Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

Zoe

A t his low murmur, I turned around, magicking my wings away to make the maneuver easier. “You did?”

His face was solemn, his stormy eyes holding the pain of wounds old and new. “I requested to see her, and we met on Earth.”

Inside me, the echo of what he was feeling touched my soul—there was heartbreak there, the kind of hurt that punched the air out of one’s lungs. The hot spike of anger, too.

Oh, I was right there with him.

“Tell me,” I said, laying one hand on his face.

He turned his head and kissed my palm, and then he described his meeting with Naamah.

I didn’t know what I had been expecting from this confrontation that I’d known was coming, but I knew it wasn’t this. I’d wondered about the why behind Naamah’s actions, though I wouldn’t have guessed the truth as she’d explained it. As I listened to him telling me what she’d said—verbatim, thorough as he was—the knot of anguish and betrayal inside me loosened more and more.

When he came to the end of their terrible fight, to the part where the old hurt had surfaced, I sucked in a breath at the raw pain that flickered through the bond. God, that kind of talk would have wrecked me.

He rubbed a hand over his face and said, “And then I left her there, devastated and sobbing.”

I made a sound of distress and slung my arm around his shoulder to pull him to me for a hug. He clutched me tight, turning his face into my hair and inhaling deeply. The connection between us throbbed with pain and love and helpless comfort.

When he let me go, I caressed his face and placed a soft kiss on his lips. “I’m so sorry. I know that must have been really rough for you.”

He closed his eyes, his power vibrating, a sharp note underneath. “I’m still working through it.”

I chewed on my lower lip and laid my hand on his chest, working through some thoughts of my own.

He peered at me and tilted his head. “What is it?”

“Hm?”

“I can see those wheels turning.” He made a circling gesture with a finger pointed at my head. “You’re having some big thoughts. I want to hear them.”

“Do you?”

His brows drew together in question.

“It’s just…you might not want to hear them.”

He shifted so he fully faced me, grabbing my chin and catching my gaze. “I always want to know your opinion. Even more so if it’s one that challenges me or makes me uncomfortable. The last thing I want is a life partner who only tells me what I want to hear. That’s the quickest way to lose touch with reality.”

I blew out a breath. “Okay, that’s good to know. Because…I think you’ve been too harsh on Naamah.”

Lightning flashed in those thundercloud-gray eyes of his. “Elaborate.”

“You know I’ll always have your back,” I began, stroking his chest, “and I’ll always support you. But I think you may have overreacted just a touch. I know you were agitated going into this—and Hell knows you had every right to be—and all of that anger and pent-up hurt may have made you not hear what she actually said.”

He withdrew a bit to give me an intense look. “Are you saying I had strong emotions that clouded my judgment ?”

A small smile snuck onto my face at his exact quote of the words he’d told me that night when we’d come back from my mom’s after I’d learned that she was dying of cancer. My fear of losing her and my need to hold on to her had overridden my common sense and made me try to push her into selling her soul just so I could keep her around a while longer. Obviously, I hadn’t been in my right mind in that moment, not realizing I was acting on selfish impulses.

Azazel had set my head straight, and he’d been right to throw that in my face, even though I didn’t appreciate it at the time.

I gave him a sheepish look. “I mean…yes?”

“Turning the tables now, I see,” he murmured, but there was the tiniest glint of humor in his eyes.

I raised a brow. “Doesn’t feel so good, does it?”

He scratched the side of his neck. “A little uncomfortable.”

Pressing my lips together to keep from grinning, I went on, “What I’m saying is that it’s understandable that you didn’t see her side in that moment because you were coming from a place of anger and hurt, and you were in a confrontational mindset rather than a listening one.”

The slightest smile touched his lips. “Look at you using therapist speak on me.”

I shrugged. “You’re one to talk. You’ve been doing that to me since the start. I just picked up some pointers.”

“Fair enough.” His eyes danced. “Also, that’s a good demon trait—analyzing how someone ticks. All the better to make deals with humans and torture damned souls.”

I reared back, then poked a finger in his chest. “I will never do that!”

Just the thought of having to torture a soul turned my stomach.

He grabbed my hand and placed a kiss on my wrist. “Good thing you’re too high of rank to ever be put to those tasks.”

I heaved a sigh of relief. “Okay, anyway. About Naamah, I think, when you look at what she said, she really did everything in her power to make this easier for us. If Lucifer was really hell-bent on getting me under his control, then not even Naamah would have been able to deter him from that. I think the only person capable of that would have been Lilith, and, well…her not being there to talk him down from the ledge is exactly the reason he’s on that ledge in the first place, right? Naamah has a good deal of influence over him, but like she said, it has its limits. So, when you look at it from that angle, Naamah was put into an impossible situation, the fallout of which she tried to mitigate as much as she could.”

Azazel’s gaze was unfocused as he looked past me, the whirl of emotions echoing over from him telling me he was digesting what I had pointed out.

“I mean,” I continued after a moment, “I can see what she means by this being the best option. Every other scenario would have seen us separated longer, you waging war against Lucifer to get me back, or Lucifer bringing the might of Hell down on you for not giving me up. I’ve seen him and talked to him about this whole mission. I know firsthand how desperate and determined he is to find Lilith, and I don’t have a single doubt that he would have waded through seas of blood in order to get to me so he could use me to find her. He is not rational about this. He is all out of fucks and has no patience left.”

“I know,” he muttered, his eyes dark.

“And she’s also right that you would not have been rational about me,” I said softly. “You know that, too, don’t you?”

He heaved a mighty sigh, slumping against the pillow, his gaze on the canopy of the bed. “I do.”

“I know this is hard, but when you look beyond all the anger and hurt, there is actually reason for what she did. I mean, I was so mad at her. So, so angry. And I felt betrayed, too. So it’s not like I’m not coming from a place of prejudgment here, but those emotions were born of a lack of information. I had no idea what she was planning, what she was working on behind the scenes, and while I wish she would have told me, or you, I get why she didn’t. The execution of that plan hinged on neither one of us knowing, because she knew us well enough that she couldn’t be sure we wouldn’t try to fuck this up somehow.”

He scratched at a loose thread of the sheets, his face set in grim lines. “I definitely would have.”

“Which is why she didn’t tell you. And she didn’t tell me once I’d regained my memories because she probably feared I’d spill the beans to you. And she wouldn’t have been wrong.” I rubbed my nose and grimaced.

“Right.” He speared his fingers through his hair, mussing the shiny black strands up in the most delicious way. “You’re right.”

I hadn’t been aware of how much tension my shoulders held until it loosened all at once. My next exhale released even more. “I’m glad you see it that way.”

He mussed his hair up even further. “Azmodea said much the same thing. And I’ve been mulling it over ever since. So this is…more confirmation of what I’ve been coming to see already.”

“Oh, that’s good.” I grabbed his hand and squeezed, infinitely grateful he had his sister to talk to when I couldn’t. After all, I’d been busy playing GPS tracker on Earth the past few weeks.

“There’s more, though,” I added, ducking my head.

He raised a brow. “Not done setting me straight, are you?”

“?’Fraid not.” I made small circles on his chest. “When you got mad at Naamah for still sticking by Lucifer and not choosing you at the expense of him…you were being just a tad hypocritical.”

An echo of faint hurt pinged over from him. His eyes darkening, he gave me his undivided attention. “Tell me.”

I focused on tracing the lines of his collarbones. “Well, you want and expect her to put you first, before anyone else, to act and make decisions only in your favor…when you yourself once told me you wouldn’t put her first.” I raised my eyes and met his gaze, holding it despite the intensity of that contact, despite the depth of emotions rolling through me. “Because you’ll always put me first. Wasn’t that what you told me? When I came back from Lucifer after I’d surrendered myself to him to take away his leverage over you, so you could then demand to see your mom, you said that you’d put me above anyone else, even your own well-being, even your mother.”

His eyes flashed as he held my gaze.

“And now you demand of her to give you priority over anyone else when you won’t return the sentiment. That’s not fair.”

More storm clouds in his changing eyes. After a moment, he let his head fall back against the pillow, his brows drawn together. The emotions rolling over from him were a hot tangle I couldn’t quite parse, yet one stood out—regret.

I twined my fingers with his. “From what you told me, you pretty much broke ties with her over this.” I hesitated, then asked, “Is that still what you want?”

The muscles in his throat worked as he swallowed. “No,” he said quietly. “But I don’t know how to reconcile her love for me with her love for Lucifer.”

“I get that.” I squeezed his hand. “Family dynamics are hard as shit. Even after we rescued my dad, and I started talking to him again, I had these moments of irrational jealousy about him loving my half sisters just as much as he loved me. I felt like he shouldn’t, that his love should be for me alone. And that stemmed from how things had played out, of course. From how he’d left us and had focused on his new family for a while before reaching out to me again. But in the end, it’s unreasonable to expect him not to love all of his children. He has a bond with my half sisters, like he does with me, and even if he can’t interact with them anymore now that he’s a ghost, he is still allowed to love them, of course.” I took a deep breath. “And his love for them does not lessen his love for me. Love is not finite.”

He squeezed my hand in silent acknowledgment.

“I know your history with Lucifer makes it hard for you to accept that Naamah has a good relationship with him,” I went on. “You feel like, out of loyalty to you, she should cut ties with him. But that assumes that her loyalty should only be to you. And that’s just not realistic. Not with her, at least. Not with her history. If what she said about what Lucifer did for her is true—and I don’t have reason to believe otherwise, to be honest—about what he means to her…that he’s the reason she is even alive at all. That he carried her through the darkness. That’s heavy. That’s the kind of bond that goes so deep that breaking it might break her as well.” I was silent for a moment, my eyes on the neatly trimmed hair on his chest. “She is allowed to love someone else just as much as you, even if you don’t like or understand that choice.”

His chest rose and fell with his heavy sigh.

“And in the end, you can’t even accuse her of not choosing your side in this specific situation, when Lucifer’s intention to seize me clashed with your need to have me for yourself. Because when you think it through, there would have been no way for her to choose you the way you wanted her to and thwart Lucifer’s plans completely. I believe her when she says Lucifer would have come for me regardless. So her only option of taking your side was to help you out as much as possible behind the scenes and steer Lucifer’s plan in a way that allowed you to court me in Heaven, trigger my memory, and then hopefully be able to see me regularly while I search for Lilith, while she also made sure that Lucifer would be bound to treat me well and release me once the mission is complete. She did choose you, Azazel.”

His eyes glistened as he looked at me, fine cracks of pain in his expression.

“Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to,” I said softly, “doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all that they have, and in the best way they can.”

Closing his eyes, he rubbed his brow and temples with his fingers, his power whirring in the air around us. “You’re too young to be so wise,” he said so quietly I almost didn’t hear it.

I gave him a small, melancholy smile and cupped his face with one hand. “I love you. And I hope this helps you. I had the impression you weren’t at peace with how you left things with her. Maybe now you can change that.”

“Yeah,” he rasped. “I think I will.”

I was silent for a moment before I dared touch the other subject I knew was going to be hard to talk about. But we would have to, eventually. He had a right to know, even if it ripped open barely scabbed-over wounds.

“Your father,” I quietly said into the contemplative silence between us, and I felt Azazel’s flinch where my body touched his, “didn’t just help us during that fight right before he was…” I trailed off, unable to say what I still struggled to process. Swallowing, I continued, “It’s all thanks to him that my memories were preserved at all.”

Luminous storm-lashed eyes slammed into mine. “What do you mean?”

“He came to visit me right after you’d been captured.” My chest drew tight as I remembered my agitation and despair in that moment, having just regained my memories only to be faced with Azazel’s imprisonment and possible execution. “And he noticed right away that I finally remembered. That’s when he told me everything. It was him, Azazel. He made the decision to try to preserve my memories against all odds. Usually, the erasure of all knowledge of a newly made angel’s former life is automatic. It just happens during the transformation process, and it’s nothing that Azrael had ever done on purpose or even had any control over. But in that split second when he initiated the ascension for me, he decided to attempt to intervene and lock my memories behind a sturdy mental wall in order to keep them from being deleted.”

Azazel was barely breathing, his attention fastened on me with disturbing intensity.

“He had no idea if it would work,” I went on. “He’d never done anything like it before. But he wanted to try…for you. He told me”—my voice turned fragile—“that he did it because you love me. He didn’t do it in exchange for your forgiveness. He said that some sins are too great, some wounds go too deep. He didn’t expect to be redeemed for his past wrongs, but he still wanted to attempt to make amends, purely for your sake. He said that he’d never done anything for you, but he thought that maybe if he could do this…if he could preserve my memories, for you, then there’d at least be a chance that when you found me again, I’d actually remember you. He said he accepted that it wouldn’t change anything between you and him, and that it would be enough for him to know that it would change everything for you and me.”

Azazel closed his eyes with a shudder. His power pressed down on us with the heaviness of an impending thunderstorm. Over the bond, a surge of emotion built. I could sense the wave of it rising, rising, looming massively over us both.

When it crested and crashed, flooding him and me through my connection to him, it was the harshest, cruelest, most piercing anguish I had ever felt. It ripped sobs and tears from me with unprecedented violence.

I held on to him through the tempest of his devastation, and I cried for us both.