38. Max
Max
Lucifer came down off the dais, stepped around the wreckage of his own welcome party, and grinned at me.
I just stared at him, still breathing hard, a sanjiegun in each fist.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Sure,” Drakken said, before I could locate a single word. “We’ve worked up an appetite.”
Lucifer chuckled. “Come then,” he said, and snapped his fingers.
Between one blink and the next, the throne room was gone and we stood in a modern kitchen, the kind I’d only ever seen in salvaged magazines. Warm light, firelight. Pale stone counters running the length of two walls, a great black range with six burners, and a wide island with expensive stools.
It smelled of butter, coffee, and bread somewhere close to done.
Drakken wasn’t naked anymore. He’d been put into a robe, black silk with a subtle scale pattern and a collar that stood up like a courtier’s, a garment built for lounging on a chaise. Drakken did not lounge anywhere, ever. He looked down at himself and shrugged.
Better than naked.
The blood and gore were gone from me too. Skin, leathers, hair, all of it, as if I’d never crossed that floor. Never slaughtered anything.
“You can put the sticks away,” Lucifer said, rolling his sleeves to the elbow at the sink. “Nothing in my realm will touch you. Not after the throne room.”
He’d named me heir in front of his whole court, and every knee in it had hit the floor. Drakken flicked his wrist, and the ebony broadsword vanished. I let my sanjieguns flow back up my arm into the armguard.
That didn’t mean we trusted him.
Then the King of Hell tied on an apron and started cracking eggs.
He worked like a man who had done this a thousand times, one-handed cracks against the bowl rim, the whisk going in fast little circles.
Bacon went into one pan and sausages into another.
He built a batter and ladled out pancakes in neat rounds, flipped them without looking, slid tomatoes and mushrooms into the fat, put bread under the grill, and shook the pan with a practiced snap of his wrist that made the whole thing hiss.
Shit, it was the most surreal thing I’d ever witnessed, and I’d recently watched a severed head give me advice.
But I understood it. He was showing me what a father does for his child. He’d chosen the language he thought I’d read.
“Uh.” I cleared my throat. “I’m actually in a rush. I just wanted to ask you…”
“Business later, daughter.” He shook the pan again.
The smell of the sausages hit me and my mouth flooded.
“I have been rehearsing this role for twenty years with nobody to perform it for. Indulge me.” He tipped his chin toward the archway.
“Go explore. Take the tour. This was supposed to be your penthouse in the realm.” A beat, while he turned the bacon. “It still is yours.”
Drakken caught my eye and nodded, and we wandered out.
The room beside the kitchen was an observatory.
The whole outer wall was hard glass, floor to ceiling, and beyond it hung a sky with no stars in it. No clouds either. It was dark and deep and complete, the black of it going up forever, and it was obvious why a fallen star would build a room to look at that from.
The ground made up for the empty sky. We stood high in the palace, high enough that the first level of Hell lay out below us like a map of the world’s first age.
The black plain we’d landed on, the ring of mountains fencing the horizon, the tallest one pouring its slow ropes of lava down into the dark, and everywhere between, the ocean burning from beneath, amber light shifting under the black water in slow tides.
Winged shapes rode the thermals over the peaks, distant as birds.
Prehistory, preserved and darkened.
It was breathtaking, and it broke a seam open in me.
Drakken came to stand beside me at the glass, close enough that his warmth reached me, solid as a wall at my shoulder, and my eyes stung.
I was standing in Hell looking at my father’s kingdom, and I was not alone.
One of them was with me. And because he was here, the other three weren’t, and I missed them so much it had teeth.
Drakken’s hand brushed mine.
I snatched it back on instinct, bracing for the burn.
It didn’t come.
“In my realm,” Lucifer’s voice called from the kitchen, lightly amused, over the sound of a spatula, “no curse or geas operates without my permission.”
Drakken looked at me, the question sitting between us. Then he held out his hand, palm up, waiting.
I took a deep breath, then put mine in his gingerly.
His fingers closed over mine, warm and callused and careful, and nothing burned. Nothing punished me. My whole arm felt lit from within, and I stood there gripping the hand of the man I’d been at war with.
I could have this here. Every touch I’d been starved of, with every one of them, if I stayed.
No.
I shook my head before the thought could put down roots. I would never ask my princes to abandon their people to live in my father’s realm under a starless sky. My place wasn’t here either. My place was with them, with Missy, with every soldier holding the line at a fortress two realms away.
We went on through the penthouse with my fingers laced through Drakken’s, and neither of us let go.
It was the first time he’d ever touched me like this. His thumb moved across my knuckles, and then again, as if testing whether it was real. He held on the whole way, and he didn’t push for anything more, didn’t crowd me, didn’t say a word about it.
The next room stopped me in the doorway.
A nursery.
Pale walls with a mural of a night sky full of stars.
A carved crib with a canopy. A rocking chair.
A shelf of picture books. Toys arranged in a row and never once disturbed, wooden animals, a stuffed rabbit with both ears still perfectly upright.
And along one wall, an open wardrobe of infant clothes, tiny, soft, sorted by size, going from newborn up through what a walking child would wear.
Under them stood shoes. Rows of them, each pair no longer than my thumb to my wrist, waiting.
Nothing decayed here. Twenty years, and not one speck of dust anywhere.
I stood in the doorway of the childhood I never had, and it hollowed me out. There had been a room. My father had built it and kept it, and I’d grown up down a mineshaft instead.
But if I hadn’t, I’d never have met a shifter prince who called me sweetheart, or a vampire who called me Eirath, or a Fae heir who called me his. I wouldn’t have Missy in my life. None of them would exist to me at all.
I held both of those realities at once and couldn’t have said which one hurt worse.
“I was robbed of raising my own daughter,” Lucifer’s voice came down the hall, along with the smell of the food. “My true heir.” A pan clattered onto a trivet. “Come eat, baby girl.”
Drakken and I traded an alarmed look.
Baby girl? Shit.
No way in any of the thirteen floors was I going to call him Daddy.
He wasn’t what the stories had promised. No serpent, no leer, no bargain scratched on a scroll. A man in an apron who’d cried into his own eggs, probably, while we toured his empty nursery. But then, he was also called the greatest deceiver and the finest liar ever to draw breath.