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The man was <i>unhinged</i>. There was something about the look in his eyes that was different from the other celestials that Lilianna had seen, on television or otherwise; there was something almost <i>animal-like </i>about the way that his gaze caught the candlelight and shone back in a dangerous shade of burnished gold. She could still just barely make out the quickly-fading remnants of whatever wound that had been inflicted upon his neck; embedded into the rippling sinew and muscle was a faint line, as if he’d been constricted around his throat, but there was nothing about the god that even <i>suggested</i> that he would ever allow himself to be so blatantly caught off-guard. He was impossibly strong -<i> lethal</i>, even - and for someone to get close enough to him that they were able to leave a mark…it had to have meant that he’d <i>wanted </i>it in the first place. <br/>
<br/>
That the sick bastard had wanted it to happen - that he might have<i> gotten off</i> on it the same way that he had so clearly gotten off when Lilianna had pinned him to the dining room floor with one of his own dinner knives held to his carotid. He was unpredictable, and that made him even more dangerous than she had previously assumed; he was somewhere between a sadist and a masochist and <i>that </i>meant that Lilianna would need to go back and forth when it came to manipulating him. She couldn’t risk telling him who she really was - instead, she would play into the very few things that he already knew about her, and try to dig in deeper to uncover the things that she <i>didn’t </i>know. She’d yet to receive any sort of information on who this mysterious <i>Demeter</i> woman was, as well as her own sudden display of ferocious power that had been enough to kill two gods.<br/>
<br/>
But Paolo, with his archangel face and king-of-hell eyes, carried himself with all of the feline-like arrogance of a man that knew far too much for his own good, and he <i>also </i>seemed to be oddly fixated on her - as if she was Venus herself emerging from her seashell to bestow him with a thousand freshwater pearls. As she spoke, looking up at him with feigned distress and dishonest sorrow, his dinner was all but forgotten - it was as if everything else in the room had ceased to exist now that Lilianna was deigning to communicate with him using her <i>words </i>rather than the nearest sharp object. The heat of his gaze burned just as much as the flame that he conjured up between his fingertips; it felt like hot wax dripping over her bare skin, and his hand was still warm when he reached out to caress the bend of her knee, and she had to actively stop herself from flinching in response to his touch. He was a <i>monster</i>, he was <i>despicable</i>, he was - <br/>
<br/>
He was almost too beautiful to look at. It was like staring directly up at the sun on the hottest day of the year. Lilianna remained carefully still and poised as he spoke; she could feel the trickling ascent of his fingertips as they skimmed higher and higher up along her leg, and it took every ounce of self-control that she possessed not to ram her knee up <i>high</i> and shatter the stupidly-perfect bridge of his roman nose. She hated the way that her body reacted to him without the conscious approval of her mind - beneath the satin of her dress, the pink oasis between her thighs was shamefully slick in the sense that it had only ever previously been for <i>Santiago</i>, and the mere thought of the resistance leader was enough to have Lilianna’s heart clenching painfully. He had to know that she was missing by now, which meant that he had to be <i>looking</i> for her, too. <br/>
<br/>
<br/>
She…she would do this for Santiago, then. To keep him safe for as long as she possibly could. Paolo stood up again, and this time, he urged her to join him, and Lilianna allowed herself to fall pliant and supposedly subservient as he guided her towards a full-length mirror nearby. It made sense, of course, given how fucking <i>vain</i> the celestials were as a species, but what she hadn’t been prepared for was the startling sight that they made in the reflective glass. Paolo stood behind her in all of his bronzed, darkly-seductive glory, and Lilianna watched the fire-forged path that his hands took as they started at the elegant curves of her shoulders and trailed a heated line down the sides of her pert breasts; he was a head taller than her, and <i>wider,</i> too, easily capable of shielding the entirety of her lithe frame with his broad musculature, and there was no denying the true crux of it all: they fit together as well as Adam and Eve in the Garden.<br/>
<br/>
She could feel the silk of his curls and the roughness of his beard, both sensations juxtaposed but enhanced further by the feather-light press of his lips against her neck that he’d wrung with his bare hands just moments ago. “I can’t say yes to <i>anything</i> until I know more about where I came from,” Lilianna murmured, and she tilted her head back so that she could flutter her gaze imploringly to his; lightly, she reached out, and urged his face away from the sweetly-scented crook of her throat so that she could brush her thumb across the bottom of his pouty lip, and then she dug the smooth tip into the tender flesh for just a brief, fleeting moment, and she watched the indent that formed. <br/>
<br/>
Good. <i>Good</i>. “You’ll help me find my mother, and you’ll help me learn about my <i>powers</i>, too. <i>Shi</i>?” Her voice was a dulcet little <i>purr</i>, a sensuous melody that walked the fine line of a sharpened <i>dao</i> blade; and slowly, carefully, Lilianna slid her thumb and her index finger down, and gripped onto Paolo’s chin - tugging him swiftly towards her so that they met eye-level over the graceful slope of her shoulder. “I won’t be your concubine,” she continued softly, and she allowed the warmth of her breath to spill across his parted lips. “Nor will I be your <i>whore</i>. I want to be your equal in every way that counts. That means that I don’t want to wake up tied to a bed and surrounded by <i>harpies</i>.” She was still feeling faint from not eating, from trying to <i>heal</i>, but she pushed through, tightening her delicate hold on Paolo’s chin just once before letting go only so that she could trace the nail of her thumb along that barely-there line that bisected the thickness of his neck.<br/>
<br/>
“Tell me who Demeter is,” she urged quietly, and there was only the sound of her stuttering pulse before she continued, “Tell me who she is to <i>me</i>. To Persephone.”<br/>
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lilianna<br/>
shu lei </div><br/>
<div style="color:#a4a4a4;text-align: center; font-size: 8px; letter-spacing: 3px; text-transform: uppercase;margin-top:-360px;">code by promethean</div></div>