Page 7 of All's Hell That Ends Well

Then agony carved lines into his face once more, and he laid his forehead against my chest, right where his hand had felt for Lilith’s spark.

For the last part of her that was left in this world.

This time, his sobs tore my heart to shreds.

When he finally let me go, my eyes were burning. He got to his feet, abruptly turning away from me. His shoulders heaved, his hands balling into fists at his sides. With a flick of his fingers, he summoned a tissue and wiped it over his face with angry, jerky movements.

A moment later, he tossed the tissue to the side, and it went up in flames, the ashy residue falling to the floor.

“Take a seat,” he said, his back still turned.

I glanced around the ruined room, trying to figure out where I could perch my butt without something crumbling beneath me. I wouldn’t sit in his armchair; that was for sure.

He waved a hand, and an entire sofa appeared, thankfully in one piece and seemingly good condition.

I gingerly sat down, twisting my hands in my lap.

A small table plopped into being before me, decked with a steaming mug of tea and a platter full of delicacies. I stared at it with the same suspicion I might bestow upon an unknown cat presenting me her belly for rubs.

“It’s not poisoned.”

At Lucifer’s dry remark, I looked up at him. He’d settled onto his armchair again, that otherworldly, eerie note of his energy now a bit less noticeable. He seemed a touch more like the demon I’d known him to be, rather than an eldritch creature slithered in from another dimension.

The emo-goth look remained, though.

“It’s not that, Your Grace,” I responded carefully. “It’s just that the last time I ate food you offered me, you made me puke it out again not long after with your psychological torture.”

One corner of his mouth twitched up in a half smile, there and gone again in a second.

Look at me, amusing the Devil by reminding him of how he used to hurt me. Good times.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” he said quietly, his face a cold mask.

I cleared my throat, my brows rising. “Oh, really?”

“I have something else planned for you.”

My stomach twisted itself into knots. That was about as ominous as the dreadedWe need to talkin a relationship.

“What is it, Your Grace?” I asked, forcing my words and tone to be polite and respectful.

“You’re going to find her for me.”

I blinked. Tilted my head. Shook it a little to get rid of the befuddlement caused by his weird statement. “Excuse me, what?”

He summoned a glass with an amber liquid in it and took a sip. “That spark of her inside you,” he said with a nod at me. “You will use it to find her reincarnation on Earth.”

My jaw dropped, and I sat there for a good few heartbeats of stunned silence, staring at him in disbelief.

“Not to repeat myself,” I said eventually, “but—excuse me,what?”

“I see that the transformation to angel and then demon didn’t do anything for your intelligence.” His black eyes glinted coldly.

My nostrils flared. “I just…”How to put this delicately?“Lilith was human. Humans don’t get reincarnated. So, after her passing, she’d…”

I paused, suddenly struck by the realization that I had never considered what might have happened with her soul. As a human, she ought to have gone to either Heaven or Hell, and seeing as she’d been just as bound to a demon as I’d been, her soul would not have been eligible for Heaven, which only left Hell as her destination.

But undoubtedly, if her soul had come down here, Lucifer would have taken her into his care, making sure she’d never feel a single second of torture. And if he had her soul here with him, he’d be…happymaybe wasn’t the right word, but…less depressed-looking?

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