Chapter 50
Fifty
We spent hours looking around Wrath, asking people if they had seen anyone who might be suspicious, trying to find any sign of the cross. And when it started to get dark above—the sky a maroon color—we went back to the castle and looked down at the fire and pits below.
“Bathroom?” Eros asked Biast, taking a peek at Dani.
Biast rolled his eyes, stuck a thumb into the air, and hiked it back, pointing at the hallway behind him.
“I’ll be back,” Eros said, heading toward the hallways and winking at Dani.
I cleared my throat. “This is not a time to fuck,” I said through clenched teeth.
But Eros was already gone, so I gave Dani a pointed expression so she knew I was serious. I was not about to lose whoever this was to two horny leaders.
We had the fucking Crucifix to deal with right now.
Wrapping my fingers tightly around my glass of blood—because that was the only thing Wrath had—I stared down at the kingdom of fire and shook my head.
Who the fuck had taken it? Nobody seemed out of place.
Everyone was doing what they always did—torturing lost and broken souls.
Nobody had the Crucifix or even anything that looked like it.
My gaze scanned the crowd until it landed on the pathway leading from the portal. Gray ash rained down from the sky, and part of me had to blink a few times … but I swore I had seen Raphaela.
No. I knew I had seen Raphaela.
“What the fuck?” I said under my breath, placing the glass down on the table and hurrying toward the exit of this castle with Dani’s wrist in my grasp.
It was that fucking bitch. She could give me every fucking reason in the book, but there was no reason for her to be in Wrath.
I had given her a choice to choose a kingdom, but she would never choose this one.
She was meeting with someone here. Someone who was trying to steal the Crucifix.
Before she could make it out of the town and to the portal, I sprinted to her and grasped her wrist, pulling her back.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked with so much power that she looked terrified.
She parted her lips. “No-nothing! I just wanted to see if I’d like it here. I-I met with the commander, and I—”
“Cut the shit,” Biast said, fire erupting from his fingertips.
She snapped her head toward him.
“You never fucking met with me. I don’t know who you fuckin’ are.”
Caught in a lie, Raphaela tried to pull away from me, but I just tightened my grip around her wrist. I wrapped another hand around her throat and pushed her toward a torture pit. She squirmed in my grasp, shaking her head back and forth and screaming to the high heavens for me to stop.
But I didn’t.
She had betrayed me.
She had lied to me.
She had hurt my pride.
Shaped like an X, the pit had all kinds of torture devices inside of it. I strapped her wrists to either side of a plank and her ankles to the ones below.
“Where is it?” I asked again, not wanting to do this, but willing to. “Tell me who took it, and I won’t hurt you.”
“You will never get it back, Lucifer,” she said. “I did what I had to do for Mother. I don’t care what you do to me. All this pain is for goodness and glory, to keep the believers—”
I swiped my nails across her stomach and watched her start bleeding out white blood— angel’s blood. She hadn’t fallen from Heaven; she had chosen to come here to distract me. She was still all holy and good.
She screamed out in pain, a tear racing down her cheek. “Hurt me all you want. It will never hurt as bad as your betrayal.”
Again, I swiped my claws across her stomach—deeper this time. Biast stood next to me, his eyes red with wrath and with excitement. I could tell by the way he stared at her that he wanted to hurt her too. But she was all mine.
Mine to hurt. Mine to torture. Mine to destroy.