Chapter Sixteen - Lucifer #4
He looked at me again, hard. “So if you’re sitting there thinking you’re going to walk into Heaven blind and lose her again, stop acting like your face isn’t giving you away.”
The words hit because they were true. And because I hadn’t said them.
I held his gaze, forcing the heat in my chest down into something usable. “You don’t get to rummage through me because you’re impatient.”
“I’m not rummaging,” Az growled. “You’re practically shouting.”
Topher lifted a hand, careful, like he was approaching a wild animal. “Okay. Great. Noted. Terrifying. Can we—”
“No,” I said, cutting him off without looking away from Az. “We’re going to address this now, because if he can hear me, then he can hear all of us. Is that what you all want?”
Morathis tilted Her head, thoughtful now. “It might be useful. In Heaven.”
“Or catastrophic,” Thyronis countered.
Destiny swallowed. “I vote catastrophic.”
Az’s mouth curled, bitter. “I’m standing right here.”
“And I’m telling you,” I said, voice quiet and absolute, “you ask before you listen. If you can’t control it, you tell me when it starts. Because the next time you answer something I didn’t say, in front of someone who isn’t… us, it could get us killed.”
The Reliquary hummed louder as Az held my stare for a long moment. Then, tight-jawed, he gave the smallest nod.
“Fine,” he said. “So what’s the plan to not go in blind?”
The question snapped the room back into motion. And that was when the name rose through the noise in my skull like a lifeline.
“Vespera. She was the caretaker,” I said, more to myself than to the room. “She tended the Beloved once. If anyone knows how those places are laid out, how you get in and out without being seen, it’s her.”
I turned to Topher, already moving. “Is she still at the cavern house in Patagonia?”
“Yeah.” His gaze flicked up. “Training with Damien and Liora.”
Vespera wasn’t an angel. She was an oddity, like Lilith, something that often got lost in the cracks of time.
I was certain she hadn’t been trained for war like the rest of us.
She hadn’t learned the ruthless instinct to survive a realm that called itself holy.
But she’d been catching up. And from what Topher had told me before, she was learning fast.
“Get her here,” I said.
Topher didn’t hesitate. He pulled his phone from his pocket and started texting.
While he worked, Thyronis drifted toward Morathis, drawn as if by gravity only the two of them could feel. Their voices dropped immediately, hushed and close, the kind of conversation that didn’t need witnesses.
Topher paused, frowned, then pulled out his tablet, fingers moving faster as he shifted from simple messaging to logistics and the quiet machinery he kept hidden under his silence.
A moment later, he looked up. “She’ll be on the next flight out of Chile. She should be here in about a day and a half.”
I nodded once.
“We wait,” I said. “When she arrives, we debrief on anything she knows about layout, the access points, the patterns. I want all of it. I want us to show up with something better than instinct.”
Az didn’t like it. I saw it in the set of his jaw. But he didn’t argue. Because even he understood what was at stake.
I turned to Thyronis and Morathis. “You two should come up to the penthouse. Plenty of room. Private. No listening walls.”
What I didn’t say sat under my tongue. I didn’t know the full extent of what these ancient gods could do, not after discovering two of them had been living under human faces in my own hotel, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
If they could hide that well, they could disappear just as easily.
Morathis’s mouth curved faintly. “Inviting the Arcana into your home now?”
“Of course, I know hospitality,” I said, keeping my voice level.
Then I let my gaze hold hers, steady and unmistakable. “And I’m not letting either of you vanish while I still need you.”
Thyronis inclined his head. “Very well.”
Finally… finally, this plan was no longer a half-assed lunge in the dark.
It was still dangerous. Still stupidly insane.
And still built on threads and guesses and the kind of arrogance that could kill someone.
But for the first time since Evie had been taken, I could see the shape of the path ahead of me.
Hope slipped under my ribs like a stubborn flame, hot enough to hurt, but bright enough to keep me moving.
Because I missed her with an ache that didn’t let up.
Every time I crawled into bed, I stared at the ceiling as I heard her laugh in my head, pictured her mouth forming my name, thought about the way my body had already decided she was mine before my mind had ever caught up. Every second she was gone was torture.
Now, though, the desperation had somewhere to go.
It became momentum. And I could almost feel her again, not as an echo down the tether, but real, warm, furious, alive in my arms where she belonged.
And I would get her back, even if it had to be by force.
Even if I left nothing standing in Heaven but ash and memory.