Authors: Colleen Gleason
Not as she had paid for hers so many times and in so many ways.
“I want to leave,” Nina bit out the words, putting force into them this time.
It had zero effect on the man.
“I am not sure whether the one who brought you here is gone and it is dangerous for you to be out there right now. Once we are certain that it is safe for you, you will be returned to London.” He sighed, the soft sound conveying a wealth of irritation. “It might help if you would tell me why someone wished to kidnap you.”
Nina froze. Would. Not could. He was on to her. Somehow, he was aware that she knew why the man had grabbed her and what he had intended to do with her. The little voice said to tell him, but she bit down on her tongue to stop the words from leaving her lips. The less he knew, the better. She was keeping him safe by keeping things secret from him.
“I don’t know why someone would want to do such a thing to me. I’m just an office clerk. I’m not important in any way and I don’t have any enemies.” Nina tipped her chin up and looked across the room at him.
His expression darkened, his irises turning a full shade richer, more amber than gold, as his lips flattened and his features hardened. He didn’t believe her. Her heart beat a little quicker as she held his gaze, her hands shaking where they gripped the wall beside her hips.
“What happened?” she whispered, a trickle of fear running through her veins as he stared at her, suddenly looking like the sort of man that it wasn’t wise to lie to or cross in any fashion.
Gone was the handsome and charming man who could win any woman with nothing more than a brief smile. In his place was one who looked more demon than angel. A devil made flesh and blood. A man who spoke to her on a visceral level, calling to her primal instincts.
A warrior who was the embodiment of masculinity.
One who answered her question with nothing more than a narrowing of his striking eyes.
“You made the man leave… you didn’t just find me,” she whispered breathlessly, suddenly aware that she was alone with him. The gap between them seemed to shrink and the air in the room felt too thin. Her head turned, her heart labouring as she fought the onslaught of sensation and emotion. “You drove him away so you could bring me to safety.”
He dipped his head, a slow and steady movement that didn’t seem adequate to acknowledge the magnitude of what he had done. Most of the men she knew would have beaten their chests while grinning at her, their male pride on show for all to see.
He
would have acted in such a way.
But not this man.
This man was different.
He barely acknowledged what he had done, even though it was worthy of praise and gratitude.
“Thank you,” she said and he turned away from her, fixing his gaze on a door far to the left of the room.
“I will find you something to wear and will see to it that you are given some water and something to eat. Perhaps it will make you feel better.” He strode across the room and was gone before she could respond.
Air rushed back into her lungs and into the room.
It seemed larger without him in it and she couldn’t stop herself from wandering around the luxurious yet gothic and grim room as her panic and fear began to subside. Her fingers danced over polished black wooden side tables, the soft velvet of the chaise longue and the couch that stood facing it across an ebony coffee table. She caressed the cool marble of the black fireplace, lingering a moment to press her hot cheeks to it and savouring the cold before the stone warmed.
Her eyes drifted back to the black door the man had exited through. He hadn’t been the one she recalled, that one had long hair, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t involved. She had to keep her distance from him, no matter how fiercely she felt drawn to him.
She jumped as the door opened again and the man entered, carrying a silver tray on one upturned palm. The ease he did it with stirred her suspicion that he was a butler, a servant in this house, together with his practiced smile and the way he spoke to her.
“Did you ask someone to take me home?” Nina eyed him as he set the tray down on the coffee table and poured her a tall glass of icy water from a pitcher. “Can you get me out of here and take me home?”
He paused and looked up at her through long black lashes. “I cannot do that. I cannot leave this place.”
A brief flicker of something suspiciously like sorrow crossed his handsome face before he forced a smile, set the glass jug down and straightened. He smoothed his jacket down over his trousers in a manner that only strengthened her belief that he was a servant. It had to be the reason he couldn’t help her leave, and couldn’t leave himself.
“How long have you been here?” Nina eyed the water, her parched throat and aching head screaming at her to gulp it down. It might be poisoned. Laced with a drug that would knock her out again.
The man sighed, poured a second glass of water, and lifted it to his lips. He took a mouthful from it and nodded towards the other glass, a clear gesture for her to do the same now that he had shown her that it wasn’t poisoned. Nina shook her head.
The water might not contain the drug. It might lace the glass.
He offered his glass to her with a smile, one that held a little more warmth this time, humour that seemed sad to her somehow. “I would not trust me either.”
Nina took the glass from him, her fingers brushing his as she wrapped them around the icy tumbler. Heat shot up her arm and she almost dropped the glass when he snatched his hand away. Had he felt it too?
She couldn’t bring herself to look at him as he paced away from her. She stared at the tumbler, at the spot on the other side where his lips had pressed, leaving an imprint on the polished glass. Her stomach heated. Flipped. She crushed the ridiculous urge to turn the glass around and press her lips there too and drank a mouthful from it instead. The cool water was bliss as it ran over her tongue and down her throat, instantly soothing her. Heaven.
“How long have I been here?” His rich voice swirled around her as she took another few sips and she felt his eyes on her again, burning her with their intensity and stirring the heat in her veins.
Nina slowly lifted her gaze back to his face and paused with the glass at her lips, the ripple of heat in her veins becoming a flood of wildfire as she found him staring at her mouth. The dark abysses of his pupils devoured the gold of his irises before he pulled his eyes away from her lips and raised them to lock with hers.
“I have been here a very long time.”
She stared at him as those words sank in. He didn’t look much older than she was, maybe just a couple of years closer to forty. Had he been working here his entire life?
Had he grown up in this grim place?
It would explain the edge he had about him at times, the dark and cold side of him that made her nervous.
That made her feel he had secrets locked deep in his heart.
Secrets as painful as the ones in hers.
Lucifer stood in his study in front of the middle of the three towering windows, his gaze fixed on the distant plateau. White light broke the darkness there, a sign that angels were travelling between his realm and the mortal one.
A world he hadn’t set foot in for millennia.
His golden gaze slid off to his left and downwards, towards the room where he had left the mortal female.
Her world.
He clasped his hands behind his back and studied the black stone floor. His black suit jacket stretched tight across his chest as he breathed slowly but steadily, his mind churning over everything he had learned about the woman in his custody.
He still didn’t know why Mihail had brought her to him, and he couldn’t help thinking that it was a trap. It was possible that the woman had been given instructions, orders that were buried so deep in her mind that she wouldn’t remember receiving them. Some angels possessed the power to manipulate weaker creatures in such a manner, and everything she had told him yesterday had made it clear that Mihail or another angel had tampered with her memories.
If she had been given orders, then he had to wait for the right event to trigger them before he could discover why Mihail had sent her.
Lucifer narrowed his gaze on the floor, his focus on the woman.
He didn’t think she was anything other than mortal, but it was entirely possible he was wrong about that. Some species could masquerade as mortals. Shifters in particular. It had been a very long time since he had encountered one from that species, long enough that he might not recognise them.
She could be a witch too.
But she didn’t feel powerful to him. Her strength was barely a drop in the ocean of his.
Was she using a spell to mask her power and muddle his ability to detect lies on her?
He shook his head at that.
She hadn’t lied to him when he had asked whether she could remember what had happened to her, but she had lied when she had told him that she couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would want to harm her or have her kidnapped. If she possessed the ability to conceal her lies, she would have hidden that one from him.
There had been a haunted edge to her bright peridot eyes as she had uttered that lie and a spike in her heart rate that had warned him that she had walked the same path as he had millennia ago—a path of pain and suffering.
Of betrayal.
A path he still walked now.
He didn’t know what had happened to her, and he didn’t want to know.
She wasn’t here so he could learn about her. She was here so he could discover Mihail’s plan and take the angel down once and for all.
Lucifer dragged his focus away from her and fixed it back on the plateau.
Mihail was up to something and he had to concentrate on discovering what that was.
His focus slipped, his acute senses drifting to pinpoint the woman again.
Who had betrayed her?
The first stirrings of anger warmed his heart, warning him to pull his thoughts away from not her but the betrayal she had suffered before it was too late and his mood degenerated.
All of Hell would suffer if it slipped his grasp and his temper flared, but even the knowledge of what he might do in a fit of rage wasn’t enough to stop him treading the dark path of his memories to a place he had tried to forget.
A time when he had trusted someone and they had betrayed him.
A time when he had been given no choice and had been powerless to stop his fall.
Lucifer curled his hands into fists, his emerging black claws cutting into his palms. He glared at the plateau as another white streak of light appeared and growled through his short fangs, the desire to teleport there and tear into the angels almost overwhelming him and shattering his fragile hold on his control.
He wanted to rip their wings from them just as his had been torn from him.
He wanted them to suffer the torture that he had, the agony of being cast from their home, slung into a bottomless and dark pit where only endless pain awaited them.
He wanted them to know how it felt to do all that their master asked of them, to carry out every terrible act and horrific crime regardless of how it had made them feel, only to have that same master betray them.
Lucifer snarled and slammed his left fist into the black wall beside the window. The stone shattered under the blow but he didn’t feel the pain that ricocheted up his arm. He felt only the burning rage that lived in his heart, the pain of a thousand times of having his wings torn from his back, a hundred thousand lashings that had peeled the flesh from his bones, and a million hours of wondering what he had done wrong.
Followed by a million more contemplating his revenge.
He hadn’t realised it at the time he had served Heaven, a loyal dog for his master, but he had been set on the path towards his fall from the moment he had been created. It had all been part of a plan to create balance between the three realms.
His master had shaped him, giving him duties and missions with little information and stating that he trusted him to interpret the missions and carry out the duties therein without aid. Lucifer had felt he had owned a position of power, a place at his master’s side, but in reality he had been given as little information as possible in order to drive him into committing sins.
He had wanted to please his master, and he had ended up breaking unknown rule after rule, committing sin after sin.
When he had felt something stirring inside him, a darkness that had been destroying the light, he had wanted to stop.
It was then that his master had dealt the final blow.
He had been exiled from Heaven and thrown into the pit.
At the time, the pit had been a place of nightmares, filled with vile creatures bent on destroying angels, drawn to their light by a ravenous hunger to extinguish it.
Centuries into his torture, Lucifer had realised the reason the pit had been created. It had been designed as a place of punishment for angels. That had given him false hope that he could escape the pit if he served his time.
He had survived the torture his captors had dealt, the abuse they had inflicted upon him, using him against his will. He had wallowed, tormented by every sin he had committed in his life serving his beloved master. He had writhed in agony as he had tried to fight and claw his way out of the darkness to stand on his feet again. He had wanted to repent so he would be welcomed back into the fold.
He had wanted to return home.
But it had become too much for him, and the darkness had been too strong.
After what had felt like an eternity of fighting, he had surrendered to it, allowing it to fill him and vanquish his softer feelings in order to end his suffering and stop the pain. His thoughts had turned from repenting to revenge.
When he had eventually seized control of the realm through brute and relentless force, he had ended up changing it without really thinking about what he had been doing.
He had hunted and destroyed most of the original inhabitants of Hell and sent the rest fleeing to the far corners of Hell, allowing the weaker breeds of demons to emerge from the shadows and take their place.