Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet by Darynda Jones

magnificent.
    The first time I saw Reyes, I was in high school and my sister Gemma and I had spotted
     him through the kitchen window of his apartment late one night. It was a bad part
     of town, and what I saw proved it. A man—a man who I would later learn was Earl Walker,
     the monster who raised Reyes and who, years after that event, had tortured and almost
     killed me in my own apartment—was beating him. Reyes was nineteen at the time. Fierce.
     Feral. And beautiful. But the man was huge. His fists were slamming into Reyes until
     he could no longer stand. Could no longer defend himself.
    To stop the man from killing him, I’d thrown a brick through the kitchen window. It’d
     worked. The man stopped. But that brick was like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.
     I found out years later that Reyes had spent over a decade in prison for killing Earl
     Walker, only to be told that Earl wasn’t really dead. He’d faked his own death, and
     Reyes had gone to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The problem lay in the fact
     that Reyes escaped from prison to prove his innocence and used me as bait to get Earl
     Walker to come out of hiding. I almost died as a result. Cookie and her daughter,
     Amber, were put at risk as well.
    Those things combined with the fact that Reyes was literally the son of Satan, forged
     in the fires of sin and degradation, were proving a little hard to get past. But he
     was also the dark entity that had followed me my whole life. Had saved it more than
     once. His actions contradicted everything I was raised to believe about such darkness.
     Such ambiguity.
    And now, I stood at the precipice of a great divide. Did I dare trust him again? Did
     I dare believe anything he had to say? I had spent two months in my apartment pondering
     that very thing.
    His heat reached me then, and I stepped closer. The familiar warmth that radiated
     out of him in soft nuclear waves was like a stinging ointment, soothing and unsettling
     at the same time. I stood under the glaring fluorescent, but he didn’t look up. It
     gave me a chance to study him more closely, to assess how freedom had changed him.
     Not a lot, I quickly realized. His hair was the same length it was two months ago.
     Thick strands hung down over his forehead and curled behind an ear. His jaw—that strong,
     stubborn set he always carried—was shaded with a day’s worth of growth. It framed
     his full mouth to such delicious precision, my own mouth watered in response.
    I forced my attention off his face to his wide shoulders, laid bare for the fight,
     exposing the ancient tattoos he’d been born with. The tattoos that doubled as a map,
     a key to the gates of hell. I could read a map as well as the next girl, but how did
     one use such a map to travel onto the other plane and traverse the desolation of infinity
     to get to a place nobody wants to be?
    Without looking up from the trainer’s ministrations, Reyes asked, “What are you doing
     here?”
    He was so startlingly beautiful, it took me a moment to realize he was talking to
     me. I hadn’t seen him in two months, and even before that, I’d seen him in the flesh
     on only a few fleeting, harried occasions, each one eliciting similar feelings of
     preoccupation and light-headedness. No matter how angry I seemed to be, his attraction,
     his raw succulence acted as a magnet. And I was apparently a paper clip. Every cell
     in my body urged me forward.
    The trainer glanced up in confusion, then realized someone else was in the room. He
     turned to me, a sharp disapproval lining his face. “You can’t be back here.”
    “I need to talk to your fighter,” I said, thrusting as much authority into my voice
     as I could muster, which admittedly wasn’t much.
    Finally, and with infinite care, Reyes raised his lashes until I could see the shimmer
     of his rich brown eyes. I tried to force my heart to keep beating, but it stopped
     dead in its tracks. His lips parted slightly,