We fell to the carpeted floor, scattering clothing, half-dressed as we wrestled, our only goal to obliterate ourselves in each other. For that moment, everything I’d been through, everything that still stood before me—treachery, torment, death—they all fell away. I didn’t even stop to consider that making love in one of Hell’s most famous boutiques wasn’t exactly discreet, because at that moment nothing existed but the two of us, separated for so long but never truly apart, still burning for each other. It doesn’t make sense in Hell or on Earth, but if you’ve been there, you know. We were making a cathedral of sweat and skin and stifled cries in the worst place that ever was, and nobody was in it but us.

We gave up on the clothes at some point, having removed enough of them that I could climb on top of her and sink myself to the root. My demon body, I was discovering, reacted pretty much like my earthly one. I guess the scientists are right: most of sex is in the mind.

Caz gasped and stiffened, her nails driving into my thickened hide like the tips of knives, ten stabs at once, but it only made me crazier, more animal. I rubbed my face against hers, taking in her smells in insane gulps even as she wrapped her thighs around me, urging me past the chilly bite of her petals to her deep inner heat. She groaned. So did I. We were pushing against each other so violently, striving for some impossible completeness of connection, that we kept bumping into things on the floor, legs of tables, dressmaker’s dummies, knocking things over until we must have looked a lot like those two damned souls in the Lykaion race, trying to destroy each other in the bloody sand of the Circus Commodus.