Screw Devi! Finn was an exorcist. He’d been through what I was going through, right? So why couldn’t he understand that my body was giving me a command I had no choice but to follow? I couldn’t stand still for one more minute, with my muscles burning and my—

His mouth met mine, and I almost choked on surprise. Then his hand slid behind my neck and his head tilted, and I had a second to decide whether to bite his tongue off or kiss him back.

I’m not sure why I kissed him back.

Maybe because he was the only person I’d spoken to in the past twelve hours, other than my sister, who hadn’t tried to kill me, possess me, grope me, or arrest me. Maybe because I’d never been kissed by someone who wasn’t clumsy and hurried, or ashamed of what he wanted, or using me for an entirely different reason than I was using him. Maybe because kissing Finn felt good when I needed to feel something that wasn’t scary and dangerous and terrifyingly uncertain.

What I do know is that I committed to that kiss like I’d committed to little else in life. My fingers brushed over short stubble at the back of his jaw on their way into his hair. He sucked my lower lip into his mouth and I let him have it, then I gave him more. I lived in that moment, fighting panic and urgency with the boldest, most breathtaking and brazenly immodest human contact I’d ever felt.

Then something caught the back of my shirt and I screamed as I was ripped away from Finn, reaching for him, my fingers grasping. I twisted, my heart pounding, ready to scratch and claw at the degenerate who’d snuck into our sanctuary, surely the first of dozens ready to chew me to death and slurp up my insides.

My feet met the floor and someone swung me around by one arm.

A girl’s face came into focus in the dark, and she was definitely not a degenerate, though she did look mad enough to rip my arms off. Before I could truly process the fact that I’d just been caught in carnal contact—yet another sin on top of the charges already leveled against me—she said my name.

“You’re Nina?” Her dark eyes narrowed as she studied me, though she couldn’t have seen much in the shadows. Her grip on my arm bruised, and my heart kept racing, even though she was human, thus unlikely to eat my face off or devour my soul.

I nodded, too surprised to ask the questions rapidly coalescing from the chaos in my head.

“Well, Nina, we’ll get along just fine if you remember to keep your mouth off my boyfriend.”

Chapter Ten