Page 89 of All's Hell That Ends Well

My jaw went slack as I watched Lucifer’s face transform from a mask of hardness into an expression of true mirth. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him laugh like this, not derisively or with a mocking twist, but with genuine warmth.

“You,” he said after a moment, leaning back in his chair, “are every bit your mother’s son.” He nodded at me, his voice bare of any scorn. “That fire, that zeal, your forthrightness, and your disregard of propriety in pursuit of that which you care about. The way you burn for those you love, your capacity for unwavering loyalty.”

His expression growing pensive, he regarded me while I stood in stunned silence, incapable of processing this change in him and the way he spoke to me.

Never had he addressed me like this.

“I did not see it before,” he said quietly after several heartbeats. “I was expecting to find him in you, to see his flaws passed on to you, and it made me miss all the ways you reflect the best of her.”

He might as well have snatched the rug out from under me. That was how floored I was. I could have handled anything he threw at me, just not this.

Shifting my weight subtly to get into a better defensive position, I eyed him with wariness beating underneath my skin. “Is this a trick?”

He lazily waved that away. “She was right about you. It shouldn’t have taken her bluntness to make me see what I’ve been blind to. To make me look beyond my anger.”

My brow scrunched in confusion. Was he talking about Naamah still?

“But she was right about something else, too.” His fingers drummed slowly on the armrest, his unnervingly intense gaze fixed on me. “I did not treat you as I should have. My sins are numerous, no doubt, and I take pride in most of them. This one, I regret.”

My eyes darted about the room, looking for the impending danger, sure that this was some kind of ploy to fuck with me, and any second now, I’d be struck down and dragged back into our old game of humiliation and threats again.

“You deserved better,” Lucifer said, his voice steady and without a shred of derision or sarcasm.

What was going on? None of this made sense.

“And if I could go back and change the way things played out,” he added, “I would.”

My hands clenched and unclenched at my sides, my entire body abuzz with the unsettling uncertainty of how to deal with whatever this was.

“I would raise you in your mother’s spirit,” he said with a rough note to his voice, “and do right by her and you.”

I’d faced a multitude of foes over the manifold centuries of my life, had found myself in and fought my way out of countless traps and snares of strategy. This one paralyzed me.

I stared at him, struck mute.

He pinned me with a glare of his own, and for a long, agonizing moment, we simply squared off with our gazes locked.

Eventually, he uttered a sound of sheer frustration. “Just accept it,” he ground out.

“Accept what?” My voice was but a harsh whisper, my nerves frayed.

“My apology!” he barked.

I reared back. Blinking several times, as if that might make this weird interlude resemble any sort of logical reality again,I shook my head and opened my mouth, though nothing came out. My brain was still processing.

“Well?” he prodded.

“I’m still trying to make sense of what you just said.”

With an impatient sigh, he got up. “Then make it make sense faster.” He made a rolling gesture with one hand. “Or mull it over while we go. It doesn’t matter.” In a murmur, he added, “She can’t say I never apologized to you now.”

I tilted my head and gave him a bemused look. Had Naamah said that to him? I’d known she talked with him about me, but I hadn’t thought?—

“And for the record,” Lucifer said as he summoned a sword and drew it out of its sheath to check the blade, “I do care for her.” Pausing for a beat, he bared his teeth in a grimace and muttered, “She did the fungus-growth thing on me, too.”

“Who?” I asked with bewilderment heating my blood.

Satisfied with the sharpness of the blade, he sheathed the sword again and fastened it to his belt, then shot me a short look while he summoned another sword, which he checked as well. “Zoe, of course. Now come on.”

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