17 Ariuk
Ariuk
I had barely finished soaking in the bath and slipping on a new outfit when I stepped back into the living room and found Nick glaring at a small hole in the wall like it had personally offended him. His phone was pressed to his ear, his jaw tight enough to crack a tooth.
“Why the fuck would you say that to him? You know that would piss him off.” Nick listened for half a second, rolled his eyes, and ended the call before Dante could apparently make things worse.
A crash sounded down the hall hard enough to make me flinch. “What the hell is going on?”
Nick shoved his phone into his pocket. “Apparently the fucking Devil thought it would be helpful to clarify a few things about your placement here with us.”
I frowned. “Which was?”
Another crash came from Luc’s room and Nick grimaced toward the hallway. “He made it sound like you were some kind of fucking experiment because he’s never had an impossibility from Heaven dropped in his lap before.”
“But he doesn’t actually believe that.”
“I know.” Nick dragged a hand down his face. “Dante talks in riddles, Luc heard the worst possible version of it, and then Dante told him he would’ve done the same thing in his position. You can imagine how well that went over.”
Apparently, not well at all. Luc had been in his room for maybe an hour since then, and whatever he was doing in there had already produced enough noise to make me wonder how much furniture he had left.
The bond made it impossible to ignore when something was wrong with either of them, and Luc’s distress had been sitting beneath my ribs ever since I got out of the bath.
Another crash rattled down the hallway and I just sighed. “I’m going in there,” I finally said, staring at Luc’s bedroom door.
His hand closed around my wrist before I could move, though his grip lacked the usual playful insistence. “I wish you wouldn’t. He doesn’t lose control like that. Not usually.”
“If you’re telling me he’s dangerous, I’m assuming I should be terrified,” I said, trying to tug my hand free.
Nick didn’t smile. “I’m saying if he hurt you, even by accident, it would fuck him up worse than whatever Dante already did.”
That softened my irritation, but not enough to make me sit back down. I squeezed Nick’s fingers before pulling away. “And I can handle myself.”
“Ari.” His shoulders sank as he looked toward the hallway. “Please.”
“No. I’m not going to stand here listening to him tear the room apart.”
I crossed the apartment before Nick could stop me and shoved Luc’s door open.
A lamp had been ripped apart near the wall.
One side of the dresser was split open, drawers hanging crooked from the frame, and pieces of wood and glass covered the floor.
His desk chair had somehow ended up on its side near the bed.
I had expected chaos after listening to it from the living room, but seeing it made the difference between Luc and Nick even more obvious.
Every broken piece of furniture seemed chosen, as if he couldn’t stand looking at anything that reminded him he had missed something, failed to see something, let Dante maneuver all three of us while Luc stood there believing he understood the game.
He turned at the sound of the door opening. His eyes were nearly black, his jaw clenched so tightly I could see the muscle jumping along the side of his face. His nails had sharpened into claws, and for the first time since I met him, there was nothing polished about him.
“Ari, get out.”
I stepped inside instead.
“Ari.”
Something tore loose from the wall in Luc’s hand. I barely had enough time to register the movement before he hurled it toward the door, obviously aiming somewhere beside me.
I ducked, but not fast enough. A cord snapped across my cheek, and sharp pain bloomed beneath my eye before something wet slid down my skin. Everything stopped so completely that for a second neither of us seemed to breathe.
The sting itself was strange enough. Pain had always felt distant in Heaven, something I understood more as a concept than an experience, but this was immediate and hot enough to make my eyes water. I touched my cheek and stared at my fingers when I pulled them away.
The blood wasn’t red or black. Brown-black liquid gleamed against my fingertips, almost translucent where it thinned along the ridges of my skin, and my stomach dropped. Whatever Heaven had buried in me wasn’t staying buried anymore. First my wings, and now my blood.
“Fuck.”
Luc crossed the room so quickly I barely saw him move. Both hands cupped my face as he leaned down, every trace of rage gone beneath naked horror. “I’m so fucking sorry. Ari, shit, look at me.”
“I am looking at you.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“I know.” His eyes dropped to the blood on my fingers, guilt tightening his expression all over again. His claws had already started retreating, but the rest of him was still wound painfully tight, like he was bracing for me to shove him away.
I pushed my fingers into his hair, lightly scratching my nails along his scalp the way he had done to me more than once over the last few days.
The darkness in his eyes began to ease. His shoulders lowered by degrees beneath my other hand, and when I traced my thumb over the tense line of his jaw, he finally exhaled.
“Hey,” I murmured.
His forehead dropped against mine for a second before he pulled me into his chest. There wasn’t anything sexual about it. No rush of heat or need to turn being close into something else. He just held me so tightly I could feel his heartbeat hammering against my cheek.
Nick appeared in the doorway behind us and let out a low whistle as he surveyed the room. “Really did a number on the place. Thought I was supposed to be the rough one.”
Luc’s body tightened immediately and I clung harder before he could pull away. “Don’t,” I warned.
Nick raised both hands. “Wasn’t starting anything.”
“You exist. Sometimes that’s enough.”
Luc made a sound against my hair that could have been a growl or a reluctant laugh.
Either way, some of the tension finally left him.
He rocked me slightly without seeming to realize he was doing it, then brushed his thumb beneath the cut with an expression so devastated that anyone watching would have thought he had ripped half my face off instead of leaving a tiny scratch.
“Why’d you lie to Dante?” he asked quietly. “He’s not stupid.”
I tried to lean back, but his arm stayed firm around my waist. “I’m aware of that now.
I think we’re the test. Or I am. Maybe both.
” Luc loosened his hold enough for me to look at him properly.
“He barely asked about either of you. He wanted to know about my feathers, my reactions, what was changing. He didn’t care that I gave him absolutely nothing about your gifts. ”
Luc’s expression hardened again, but this time the anger stayed contained. “He was watching you,” he said.
“That’s what I think.” I lifted my stained fingers between us. “And I don’t think whatever is happening to me is something we can stop.”
Nick finally stepped farther into the room. He caught sight of my fingers and frowned, the humor leaving his face. “What the fuck is that?”
“Apparently blood.”
I held my hand toward him. He took my wrist carefully and tilted my fingers toward the light. “Demons bleed darker than humans, but I’ve never seen that.”
My gaze jumped between him and Luc. “What do impossibilities bleed?”
Nick’s mouth tightened. “There aren’t enough of us for that to be a useful fucking question.”
Well. Fantastic.
Luc brushed his thumb gently over the uninjured side of my face before finally letting me step away. I grabbed my phone from the pocket of my dress and glanced at Dante’s message again. We had already picked apart everything Nick and Luc knew about Zel, and none of it made me feel any better.
I moved closer to Luc as he started collecting the larger pieces of whatever he had destroyed. “What are you not saying?”
His hand stopped over a shard of wood as Nick’s expression shifted.
I pointed between them. “That. Both of you just did the thing.”
“What thing?” Nick asked.
“The thing where you both decide something for me and then pretend there’s nothing to explain.”
Luc straightened slowly, rubbing one hand over the back of his neck. “I don’t think Dante sent you here just because he thought you might be our mate. We know he expected some kind of reaction, but moving you through all seven of us feels bigger than that.”
Nick folded his arms across his chest. “Dante doesn’t play Cupid. Whatever happens with the bonds might be useful to him, but he wouldn’t build this whole fucking deal around getting us laid.”
I had spent days trying to understand what Dante wanted from me, and somehow every answer kept circling back to the same thing.
He knew more than he was saying and kept putting me exactly where he wanted me.
“So I’m being used again.” Luc’s expression softened, but I kept going before he could try to make it sound better.
“Why? What possible reason could Dante have for dragging me through seven demons if the bonds aren’t the point? ”
Neither of them had an answer. The silence gave an older thought room to surface, one buried beneath twenty-eight years of Heaven telling me exactly who Dante was and what he had already tried to do once.
“Is he trying to take over Heaven again?”
Nick’s arms dropped slightly as he glanced toward Luc. “Fuck, I hope not.”
Luc looked around the wreckage of his room, his expression tightening as he set the overturned lamp upright on the dresser. “I don’t know what happened the first time. Dante never talks about it, and most of what everyone believes came from Heaven.”
I frowned. “Everyone knows he challenged God and ended up ruling Hell. How am I supposed to look at that and come away thinking he isn’t evil?”
“Because ruling Hell and being evil aren’t the same thing.
” Luc finally looked at me again. “He manipulates people. He keeps secrets. He’ll bury the truth under enough technicalities to make you want to strangle him.
I’m not defending any of that. But whatever happened between him and Heaven, I don’t think the version you were taught is the whole story. ”
The certainty in his voice shut down the immediate argument sitting on my tongue.
Everything I had learned in Heaven had been built around lines that suddenly weren’t as clean as I remembered them being. “Right.” I rubbed both hands over my face before remembering the blood on one of them and stopping. “So if I’m connected to all seven of you, what happens then?”
Nick’s mouth twitched before he glanced at Luc, and whatever passed between them made both of them start laughing.
I stared at them. “What?”
“Nothing,” Nick said, which obviously meant the exact opposite.
Luc shook his head, still smiling, and it took me another second before the rest of the problem finally clicked into place.
The pull I felt toward Pride and Wrath wouldn’t necessarily stop with them if Luc was right.
Gluttony. Lust. Envy. Greed. Sloth. Seven different demons, seven possible bonds, all of them somehow tangled around me.
I looked between the two assholes still trying not to laugh and pictured seven demons crammed into one apartment. The logistics alone sounded like a nightmare, and that was before I even got to the sex. “Oh.”
Nick’s grin turned downright filthy.
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face did.”
Luc chuckled as he stepped around another pile of broken furniture and came back toward me. His fingers brushed lightly beneath my chin, careful of the cut. “You don’t have to decide how you feel about any of it tonight.”
That was probably for the best. I looked down at Dante’s message again, the words carrying a lot more weight than they had when they first appeared on my screen.
I should have been terrified at the thought of walking into another bond, another demon, another part of myself I didn’t understand yet.
Instead, curiosity kept pushing through everything else.
Heaven would have told me to run from all of it.
I wasn’t in Heaven anymore.