Chapter 20

CHAPTER20

Oh, shit.

I sucked in a breath and then closed my mouth with an audible click, as if I could inhale back the words I’d just spoken and hold my fucking tongue. All of the whip-sharp anger and hurt I’d felt a moment before evaporated in the blink of an eye as the realization of the monumental fuckup I’d just committed settled over me like some chill-inducing mantle.

Azazel’s searing focus on me made me tremble and back away a step.

He followed me with terrible predatory grace. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” I squeaked.

He grabbed my chin and bared his teeth as he leaned in, every inch the otherworldly being that he was. “Don’t lie.”

My heart sank to somewhere beneath my feet.

“What do you mean,” he said with lethal softness, “my mother is right here?”

I withstood that drilling gaze and the force of his power pressing against my skin for exactly five seconds. Then I broke.

“Your mother is still alive,” I whispered, closing my eyes so I wouldn’t see his reaction. “She’s in Lucifer’s palace, cloistered away in a secret suite”—here my voice became almost inaudible—“where she has been all this time.”

The silence that followed was deafening. The quiet actually rang in my ears, the pressure was that intense.

His hand fell away from my chin.

The push of his energy against my skin faded.

When I opened my eyes, it was to see him stare at me with the most shell-shocked expression I’d ever seen on him.

“How do you know this?” he asked hoarsely.

I wrung my hands. “When we were at the Fall Festival—”

“Last year?” he snapped.

I flinched.

“You’ve known about this for an entire year?”

“I wanted to tell you!” I rushed to throw in, my heart hammering up into my throat. “Believe me, it killed me that I couldn’t say anything!”

“And why couldn’t you—” He bit off the rest of his question, his eyes widening a little. “The vow. The one you had to make to Lucifer about the—” He broke off again, glaring at me.

“About the treasure I found,” I completed, my shoulders slumping and curving forward. “Yes.”

“Treasure,” he echoed, his voice hollow. “My mother.”

I nodded, every breath struggling against a leaden weight sitting on my chest.

He rubbed a hand over his face and turned away, as if looking at me right now was too much for him. Hurt and nausea and sizzling anxiety boiled in my stomach.

“Tell me everything,” he ground out, facing me again, his hands balled into fists.

I had to swallow several times to be able to speak. “When we got separated in Lucifer’s palace, I got trapped in this cavern with hellrats on my tail, and there was no way out, but Mephisto was suddenly there, and he told me to use your sigil to create a doorway, so that’s what I did, and then I stepped out into this suite, and that’s where she was.” I took a deep breath and continued. “She noticed me, and she said I smelled like her son, and that’s when I realized who she was. I told her I’m bonded to you.” My voice cracked a little with my next words. “She asked about you.”

Few times I’d seen Azazel’s composure shatter like this, when all the masks and the iron control over his appearance and features splintered to reveal the rawest, most brittle and vulnerable core of him. It was a sequence of involuntary, minuscule twitches of his facial muscles, a slight blink of his dark lashes over eyes that nearly glowed with the intensity of the pain and stark longing in them.

All of who he was, all of who he’d fought to become with gritted teeth and blood on his hands, all the hardness and calculation he’d had to cultivate to claw his way up against cruelty and adversity, it slipped and fell, gave way to reveal a glimpse at the young boy he’d once been, yearning for the love of a mother who’d been ripped from him.

“She did?” was his husky question, barely intelligible, his voice was so rough.

I nodded, my eyes prickling with incipient tears. “She asked how you are. And she wanted to know…if you remember her.” I fought hard not to let my voice break again. “If you remember more than just the bad things.”

A tremor went through him, his eyes glistening.

“I reassured her that you do,” I continued while he visibly struggled to regain his composure. “She—she didn’t even know how long she’d been in there. And she got angry when she thought of how everyone assumed that your father abandoning her had broken her mind. She said it wasn’t that.” I paused as the details of that moment floated back to me from the depths I’d stuffed them in. “She said that it’s always been her. That something’s not right with her, inside her mind, and she can’t get it out.”

Naamah’s anguished face as she’d torn on her hair and sunk to her knees was indelibly etched into my memory—just as my powerlessness in the face of her pain felt like a stain on my soul. I’d wanted to help her so badly, but I was barely equipped to deal with my own anxiety, much less with what looked like some deep psychological issues in someone else.

“I think she had a mini breakdown,” I went on, “and then she just sort of withdrew into herself, humming a song and tracing the pattern on the rug. She healed my injuries from the hellrat fight, right before the door burst open and one of the insurgents stormed inside and threw a dagger at her. He incapacitated her and then went for me, but I managed to stab him with my dagger and knock him out. I pulled the blade out of Naamah’s chest and tried to get her to wake up. Another demon entered and hauled me up, ready to take me with him, and that’s when one of Lucifer’s guards showed up and incapacitated him. Naamah woke up and strolled into another room, and the guard dragged both insurgents to the throne room and barked at me to follow.” I swallowed hard. “And that’s how I met your mother.”

He exhaled a rough breath, his power a wild hum in the room.

“Lucifer was livid that I’d been in Naamah’s quarters, and he was about to crush my throat when Lilith intervened and said that he owed me a favor because I’d saved his daughter’s life. He grudgingly conceded her point and granted me a boon to repay his debt, which is where you entered the throne room, and…well, you know the rest.” I worried my lower lip. “When we were on the way out, Lucifer spoke directly into my mind and demanded I swear an oath not to reveal anything about Naamah, especially to you. That’s why I couldn’t tell you. It’s been tearing me apart for a year to know this and not being able to say anything.” I wrung my hands together again. “And that’s why, by the way, it seemed like I’d ‘forgotten’ that your mother was dead when we had that conversation the other day. I did not forget. I just knew the truth, and I slipped up in pretending that she’s dead.”

There. It was finally out! But instead of a weight being lifted off my chest, instead of feeling like I’d righted a wrong and redeemed myself in his eyes, the magnitude of the disaster I’d brought upon me by spilling the secret pushed down onto me like the pressure of an impending thunderstorm.

Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.

Azazel sank down onto the edge of the bed, his face a mix of grim resignation and profound agony. “He’ll be coming for you.”

The breath stalled in my lungs. “Do you think he knows?” I asked, my voice trembling.

He uttered a humorless laugh and looked to the side. “Of course he knows. He’ll have felt it the second the words left your lips. That’s how it works here. When we make a vow or a deal, it’s magically binding.” His gaze slammed into me, making me flinch. “That’s why there would have been consequences for me had I refused to marry you.”

I dimly remembered that he’d alluded to losing his powers if he hadn’t fulfilled the contract.

“What will he do to me?” My voice was barely more than a squeak, ice-cold fear seizing every cell of my body.

Flames rolled out from Azazel in a sudden explosion that rocked me to my core. The entire room went up in a blaze, the bed, the chairs, the rugs, the armoire. Instinctively, I shied away and shielded my face with my arms…though the inferno didn’t touch me.

I blinked down at myself. I stood in a perfect circle of unscorched floor while all around me, a firestorm ravaged our room, Azazel’s shadowy silhouette somewhere in the middle of it.

His rage, when he let it loose, was a force to be reckoned with.

Even had the fire touched me, though, I wouldn’t have been harmed, thanks to the fireproof powers I’d gotten from Azazel when I’d bonded with him. Still, it was a boon not to lose my clothes to his fiery rage.

“Azazel!” I called out over the noise of the furniture crackling and breaking under the flames.

The amount of smoke in the room should have made me cough and severely threatened the health of my lungs, but apparently the whole fireproof thing extended to being unaffected by the fumes of a blaze, because I could breathe just fine.

“Stop,” I pleaded with him, the din of the fire almost drowning my words.

Overhead, the sprinkler system he’d installed—so Mephisto wouldn’t have to spit out fires anymore—came on with a gargling sound and sprayed the entire room. I gasped when the water hit me, sizzling on my overheated skin. The sprinklers doused the flames, the fire hissing where it was drowned, and within moments, the blaze was extinguished.

Drenched from head to toe, I stood in the middle of the room, water dripping down my nose, from my fingers. All around me, the remains of the furnishings lay charred and smoking. My gaze fell on Azazel, kneeling across from me, his head bowed, his power a tangible force around him. Behind his back, his wings rose in the air—with half a dozen white feathers peeking through the cracks in his illusion.

I twitched forward to go to him when a giant stream of viscous liquid hit me full frontal from above. I froze in mid-step, trembling as the warm saliva sluiced down my body, and raised my gaze to the ceiling—where two luminous yellow eyes stared down at me from the shadows.

You’re welcome, purred Mephisto.

“The fire was already out,” I said through gritted teeth, trying not to get cat spit into my mouth.

His pink tongue flashed as he nonchalantly licked his paw. Are you sure? I thought I saw a flicker there.

Ugh. That cat.

Ignoring the fickle feline, I closed the distance to Azazel and sank to my knees in front of him. The sable hair hanging into his face half obscured his expression to my gaze, but the tense set to his shoulders and the bite to his energy told me enough. The fury simmering in him was not as easily doused as the fiery representation of it.

“Hey,” I whispered as I reached out a hand and tentatively touched his cheek.

A tremor went through his massive body. He grabbed my hand, squeezed it tight, and softly kissed the knuckles of my fingers. The juxtaposition of the sharpness of his power making the air shimmer and the gentleness with which he caressed my hand was staggering. He’d lay waste to the world, but me? Me, he’d only ever touch with reverence and love.

Earlier, he’d told me that I felt deeply, as if that was unique to me. As if he didn’t also have the capacity to feel with such force that it manifested in elemental power. I’d once teased him that he had some anger issues to work through, and maybe he did, but…could anyone blame him that the depth of his emotions most violently revealed itself when it came to fury? When that was, by all accounts, the only permissible emotion to show in Hell—when you had to mask and mold all other feelings such that they’d be channeled into rage…so you could actually release them?

When he spoke, he proved my guess that there was a whole lot more folded into the fiery fury he’d just displayed.

“What will he do to you?” The words were a whispered snarl. “What won’t he do to you? Whatever the fuck he pleases! Even if he didn’t already have supreme authority over all of Hell, the broken vow gives him the right to exact whatever punishment he deems fit, and there is nothing, nothing”—he spit the word out between clenched teeth—“that I can do to stop him. I have no recourse. I have no justification to appeal. I can’t even ask Daevi to intervene because the laws of Hell put him firmly in the right.” His tortured gaze lifted to mine, and the anguish there broke my heart. “When he comes for you, I will have to watch him take you away, powerless to stop him. Anything I could do to step in would make it all worse. He knows how much you mean to me, and he must have been itching for an excuse to legally get his hands on you, so he can hurt me through you.”

I inhaled a trembling breath. “You—you think he’ll take me with him?”

The cynical, resigned set to his features broke my heart impossibly more. “Whatever he’ll have in store for you won’t be quickly done. He’s known for dragging things out.”

I uttered a sound of dismay, shivering despite the ever-present heat of Hell.

Azazel remained kneeling, his gaze unfocused for a moment, then he rose to his feet and shook his wings once. Gleaming black rolled over all of his feathers, swallowing the scattered white until nothing remained but shining onyx. Perfectly acceptable demon wings. The kind that wouldn’t draw undue attention, or cast their owner in an unfavorable light.

He turned to the balcony door, then paused. Glancing around the destroyed room, he sighed. “You can’t sleep here.”

He walked over to the adjoining sitting room of my old quarters, and I followed him on his heels. With a wave of his hand, he telekinetically cleared a space against the wall, and then summoned an entire bed. Like it was nothing.

“The merihem will clean the other room,” he said as he turned to me. “For now, you can sleep here. Don’t wait up for me.”

He was already striding into the trashed bedroom again, as I jolted out of my stupor and ran after him.

“Where are you going?”

He halted inside the open balcony door, the dark sky behind him intermittently illuminated by purple lightning. “I have to tell Azmodea.”

“What?”

Muscles feathered along his jaw, each of his words enunciated clearly and with a biting note to it. “I have to go tell my sister that our mother, whom we have mourned for so long, is alive, and that our grandfather has kept this from us for thousands of years.”

I grimaced. Right, he wasn’t the only one who was directly affected by this. Azmodea had lost her mother just the same, and I knew for a fact that she still grieved her dearly. She’d once mentioned to me that she couldn’t even remember her face because there were no images of her—photographs weren’t invented back then, and apparently, there were no paintings of her either. Wistfully, Azmodea had recalled how her mother used to sing to her, that she’d had a lovely voice…even if she couldn’t remember what that voice sounded like, the centuries having erased that memory.

Azmodea would be distraught. As glittery and nonchalant as she usually appeared, I’d learned that this version of her was just as much a calculated mask and armor as Azazel’s cool control. Everyone had to curate their image down here, keeping their softer, more vulnerable parts safely contained behind the face they showed the world. Hers was that of a carefree, frivolous, flamboyant tease, and she played that role so well, few noticed the depths she hid behind that facade.

I opened my mouth to ask him—what, exactly? To tell Azmodea that I was sorry? That I didn’t mean to keep this enormous secret from both of them? That I felt their pain?

I resisted the urge to do just that, instead forcing myself to bite my tongue. Telling them that would make this about me. About appeasing my own guilty conscience.

I rationally knew that it wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t chosen to withhold this vital piece of information from them—I’d been coerced to do so by Lucifer. But the emotional part of me didn’t understand that. The fucking guilt remained, uncaring of the circumstances, and I felt awful, just unbelievably miserable about my lie of omission to them both. Which was why I had this insane need to apologize and beg their forgiveness, as if that would make it right.

But it wouldn’t help either of them. It would be purely to soothe my own conscience, something that I needed, not them.

And the last thing I wanted right now was to appear selfish. Again.

So instead I softly said, “I’m here for you.”

He held my gaze for a heartbeat, then he nodded and walked out.

Leaving me alone with the weight of the secret I’d carried, the anticipatory grief for my own mother, and the paralyzing fear of Lucifer’s revenge.