Page 13 of Wicked Believer
I clear my throat. “My Mother just paid us a visit, unfortunately.”
“Y-your Mother? Lilith?” she stutters. “Did she ...”
She moves to cover herself, but I stay her movements with a lift of my hand. “Don’t bother. It’s nothing she didn’t help create.”
“Create?”
I pull a pack of cigarettes and my lighter from my suit-coat pocket. “My Mother is a goddess. Who do you think inspired my Father to ...” I light my cigarette before I gesture at the woods around us.
“Birth humanity?”
“I suppose you could put it that way.” My cigarette flares, the flame a spark in the darkness as the scent of tobacco fills the clearing.
Charlotte blows out a short breath. “There’s no such thing as an original idea, I guess.”
“She expects grandchildren.” The corner of my mouth lifts. “And soon.”
That gets her attention quickly.
Charlotte sputters. “She what?”
I chuckle at the shock in her voice, at the sudden realization that children are still a possibility for her, even with her newfound immortality. Though the thought sobers me quickly.
And for once, I make the decision to be honest with her.
I only hope that whatever humanity is left in her doesn’t make me regret it just as swiftly.
“There’s ... something else you ought to know, little dove.”
Chapter Five
Charlotte
The moment the words fall from Lucifer’s lips, I ... don’t know what to make of them.
“Fated,” I repeat, the word suddenly feeling foreign. Too otherworldly, too ... supernatural to be real. Made from one of his bones. Like Adam and Eve. “As in ... as in I never had any free will?”
Lucifer shrugs, the cigarette between his fingers burning as he flicks some of the ashes onto the forest floor. “I fail to see how that’s relevant.”
I blink, nearly at a loss for words.
“How is itnotrelevant?”
We’re standing in the middle of the barren forest, my bare feet so numb I can no longer feel my toes. My dirt-covered dress is torn from where he fucked me so hard I saw stars. Not to mention how he made me cause a freaking mini-earthquake and unleash whatever the hell else that pulse of light mid-orgasm was, but somehow, it’sthisthat undoes me.
Makes me feel like the ground beneath my feet is moving.
Like there’s nothing left to tether me.
I swallow hard. The choice he gave me to stay with him was never really a choice at all. The same as working for him. The same as becoming his fake fiancée. The same as my father’s death. Only worsethan all those, and the knowledge of that steals the last little bit of my sanity.
“Fated,” I exhale.
“Or something close to it, really,” he mutters before blowing out another cloud of smoke.
The end of his cigarette pulses, the vapor disappearing. There and gone instantly.
Like I would’ve been. If he hadn’t remade me.
