Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
As soon as the words left her mouth, I grabbed her by the throat and pulled her closer to me.
She stared up at me with wide eyes and grasped my wrist, her voice coming out softly. “Lucifer.”
My hand tightened around her, yet I didn’t give in.
Something told me to keep pushing forward, to fuck her, to see if she was all talk or if she was really here as a recently fallen angel.
I didn’t have to check out every fallen angel to make sure they weren’t just a fake, as most of them I didn’t give a fuck about.
But this one … I watched her scramble in my arms … this one I had to check.
I didn’t trust her or Mother.
After pulling her closer to me, I stared down at her and clenched my jaw. “Is this what you want, Raphaela? Because if it’s not, you’re welcome to leave. I don’t need you in my life.”
The words hurt me because I wasn’t like this. I wasn’t like a Wrath. I didn’t have to make people feel bad because they were lesser than me. Everyone already knew it. Heavens, I knew it.
So, I pushed her down onto the bed and did what I had seen Eros do hundreds and hundreds of times with women he didn’t want to be with, but had to in order to please his parents.
“Take your clothes off,” I said.
Raphaela scurried up the bed, her eyes wide, until she reached the headboard.
I crawled up onto the bed with her, parting her legs to sneak myself between them. “I said to take them off.”
She brushed her fingers down my chest, and I nearly shivered.
“You take them off of me,” she said. “Just like you used to.” Though her voice was strong, her eyes showed me that she was hesitant.
After a couple of moments, I snatched her pants and ripped them down her legs, exposing her bare pussy. Then I popped every single one of the buttons on her shirt and tore it off her. She lay back in my bed, completely naked, her body unchanged from the last time I had seen it.
“Is that what you wanted? Is this what you’ve been wanting? Me?” I asked.
She nodded her head and reached for me, but I pushed her away.
“Show me how much you want it.”
I sat back on the bed and waited for her to do something—anything—to prove to me that this wasn’t fake. And then she pulled her legs apart, showing me her glistening pussy, and pushed her hand between her legs. But when she touched herself for me, all I could imagine was Dani.
I could see Dani’s big hazel eyes staring up at me, tinted with just a smidgen of darkness.
I could see Dani’s tongue glide against her fangs as I watched her.
I could smell the sweet scent of vanilla drifting through my nose.
My cock got hard, the image of me pounding into Dani from behind while Eros watched filling my mind.
“Lucifer,” Raphaela whispered.
My vision faded back to Raphaela, her petite, naked body in my bed, the moonlight making her breasts glow, her eyes so dull—unlike her bright ones in Heaven.
For the second time today, she had proven that this was really her. That this was really Raphaela without playing any tricks on me. I climbed closer to her, my hard-on disappearing. While I had thought so much about her recently, while I sometimes ached to have her back, this felt wrong.
And I wasn’t one to say that lightly. I never backed down from something like this.
I grabbed her hips, pulling her closer to me, hoping that touching her would get me hard.
But … it didn’t. I couldn’t stop picturing Dani and Eros and the last night I had spent with them.
We had just started something I had been looking forward to for thousands and thousands of years, and … this wasn’t right.
“Come on, Lucifer,” Raphaela said. “Fuck me already.”
I clenched my jaw and swallowed hard, pressing a hand to my pants. They had been so angry when they left, and Eros had sounded so sad on the phone. Maybe it was guilt that was eating him alive … I didn’t know.
Raphaela took control and placed a hand on my pants, stroking me through them. “You see your wife lying in your bed, and you can’t get hard?” she asked me. “You always used to be so prideful of your manhood, and now … nothing?”
Though she said it so innocently, I could hear the annoyance in her voice. She was pushing me, and she knew it too. A heap of shame washed over me—first from betraying Eros and Dani and now from her words. So much shame, and I remembered that this was one of the reasons I had left her.
If I forgot about Eros and Heaven and my pride, I had left Raphaela because I never felt good enough for her. She was always complaining about me during my later years, always trying to make me good.
But I wasn’t good, great, or gracious.
I was Lucifer, king of the Underworld.
“Out,” I said to her, moving off the bed and grabbing my glass of Vemon. “We’ll plan your fallen angel party for tomorrow night. Be ready.”
“But—”
“Don’t make me say it again, Raphaela. Get out.”