Celestial’s words echoed again in Gali’s head. “They might. And they don’t.” She sighed and leaned her forehead against his. “It’s complicated.”
“Family always is,” he replied.
“I know you don’t care, but I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry they found us. I never wanted any of this to be twisted into something ugly.”
Lucifer dropped light kisses on each corner of her mouth. “I don’t need your apologies, Galilee. You are not them. Your family can hunt me if they want.” He shrugged, and Gali pulled back, her heart in her throat.
“You can’t hurt them,” she said. “And you can’t let your princes hurt them either.”
Lucifer looked genuinely surprised. “Is there some impending showdown that’s about to involve my princes?”
Gali stared at him. “Have you been listening toanythingcoming outta my mouth? I just said my family’s coming for me andthey know where I am.”
He tilted his head. “Galilee, they’re just humans.”
Well, now she was pissed off. “And a human can’t stand a chance against you or your princes, huh?”
To his credit, Lucifer stopped and gave the question serious thought. Instead of answering, he took in Gali’s simmering expression and nodded slowly.
“You said they were favored. Exactly how powerfulisyour family, Galilee?”
It was a question with an answer almost as intangible as who she was, but Gali found the words coming to her tongue. She wasn’t supposed to know this—it was tangled with the secret Celestial held about her; it had been buried deep but was now resurfacing as a half-blurred memory.
“They bargained for me.” Gali said it slowly, but she met Lucifer’s eyes. He’d given her a gift: the borders of what she was, some parameters of her power. “They were powerful enough to bargain for me, so they gotta know what I am. Right?”
The bargain was true, because there was the sharpened memory at last—a young Galilee walking in the woods, looking for her cousin. A young Celestial sitting on the bank of a creek with Nana Darling’s arm around her. Their grandmother was speaking softly, her voice running alongside the birds and the water.
“You must take care of her, Celestial. She’s ours.”
Celestial’s black eyes had flickered. “Done deal,” she’d said. “Cut it on the creek bed.”
Nana Darling had simply nodded. “Yes, you know. The creeks are yours, baby girl. You guard the Kincaid bargains, and Galilee is our most important one.”
“But you paid the cost,” Celestial had replied.
“Yes, high as it was.” Nana Darling had pressed her mouth into a hard line. “She was worth it.”
A twig had cracked loudly under Galilee’s foot, and Nana Darling’s head had snapped up. She saw Galilee, and tenderness covered her face as she stood up and walked away from Celestial, reaching her arms out. Galilee had stepped into her embrace, and Nana Darling had brushed a hand over her brow.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she’d whispered, and that was where the memory ended.
Gali blinked in Lucifer’s room, still naked on his bed, tears salting unexpectedly into her eyes.
“I think... I think my grandma is keeping a really big secret from me,” she said, hurt thickening her voice.
Lucifer pulled her into his arms, pressing his mouth to her hair. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, cradling her against him.
“Why would she do that?” Gali was fighting to make sense of it, toomany vines tangling inside her, a forest eating her up. The memory had intruded on her mind and it remained there, clear and sharp and truncated. “Why did they decide I couldn’t know anything?”
“Perhaps it’s for the best that they’re coming here, then.” Lucifer kissed her temple. “It seems like you have some questions they need to answer.”
Gali shook her head. This wasn’t about to be a friendly little family conversation mediated by the fucking Devil.
“They want war, Lucifer. I need you to take it seriously.”
“I know, I know.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Ihavemet hunters before, you know. It’s just that they usually have different motives, not quite because I made their little girl scream my name.”
Gali smacked his arm even as the memory thrilled through her. God, she wanted to touch him again and again, for days and days and more. She couldn’t let herself think back on what it had felt like to have him sliding in her with all his power scraping against every surface. “I’m trying to be serious,” she said instead.
