CHAPTER 1
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IT WAS COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE, but all Bex could think about as she and Adrian climbed the steps out of the Hells was the feel of his work-roughened hand where it wrapped around hers.
Going up to scout the situation in Heaven had been her idea, but as they left the war demons’ tower and started up the long, enclosed spiral staircase that led to the final door, her feet moved slower and slower.
It wasn’t that she was afraid—she was actually more convinced than ever that they could do this—it was just…
“Bex?”
She raised her head to see Adrian looking at her, his mirrored eyes glowing in the dim light like torches.
That should’ve freaked her out, but not even Gilgamesh’s prince eyes could make Adrian look like anything other than Adrian, and Bex’s pace grew even slower.
She was practically standing still when Adrian finally turned to face her with a huff.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, placing a hand on Boston’s arched back to keep his clearly impatient familiar from blurting out something insulting.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Bex replied, looking up the torchlit spiral stair behind him. “That’s the problem. We still don’t know what Gilgamesh is up to, but I know we’re going to be neck-deep in trouble again the moment we step outside, and I…”
Her voice trailed off, but Adrian didn’t say a word. He just stood there, watching her patiently as Bex slumped against the sin-stained black stone wall with a sigh.
“I don’t want to jump back into that mess again so soon, you know?” she admitted in a tiny voice. “We just freed all of demonkind from the Hells. This is the biggest victory I’ve ever won. The biggest any version of me has won, and it feels like we’re blowing right by it.”
That was the most selfish thing Bex could bring herself to say out loud, but it was only the tip of the iceberg.
It’d been so easy to keep rolling when the thrill of beating the Queen of War was still pumping through her veins.
Now that it was just her and Adrian on the stairs, though, Bex was discovering that the closer they got to Heaven, the less she wanted to let go of this moment.
This rare, beautiful fragment in time when she wasn’t fighting or burning or being stabbed.
When no one was looking to her for orders or depending on her to save them.
It felt like something precious, a treasure to be savored, but Bex couldn’t stop to enjoy it.
The battle wasn’t over. Everyone was still depending on her.
She needed to stop being selfish and keep moving, but when she shoved herself off the wall to keep walking, Adrian reached out and pulled her into a hug.
“It’s okay,” he whispered, squeezing her close with his arms while his clever fingers worked her hair out of the wet, bedraggled ponytail she hadn’t even realized was pulling on her head. “It’s okay, Bex.”
As always, he didn’t say what was okay, and, as always, it didn’t matter. Her subjects needed her to be strong, but Adrian wasn’t a demon. He didn’t need her to hold him up, which meant she was free to break down.
Bex did so with a sob so hard that even she jumped.
The ugly sound was both mortifying and terribly timed, but Bex had nothing left to stop it.
It’d been a long, hard push even before they’d left for the Hells, and she was so tired.
Tired of fighting, tired of being responsible, tired of forcing herself to be brave.
The moment they stepped into Heaven, she’d have to do it all again, but they weren’t there yet.
They were hidden in a dark stairwell where no one could see.
Even Boston had hopped off his witch’s shoulder to give them some privacy, which made it dangerously easy for Bex to pretend it was just her and Adrian.
That thin pretense was all her body needed.
Her demons were just a few spirals down in the Hell of War, so she couldn’t bawl like she really wanted to, but she was still a mess.
Adrian had to be disgusted, but when Bex tried to move away, he pulled her back, pressing her face against his shoulder as she cried and cried and cried.
“Sorry,” she whispered when the storm finally passed. “I’m always doing this to you.”
“I’m glad,” he insisted, petting her loose hair. “It makes me feel special to be the one you cry on.”
“Well, I hate it,” she muttered, scrubbing her puffy face. “What kind of queen cries after she wins?”
“One that’s not a robot,” he replied, bending down to press a kiss against the top of her forehead where her horns used to be.
“Winning can be as hard as losing sometimes. Just because you came out on top doesn’t mean the fight wasn’t brutal, or that you didn’t get hurt.
You’ve been waging this war for your entire life.
That’s a lot of damage to carry, so I think it’s a good sign that you can still cry. It means you’re healthy.”
Bex thought it meant she was a weepy embarrassment, but while her cheeks were burning with shame, she did feel a lot better.
“Okay,” she said, pulling herself straight again. “Let’s do this.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “We don’t have to move just yet.”
“I’ve already wasted enough of our advantage,” Bex insisted, finger-combing her hair back into a fresh ponytail that she fixed in place with one of the spare hair ties she’d stashed in the back pocket of her black fatigues.
“Gilgamesh is probably scrambling his troops as we speak. If we want to take a look at the battlefield before it gets swamped, we’ve got to go.
Besides, if I cry anymore, I’ll dehydrate myself. ”
Adrian’s shoulder was damp enough already.
Thank Ishtar he always wore black, or her ashy tears would’ve ruined his clothes.
It was pathetic how much she liked knowing that she could cry on him without leaving a trace, but Bex was used to her heart being an idiot by this point, so she rolled with it, grabbing his hand so they could run together up the staircase’s final spiral.
Boston was already waiting when they got there, pawing at the bottom of yet another set of massive sin-iron doors.
It was the biggest, heaviest, most ornamented doorway Bex had seen yet, which she took as a sign that they were on the right track.
Gilgamesh had always been a sucker for grandeur, and those definitely looked like the gates of Hell.
“Finally,” Boston said, looking over his shoulder with a lash of his tail. “I’m not sure if the doors are locked or just heavy, but I can’t get them to budge.”
“Have you heard anything from outside?” Adrian asked as he crouched beside his cat.
“Not a peep,” Boston reported, leaning down to push his nose against the perfectly fitted seam where the giant doors met the floor. “I haven’t smelled anything, either, though that could be because the doors are so tightly sealed. They were meant to keep the Hells out of Heaven, after all.”
“Let me give it a try,” Bex said, pressing her hands flat against the cold, ornately carved metal. “Um, you might want to give me some distance.”
Boston leaped out of the way at once, scrambling up the front of Adrian’s coat to his damp shoulder like a fluffy black squirrel. When Bex was confident she wouldn’t have to worry about singeing anyone’s fur, she closed her eyes and called her fire.
As always since she’d reignited during her flight with the princess version of herself, the flames came over her in a rush.
That was normally a good thing, but Bex was only a few minutes off the blinding-white, cutting-torch burn that had taken down the Queen of War.
Her arms started shaking the moment the fire engulfed them, but she’d wasted too much time being weak already, so she forced herself to push through, silently reciting all the things Gilgamesh had done to her people to stoke the flames of her anger higher and higher, hotter and hotter.
She was closing in on the sin-iron melting point when Adrian said, “Hit it here.”
Bex turned in alarm to see him standing way too close.
She was pretty good with her fire these days, but one mistake was all it would take to burn him to a crisp.
Adrian had to know that, but either he was very good at hiding his nerves or he trusted her to an insane degree, because he’d planted his hands less than an inch away from her flaming ones without a trace of fear.
“There’s a smaller door hidden inside the big ones,” he explained, running his fingers over a crease in the sin iron that Bex had assumed was just part of the decoration. “I saw the war demons using it when I was here earlier. It might be easier to open.”
Bex nodded but waited until Adrian stepped back to lean in for a look.
Sure enough, when she got her face right next to the metal, she spotted a hidden seam exactly where Adrian had put his fingers.
The rectangle it made was still pretty big for a door but much smaller than the rest of the massive gate and sealed only lightly with a few pins at the corners.
It looked more like it’d been made to stop bad smells and noise than demons, which made a weird sort of sense when Bex thought about it.
If a rebellion ever did get this far, Gilgamesh would stop it with an army, not a door.
This gate was probably meant to be more of a logistical barrier than an actual security measure, a suspicion that was proven correct when all the pins snapped like cheap birthday candles the moment Bex’s flames touched them.