captured your father’s soul, brought it down here, and then traded it up. It has been added to the cattle in Lucifer’s personal demesne.”
Cattle. I choked on my breath, and bile rose up my throat. I covered my mouth with my hand.
“There’s no trading for him, Zoe. There’s no buying him out. Not with Lucifer. Not with our history. As soon as I ask him for this one particular soul, it’ll paint a target on your father’s back. Lucifer will keep him just to spite me. And do not ever underestimate how astute he is—by now I’m sure he’ll know about you as my ‘pet,’ and if I ask him for your father’s soul, he’ll put two and two together and will probably pour acid on him in front of me just to see if I flinch.”
I staggered back, the image of my father screaming in agony as his spiritual skin corroded under acid far too vivid in my mind.
“If his soul were in another demon’s territory,” Azazel continued, his voice low and rough, “I’d have options. Depending on the demon’s rank, I could either sneak in and steal it, or march in there and take it by brute force. I can’t do that with Lucifer. His demesne is the best guarded among all the domains in Hell. Anything I could try would be akin to suicide. There’s no scenario where I would come out of this on top.” His hand flexed around the sword hilt. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to give you false hope before I knew where his soul was, and after I found out—telling you would only hurt you.”
With my hand still covering my mouth, I met his gaze, my entire body trembling.
My father was here, in the same realm as me, and yet he might as well have been in a different dimension. I couldn’t help him. He would suffer, day in and day out, for who knew how long, while I stood by, powerless to do anything.
The irony. The goddamn irony of it all. My estranged father, who’d ruined our family, ended up in Hell, and instead of it making me rejoice for poetic justice, it broke my heart. And here I was in Hell, married to a demon, but instead of it giving me any sort of power to change my father’s fate, all it gave me was a lesson in helpless anguish.
A sound of despair escaped my tightened throat.
Despite all the hurt he’d caused me and my mom, despite years of pain and resentment and broken childhood dreams, the thought of him being tortured shattered something inside me, a small, soft part that had stubbornly resisted calcification under bitter cynicism.
How could I live here knowing he was being ripped apart? There was no way I could ever relax, smile or laugh, with the certainty of his suffering hanging over me like a toxic storm cloud.
I couldn’t shake the image of my father’s soul being tortured, over and over, with acid and hellhounds and fire and a thousand ways I couldn’t even fathom. The cries and wails of the damned souls echoed in my mind, the piercing agony in their voices making me taste bile.
Nausea bubbled in my stomach, boiled up, up, up until I gagged. Convulsing under a violent tremor, I sank to my knees and vomited.
I barely noticed Azazel kneeling beside me, holding my hair back. My guts twisted, bucked, and I puked, over and over, until my throat burned, my stomach ached as if grated to shreds, and nothing came up anymore. Still, I dry-heaved, shivering uncontrollably. Tears ran down my face, and I gasped for air.
Azazel’s arms closed around me, pulled me to him. White-hot anger sparked in my veins. I jerked and tried to get out of his hold. He didn’t let me go. With the kind of unshakable patience that drove my irrational fury only higher, he held me tight as I fought him like a wildcat.
I bucked and writhed, pummeled his chest, angry, so fucking angry, at him, at this fucked-up situation, at this fucking twist of fate that put me in the care of the one demon in Hell who was so high on Lucifer’s shit list that he couldn’t even ask for a single soul. Fury seared me from the inside out, and I screamed, striking out in a mindless rage. My knuckles hurt from the blows, but I kept punching his chest and shoulders…until a whisper of a memory