Page 109 of Infernal

To Hannah.

To Taylor.

To Trace…

My brain clicked off to everything around me, but him, and I attacked.

The force of my chest slamming into his knocked him off his feet and sent us both tumbling to the ground in a messy heap of good and evil. My fingers clutched his throat as I climbed on top and locked his body between my legs.

He wasn’t going to kill any more of my friends.

He wasn’t going to kill another living soul, because I wouldn’t let him.

“Mmm,” he moaned lewdly. “We’re finally getting somewhere good,” he said, pushing his hips up towards me, and I responded by socking him in the nose. Twice.

“Ah, you like it rough then?” he went on, his bloody lip curling into a twisted snarl as he bucked his hips again. “That’s my kind of girl.”

“Shut up! Just shut the hell up!” I screamed as I rained down three more blows to his mouth, hoping to break it enough to stop him from speaking. To stop him from using Trace’s voice, ever again!

“But this is Trace’s voice,” he said, catching my fist before I could land the fourth hit. He squeezed his palm around my fist, crunching the bone and then using it to toss me off of him.

Within seconds, he was on top of me, straddling my body under his weight. “If you could only see the things he wanted to do to you, Daughter.” His grin turned into a sneer as he leaned down and whispered, “Dirtythings.”

I rammed my elbow into the side of his head, knocking him back a notch, but not enough to get him off me.

“Why don’t you be a good little girl and throw the guy a bone, hmm?”

I threw a left hook instead, clipping him in the nose as he ducked back.

“You’re really riling him up now! Can you feel that?” He was moving his hips again, rolling them over me as though he were riding a bull.

“You’re sick! You’re fucking sick!” I said and then slammed the palm of my hand all the way up into his nose.

His hands shot up to his face at the sound of crunching bone, giving me a chance to buck him off and reclaim the upper hand. With my knee pressed against his torso, I reached back to my other leg and pulled out the Sword of Angelus.

That shut him up real quick.

The moment the sword touched my hand, its power ignited, turning it blue in my hands, and mesmerizing me with its grippingly beautiful deathly glow. Even Lucifer couldn’t help but drop his hands from his face and stare up at it, almost as though transfixed by the power. I flipped the blade in my hand, taking it by the hilt and angling it down to his chest.

And then I hesitated.

The red flames in his eyes had extinguished themselves, leaving only the magnificent blue eyes of the boy I loved. I knew he had done it on purpose to distract me, to make me falter, and it had worked.

His lips curled into a smug grin as he pushed up onto his elbows. “I told you you couldn’t do it, Daughter. You can’t kill me no matter how much you want to. Not when that means taking your soulmate down with me.”

The Roderick sisters had thought long and hard about choosing the perfect vessel for Lucifer. They had me pegged from the start, knowing I was weak and inexperienced, and that I would let my heart rule my mind.

“And they were right, weren’t they, Daughter?” he asked, listening in to my private struggle.

I nodded, tears dripping off my jaw and dotting his shirt below me. I knew now, without a doubt, that killing Lucifer would kill Trace too, and I’d sooner choose death by my own hands than be the reason that he was no longer living.

And they’d known that all along.

My chest heaved as I sobbed uncontrollably. “I’m sorry.”

“An apology isn’t going to save you,” he sneered back up at me, his eyes glowering with vengeance.

But so were mine when I said, “I wasn’t talking to you.”

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