45. Max
Max
We returned to my penthouse, leaving the wreck of the bridge behind, and the first thing Drakken did, after every hot and dirty thing we’d just done in front of an audience, was raid the kitchen.
He rolled up his sleeves and set a pan on the heat, and I took a stool at the island, fully sated, and watched the dragon general work.
Shame he wasn’t doing it naked. I’d have given an arm for that. But then we’d have ended up in the sheets and never made it out of the bed, and after the rite and what our powers had done to that bridge, I was starving.
We’d both changed into travel clothes. Eat, then fly. Ten hours if we didn’t stop, and part of me sat there content while the rest of me was already home with Aelindor and Caspian and Nikolai.
Don’t let anything go wrong. Please. Please.
The smell dragged me back. Steak seared hard and fast, potatoes crisping in the fat, eggs going in last and basted until they were glossy.
“I didn’t know you could cook,” I said, studying that harsh male beauty that never failed to take my breath away.
“I’m not a barbarian, Spartan.” His mouth tipped up. “Even my dragon wants his meat seasoned. Medium rare, or he sulks.”
A low rumble rolled out of his chest in protest. His dragon was listening in, and I laughed.
This was nice. None of the after-sex awkwardness I’d pictured and worried over had turned up at all.
“I learned to cook when I was nine.” He turned from the pan and seasoned the mushrooms. “It relaxes me.”
A cold knot formed at the back of my throat. Nine. I’d been down the shaft since I was eight, and he’d been about that same age when my birth mother took his father’s head on that platform, and then his mother’s.
I was grateful he’d had Aelindor after that.
“All of us can cook except Nikolai,” Drakken said, and it took some of the weight out of the room.
Nikolai had fed me more times than I could count, sending his aides across the base with the comfort food his own chef prepared, all the way to his penthouse. For me.
“I’ve never heard of a vampire chef,” I said. “Maybe the taste buds aren’t there. You ever met a vegetarian vampire?”
I’d made a joke. Look at me.
One of Caspian’s came up behind it, uninvited, the one Bryn and I had howled over in the officers’ club.
A vampire, a shifter, and a dragon walk into a bar.
The bartender asks what they’ll have. The vampire says, “A glass of the finest blood.” The shifter says, “The biggest steak, rare.” The dragon says, “I’ll have a small salad.
” The other two stare at him. He shrugs and says, “My nutritionist says I need to watch my temper.”
Drakken hadn’t been amused that night in the officers’ club. He’d crossed the whole room to put an end to my fun.
My smile went out with the thought.
No more mischief with Bryn. Not ever.
“Caspian’s cooking isn’t what you’d call refined,” Drakken went on. “Barbecue man. Throws everything on a grill and shouts for more meat. Aelindor, though. Aelindor understands cuisine.”
The air shifted behind us, and we both turned to the entryway.
My father stood there watching us, approval plain on his face. A male who could protect his daughter was the minimum entry requirement. A mate who fed her afterward was worth a nod.
“Daughter, come,” he said, and walked into the observatory.
I followed and sat across from him, a crystal coffee table between us, a starless sky above us, and the dark version of prehistory outside the glass walls.
He knew we were flying out after this. He wanted a farewell, and I’d give him the time.
“You sure the heirs are the ones you really want?”
Straight for the throat. No small talk.
It had never been a question for me.
Aelindor had broken his own rules and come for me with an army. Caspian had walked away from his playboy life and hadn’t looked at another woman since the day he met me. Nikolai called me his eternal sunshine and meant every syllable of it.
And Drakken had shown me on that bridge, in front of a whole realm, exactly how much he wanted me. Heat climbed my face at the memory.
In the kitchen, the sound of the pan stopped. Drakken was listening, holding his breath.
“Yes,” I said, sweet and steady. “They’re mine. They’re my everything.”
“Then all is well.” My father settled back. “And you chose well, daughter. Excellent move, gathering that much power around you.”
I gaped at him.
“The heirs are top players in the mortal world, and every one of you comes out stronger once you’ve taken the other three. You’ll need all of it when you face your mother.”
I made myself ask, “What’s the White Witch’s weakness?”
“You,” he said. “And she’s stronger now than she was when I broke out of her cage. Now that she knows where you are, she’ll come for you with everything she has. You’d be safest here. But you won’t stay, and I won’t waste breath asking.”
His gaze dropped to the pendant at my chest.
“Hecate knows a little about everything and a great deal about blood magic. Her mind work is stronger than Xander’s. But as long as you wear the Hellgold, she can’t get inside your head.”
Drakken came in with a mug of coffee for me and a glass of water with ice and lime for my father, set them down and went back to the kitchen. Lucifer nodded his thanks and drank his iced water.
“We’re done with her for today.” He squeezed the lime into his water. “You have to go soon. Three mates left to claim, and a war standing on your doorstep.” A breath went out of him. “Your road only gets harder from here.”
“Nothing worth having ever is.” I lifted my chin. “And I’m not afraid of hard work.”
“Of course not.” He chuckled. “You’re my daughter.”
“Things always get worse before they get better.” Drakken came back with the whole breakfast and laid the dishes out, steam coming off them.
“Your darkest hours are ahead of you,” Lucifer said, like a man reading off my charts. He probably had.
“I’m no stranger to the dark. I was down the deep shaft from the age of eight, and I dug rock for twelve years until I got myself out.”
Regret crossed my father’s face, sorrow behind it.
I was learning to read him. He’d watched suffering on a scale I couldn’t hold in my head, had caused it, priced it, and billions of tormented souls went into his engine as fuel without ever costing him a blink.
But a decade of one girl in the dark, his daughter, and the oldest face in creation had just flinched.
His feelings weren’t smaller than any human father’s.
“If I could take away your suffering, I would,” he said.
“I wasn’t bitching,” I said. “I’m just saying I came from tough material.”
“You came from me,” he said.
Pride burned in his eyes like stars, and I caught the thing I’d been misreading since the throne room. I’d taken them for obsidian with light in them. They weren’t. Midnight sapphire, dark until the light found them.
Like mine.
Neither of my birth parents was nice. Evil even, by every book ever written upstairs, and nothing was going to rewrite that. I’d been sold by a mother and hunted by a brother.
But my father was the one who never sold me out. He’d protected me.
“There are a great many forces at play,” he continued. “Over the eons I’ve learned not to leave my fingerprints on anything I actually care about. Everything I touch ripples, and nothing good has ever come of it. I have enemies. The worst of them is Archangel Gabriel.”
Every pleasant thing went out of his voice.
“Leader of Heaven’s host now. A creature of extremely tidy convictions.”
“This Gabriel.” Drakken plated my food and slid it across. “Does he know about Max?”
“He’s known since the hour she was born.”
The observatory went quiet. Below the glass, the burning sea turned its slow amber tides.
“Heaven keeps a close eye on my house, but Heaven can’t see through Hell. The surface is another matter. Up there I sneeze and Gabriel has the report inside the hour.”
“He hasn’t come after her yet.” Drakken’s eyes had gone predatory.
“He has no cause, so long as I keep my hand out of my daughter’s war.
” Lucifer let the ice settle in his glass.
“But make no mistake. His eyes are on her. Gabriel doesn’t care about my other children.
Rhemus could burn a continent tomorrow and Gabriel would file it and go to lunch.
A named heir, though. An old god’s blood on one side and mine on the other. ”
He held my gaze.
“Every eye in the high places turned to you the day you walked out of that mine and stopped being shrouded by my metal. That’s why I put you down there and never once looked in your direction. You’d have been the center of that target before you could crawl.”
And as an infant, I wouldn’t have stood a chance.
My mother had wanted a weapon. My brother had wanted a womb. Heaven had kept a file on me since before I could hold up my own head.
The same cold went through me that had come up in the kitchen when he told me Xander’s name.
“I was once the brightest star and the most powerful being in creation,” Lucifer said, without any weight on it at all.
“What’s left of me is still the strongest thing in this realm by a wide margin, and I still had to send my heir away to keep her breathing.
That’s how balance works. It always collects.
” He drank. “I learned not to tempt the Fates. Doesn’t mean I can’t lean on an outcome. ”
I cut the steak and ate it. Nothing makes a miner lose her appetite, not danger and not revelation. Beside me, Drakken worked through his own plate with that calculating light in his cold gray eyes, laying a new piece down on a board that already had too many on it.
“Commanding my army sits within the rights of my heir,” Lucifer said.
“Hold it as a last resort, daughter. I mean last. The hour you raise Hell’s legions on the surface, you start a fresh war between Heaven and Hell, and this time they have their excuse to come for my heir directly.
Gabriel’s been waiting on that excuse since the day your birth went into the record. ”
Drakken snarled. “We’ll deal with this angel and his horde if he ever comes at my mate.”