Repost: Bad Boys in Love

leather jacket, from a bad boy (probably)

Hi, I’m Jane Kindred … and I’m a bad-boy addict.

It’s hard to say who’s the “badder” boy in my Demons of Elysium series. Belphagor is the consummate bad boy: a spiky-black-haired, black-leather-wearing, (very) tattooed thief, as well as a card sharp, a BDSM top, and a sometime member of the Russian underworld known as the vory v zakone. Not to mention that he’s a demon living on the wrong side of Elysium’s River Acheron in the Demon District of Raqia. But Belphagor meets his match the moment he catches a young firespirit demon named Vasily trying to pick his pocket.

Vasily turns everything upside down for the demon known as the Prince of Tricks:

“It occurred to him he’d never tried to earn anyone’s forgiveness in his life. It wasn’t the way he lived. He did what was necessary, shared what was mutually fulfilling and moved on when what remained was not. Life in Raqia—and in the world of Man—had taught him that it was every demon for himself. He’d never expected to need someone else.”

Vasily, at nineteen, is already built like a linebacker, wears his flame red dreadlocks in a thick ponytail at his crown, and has scruffy mutton chops, spiked piercings on both sides of his neck, and a voice like gravel and embers grinding together. He can also light cigars with his tongue. And he is Belphagor’s “boy.”

They don’t have a typical D/s relationship, as evidenced by the opening paragraph of my April 29 release, King of Thieves (Demons of Elysium #2):

“It would be an abuse of the term to call Vasily a submissive. Belphagor’s “boy” was about as submissive as a cat in a bathtub. You could hold him down long enough to accomplish the needful, but you’d damned near drown yourself when the contained outrage burst without warning from every limb, and you could count yourself lucky if all he did was draw blood. And yet he insisted this relationship was what he wanted, to belong so thoroughly to Belphagor that his will was no longer his own.”

Topping Vasily is very much like trying to bathe a cat. He fights surrender with everything in him. Once he’s wrestled into submission, however, giving himself to Belphagor completely is the ultimate release for all the bottled-up rage inside him. These two bad boys are perfect for each other in the best and worst ways: constantly pushing each other’s buttons, resulting in the verbal and physical altercations they both need to feel loved—and to feel they deserve love.

Because at the heart of every bad boy is a wounded inner child who got the message somewhere along the way that he was irredeemable, and possibly unlovable. I think that’s what draws me to all the bad boy characters—both those I love to read, such as Jacqueline Carey’s Imriel in her second Kushiel trilogy, and those I seem to be compelled to write: the idea of the little boy inside them looking for love. The idea that all their bad-boy ways are covering insecurities and inner torment. And the idea that any bad boy can be redeemed by true love—at least in fiction.

Originally published at ARe Cafe, May 7, 2014.