Page 84 of All's Hell That Ends Well

“You will not stand for that?” Lucifer repeated in a murmur, his eyes black chips of ice.

“That’s right.” I pressed my lips together and inhaled through my nose. “I want your word that, should I find her while she is underage, you will not bring her here until she is a fully grown adult. If you refuse, I will simply not tell you when I locate her. I’ll keep pretending to search for her until she has reached adulthood.”

I’d expected him to yell at me, or hiss some threat. Instead, he stared at me for a long moment, then took a deep breath and flicked his hand. “You have my word. I will leave her to grow up in peace on Earth, albeit protected. Discreetly.”

I sat up straighter in surprise. That had gone shockingly well. I’d braced for a drawn-out argument and negotiations.

“Don’t look so astonished.” One corner of his mouth tipped up. “Your reasoning is sound. I will not rob her of the childhood and youth she deserves, and I will always honor her free will—which she won’t be able to exercise if she has been manipulated beforehand. As great as my yearning to have her near is, her well-being will forever trump my own needs.”

Only weeks ago, I wouldn’t have thought him capable of displaying the kind of selflessness apparent in that statement, but I’d come to realize he had more depth and maturity than I’d given him credit for. At least when it came to Lilith.

“Speaking of her well-being,” I ventured in a small voice. I hadn’t meant to tackle this aspect, but the understanding and empathy he’d shown just now had kicked that particular thoughtloose. It had been niggling at me for a while now, and I had to try to put it into words.

He raised a brow. “Go on.”

“Well, it’s just…” I clenched and unclenched my hands, my chest tight with worry and uncertainty, about what I wanted to say and his possible reaction. “You do remember that she wasn’t…happy down here?”

The air turned frosty between one breath and the next. Lucifer’s face was a mask of coldness.

“And I don’t mean to say that she wasn’t happywith you,” I hastened to add. “I think, if anything, you were the one thing that kept her afloat here. She loved you deeply. You were her lifeline. But everything else…” I raised my hands in a helpless gesture to indicate our surroundings and the whole of Hell. “She wasdyinginside. I think she never got over the transition from living on Earth to living in Hell. It just took millennia for it to catch up with her, but by the time she met me, she’d already been calcified in large parts—her words, not mine.” Again, I lifted my hands, this time in a placating move.

“What are you trying to tell me?” he asked with a note of brokenness to his voice.

My heart splintered a little. “I’m not sure,” I whispered, “that it’s the best idea to bring her back down here. For her sake.”

CHAPTER 25

Lucifer regarded me with an intensity that could have flayed the flesh off my bones.

“Just think about it,” I went on, not knowing where I took the courage from to poke the Devil in his bleeding wound. “You want her to have a good life on Earth, right? You said you want to make sure that she has a good family, that she’s safe and happy, and that nothing bad befalls her. You’ll let her grow up unaware of her former life and the long-lost lover who’s waiting for her. But then you intend to somehow barge into that safe, happy, and fulfilled life she has and uproot her, turning her world upside down and taking her into a different dimension that is foreign and scary. You expect her to just leave her family, her friends, everything she’s ever known to go to Hell and become the Devil’s bride? Can you even fathom how much she’ll have to give up to be with you down here? The sheer extent of the sacrifice you demand of her?”

Muscles jumped and shifted in his jaw as he ground his teeth. “You lived through it, and you’re happy with Azazel now.”

“That is hella different.” I raised my index finger to underscore my point. “First of all, I had no choice but to marry Azazel and follow him to Hell because the alternative would havedamned me to Hell anyway. There wasn’t an option where I could have stayed and continued living my human life on Earth instead. Lilith, on the other hand, has that option. She will have to make an actual decision to give up living on Earth and go to Hell instead, which is a completely different premise. Secondly, I only had one year of living in Hell as a human before shit turned sideways and my humanity was ripped away, but mind you that even in that one year, my soul ached from not being on Earth anymore. Now, however, I am basicallycustom-builtto live down here. I’m a demon. My entire metaphysical makeup is different now. With my nature not being human anymore, there’s less chance that life in Hell will drag me into depression over the millennia. The same will not be true for Lilith.”

His fingers curled on the armrest of his chair, and I definitely didn’t imagine the black talons slicing out from his fingertips and scouring the wood.

A shiver ran down my spine, but I pressed on. “And on the point of having lived through it, that is precisely why I understand exactly what it will be like for her to go through that huge transition. I know how much it hurt to leave my family and friends behind, and worse yet was the fact that I couldn’t even visit. I was a ghost on Earth, and there was no way to explain to my loved ones where I’d gone and why I couldn’t keep in touch with them. The same will be true for Lilith. She won’t be able to see her folks in flesh and blood, she won’t be able to show herself, and they will all think she has disappeared without a trace and possibly died. You cannot imagine how painful that will be for her.” I thumped my chest, tight bands constricting my lungs. “But I can. I’ve been through it. It is horrible.”

His jaw hard as steel, he turned his head to the side and closed his eyes briefly.

“When you brought Lilith to Hell all those thousands of years ago,” I said softly, “the situation was vastly different. Shehad just been banished from Paradise, she was wandering the wastelands alone, and she had nothing to lose. She had no family, no friends, no life on Earth to speak of. Going to Hell with you was an easy choice then. You were her lover, she knew and trusted you, and of course she’d happily choose to live with you even if it meant doing so in an inhospitable dimension of death and torture.” Chewing my lip, I paused, then added, “This time, it will be so, so different. She will have everything to lose. Yes, if she chooses you, she’ll be with the love of her life—but will she even remember that this is what you were to her?”

He wasn’t looking at me, his gaze fixed unfocused on some spot on the wall, his power woven with tendrils of a pain so deep it made me ache.

“You are somehow convinced that she’ll regain her memory of her former life,” I said, twisting my fingers, “and the question of whether that is at all possible aside, even if it were, you couldn’t expect her to choose to go to Hell to be with you before she remembers everything. I mean, just how did you think this was going to work? You can’t go to Earth, so that means you’ll have to send someone else to convince her to leave her human life behind and go to Hell. If she doesn’t remember yet, that will be weird as fuck, not to mention doomed to fail. She’d have no reason to choose you if she doesn’t even know you.”

“She will remember,” he whispered.

I leaned forward, frustration and doubt making me grit my teeth. “How?”

“Same as you.”

“What?”

“You remembered, didn’t you?” His eyes glittered as he met my gaze. “Your memories were buried, but they surfaced again.”

I threw up my hands. “Yes, but that...that was different!”

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