Page 42 of All's Hell That Ends Well

My eye twitched. “Yes, so caring you are as to rob her of her chance to have closure with her mother. All your professionsof tenderhearted generosity for Zoe, yet you knew exactly how much it meant to her to find her mother in Heaven, to be able to say goodbye, and you still sabotaged her fall so much sooner and took all that away from her.”

“That,” she said, her voice dropping, genuine regret pinching her features for the first time, “is the one thing I wish I could undo. It wasn’t cold-blooded disregard for her feelings that caused me to orchestrate her fall before she could find her mother. My hands were bound.” She wrung said hands in front of her. “In my negotiations with Lucifer, I had to promise him to make her fall right after your rescue. We made those plans, had those negotiations, years before I ever found out that Zoe would want to stay in Heaven a bit longer to see her mother. I’d managed to talk him into waiting all this time to claim her, but as a concession from me, he demanded that I swear to bring her to Hell with no further delay in the case you got caught and we broke you out. It was a binding promise, Azazel. I could not break it, as much as I wanted to.”

I rubbed a hand over my face, my thoughts whirring in my head, my body brimming with too much agitation that I didn’t know where to put.

“I know you will have to chew on this,” she said quietly. “And maybe you won’t ever see my side. It will be just as well. Paint me as the villain all you want; it does not anger me. Not when I know I did what I could to help you both. But know that it was my pleading with him that made him swear to transfer his claim on Zoe to you once she finds Lilith’s reincarnation. He will not keep her. As soon as she completes her mission, she will be free.”

I barked a dry laugh. “In other words,never.”

She tilted her head. “Are you so sure the search will be fruitless?”

“There is no precedent for this,” I ground out.

“And there was none for a human turned angel who kept her memories and was able to access them years later, yet Zoe did so.”

“That is different.”

“Is it, though?” She shrugged. “There was no precedent for Lilith, ever. She was the first of her kind, in everything. There is no reason to think she wasn’t reborn as a human like one of us upon their death.”

“That,” I said and pointed a finger at her, “is the least implausible part of all this. I’d be inclined to believe she was indeed reincarnated, given the way she’d changed over the millennia. It’s the rest of this unhinged theory of his that I have a problem with. Zoe might carry a part of Lilith inside her, but that doesn’t mean she can locate her with it.”

“Like calls to like,” Naamah murmured. “And lost pieces of ourselves tend to find their way back to us.”

Hands on my hips, I turned away, shaking my head in utter frustration.

“Zoe will be by your side again, sooner or later.” Her sari rustled softly as she moved. “And in the meantime, she will be cared for. I have tried talking to him about allowing her more freedom of movement when she is in Hell, but he is reluctant due to safety concerns. She is his only means of finding Lilith again. Should anything happen to Zoe, it would destroy his plans, his future…would destroy him.”

I speared her with a dark look, unable to keep the words from slipping out. “And what a loss that would be.”

She hissed with bared teeth. “Have a care, Azazel. He is still my father.”

“And I am your son.”

And there it was, the point of contention between us. The thing that had loomed, unmentioned but ever present, over every conversation, over all those moments of bonding andmaking up for lost time. For as much as she’d shown love and support for me in the years since she’d ascended and healed, it had been evident that she cared for her father as well, despite the strife between him and me.

“Do you wish for me to tear myself in two?” Her eyes glinted hard. “To give you one half of my soul, bleeding and broken? I am trying to balance the love I hold for you both, though it claws me to shreds on the inside.”

“I wish for you to stand by me!” I thrust a finger at my own chest. “To chooseme. It shouldn’t be that hard!”

“And now you’re being selfish.” Her features tightened. “To demand I turn my back on the one person who’s never given up on me. He was there for me, through it all, through millennia of debilitating darkness that ate away at my mind. He cared for me, gave me every comfort, made sure I never lacked for anything when I wasn’t even able to get out of bed because I was so numb. You have no idea how much it hurt him to see me that way, to do so much for me and yet never feel like he was helping me enough. To see his own daughter wither away or try to tear herself to pieces to escape the pain.

“And yet he never wavered. He never stayed away or pushed me off to be taken care of by others just so he wouldn’t have to witness my struggle. When my mother couldn’t bear to be with me often because the sight of my suffering destroyed her, when my own children had to keep their distance because I might be a threat to them, he came to visit every day. Every day, Azazel. He would sit with me, keep me company, read to me. Hundreds of thousands of books and stories over thousands of years. He’d even tell me the tales passed among humans that weren’t yet written down. All to keep my darkness at bay, to fill my mind with something other than the whispers of ill or the bleak memories of how I’d failed my own children.”

Her voice broke, and it broke something inside me, too.

“He was my rock,” she said, her power vibrating in the air, “unyielding in his support. He’d talk to me, relentlessly, even when all I could do was stare at the wall and wonder why I couldn’t just die. He is the reason I never succeeded in taking my own life. And you wish for me to spit on that?” Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, her voice cracking.

My chest felt like someone had punched a hole in it and filled it with acid.

“I know he failed you,” she continued, shattered sadness splintering her voice. “I know you suffered at his court, that he didn’t protect you as he should have. And I castigate myself every single day because I wasn’t there to protect you either, because I was too lost in the darkness to be there for you as I should have been. I am sorry.”

Her breath hitched, and so did mine. My lungs hurt so much that I could barely draw in air,.

“And I am deeply sorry that he wasn’t good to you,” she said in a broken whisper. “I will never forgive him for it, will hold that pain within me for eternity. But please understand that he has shown me such love, such loyalty, as I’d never received from anyone else. And so I hold my love for him, my gratitude for how he has been there for me all my life, right next to my love for you and the sorrow over how he failed you. I hold all of it.” She thumped her hand on her chest, her features fierce and anguished. “All of it, no matter how much the clash of these emotions torments me. To dig out only one to release would ravage all of me. I cannot extricate one love in favor of the other. And my affection for either of you is not diminished by my care for the other. I am walking the tightrope of not choosing between you or him, because you hold equal parts of my heart, and to choose one would destroy both.”

I closed my eyes and rubbed both hands over my face. Every breath seemed wrought with spikes that serrated my chest. “Bewell, then,” I said after a moment, sending her one last look as I walled up my heart. “Take comfort in that love you’ve got for me, for you will have no more of mine.”

Her face crumpled as I turned away, her devastation following me down the stairs.

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