Cipher (Demonica Underworld #8) - Larissa Ione Page 0,3
And Lucifer. And my father.
No shit. Cipher hadn’t met the first two infamous fallen angels, but he’d worked for Azagoth, the literal Grim Reaper, long enough to have seen what eons of exposure to malevolence did to a person.
And now he could add Bael and his bastard brother, Moloc, to the list of sadistic, evil-ravaged fallen angels he had firsthand experience with.
Which brought him to the second voice that spoke in his head when he was getting off on beating down demons in the arena.
Don’t die, Cipher. Don’t. Die. If you die in Bael’s realm, your soul won’t be whisked away by griminions and taken to Azagoth. It’ll be trapped here, where Bael can torture you for eternity in ways you can’t even imagine.
Lyre had told him that, but she was wrong. He could imagine it. He’d seen what Azagoth could do to a soul. Still, Cipher would prefer that his soul reside with Azagoth, who was an ally and the father of his best friend, rather than spend the rest of his eternal life with a sadistic motherfucker who hated him.
The sound of approaching footsteps outside his cell brought him to his feet. Maybe it was time for food. Or, more likely, it was time for another round of torture. If he was lucky, the torture would come in the form of his newest handler, a pretty raven-haired fallen named Lyre.
His pulse picked up in anticipation, which was a sad measure of how shitty Cipher’s life was; he was actually looking forward to seeing one of his captors. Sure, she was gorgeous, but what intrigued Cipher most was that, unlike everyone else in Bael’s realm, she hadn’t gone completely rotten to the core with evil. Not yet. Which was awesome, because unlike his two handlers before her, she hadn’t strung him up with razor wire and beat the shit out of him. Yes, she’d shoved him into a pit full of demonic piranha once, but only because he’d done the same to her on the first day of her assignment.
It had been his twentieth attempt at escape, and it had gone as badly as the nineteen before, ending at the wrong end of a Darquethoth torturemaster’s skinning knife. The weird thing was, Lyre hadn’t attended his torture. She never did.
But she’d been at the arena last night for his latest death match. Had she hoped he’d win? Or had she wanted to see him die? She’d looked like she was having fun, in any case.
Gotta love good old family entertainment in Hell. He wondered what the concessions stands served. Probably not popcorn and Red Vines.
The heavy metal lock outside his cell clanked, and the door swung open. He shoved to his feet as the hulking eight-foot tall Ramreel guard moved aside to allow his visitor to enter.
Curiosity veered sharply to rage at the sight of the flaxen-haired fallen angel who stepped inside, her thigh-high leather boots clacking on the floor as she strutted to the middle of the cell.
Flail.
She might have changed her hair color, but the she still reeked of deception. Hatred unlike anything he’d experienced before consumed him, rerouting all rational thought and leaving him with only one goal.
“You.” Dropping his blanket, he charged her. “You bitch.”
He was going to kill her with his bare hands.
He’d wrench her head from her body and impale it on that shard of ice over there, and then he’d—holy fuck!
A red-hot bolt of agony detonated inside his chest, blasting him backward like a rag doll. His spine crunched into the ice-glazed wall, and he crumpled to the floor. The impact shook the massive icicles that hung from the ceiling like monster fangs, and he cursed his impulsive mistake as dozens broke loose and rained down on him.
“Hello, baby,” Flail purred. “It’s been a while.”
“It hasn’t been long enough,” he growled as he sat up, clutching his throbbing chest and wondering where she’d stashed the sledgehammer. “But remind me, how many months has it been since you got me dragged down to Hell?”
Demons had done the actual dragging, but she’d been the one to call them in when he left the safety of Azagoth’s realm, Sheoul-gra, to help Hawkyn’s sister kill a seriously dangerous demon. As a wingless, powerless Unfallen angel, he’d been exposed and vulnerable, and Bael’s minions had done a grab-and-go. He’d been forced to watch helplessly as his friends ran toward him in a futile attempt to save his dumb ass. Twenty-four hours later, he’d morphed into a True