whimsical bidding. If the circumstances were different, it’d have made him quite likable.
Noise from somewhere behind me drew Lucifer’s gaze. His eyes narrowed, and I dared a glance over my shoulder to see what was going on. My heart stopped, then launched into a wild gallop.
Azazel strode into the hall, flanked by two guards. He spotted me. His eyes widened. A tremor visibly went through him, and for a second, the beacon of his energy inside me pinged with a white-hot emotion.
Zoe, he said in my mind, are you—
His voice cut off like a disconnected phone call. The beacon of his energy faded away, as if muted.
“Ah, Azazel,” Lucifer drawled. “How fortunate of you to join us. It seems like you lost something.” He indicated me. “Or maybe that was deliberate? In the hopes an accident may befall her, to be rid of your unwanted wife?”
I jerked as if slapped. Lucifer’s words pierced something soft and raw inside me, scraped over old, festering wounds like claws, tore them wide open. I sucked in a sharp breath.
No. That wasn’t right. Azazel wouldn’t do that. Lucifer was just trying to needle me—however he knew exactly how to do that, I had no idea, but he was the devil for a reason.
I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. All the things Azazel had done for me, the way he treated me, it had to count for something. He walked back into his own trauma for me, for fuck’s sake. You didn’t do that for someone you wanted to get rid of.
And yet, I couldn’t shake that small, insistent voice in my head whispering that this was before I’d unwittingly humiliated him in front of Lucifer’s entire court and gave them the ammunition to mock him for at least the next century. Azazel had been so hurt after, so withdrawn, the cold edge with which he talked to me chillingly fresh in my mind.
What if my blunder, however much it wasn’t my fault, broke the fragile thing that had grown between us? What if it soured his feelings for me…such as he might have had? He’d never told me if he did. We hadn’t talked about what we felt for each other.
And now…now I feared the tender thread between us frayed, threatening to snap. Resentment wasn’t rational, defied best intentions, and found cracks to slip inside and wedge wide open over time.
While I wrangled with my sobering thoughts, Lucifer spoke once more. “It seems I owe dear Zoe here a debt. I’d hate to have it hanging over my head, so allow me to settle it. I have just the thing, perfect actually—” he pointed at me and Azazel with a smile that was edged with a razor “—for both of you. It will make all parties happy.”
Inwardly, I cringed. Knowing Lucifer, whatever he was about to propose would be a double-edged sword. I pressed my lips together, bracing myself.
“My offer, darling Zoe,” he purred, giving me his undivided attention, “is to annul your marriage to Azazel and send you back home.”
If a freight train had barreled into me, I couldn’t have been more shocked or keeled over. Home.
“You’ll be back in your old life,” Lucifer continued, “with your friends, your job…your family. It will be as if none of this ever happened. No one will remember that you disappeared. People will think you took a long vacation volunteering on a llama farm in Peru, or whatever you kids do these days. And you won’t remember any of this.” He leisurely waved a hand at the entirety of Hell. “No harm done, everything back to normal. A wish come true.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. Didn’t I wish for that? A way out of this nightmare, to go back to my ordinary, perfectly boring life, in a world that was familiar and safe…ish? Compared to Hell, at least. And to see my mom again…talk to her, touch her. My heart ached, and I rubbed over my breastbone.
But was it still? A nightmare, that is. However this started, hadn’t it become something else since then?
Before I could answer that question, Lucifer turned to Azazel, a glint in his eye. “Wouldn’t that be a gift for you as well? To be able to divest yourself of this unbidden burden, to rid yourself of this problem. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted?”
My breath got stuck in my throat. Every aching part of me hovered on the precipice of a great fall, painfully tense.