Chapter 5

CHAPTER5

My mind was slow to catch up. “What?”

“Was it Inachiel?” He trailed kisses down my throat. “Or one of his entourage?”

“I—uh—no one. Did. Um. Anything.” Hi, I’m Zoe. Skillful liar extraordinaire.

He lightly bit into my neck. Predictably, it scattered my thoughts. “Don’t play. I saw you. Someone said something. Who was it?”

What the—how had this turned into an interrogation? And how the hell did I get out of this now?

“Zoe.” He gripped my chin between thumb and index finger and caught my panicked gaze.

Eeek. With a grimace, I closed my eyes just to escape his probing look, and I raised those mental shields up as high as possible. I couldn’t let him know. He’d already lost enough allies and trade partners.

“Tell me.” His voice had dropped, now holding the kind of command it rarely did when he talked to me. This was the tone he used on his soldiers.

I opened my eyes just to narrow them at him. “Don’t speak to me like that. I’m not one of your subordinates.”

He blinked, the only sign of surprise in a face of hard angles and simmering anger. Other than Azmodea, no one else ever dared to rebuke him like this.

“You’re right,” he said, but his features didn’t soften with his admission. “You’re my wife. And I need to know if someone treats you with anything less than the respect you deserve.”

“So you can what? Cut ties with them? Attack them?”

His expression darkened. “You’re mine. To care for. To cherish.” A rough edge slid into his voice. “To defend.”

“Azazel—”

“I will not,” he said through gritted teeth, “stand by while those snakes insult you.”

“It wasn’t even an insult. He just—”

Lightning flashed in his eyes. “Inachiel?”

My flinch gave it away. Dammit.

“What did he say?” A soft, soft question, but I still heard the fury hiding in its depth.

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

And, Lordy, he really looked like it did. Such concern wrapped in anger tightening his features, giving his eyes even more of a demonic glow than usual. In another life, another time, I’d have appreciated that I had a sexy guy on my side determined to spill blood to defend my honor.

But this, here, was far too real, with damning consequences.

“Let’s just drop this, okay?” I smoothed my hands over his shoulders, petting him in the small hope I could simply soothe this obsession away. “It didn’t even affect me. Really, I’m fine.”

A calculating gleam in his eyes, and then his expression shifted, as if rearranging itself in sync with a new strategy of his. “Did it ever occur to you,” he asked quietly, “that when they dare to insult you to your face without me there, and I let that go unchecked, it reflects poorly on me?”

I blinked, stumped. Dammit. I had not considered that.

His look said he knew, and that was why he used it against me now. Because I might swallow my own pain and anger about how their slights made me feel, as long as I thought in doing so I was protecting him. But if that wasn’t the case, if my silence was actually causing him harm…

“When my allies”—he gave the word a sour taste—“disrespect my wife, and I continue to do business with them not even knowing what kind of toxic shit they’ve been throwing in her face, what message does that send? Would you like me to be ignorant, walking like a fool into a meeting with them without a clue about their insults to you, so they can smirk and snicker behind my back about how they can get away with treating you like trash?”

I numbly shook my head, my throat closing up.

“What do you think,” he continued with surgical precision, “it does to my reputation when I walk around oblivious to how—and which ones of—my friends belittle you?”

God, this was so fucked up. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. Telling him of all the snide remarks would result in the kind of retaliation that would lose him allies and trade partners. Not telling him would make him look like a fool to his peers, or worse, like someone not strong enough to defend his own. And a show of strength in Hell was everything.

“We just can’t win,” I said in a voice as small as I felt. “No matter what, we just can’t win in this.”

His expression hardened. “Oh, but I will.”

I frowned and made a frustrated noise. “And how do plan to accomplish that? It’s not like you can reach into their heads and change the way they see me.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

I frowned some more. “I don’t follow.”

He cupped my face, his thumb tracing the line of my lower lip. “Lilith is human.”

At that, I raised my brows. “Statement of the obvious, but okay. What does that have to do with anything?”

“She’s Lucifer’s equal in rank and status.” Something was brewing in those thunderstorm eyes of his. “Have you ever heard of anyone treating her with less respect than they would Lucifer?”

I shook my head, an inkling of where he was going with this uncoiling inside me, along with a vague fear I couldn’t name.

“And why is that?” he asked quietly.

My answer was just as soft. “Because Lucifer would eviscerate them.”

He nodded, slow and deliberate. “When he first brought Lilith to Hell and made her his equal, there were those who didn’t take well to it. I wasn’t born back then, but the whispers of it carried over the millennia since, the impact of his response indelibly etched into the minds of all demons, whether they witnessed it firsthand or not. Few of those who dared to even look wrong at Lilith are still alive. You walked right over them when we went to the Fall Festival.”

My stomach cramped at the memory of those demons chained to the subfloor beneath the glass floor of Lucifer’s entrance hall, being eaten alive by hellrats, but unable to actually die. “They’ve been there for all this time?”

His face was grim. “Thousands of years, for one slight against Lilith.”

My God.

Azazel’s eyes mapped my face, his energy vibrating darkly as he went on. “Mostly, though, Lucifer simply killed the ones who disrespected Lilith, after making a spectacle of their torture in front of his court. They say the blood on the floor of his throne room didn’t dry for weeks and months because he kept spilling more in defense of her honor.”

A shiver stole down my spine. Not just from the tale he was telling, but from the glint in his eye.

“In the end,” he continued, “he’d cemented Lilith’s rank and status so firmly that no one has dared to cast doubt on it ever since. She is afforded the same respect as him, whether he is present or not.”

I swallowed hard.

“So you see,” he said, his voice lethally soft, “it can be done.”

“Azazel,” I whispered, and that vague fear I’d felt sharpened just a little. “What are you planning?”

His lashes half lowered, darkening his eyes. “It can be done.”

That fear, it spread slithery roots across my heart. “You can’t kill them all.”

His knuckles gently stroked over my cheek. “I need you to tell me what Inachiel said.”

I grabbed his hand. “Azazel, you cannot kill them all.”

“No. But I don’t need to. I just have to kill enough.” His eyes met mine again, that brewing storm in them coalescing. “Power and fear. Those are the keys. Get enough of one, and the other will follow. They’re not afraid of me yet. I don’t rank high enough, and my power is at medium-high levels.” He interlaced his fingers with mine. “I intend to change that.”

I was struck speechless, dread coiling in my gut. All I saw in my mind’s eye was a path littered with mangled bodies, soil drenched in blood, a path leading up to…

“How high?” I whispered. “How high do you want to climb?”

“When I’m done,” he replied, steely resolve in his voice, “only two people will outrank us.”

Lucifer and Lilith.

He planned to seize enough power to rival the original rulers of Hell.

That slithery fear struck roots into my heart.

I shook my head. “You don’t need to do this. Not for me.”

What he intended would not be accomplished without mass slaughter and seemingly endless war. The risks involved… I could lose him through this. That was a lot of fighting, the kind that required sharp blades and terrible demon power. He was courting death.

I frantically shook my head again. “Please don’t do this. I’m not worth—”

“Yes, you are,” he cut me off, his face harsh.

My breath lodged in my throat.

“What you have to understand,” he went on, his energy rough silk over my senses, “is that I would tear all of Hell apart for you.”

The room filled with water. Oh, wait, that was just my eyes.

He pressed his forehead against mine. “I would rend this sun-forsaken place from one end to the other to keep you happy. I have lived a long, long time, Zoe, and most of it was shit. Eternity is damnation in itself if you go through it missing half your soul.”

I couldn’t breathe, my body melting into his in all the places our skin touched.

“So, yes,” he continued, his voice raw, “you’re worth it. And I will gladly bathe in the blood of all those who dare to make you feel less.”

Okay, fuck, he really had a way with words.

I slung my arms around his neck and buried my face against his shoulder. My voice came out choked. “I don’t want to lose you.”

He pressed me close, his lips at my ear. “You won’t.”

He sounded so sure, as if he was simply acting out some prophecy that foretold his success. But when, in life, were things ever this certain?

Pulling back, he wiped the tears from my cheeks and kissed my nose. “Now tell me what Inachiel said.”

And damn it all, I did. Because when he looked at me like that, when he made me feel like the only thing that mattered in Hell and beyond, I was ready to tell him everything.

Except, maybe, that secret I kept close to my heart, the one for which Lucifer bound me to silence.