left and stopped in his tracks.
    Paloma .
    She stood not fifty feet from them, looking not
a day older than the last time he’d seen her smiling down at him in his
cell.   Two Illuminati henchmen flanked
her.   The three gazed through the crowd,
looking for him and Gabriel, but had not witnessed them yet.
    “What is it, Michel?”   Gabriel’s voice sounded distant, although he
stood right next to him.   Michel wasn’t
there; he was in 1560, lost to the torments he’d borne.  
    Paloma turned and their eyes met. Visions of it all passed through his
mind, frozen to the spot, unable to move.
    Michel felt his friend step close and then he
was being dragged into the limo.   He was
physically pushed into the vehicle and it took several moments for
comprehension to filter through him.  
Monte Carlo
, the
Mediterranean
,
and expensive cars sped past him in through the window.   Between the exhaustion of the trip, his
longing for Kadence , and now, his five-hundred-year-old
ex-lover appearing before him very much alive, his mind was a muddle.   
    Surprise was an understatement.
    ****
    Gabriel watched Michel closely.   The man was obviously in shock.   Paloma had been
instrumental in Michel’s torture.   If
Gabriel and Thierry had not intervened and gotten him out of the hands of the
Inquisitors, who knew what could have happened. The guillotine would have ended
Michel.   He could still remember pulling
the Frenchman’s near-lifeless body from the cell, coated in blood.   Open, festering wounds had covered him and
bruises filled the skin still intact.   Had it not been for Michel’s few seconds of lucidity to call out to
Gabriel’s voice, there would have been no way to discern it was him.  
    She should have been dead long ago.   Nearly five hundred years had passed.   But seeing the men flanking her had left
little question in his mind.  
    Paloma was Illuminati.   She must
have been given Immortality by the powers that be.
    The only questions that truly remained were how Paloma had found them, and why now, after all these years,
had she surfaced?  
    And was Kadence drawing them close?
     
     

Chapter Ten
     
    Michel tried to wrench himself from the grips of
madness, knowing that the moments of weakness had left himself and the people
with him in harm’s way.   Weaknesses got
you killed.
    Paloma would forever be a weakness.
    Visions of his weeks in agony ran through his
mind.   The beatings, long and arduous,
hadn’t broken him.   The bruises would
eventually heal, the bones mend.   When
they’d begun to cut