Page 128 of Wicked Believer
“If that’s true, then why haven’t I—”
“That’s enough questions.” She claps her hands. “Come along now. We don’t have all day.”
“All day for what?”
She isn’t dressed for the gym or any kind of combat training.
“Haven’t I already done enough training?”
“Azrael’s job is to train your body”—she smiles like there’s something painfully amusing about that—“but it’smyjob to train your mind. Make you a true celestial. Teach you how to embody your feminine divine power.” She spreads her arms wide, and for a moment, she looks exactly like the self-love wellness guru all her followers believe her to be. “Come.”
She takes my hand, and before I can stop her, the stars inside the ether are swirling around us, making me dizzy so I can’t gather my bearings before we land hard. My stomach bottoms out at the sight before me.
Because my father is standing right there, furiously glaring at me.
Chapter Forty
Charlotte
“What is this?” I snap, glancing to my right at Greed.
I’ve barely even processed what happened last night. Lucifer’s lockdown. My unplanned jump. Azrael saving me. Lucifer opening the first seal. And now ...
My father standing before me inside our old living room.
But this can’t be real.
Itcan’tbe, because I ...
I recognize this scene.
We’re in the middle of our old house. The one we lived inbeforemy mother’s death. Before my father became so focused, so obsessed with the congregation, the church, so caught up in his own grief and zealotry that he ...
“What is this, Mimi?” I repeat, panic making my breath shallow and quick.
“Lucifer tells me that your powers come out when you’re angry.” Greed glances down at her manicured nails and shrugs unhelpfully. “So, get angry, Charlotte.”
I blanch, my panic reaching an apex. My heart thumps as my father prowls toward me, but then he steps right through me as if I’m madeof mist, not even there, heading toward the little girl I now notice cowering underneath the couch behind me.
My stomach drops.
Me.
The little girl is me.
My father was never a kind man. I’d seen him hurt my mother plenty of times before, but never once had he ...
I turn and drop to my knees, vomiting the scone I just ate onto the old shag carpet as the younger version of me starts to scream.
“Too much for your first time then?” Greed says, seemingly undisturbed by the little girl’s—bymypain. “Perhaps something different.”
She snaps her fingers.
Suddenly the carpet beneath me is concrete.
Greed stands near the fence beside me. The playground outside my old youth group building. I’d been barely a day older than eleven, not even a full preteen, but unlike most of the girls in our congregation, I’d developed early. Early enough that the older boys from our youth group had thought it would be funny to try and pull down my shirt.
My father had blamed me, of course. No surprise there.
