Page 58 of All's Hell That Ends Well

“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 lovesomeone 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. Shedidchoose 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.

CHAPTER 17

Iknocked on the door to the room in which Lucifer always received me, and waited for his call.

Azazel had just left to take care of some archdemon business in his own territory after spending the entire day and night with me—at least, what I considered day and night here. Obviously, there was no way to tell from changes in light outside, because the sky here never changed, but I’d apparently developed a pretty good sense of time, and there was a kind of ebb and flow to the passage of time down here, one that—now that I was a demon—I felt instinctively.

In the end, even on an immortal plane without seasons or celestial changes, the inhabitants needed some way to differentiate points in time. Otherwise, it would be impossible to make any kind of plans. Party at my place next week? Well, how would my guests or I be able to prepare if we had no way of determining when exactlynext weekwould be?

So, yeah, there was an innate understanding of time here, a feeling that this phase right here was different from the phase before, and for convenience’s sake, we used human terms for it.

With Vengeance sitting pretty at my side, I stood in front of the door, that inherent sense of time telling me it had beenseveral minutes since I’d last knocked. He hadn’t called me in yet. But he’d told me to come see him today in order to get some training, even if he hadn’t specified a time. So, here I was.

Maybe he was in a meeting? I scrunched up my face. How likely was that? I hadn’t seen him receive anyone else in my time here, and from all that I’d heard, he wasn’t evenhavingmeetings anymore.

Pressing my ear to the door, I listened, trying to suss out if he was talking to someone.

Nope, just oppressive silence.

I blew out a breath and knocked again. “Hello?” I called through the door. “Your Grace?”

No answer.

---