Chapter Eighteen - Lucifer #2
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the chair as the cigarette burned down.
The wanting hollowed me out. I wondered if I’d get to hold her again.
Not fight for her. Not tear Heaven open to reach her.
Just hold her. Feel her breathing steady against my chest. To exist in a moment that didn’t require being on guard every second.
The doubt crept in again, sharp and unwelcome. Could we pull this off? What if I lost control when it mattered most? What if saving her cost me the very thing she needed me to be?
Across from me, Vespera sat silent, sharing the night without pressing into it. Then, she spoke so quietly I almost missed it.
“You’ll get her back,” she said. It was more statement than comfort. “But you’ll lose something.”
I nodded, slowly, the cigarette glowing as I drew in a breath and let it out through my nose. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
She laughed then, soft and sharp all at once.
“Since when are you afraid of anything?” She glanced sideways at me, eyes bright with memory.
“I remember the spectacle you made, throwing Lilith out of Hell. You love a dramatic exit with fire and teeth and… an audience.” Her mouth curved. “You’ve always enjoyed a good show.”
I huffed a quiet breath, smoke curling into the night. “Turns out it’s different when the one you might lose is the only one that ever felt like home.””
That wiped the humor from her face, just for a second.
I crushed the cigarette out against the stone with my fingers and finally looked at her fully. “So,” I said, because I couldn’t sit in that place any longer. “How do we find where the Beloved are kept?”
Her smile came back, but this one was wicked and satisfied.
“Oh,” she said lightly. “Better than that.”
She leaned forward, the night seeming to lean toward her like it was curious.
“I can draw you a map.”
For a beat, I just looked at her. Because a map meant routes, and routes meant choices, and choices meant there was a version of this that didn’t end with me clawing blindly through Heaven’s gate.
“Stay there,” I said, already pulling my phone out.
I called Topher.
He answered on the first ring. “Yeah?”
“Bring paper,” I said. “A lot of it. And writing instruments.”
There was a brief rustle on the other end, then Destiny’s voice cut in, unfiltered and curious. “For what?”
Topher shushed her immediately, and a second later, she blurted, “Sorry,” like the word had tripped over her tongue before she could stop it.
He didn’t ask anything else, just said, “On my way,” and hung up.
I slid the phone back into my pocket and turned to Vespera. She was watching me with quiet satisfaction. We didn’t move from the terrace.
When Topher arrived a few minutes later, he pushed through the glass doors with an armful of paper and a fistful of pens, momentum carrying him forward until he stopped short. His gaze flicked from me to Vespera. She arched an eyebrow as he laid the supplies on the table between us.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
I told him, briefly, and his mouth flattened. For half a second, I thought he might stay. Thought he’d sit down, lean in, start asking the kinds of questions that turned chaos into structure. It would’ve been his first instinct. It always was.
Instead, he glanced at his watch. “It sounds like you got it handled. I… uh,” he said, already backing toward the doors. “I’ve gotta go.”
The words were wrong coming out of his mouth. They seemed rushed, unsettled, and not like him at all. I watched him go, puzzled, but then I caught the faintest look Destiny gave me through the glass, wide-eyed and apologetic and tugging him along by the sleeve.
Topher let himself be pulled. He shifted his body without thinking, turning with her as if her gravity had rewritten his instincts.
I’d seen that look before on fools. On myself.
And if I was right, Destiny wasn’t a distraction.
She was his tether. The doors slid shut behind them, and the terrace settled back into quiet.
We drew for hours. And it wasn’t just her memory spilled onto paper, but mine too, braided into it where it belonged.
Vespera sketched the cloud formations first, the districts of Heaven laid out like a large city-state.
I added what I remembered from before the fall, the routes angels favored when they wanted to be seen, the corridors that always felt watched even when they looked empty.
When she hesitated, eyes unfocusing like she was listening for old footsteps, I filled in what my body still remembered even when my mind couldn’t name it. We argued over angles, redrew bridges, and corrected each other without mercy.
By the time the sky darkened and then began to pale again, the table was layered with paper, corners weighted down so the wind wouldn’t steal anything important.
Then her hand slowed. She drew another place last, a grand palace that was both precise and immaculate, and tapped the space beneath its gardens.
“Here,” she said quietly.
The Beloved.
I gathered the pages like they might shatter if I wasn’t careful. For a long moment, neither of us spoke. Vegas glittered below the terrace, all that mortal light trying and failing to matter while the map of Heaven sat between us like a wound sketched in ink.
Then I asked, very quietly, “How much of a person can still be left after living in that dollhouse?”
Vespera went rigid for one long minute and just stared out at the darkened skyline. Wind moved one loose strand of hair near her horn. She said nothing, and the silence itself started to ache.
When she finally answered, her voice had lost its lacquer. “I know exactly what it can hollow out.”
Something in me tightened. My fingers hooked harder around the arm of the chair until the wood creaked under the pressure.
I looked over at her. And this time, when she didn’t turn, I saw it, not just regret, but guilt. Old ugly guilt. The kind that had lived in a body long enough to settle into her posture, and into the careful, measured way she held her face when the truth got too close.
That only made it worse. My voice went quieter and deadlier. “What did you tell yourself,” I asked, “so you could sleep at night?”
She shut her eyes.
I leaned forward, and the magic answered with me. Heat climbed under my skin, and I knew my eyes had given me away, fire ringing my pupils in a molten glow.
“That it was mercy?” I said. “That teaching them to endure Him was somehow kinder than fighting back?”
Her hand tightened once on her knee. It only happened for a fraction of a second, but I saw it. That little fracture in her control. That tiny flinch that told me I had found the exact nerve.
When she opened her eyes again, the city was still reflected in them, but dimly now, like even that cheap brightness had gone too far away to matter.
“She’ll probably come back with fear,” Vespera said quietly.
All that heat leached out of me, and the words landed like a blade sliding between my ribs. I said nothing. I couldn’t.
“She may come back with shame that was never hers to carry,” she went on. “She may come back someone who startles easily. Someone who flinches before she remembers she’s safe.”
I stared at her. The rage in me rose again, but it changed shape. It went inward and turned heavier. Because I had asked. I needed to know, and some part of me had already feared this and dreaded hearing it said aloud.
My mouth felt dry, and I heard my own voice come out rougher than I intended. “Can she come back from something that?”
Vespera looked at me then, but it wasn’t pity or any kind of softness. It was just an honesty that didn’t care whether it comforted.
“Getting her back and undoing what He did are not the same rescue.”
I looked away first. And I hated this. But it wasn’t just the answer. It was because I needed it from Vespera, from someone who had once ruled that place. From someone who had stood inside the machinery and learned its shape well enough to name what it left behind.
My fury came back sharp and immediate, aimed at her this time, at her complicity, at the part of me that wanted to drag her by her horns through every room beneath those gardens and make her look at what she had once helped maintain.
What if when I reached her, when I held her again, she… flinched. What if I saw fear where she should feel relief? I could tear Heaven down stone by stone and still not be able to tear that damage out with it.
Vespera stood, and her shoes scraped softly against the terrace stone. I couldn’t look up. “Don’t punish her for surviving,” she said.
That made me lift my head. Her face had gone composed again, but not untouched. There was still something raw under the surface, something she’d failed to conceal in time.
“She may come back to you changed,” Vespera said. “That won’t mean she loves you any less. It will mean she did what she had to do to survive that place. To survive Him.”
The words sat between us. I hated them because I knew they were true. I hated them because I knew they needed to be said. And most of all, I hated them because some part of me had already begun building the wrong kind of anger, not at Evie, but at the shape survival might take in her body.
Vespera saw enough in my face to know she’d landed the blade where she meant to. Then she turned and walked toward the door, leaving me alone with the knowledge that Heaven might not be the impossible thing I’d have to fight to get her home.