Chapter 51
Fifty-One
“Who did it?” I asked again, my hands bloody with so much holiness that it burned.
Raphaela shook her head another time, more tears falling from her eyes. Yet she refused to say another word, and I was getting tired of her games. A crowd had formed around us, and people had started chanting to kill the angel. Part of me wanted to do it. I was seconds away from ending her life.
Maybe it would teach Mother a fucking lesson—not to send angels to Hell to do her dirty work anymore. It was overrated and wrong, but she knew exactly how to get what she wanted without getting her hands messy.
That was one of the reasons that I had left when I did.
I grabbed her throat, ready to pull it out, when someone yelled, “Stop!”
And I stopped because the voice sounded familiar. I looked over to my left, and people started to part the way. My eyes widened when I saw her, standing in the middle of the crowd with the Crucifix.
As she held the Crucifix in one hand and Eros’s throat in the other, Tonia’s eyes glowed the color of Heaven’s gates.
I clenched my jaw. Tonia had never fallen from Heaven; her wings were never forcefully cut off; the bitch had never banished her. She was still working for Mother, but this time in Hell.
She was trying to steal Eros away from us and turn him holy, trying to convert Dani with the promise of a relationship with her—true happiness. How disgusting.
She was an angel, doing business in Hell, and she would be the first angel to fall by the hands of Hell’s three most powerful commanders—Dani Asmodeus, Biast Sathanus, and me.
Eros gazed at me, brown eyes so big and sorrowful. He was a goner. He always had been. He had volunteered to come to Hell with me because he loved me. It was never true lust. He had learned that down here.
His wings had still been attached, but his parents ripped them off when he got here. And those wings had been the most sacred things to him.
I shook my head. No matter how much lust controlled him, he was always good. He’d had to ask for Dani’s permission to possess her; he hadn’t just taken it like the rest of Hell would have, if given the chance.
And Raphaela—the one woman I had trusted the most—had used me to get to this point. Pretending to be the third angel to fall from Heaven. I had known she would never ever fall. She was too good for her own goddamn sake, too good for even me.
“You kill Raphaela, and I kill your beloved Eros,” Tonia said.
Eros didn’t move a muscle, and for once, he looked like he was in a deep state of fear. He had probably tried to get out of this, but with the Crucifix pressed against his neck so closely, he would die.
Dani went to lunge at her, but Biast caught her waist and held her back. She shook her head from side to side, tears filling her eyes.
“Let him go!” she yelled, but Tonia stood her ground and refused to move. Dani flailed around some more. “Let him go! Please!”
Eros stared at her like she was the only thing that ever mattered and shook his head, mouthing at her to calm down.
Her freaking out would only hurt us all worse because Tonia was serious.
She would cut Eros’s throat without a second thought.
Eros was a demon in her eyes, and all demons deserved death.
Biast held her tighter as she continued to wriggle in his grip. I took a deep breath, trying to show Tonia that this didn’t affect me in the slightest, but it did. It hurt so fucking bad to see Eros with the cross by his neck—ready to die at any moment.
“Let him go, Tonia,” I said, refusing to show her my fear.
“Let Raphaela go first.”