Lucifer winced. “Leviathan.”Fuck.“We didn’t hear you come in.”
Shadows skittered in the corner, and a tall man with pale patches scattered over his dark skin and bone-white locs stepped out to join them. He moved like a large stalking cat, slow and predatory, dressed in the matte black they all wore but with a sword hanging in a scabbard from his hip. The pools of pale skin spilled over his left eye and the right corner of his mouth, the flesh of his lip pink where one fell. His gold eyes were as flat as a snake’s, and power thrummed out from his skin, pushing insistently against the air.
“Who is a breach?” he asked again.
“A girl came by,” Belial answered, ignoring the look Lucifer was giving her. “Not human. Luci struck a deal with her—a dance in exchange for seeing the artifact.”
Lucifer threw up his hands and flopped back in his chair. “It was a harmless fucking deal!”
“Andthen,” Belial continued, her voice acidic, “she touched him, and it burned so badly that his eyes went blackwithout his control.”
“You’re making this sound really bad.” Lucifer let his voice slither low. “It was alsoimmenselyarousing.”
“Which is why Luci then went down on her in the middle of the hallway after calling up a wave of darkness to cloak them. It was effective, as none of us heard her screaming his name,which he gave her.”
“I didn’t give her my name till afterward,” he corrected. “She hasn’t screamed it yet.”
Belial looked like she was about to tear him into small pieces.“Yet?”
Lucifer grinned at her. Anything to not look at Levi’s face.
“Don’t look at me like you were joking,” Belial snapped. “I know when you’re joking and that wasn’t it.”
She fell silent as Levi walked around her. Lucifer kept his head turned away, but it was impossible to ignore Levi looming over him or the sound of him unbuckling the scabbard to lay it aside before he crouched in front of Lucifer’s chair. It was a mercy that he didn’t kneel. The sight of Leviathan kneeling before him was something Lucifer never wanted to see again.
“She burned you, Luci?”
Levi’s voice was a whisper of breath, silk falling over the fresh edge of a new blade, oh so dangerous. Lucifer didn’t reply at first, and then Levi’s fingers were on his jaw, gently turning his head so that Lucifer could no longer avoid his second’s eyes. They gazed at each other for a moment, Levi’s fingers warm against his skin. Lucifer didn’t want to answer, but he never lied to his princes, and they needed the data. If someone had the power to hurt him, then they could hurt the others too. Gali hadn’t been flexing her power—in fact, she’d seemed totally unaware of it—but they had no idea what they were dealing with. Lucifer couldn’t even tell them what she was, because he had no fucking idea.
So he told Levi the truth. “To the bone.”
Belial flinched.
Levi just nodded and stood back up. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, picking up his scabbard.
Fear yawned deep inside Lucifer, and it was so unfamiliar that he froze in shock. If he had ever felt it in the past, that part of his memory was a distant void, too far away from any of his corporeal forms. Yet now, at the thought of Gali dying, of Levi taking her head from her shoulders with his blade, fear curled around his entrails. Levi was already walking away, speaking quietly to Belial. Galilee was going to die. Galilee was going todie. Lucifer forced himself to his feet.
“Levi, don’t.”
His princes stopped in their tracks and turned slowly back to him, shock mirrored on their faces. Levi drew in a soft breath and put his hand on the hilt of his sword, as if he needed the weapon to ground him.
“Don’t take care of it?” He took a step toward Lucifer. “Tell me why not.”
Lucifer didn’t have a reason. “It’s not time yet,” he said.
“It wastimewhen she touched you,” Belial countered.
Levi was frowning. “You’re asking for mercy on her behalf? With everything we have at stake?”
Lucifer walked toward them, spreading his palms out. “She can’t die. Not now, not yet.”
“She canburnyou.” Levi said it like a judgment, and it was.
“She doesn’t know what she can do,” Lucifer argued. “I need to understand what she is, what she knows.”
“So what if she doesn’t know? We need to kill her before she finds out!” Belial was staring at him in betrayal. “Luci,no oneshould be able to hurt you—you’re stronger than the rest of us.Allof us are at risk.”
“And what if she’s none of what we’ve been thinking? What if she’s an innocent?” The term sounded foreign on his tongue, and sure enough, his princes were wide-eyed, even more horrified than before. Lucifer didn’t blame them. This fear was generative—nearly everything coming out of his mouth was a surprise to him.
