Chapter Thirty-One - Evie
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Evie
I WOKE UP with a gasp, one hand clutched over my stomach and tears running down my face.
The room was dark, but I was in our room and still in bed.
The IV was still attached, but the sheets were twisted around my legs.
It was late, and the city glowed faintly beyond the curtains, all neon and distance, nothing like the silver-black sky I had just left behind.
For one disoriented second, I expected to see two little girls at the foot of the bed.
There was no one there, but my arms still remembered them.
That was the worst part. The weight of them.
Their scent and their warmth. The soft press of their little bodies against mine.
The silky tangle of dark auburn hair beneath my cheek.
I couldn’t go back to sleep.
Liora sat in the chair beside the bed, her book open but unread. The nurse had taken my vitals, checked the babies, frowned at the monitor in a way I did not like, and gone back to her little station in the hall.
Azazael stood near the door. Guarding it. Or guarding me. Or maybe guarding the world from the possibility of me making another bad decision. And maybe I needed that because I was very good at making very bad decisions.
He was very still. That was the first thing people probably noticed about him. He wasn’t just quiet and controlled. He was still, like a statue.
I stared at him for a while. He stared at the opposite wall. But I stared harder. I wasn’t even sure he noticed.
But eventually, his eyes shifted to me. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re looking at me.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.”
Liora’s mouth twitched behind her book.
Az didn’t blink. He had clearly been manufactured in a factory where expressions cost extra.
I shifted carefully against the pillows, sitting up a little more. “Were you ever going to sit down?”
“No.”
“Of course not. That would be dangerously close to comfort.”
“I’m comfortable.”
“You’re watching that door like it’s about to grow teeth.”
His gaze flicked to me. “You’d be surprised…”
That probably shouldn’t have made sense. Unfortunately, it sort of did.
For a moment, the silence settled again. The IV pump clicked softly beside me. The city glowed faintly beyond the curtains.
I should have left it alone. I knew that. But my goddamn brain had apparently decided bedrest was the perfect time to start poking ancient wounds with a stick.
“Azazael?”
His eyes returned to me.
“The oubliette,” I said.
Liora’s book lowered by an inch. He didn’t move, but I could have sworn the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
“What about it?” he asked.
“You were trapped there.”
“Yes.”
“By… Luc.”
A pause. “And The First Light,” he said.
That made my stomach tighten. I hadn’t known that part. Luc had told me pieces. Not enough. Never enough. There were some stories people only gave you in splinters because handing over the whole thing would mean bleeding in front of you.
“The First Light was there?” I asked.
Azazael’s jaw tightened. “Sometimes.”
Liora closed her book. I looked between them, suddenly feeling like I’d touched a wire I hadn’t known was live.
“In the oubliette?”
“Yes and…,” Az said. “Not exactly.”
I waited.
He looked toward the hall, but his gaze wasn’t on it anymore. It had gone somewhere darker. Older.
“He came to me in the dark,” he said. “Sometimes as Himself. Sometimes only as a voice.”
There you are. A chill moved over my skin when I remembered His voice in my head when he’d found me.
“What did He say?” I asked.
Az was silent for so long I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then his eyes moved to my hand on my stomach. To the IV tape. To the evidence of Heaven’s touch still clinging to me in ways no one else could see.
“He said I had been made for a purpose,” Az said quietly. “And that my suffering was only His mercy teaching me obedience.”
My stomach turned. I knew that kind of sentence, just not the celestial version. I knew the human one.
My father had loved sentences like that. Not those exact words, maybe, but the shape of them. The kind that made suffering sound holy if he was the one causing it. The kind that turned obedience into love and fear into proof that God was near.
“That sounds like something my father would’ve said,” I whispered.
His eyes flicked to mine. I almost laughed, but there was nothing funny in it.
“He was very big on pain meaning something. Usually that I needed to obey better.”
Az said nothing. I was glad because I didn’t know what I would have done with comfort right then.
“The First Light told me Luc’s love was corruption,” I said, my voice rougher than I meant it to be. “That Luc only wanted me because I made him feel something. That if I really loved him, I would stop fighting and let myself be used for something bigger.”
Az looked away.
“What?” I asked.
His throat moved once. “He said similar things to me.”
My fingers curled against the blanket.
“He told me Lucifer was corrupted,” Az said. “That I had been right to fear what she stirred in him. Then He showed me things I didn’t understand, things my mind was not made to hold.” His gaze went hollow. “And when I broke around them, He said I needed to be contained.”
I went cold. Because I knew that shape too. My father loved to break me and then point at it as proof I was wrong.
The room seemed to shrink. We may have been in different cages, but it was the same pretty little lies.
“That’s what they do,” I said.
Az looked at me.
“Narcissists,” I said, and the word felt too small and too modern for a god, but also exactly right in that ugly, human way. “They take what you love and turn it into evidence against you.”
I glanced at Liora, and she was watching me. When I looked back at Az, his face had gone very still. But I kept going because if I stopped, I might cry, and I was so tired of crying.
“They make you defend something over and over until you’re exhausted enough to wonder if they’re right. They isolate you. Tell you they’re the only one who understands. The only one who can forgive you. The only one who sees the truth.” I shook my head. “But it’s not truth. It’s just control.”
Az said nothing. But the look in his eyes changed, haunted. That was the only word for it. Like he could still hear the voice somewhere in him, repeating old lines.
He didn’t look like an immortal being or a fallen angel or a weapon Luc had once locked away. He looked like someone still trying to make sense of the nightmare after waking up from it.
“I was the one who told Him,” Az said.
“Told Him what?” I asked.
Az’s mouth tightened. “About Lucifer and Ediphiel.”
The name landed in the room like a dropped glass. Ediphiel. Me, but not me. The being I had been. The piece of me buried under erased names and stolen memory.
My hand went instinctively to my stomach. Az saw it, and regret flickered across his face, brief and brutal.
“I didn’t understand what I was seeing,” he said. “Lucifer was spending too much time with… her. He was changing. Distracted. Bright in ways I had never seen. And she…” He stopped.
“She what?”
“She didn’t belong,” he said. “Not the way the others belonged. I could feel that, even then. She was… different. I thought something was wrong.”
I swallowed. “So you told The First Light.”
“Yes.” He grimaced, but his answer was immediate. He gave no defense or pretty wrapping. He just said the truth, laying it bare and ugly between us.
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he said. “I thought I was protecting Lucifer. Protecting Heaven. Protecting order.” His mouth twisted. “He rewarded that loyalty by showing me things I still do not understand.”
“What things?” I whispered.
Az’s eyes moved to the window. For a moment, I thought he was looking at Vegas.
Then I realized he was not seeing the city at all.
“Light breaking apart,” he said. “Bubbles floating underwater. Lucifer standing in a place I’d never seen, while stars bent around him as if they were afraid to touch his skin.
” His voice thinned. “Ediphiel with blood on her hands that was not blood. A sky opening. Something vast beneath creation moving as if it had heard its name.”
My own breath went shallow. The dream. Luc, with light bending around him.
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a long, long time, and I still don’t understand it.”
This time, I believed him completely.
“That was part of it,” Az said. “He showed me things too large to hold and then told me they were Lucifer’s fault. Her fault. He made fear look like revelation.”
My father had done that too, not like that. He’d been more of a kitchen-table scripture weaponizer, but the shape was the same.
Show a child a world on fire. Tell her it was because she disobeyed. Tell her obedience was the only way to keep everyone safe.
“He made you responsible for what He scared you with,” I said.
Az looked at me. “Yes.”
The word came out almost soundless.
I nodded slowly. “I know that trick.”
Then I asked, “Did Luc come see you?”
Az’s face changed.
“He never opened the oubliette after he sealed it,” he said.
“But he came?”
Az looked toward the floor. “At first.”
I waited.
“I could feel him in the cavern above,” he said. “Not always. But sometimes. His presence was…” He searched for the word. “Heavy.”
I almost smiled. “That tracks.”
Az’s mouth did not move, but something in his eyes shifted.
“He would sit there.”
My throat tightened. “Did he talk to you?”
“No.”
“Could you talk to him?”
“No.”
The answer hurt more than it should have. Az looked away.
“But I knew he was there,” he said. “I could hear the rocks moving above me sometimes. Stones shifting. Falling. Being stacked or cleared away. I don’t know what he was doing. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps trying to undo what he had done and failing.”
That sounded like Luc. Forcing himself to sit in the space with his own punishment, angry and guilty, and too proud to speak, but too bound to leave.
“And then?” I asked.
Az’s face closed. “Eventually, he stopped coming.”