Chapter Thirty-Nine Charlotte
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Charlotte
The following days pass in a blur, the dates on my iPhone calendar drawing closer and closer to the Met Gala. Not even what Greed told me can ruin it for me. Even if it’s true, that’s not the whole picture between Lucifer and me.
Or at least, that’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.
I’m not certain I’d have the courage to face each morning if I didn’t.
We’re two days out from the event and the city is already buzzing with energy. The fall leaves on the trees in Madison Square Park and along Fifth Avenue create a feeling of abundance, even as an autumn chill fills the air. It’s Friday, and I’m due for the final fitting of my Gala costume at Xzander’s studio this afternoon. Evie’s going to accompany me.
She reached out a few days ago, clearly trying to strike up an advantageous media friendship, and Imani advised me to go ahead and take her up on her offer.
Before I made my first appearance on Lucifer’s arm, she was the city’s favorite it-girl, a known “virgin” and celebrity good girl kept on her daddy’s tight leash, and, according to Imani, she wasn’t lying. Her father really is Russian Mafia.
Which means Evie holds more than a little bit of power, especially down in Brighton Beach. I could use a few powerful friends like her.
Plus, she’s not all that bad, really.
Once you get used to the whole dreamy, sunshine persona. I still wonder whether it’s legit or if it’s all for show ...
My phone pings, and I glance down from the style chair I’m sitting in and groan. “Ugh. I thought I’d already put it on silent.”
Evie makes an adorable little hmmm sound as she acknowledges me. “Change your settings so that it doesn’t start your ringtone again after so many calls,” she recommends, waving a manicured hand at me as she searches through one of the many racks of clothing that fill Xzander’s upstairs studio. “That’s what I do when my father and brother won’t stop calling me.”
Her brother is set to take over her father’s place soon, or so I’ve gathered from her doublespeak.
“I would, but I’m trying to keep tabs on what the other Originals are up to.”
Especially Greed.
I glance down at my phone, but this particular notification isn’t about one of Lucifer’s siblings.
It’s about me.
Curious, I click on it, opening the article.
Immediately, my stomach feels like it drops to my feet.
Sensing the sudden shift in the atmosphere, I hear the sound of Evie’s heels click across the studio’s concrete floor toward me.
Xzander ducked outside only a few moments ago to take a call, leaving us alone.
“What’s wrong?” she says, her normally breathy voice taking a stronger tone than usual as she glances over my shoulder at the screen.
She stares down at the headline.
Charlotte Bellefleur or Charlotte Davis? Queen of the damned already married!
“Oh,” Evie whispers. “Well, that’s unfortunate.” She shrugs like it’s no big deal, heading back toward the rack she was examining. “Though ‘queen of the damned’ has a nice ring to it, even if there was that awful old vampire movie.” She wrinkles her nose.
“I ... think I’m going to be sick.”
“Hair back, sweetie. Aim away from the costumes,” she calls over her shoulder, as I lurch forward, retching the contents of my stomach onto the floor.
A moment later, when I’ve recovered, I turn to find Evie taking selfies.
“Oh, don’t worry, I didn’t position you in the background or anything.” She says it like that’s supposed to reassure me.
As if the whole story I just created with Lucifer didn’t just bottom out from underneath me. As if my old life hasn’t finally caught up with me.
“How do you do that?” I ask.
She quirks her head at me, smiling adorably. “Take such perfect selfies?”
I shake my head. “No, compartmentalize that way. Smile like the whole world isn’t burning and I’m not vomiting in the corner.”
Her expression fades then, and she steps toward me, careful to tiptoe near where I vomited like she’s afraid of getting her strappy Balenciaga heels dirty.
“Let me give you a bit of advice about living in our world.” She places her hands on my shoulders, turning me so that I’m forced to look at her.
She has the same stunning features as her mother, who, based on my Google image searching, was a famous Moroccan model, with a soft jawline, high cheekbones, wide brown eyes, and long lashes that would make even the most confident woman green with envy.
I’ll never be a permanent fixture in this glittering fairy tale like she is, and Evie will always be infinitely prettier than I’ll ever be, thanks in part to the life of luxury she leads, but despite her financially privileged existence, underneath the glamour, I think ... she might be just as terrified as me.
And she’s much too kind for the company she keeps.
“Listen, there’s always going to be some scandal or somebody who hates you or someone who wants to see you taken down a peg, or even killed, for supposedly screwing their boyfriend.” She shrugs like she’s speaking from experience. “Whether it’s the media, Lucifer, his family. Hell, even me. But what you can’t do is try to hide from it or make yourself small, because if you do, then you let them win.”
“So, what do I do?” I ask, eyes searching her face for answers.
“You hold up your head like you’re a motherfucking queen.” She pinches my cheek, scrunching her nose in a way that’s supposed to be affectionate as she says in her breathy, childlike voice, “Now go get your man and give him a good enough blow job he’ll take care of it for you. Sometimes all you can do to not scream is keep moving. Or get on your knees, in this case.”
Keep moving.
I nod. I think I can do that.
I take Evie’s advice, for what it’s worth.
She may not be a sage, but she no doubt has more experience with this kind of thing than me, considering she grew up in the public eye, and I ... think she might be a lot smarter than she appears to be. She’d have to be, to not only survive but thrive while being kept under the thumb of a violent man like her father. Her situation is all too familiar to me.
But as I grab my purse, muttering my hurried goodbyes to her as I rush from Xzander’s studio, I see it. The look in her eyes she spoke about when we met that first evening.
Like I’m desperate for someone to love me.
Both in the reflection of the Town Car’s tinted windows as I climb inside, and in the haunted look she gives me as she watches me leave.
I arrive at the penthouse twenty minutes later, not even sure if Lucifer will be there or in a meeting. His work schedule is kind of insane. But the paparazzi that stalk us constantly have practically taken up permanent residence outside Apollyon headquarters, and now is not the time I want to see them.
Not until this whole thing blows over, anyway.
If, I remind myself. If this whole thing blows over ...
Lucifer will no doubt be furious with me.
Keep moving. Or get on your knees. Evie’s voice comes back to me.
In this case, it’s not half-bad advice, actually.
To my surprise I’m in luck, and I find him in the wine cellar in a deep discussion in fluent Italian with his sommelier. Lucifer and the other Originals apparently speak every language known to man, and then some, considering the Angelic tongue I heard him singing in the other day. When I rush into the cellar, probably still a little green, he pauses midsentence, looking at me. He scans my face and then the rest of me, from head to toe, clearly recognizing something’s wrong, before he waves the sommelier away.
“Charlotte,” he says, turning to fully face me. “I wasn’t expecting you back for another few hours.”
I’ve practically been living in the penthouse with him these days.
Ever since the night he played for me. Made love to me.
I haven’t been to my own apartment in over a week. Jax has been texting me.
“Have you ... seen the news today?” I ask slowly. Like if I slow the pace of the words, that’ll somehow soften the blow.
He quirks a brow. “I don’t make a particular habit of it. Why? Is there something I should see?”
“No,” I say quickly, shaking my head.
Too quickly, based on the lift of his brow and how his eyes narrow on me.
I start to pace, picking at my fingernails as I refuse to look at him. “It’s just ... there’s something about my past that I ... need to tell you.” I chance a glimpse toward him.
He places his hands in his pockets. “Well, go on, then,” he says, encouraging me. Like it’s no big thing.
Like I’m not about to destroy everything we have in a single sentence.
My mouth feels so dry I stutter over the words. “I’m ... already married,” I manage to choke out.
I close my eyes, bracing for the impact of his rage the moment the words leave me.
But it . . . never comes.
I peek one eye open.
Lucifer tilts his head at me curiously, sighing a little, as he says, “Oh, that.”
“You knew?” I practically screech, my voice echoing through the narrow walls of the cellar. “You knew and you didn’t tell me?”
Lucifer returns the bottle he and the sommelier were discussing to the wine rack. “I didn’t find it to be of any particular relevance, considering it’s my bed you’re sleeping in each night. I supposed you would tell me. When you were ready, that is.”
“I’m ... not ready. Not in the slightest.” I shake my head.
“All right,” he says.
My thoughts race. Heat floods my face, and the desire to flee is nearly overwhelming. Why is he being so ... so reasonable about this? He has no idea how pissed off that makes me. The guilt and self-loathing have been eating away at me for weeks.
Or maybe he does know, based on how he’s smirking at me.
“You knew,” I repeat again, stabbing an accusatory finger at him as my muscles start to quiver. “You knew and you didn’t say anything.”
He examines another one of the bottles on the rack, blowing a bit of dust off its surface. “Neither did you, but you don’t see me making any hasty accusations now, do you, Charlotte?” He lifts a brow at me as if to say See? I’m learning.
I can be whatever you like, Charlotte. His words come back to me.
Clearly, he’s taken that to heart.
“You’re not ... I mean, you’re not—”
“Angry?” he finishes for me.
I nod helplessly.
He grins at me, closing the distance between us before he pulls me into his arms. I collapse into him, staring up into his face like I’m broken in two. He’s so beautiful that sometimes it feels like he uses it as a weapon against me.
“Well, whoever your former husband is to you, little dove,” he says, “honestly, I feel bloody bad for the man, considering he’ll no doubt be compared to me.”
The confident way he says it is so ... ridiculously narcissistic I can’t help but want to kiss him while at the same time, I want to scream.
Instead, I throw my arms around his neck, burying my face deeper into his chest. He allows me to stay there for a moment, silent and still, burrowed safely into him as I slowly allow the relief to seep through me. When I finally come up for air, he tilts my chin toward him, and I start to kiss him. Over and over again.
Anywhere and everywhere I can reach.
“Did I say something particularly arousing?” He smirks like he’s the cat that’s just caught the canary, one he didn’t even know he was on the hunt for.
“No.” I swat at him, tugging a little at the base of his hair. “Now, shut up and kiss me, you fool.”
“Pushy, pushy,” he teases.
We end up naked on the cellar table, and then in his bedroom sometime later, as he finishes aftercare for me, before he finally whispers, “So, are you going to confess your sins to me now, Charlotte?”
I sit up in bed, taking his hand in mine as I say, “You really want to know my greatest sin? The worst thing I’ve ever done?”
Amber lights in his eyes. Though I’m not sure if he means for it to.
“Desperately,” he whispers.
“When I was sixteen, my father decided I was going to be married. To a man named Mark, who was nearly a decade older than me.”
Lucifer lets out a serpentine hiss, his eyes narrowing into snakelike slits.
I place a soft finger to his lips. “Shh. Let me finish, please.”
He stills, molars clenched, though he nods reluctantly, capitulating as he gives me the space to tell my story.
“I ... managed to convince my father to hold off on the wedding—for the negative press it’d create—until I was in my twenties, but that was always what he had planned for me. Marriage and babies. Mark was an up-and-coming deacon in one of our sister churches, and marrying him would form a sort of bridge between our congregations.”
I trace small circles with my finger over the palm of his hand, unable to look at him. “For a long time, I viewed the marriage as a sort of escape, I guess. I wanted to get out of my father’s house so desperately, even if I wasn’t ready for the idea of being a wife and everything that comes with it.” I grip Lucifer’s hand, and he goes so still that for a moment I think I can hear my own heartbeat. “But it wasn’t even a full day after I married him that I realized my father would never choose a nice Christian man for me. Instead, he’d chosen someone just like him. Only worse.”
Lucifer’s lip curls as he lifts onto his elbows beside me, amber eyes still watching me. The calm before the firestorm.
“I was only with him a few weeks before I ... couldn’t do it anymore. Couldn’t be who my father wanted me to be. Live the life he’d chosen for me. So, I ... ran.”
“What caused you to run, Charlotte?” Lucifer’s voice is inhuman.
Fueled with a righteous fury.
For me.
Because someone hurt me.
“He ... mentioned something at dinner with his family one night, about ... about me getting pregnant shortly, now that we were married. That’s the goal in evangelical marriages, to ... to show your devotion to God by being fruitful. You know, the whole ‘go forth and multiply’ thing? And I ...” I struggle to breathe at the weight of the memory that presses down onto my chest. “I just imagined what it’d be like to have a little girl with him. A little girl who looked so much like me, and I ... couldn’t stand the thought that she’d be forced to suffer the same abuse that I had. So, I ran. I snuck out of his house in the middle of the night, and I ran into the forest, where the shadows waited for me.” I glance toward Lucifer, wondering if he could possibly know the role those shadows have now taken on in my dreams.
Prince of Darkness. Prince of wicked deeds.
And now . . .
My vicious protector, it seems.
“I stole the key to our church from his office and I went there while he was asleep. I stole all the offering money from that week before I came here. It wasn’t a lot. Not compared to the bank accounts most megachurches keep, anyway, but I ... still felt like I was wrong for it. Like I was stealing from God. Even though it was only a fraction of the reparations my father would have to pay if he ...” I look toward him. “If he ever admitted what he and the church did to me. To me and so many other women.”
Lucifer remains quiet for a beat before he says, “He’d forgive you, you know. My Father. He may be a right bloody arse when it comes to me, but in this, he’d support you. It’s exactly the sort of thing he wouldn’t blink an eye over.”
I give him a small smile. I know he means for it to comfort me, and I don’t think he could ever know how much those words mean to me, even if I don’t fully believe him.
Not even Lucifer can speak on God’s behalf.
His guess is better than mine, but even he can’t know for certain what his Father wants. Nor can anyone else, really. Especially these days.
Humans are just guessing.
I shake my head, glancing up toward the penthouse’s ceiling. Like God might somehow still be up there. “I broke my vows to my husband. I stole from the church. I—”
“My Father doesn’t care about any of those things.” He says it with such conviction that for a moment, I can’t help but want to believe him. “Not so long as you love Him. More than you love me.” At that, he smirks, like he suspects that’s no longer true for me, but the hurt in his eyes undermines it. “That’s His gift to you, after all. Eternal salvation, should you deserve it. Though He ... never offered the same for me or my siblings. Not until now, anyway. All while He sits back and watches this little competition He’s created.”
“Lucifer, I—”
“I will take care of this for you, Charlotte,” he says, kissing me. Like that’s the end of our discussion. “Have a little faith in me.”
I open my mouth, but I stop myself as soon as he adds, “Please.” The words are a tortured plea. “He certainly never did.”
The emotion in the back of my throat makes it hard to swallow.
“Okay.” I nod. “Okay.”
Lucifer leaves me there, alone in his bed, smiling until his face shines like he’s just accomplished some massive feat. He doesn’t return until a few hours later, and I end up dozing almost the entire time he’s gone. Not wanting to wake until he’s there with me.
I don’t want to face the world or the endless questions from the media that I know are coming. The looks from the staff. From the employees at Apollyon.
Though none of them matter to me.
The only person that matters has already forgiven me.
Even though it’s him that the truth likely hurt the most.
I smile to myself where I lie snuggled in Lucifer’s bedsheets. I’d never dare tell him this, but I ... can’t help but think there might be a little more of his Father in him than he’d like there to be.
Lucifer returns to me sometime later, gently sitting on the side of the bed like he’s trying to be careful not to wake me. He kisses me and somehow must sense I’m awake, even though my eyes are closed. “It’s done,” he whispers to me. “I’ve taken care of everything.”
Though I don’t know exactly what that means.
It isn’t until I wake the following morning and see the hastily signed, court-ordered divorce certificate on the nightstand, the one document that officially sets me free, that I turn to his side of the bed to thank him.
Only to find he’s already gone.