Loving with Demons

by Hana Mahmood

Genres: Romantic Suspense; Domestic Thrillers

Synopsis

'I have no words. It is definitely one of the best books I have ever read. It was written so beautifully and it was like seeing the reflection of my last relationship on every page. Truly amazing' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

My heart let down its hundreds of walls. But all I was loving were his demons.

I met him at a party, staring at me from across the room; eyes the colour of midnight. Like I was an undiscovered species that had fallen in his lap at the exact moment he was searching for his prey. The way he pursued me was fatal.

Our minds and souls were attracted like magnets. I had no idea I was selling my soul to the devil.

At first, our love burned beautifully. Furiously. But then the fire grew out of control. It destroyed everything we created.

The flames uncovered the truth about the man I gave my heart to. They exposed the demons hiding in the darkest parts of him.

Nero. The love of my life. The narcissist.

Loving him left me broken. Lost in the ashes of our relationship. Picking up the pieces of myself I had killed to be with him. The versions that had died in Nero's arms.

But my story doesn't end there. This phoenix rose from the ashes, and rebuilt her life.

I have my battle scars, but I'm free. I am Livia Dahlia. And I finally choose me.

This is not a love story. It's a cautionary tale. Loving With Demons is an emotional, seductive and completely unputdownable page-turner. This is a story about dark desires, deadly obsession and the dangerous line between love and hatred. Perfect for fans of Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us, Verity and Never Never.

Readers are obsessed with Loving with Demons:

'Truly beautiful, haunting, and lyrical'

'It really was beautifully written'

'This book was like having therapy'

'A masterpiece'

'Truly amazing'

'I loved reading this book'

'Exceptional'

Release date: May 30, 2024

Publisher: Dialogue

Print pages: 401

Sample

Love, love, love.

All I ever wanted was to fall in love. Nothing more. Not money, not success, not fame. I was just aching for this passionate, indestructible, kill-for-each-other, die-without-each-other, forever-and-ever type love. The way I ached for it was as if I’d been mourning a piece of me that had been missing since birth. Like I was grieving him from a past life. Maybe he was from a past life …

Our souls grasped so tightly onto one another, like two lovers reuniting at the airport after years apart, a bouquet of flowers in his hand, while tears of joy roll down her cheek. Or like an army soldier surprising his only child on a visit home at Christmas, the child leaping into the arms where they feel most safe.

It was that same comfort, familiarity and fulfilment that I felt when our souls first found a home in each other. I’m certain that there was always a space for him in my heart, from the day I was born, just waiting for him to find his way to it. And there was the same space in his, waiting for me. Whatever was created between us, it was meant to happen.

So you can imagine how hard it is to understand why fate had to play out the way it did. Why I constantly found myself lying in bed, physically choking with pain, hugging my weak knees into my chest, pillow soaked in tears, slowly rocking from side to side, shoulders painful from tensing, trying so hard to understand why. Why a love that burned so beautifully had also burned too violently, destroying all that we created.

Those flames burned so bright, exposing all the demons hiding in the darkest parts of us. Some had been hiding there for years. So when the light caused the demons to scatter out from the shadows, I loved him so much that I had no choice but to fight the demons with my fire, burn them, burn brighter and burn them again. If I let the demons win, I’d lose him. I refused to lose him.

But while I wasn’t looking, he gave up fighting … His demons were too big, too strong, he even liked some of them. They were all he knew for so long; how could he know anything else? He liked feeding them. He’d dance with them and they’d hold him close. In their eyes he’d see a reflection of himself, fragile and unwilling to let go, a former version of the man he knew himself to be. Eventually, they’d take over him, masking him in their darkness, causing his fire to extinguish.

So I fought them for him. He really liked that. But they were too strong for me, and, after a while … he liked that too.

Him and his demons became one.

And oh, he just loved to fuck me with his demons. Leaving me broken, damaged and alone in the burned ashes of everything we fought so hard to create. Sometimes I bathe in those ashes. I grieve as I try to understand what I could’ve done differently. I try to understand why he couldn’t fight for me like I did for him. Why he had to be so fucking weak.

But after three long years, 185 weeks, and 1296 days of battle, I had to leave and set out to heal. I had to accept that you can’t love demons.

All I’ve got left are the memories, the lessons and a love story that could be felt by anybody who meets it.

Even if you’ve never even loved before.

Even if you’ve never felt love.

You’ll feel love when you read this book.

You’ll feel my love. A love that is pain.

Immigrant parents.

Muslim family.

Pakistani culture.

In a very white part of Britain – Edinburgh, Scotland.

A mediaeval and grey little town home to extinct volcanoes, castles and over-priced townhouses built over the Old Town, which was abandoned due to the plague.

Expectations were always set high.

Angelic mother.

Noble father.

It was the least they deserved.

I was glad my sisters could meet those expectations to some degree. The versions of fulfilment my parents needed from us – based on the way they were wired to believe we should be – came from the conditioning of their own somewhat blessed but oppressed upbringings.

Their love was conditional, the condition being whether or not I was a good Muslim girl. I understood from an early age that love was conditional, and that’s why when I sought love, I searched for what felt most like home. It was all I’d known.

If only we could all understand just how much of our childhood manifests into our adult relationships. I’m sure then our parents would have loved us differently. One would at least hope.

I stand around five foot two inches in height, with long, dark brown hair down to my bum, warm brown skin, thick eyebrows. Growing up, I had a slim body that had some curves in flattering places, and was prepubescent-looking in others. I always wore a curious look on my face, though at the same time you could tell I was never really paying attention. I saw the world for what it was: a cruel place, so I daydreamed to escape those harsh realities.

I was probably rather odd. But fuck it, I wanted to be. I was hypersensitive to people’s feelings around me, so much so that it almost felt like I could read their thoughts and I could feel everything that they felt. That same hypersensitivity led to me feeling constantly invalidated and rejected by my family and culture. I only felt happy expressing myself creatively, which isn’t the most commendable of career choices in South Asian culture – the doctor, lawyer or housewife hustle would have been preferred, but all I was good at was creating.

I created stories in my mind like fine art, the picture so vivid, the dialogue so precise, all six of my senses being teased by a mere thought. I spent most of my pre-teen years daydreaming about the things I wanted to experience. I found myself especially drawn to the things I wasn’t allowed to do. Anything that seemed taboo (but, quite frankly, anything was taboo).

I’d spend hours floating around my room, acting out scenes I wanted to manifest in life, having endless conversations in the mirror. Fantasising about the things I’d do if I had the freedom I craved so badly. If I could make those dreams come true.

I was shaped too differently – too ‘weird’, too bright to fit into the small, dark box my parents so lovingly built for me. Constantly being told to lower my tone, that my jokes were inappropriate or that I wasn’t as timid as a Pakistani girl should be.

‘You’re just too much, Livia Dalia!’

My lust for life wasn’t always a good thing … My curiosity eventually became desperation and that desperation eventually led to depression. I ended up doing what every child under strict and uncompromising rules does – I rebelled three times as hard. Then the lack of guidance when I did manage to lie or sneak my way into a taste of freedom drove me to lengths that even my friends with carefree parents didn’t go.

But I wasn’t wild … I was alive! I wanted so badly to feel, to live all the shit I saw on TV and in films, all the stuff I heard my friends do, or didn’t do, everything I’d acted out in my mirror, the things I’d impregnated my mind with. I wanted to birth it all.

I couldn’t live in this cage and watch everyone else have fun, watch everyone else feel it. I had felt those things in my mind already, I had to make them real. So I did, and no matter how far my imagination took me, I returned unharmed each time – well, physically anyway …

But even with all the partying and bad decisions carrying me through my teens, I still found myself lusting over the simple things my friends had, things I had to accept I’d never have. They were all white and, specifically, rich.

My parents didn’t want me to suffer the racism they were subjected to by going to state school as immigrants. My mum had been left with a scar next to her left eye after a racially motivated attack – a stone was thrown at her face while hanging out the washing as a child. So we were sent to private school instead, even though we couldn’t afford it, where, ironically, the microaggressions and passive aggressive discrimination felt even worse than taking a rock to the eye.

But it wasn’t their big homes and fancy clothes I envied (at least not entirely), it was the simple things, like being able to tell my mum when I had a crush on a boy, or even better, when I got hurt by one. I remember telling all my friends how lucky they were … how much I wished I had what they had. I longed for a relationship with my mother where I could talk about what seemed like the most important thing in the world to me. Love.

To be quite honest, I spent the last of my teenage years being subjected to racial abuse by pretty much all my peers – whether they said it behind my back, to my face, or simply watched it happen and didn’t stick up for me. They were all just as bad to me. I guess the white kids of Edinburgh just really didn’t like a brown girl hanging around their scene. Some made jokes about my father being a terrorist, or told me to go back to ‘my country’. Some thought I was different, ‘weird’ and not narrow-minded enough for that little city. Most of them never even gave me a chance. I was simply too brown for them.

At twenty years old, I finally left.

It was spring when I claimed liberation, moving out of my parents’ house and into the great, colourful mixing pot of opportunity: London. I had no idea where my dreams were taking me this time, but I guess they were taking me exactly where I had hoped.

Freedom felt like taking that first ecstasy pill back when I was sixteen. Thousands of shiny orbs landing on the surface of your skin, absorbing into your bloodstream and causing you to vibrate pure love through each and every vein in your body. Seeing everything in full colour for the first time, with gratitude for every shade, every hue. It was euphoric.

I rented a few rooms in different parts of London and worked at Fallgirl Casino. Fallgirl promised a glamorous first step into working in the nightlife scene. In reality, it was the opposite. As soon as you stepped through the luxuriously decorated doors of the world’s most exclusive members-only casino and into the staff area, you were faced with cheaply painted baby pink walls – that dull sort of paint they use in primary school or in children’s hospitals. You were then met with underpaid, overworked and unhappy ‘Kittys’ (girls in kitty costumes and tights) who wanted nothing more than to take off their uncomfortable heels to relieve last week’s blisters and unzip the rib-crushing corsets fitted by the 24/7 onsite seamstress.

I wasn’t in costume yet. For four months I’d be in the mandatory, probationary below-the-knee, cheap, Primark-style black dress, which felt like a cross between punishment and a justification for the girls in costume to look down on my amateur status.

I was called into the head office in my black dress around two months into my stint at Fallgirl, and sat next to Ruby, the girl I’d platonically fallen in love with. Ruby wasn’t like any of the other girls (cliché, I know).

Our bond first formed at a work night out. We ended up at an afterparty, one that provided an invitation to try a certain white substance. From the roster of beautiful women working at Fallgirl who were offered the white substance, of course it was the two northerners who decided to take up the offer.

That night I had no idea I had just met my soulmate. A tall, caramel-skinned, part Mancunian-part Jamaican. An always glowing, usually smiling angel who moved with the most attitude and firmness in her demeanour, whose aura oozed of her stupendously warm and golden heart. She became my rock, the earthy Taurus that kept my slippery Pisces head above deep waters. I still don’t think I’d be here without her, telling this story today … and I really mean that.

There were a number of times we would, as young women new to the big city, be partying three times a week, making some of the best memories of our young adult lives but also meeting bizarre people with strange intentions. We were lucky that we learned and grew together. From men trying to take advantage of drunk women, to girls changing their entire attitude based on how many followers we had on social media, we quickly learned the painful truth of how shitty humans can be in this wild generation.

Sometimes we’d take a pause from our fast London life.

‘Do you ever think everyone is just like, weird?’ Ruby would ask in her strong Mancunian accent.

‘Yeah, no I really do,’ I’d respond with complete certainty.

And I did.

Then we’d fall back to the same happy realisation: ‘I’m so glad I’ve got you,’ we’d say, smiling back at each other.

Ruby and I made that big, lonely and unusual city feel as warm and familiar as the smaller cities we ran from. We moved into our own apartment together. We were so close we even shared a bed, even though we had our own rooms. But this love stayed platonic. Nope, she’s not the one who injured my soul.

I still remember the nights I’d pray to God in bed and thank Him for Ruby. I really couldn’t believe the luck I’d struck in a friendship as beautiful and safe as ours. Growing up, I hadn’t developed a great judge of character or much self-esteem, so I was often trapped in friendships with toxic girls who treated me like a doormat. You know, the girls your mum would tell you not to hang out with. Ruby was the opposite of those – and my mum loves her. Everyone loves Ruby.

But, in that office back at Fallgirl Casino, next to Ruby, our boss declared, ‘One of you is going to be fired today. You can’t work together – the constant laughing and distracting does not align with the Fallgirl code of conduct …’

Even that shitty casino couldn’t handle the spark between us.

I left almost straight away; shit, I might have even skipped out … I hated that miserable place. I started working freelance to make the most of the boring degree I’d studied to keep my parents happy – Marketing.

Somewhere between teaching my local nail salon how to post on Instagram, creating the best memories with my Ruby, almost having spiritual orgasms in being emancipated from my childhood, and consuming more alcohol than I’d ever had, I met him.

It was by mistake, almost.

Lost in a blur of drunken nights, I ended up in a taxi I quite frankly shouldn’t have been in with some rougher-than-they-needed-to-look boys eyeing up the brown skin I had learned to love again since being in the much more diverse city of London.

And while I was chatting away to one of them, there you were …

Enter Nero.

Sitting in the middle row of the seven-seater, looking back at me, hood up, dark, smooth skin and with a peculiar look on his curious-ass face. With those big, black-as-hell, intense eyes on a sharp, structured face, his strong London accent matched his croaky voice that sounded like he had chain-smoked forty cigarettes in just as many minutes (which, I later learned, he sometimes had).

He turned around to me and asked, almost offended, ‘Where the fuck is that accent from?’

We spent the rest of the night at some party in a high-rise council estate in East London, him staring at me from across the room like I was an undiscovered species that had fallen right in front of him at the very moment he was searching for his prey.

I remember exactly what I wore that night. Red Mac lipstick in the shade Ruby Woo. Gold Nike Air Max 97 trainers. White lace-trim cycling shorts and a white lace bralette, with an oversized Levi denim jacket thrown on top to justify my revealing outfit choice in the cold and wet British weather.

I was an uber-friendly, fearless and charismatic ball of energy at this time. I rolled around the room, my confidence and energy renewed after moving to London. I was always so … excited by fucking everything, down to try fucking everything. I could feel people’s attraction towards that and towards me. But the way he pursued me was fatal.

He began to rap, trying to impress me in front of the room.

He was an Alpha male. Or at least, he would have died on that hill to make it look like he was.

After intense stares and some painful small talk, we drank more liquor and quickly progressed to speaking about the meaning of life and alien conspiracy theories until the sun rose. I loved that I could impress him with my knowledge, and he loved that I loved that too.

Before I made my exit around a summery and bright 6 a.m., he handed me his phone.

It was like he just expected me to put my number in.

And I did.

The confidence was refreshing.

He knew what he wanted, I could feel it.

And once he’d envisioned it in his head, he knew he had to have it too.

So just like you, there was me.

Somewhere in the dull, run-down parts of busy Clapham Junction, south west London, where grey skies loom in every shade of grey, where high-rise estates tower over the busy, gentrified high street filled with niche coffee shops, lived a boy. Too mischievous for his own spirit, addicted to rebelling; therefore, addicted to drugs … quite frankly, addicted to anything that was prohibited at all. London-born, Monaco-raised, and of Senegalese descent, there was Nero.

He stood at almost six-foot tall, slim with a skinny pack, usually balancing a cigarette in the corner of his lips. He was covered in random, accidental tattoos like daggers, guns, skulls and even Jesus smoking a blunt on the cross; scars from picking his chicken pox as a child, gaps in between his huge, taunting smile.

He was a typical bad boy. Growing up, Nero loved to rob people, steal from shops and even got himself a blade to carry around in an all-black, grey or uniform blue Nike tracksuit.

Nero never saw eye-to-eye with his mother. She didn’t like his drug use nor his sporadic selling of weed for a few extra quid here and there, so she often chucked him out, locked the door and gave him that tough-love parenting. A conditional love just like my upbringing, but he simply didn’t like being told what to do, by anyone.

This made Nero’s behaviour even worse. He resorted to sofa surfing, and maybe even slept rough once or twice, but he almost always charmed his way into having food to eat and a roof over his head … just about.

But he wasn’t always the typical bad boy either, because unlike his other bad-minded, drugged-up, shitty, scatty, good-for-nothing friends, Nero was loud, brave, flamboyant and unique. His creativity was beyond measure. He wasn’t like anyone else you’d ever met. The way he carried himself around a room, you’d think he was the main character at a number one, award-winning Broadway show. The Nero Show.

He was incredibly switched on – something about the way he looked at you told you he was more intelligent than you. He had an intense glare that was so confident it could force vulnerability on anyone whose eyes he looked into. He made you feel nervous: lying-to-border-police-while-smuggling-drugs-in-your-suitcase type of nervous.

He made you feel like you were lying, like he had just caught you in a lie. Sometimes the lie he was uncovering was who you wished to be perceived as. That was never going to work with Nero; he had a talent for seeing everyone for who they really were, way beneath the façade.

He loved to draw. Growing up, he drew all over his bedroom walls: pirate ships and skulls, just like a true villain. He learned all the instruments he could, from the guitar to piano, and his handwriting was immaculate.

Nero truly loved art, and every form of it … that boy fucking loved to create.

He began training as a street dancer, until someone commented on how uncool they thought that was (everything Nero did just had to be cool, it was the true Aquarius in him). Shortly after, he dropped dance and turned his sights to being a hip-hop artist and singer – or whatever the hell that emotion-provoking noise he created so naturally with his raspy, croaky voice was.

He never did well at school, not because he was necessarily bad at it, but because he was governed by the one thing I found consistent all the time I knew him: a God complex. This meant that he could not and would not take direction, authority or advice from anyone. In fact, anything you told him to not do, he’d do EVEN harder.

Nero was insecure in himself and the unstable and unpromising path he’d taken in life, always feeling sold short since he knew he had all this magic inside of him that he felt nobody else could see. His defence mechanism forbade him from being able to listen to people telling him what to do, or even offering mere advice, without it attacking his fragile, blown-the-fuck-up ego. In his mind, he was special and demanded respect for it. How dare someone else tell HIM what to do.

Nero’s God complex eventually led him to live with so much hate and resentment that it drove him to seek revenge on the world for not giving him the life he felt he so badly deserved. Like some sick, spiritual warfare, hate grew from feeling too caged in life, from watching others with money, their happy families, the pussy and the clout, enjoying the heights he so badly wanted to reach.

He would sit in rooms with his ‘friends’ – who used his desperation when he was broke against him – and they would take the opportunity to belittle him. He watched them live what seemed to him to be such privileged and undeserving lives.

He listened to Drake on repeat, nodding along with the lyrics of a multi-millionaire music legend, as if he resonated with the hardships that came from a life like that. He knew what life he was going to live, and he was coming for revenge on everyone who didn’t believe in his power. He had to get there JUST to rub the dirt he grew from in each of their faces.

Revenge on every teacher who doubted his potential.

On every friend who mocked his unfortunate, self-inflicted situations.

On every girl who wasn’t interested in him or was out of his league.

On his mother, who mocked his decisions and goals and offered a love so cold and conditional.

Nero used his visual resourcefulness and ability to feel deeply, combined with his narcissistic rage and personal vengeance, to manifest all the things he had acted out in his head. It was almost as though his delusions of grandeur helped him get to where he wanted to be by shifting his reality.

Except, while Nero was out for a fulfilling, artistic and long-standing revenge to fulfil his ego, I was looking to fulfil my dreams and delve into the realms of true love that I also felt I deserved. While I was willing to give everything for that goal, he was so much more than willing to take.

Delusions of grandeur

A psychological term to describe an individual who has a persistent belief in their own grandiosity.

They might believe that they have a special destiny that makes them more special and deserving than others, that they are gifted with the fate of fame, power or success, that God or a chosen entity has chosen them as his favourite, that they are working through them or for them at all times, rather than anyone else around them.

Not long after I first met Nero, Ruby and I moved in together. I could hardly believe that we’d found an apartment building so perfect for us: bang in the centre of Aldgate East, close to the hustle and bustle of the city’s busiest business district – therefore surrounded by loads of cool restaurants and bars – and only a nine-minute tube journey into Central London. A rare find.

We both shrieked when the moody estate agent rushed out the door after handing us the keys, jumping around the room in celebration.

‘He was such a vibe kill, like honestly, we were ten minutes late – it’s not that deep,’ Ruby said, as she stood staring out of my bedroom window. We were on the ground floor, which had a view directly onto the lagoon-like pond in the middle of a square, with wooden walkways connecting the flats and fountains providing a peaceful backdrop to the summery day.

‘We were like twenty minutes late,’ I laughed back at her.

‘An extra ten whole minutes – shoot me now why don’t you!’ she exclaimed as she used two fingers to mime shooting herself dead onto the bed next to me.

Rudy made most things a joke, which was such a beautiful quality to have, especially in stressful situations. ‘It’s not that deep’ was her go-to phrase, which relieved me since to me it felt like everything was, in fact, really that deep.

Sometimes I would zone out of conversations with Ruby and become focused on how light and witty her nature was, how freeing it was to have a perspective that was so unattached … I couldn’t help but wish I had met her sooner in life; so many times I had been drowning, I knew she would’ve brought me back to shore.

I quickly realised how everyone was also fascinated by how unique Ruby was, especially when my friend from back home, Juno, came down for our flat-warming party that weekend.

Juno was special to me. We’d grown up together and she was one of the only friends who really made me feel understood in those tough teenage years.

I think it was a mixture of the fact that she was always that little bit more unstable than me … but also her incredible intelligence and acceptance of people. Her airy but profoundly carefree take on life always reminded me that it was okay to feel absolutely fucking everything as long as you remembered to release it in the end, to go with the flow. Through all her battles, she somehow seemed so unburdened. She wore that freedom so beautifully, in a way that only she could.

She had short, shaggy brown hair, and wore baggy boys’ clothes three times too big for her. Everything about Juno was original; the things she pulled off nobody else could – and trust me, many people tried to copy her. She was a muse, a musician, a star, and the coolest bitch in every room she blessed by choosing to be in.

I smiled, watching the two of them bond in fits of laughter. All sounds around me went mute, overtaken by feelings of gratitude. ‘Could this finally be my time to be as free as everyone I’ve observed from inside this cage?’ I asked myself.

You know it is, Livia.

Ruby and Juno each took a shot of tequila at the kitchen counter.

Ruby clenched her face. ‘Nobody enjoys doing this, you can’t convince me anybody enjoys this,’ she cried as she ran over to the sink, covering her mouth.

Juno instantly poured another shot, spilling it over the counter and letting it drip down her neck as she tipped it down her throat effortlessly, releasing a deep ‘AHH!’ with excitement and shaking it off like a cat.

‘Where do you think you’re going? Get your ass over here, Livia, look at your crib! We dreamed of times like this as babies, we’re celebrating! Get this shot down you right now!’ Juno shouted over to me as I sat on the sofa, attempting to figure out the sound system before the rest of our guests arrived.

‘Yeah, Livia, you’re not getting away with this, you have to suffer too,’ Ruby said, taking the bottle of Patrón out of Juno’s hand and filling the shot glass to the top.

I stared at the shot, hesitating because I knew what was to come.

‘You know I’m gonna vom,’ I said, making a sorry face, taking the shot glass of clear battery acid out of her hand.

‘Good! Then you know you’re doing it right!’ Juno said laughing.

‘Here, we’ll do another one with you,’ Ruby declared as she poured them both another one.

I rolled my eyes and then said a quick cheers – it was time to commit to the hangover that was to come, I figured.

‘To two of my favourite people ever finally meeting each other, I love you guys soooo much,’ I yelled.

Juno wrapped her arm around Ruby, ‘And we love you!’

‘Cheers!’ said Ruby.

We all downed our shots as I fanned my watery eyes with my hands, attempting not to ruin my eyeliner.

Ruby ran back over to the sink. ‘Nah, whoever invented Patrón is sick in the head, mate!’

A few hours later, Ruby was singing her heart out to ‘Ride’ by Lana Del Rey in the living room with some of the girls from Fallgirl, while Juno was chatting up a girl on the sofa. She’d already kissed her best friend earlier in the night, but in true Juno fashion, she’d somehow got away with it.

I answered the door, expecting it to be the top-up of alcohol we’d ordered at the unintelligent time of 2 a.m., swinging the door open a little too hard from being super tipsy. The face I saw standing in front of me sent a pleasant shock through me.

‘Shay!’ I let out, leaping into his arms. He stank of aftershave. ‘Mmm, is t. . .