I had given her a choice to choose a kingdom, but she wouldneverchoose this one.
She was meeting with someone here.Someone who was trying to steal the Crucifix.
Before she could make it out of the town and to the portal, I sprinted to her and grasped her wrist, pulling her back.
“What the hell are you doing here?”I asked with so much power that she looked terrified.
She parted her lips.“No-nothing!I just wanted to see if I’d like it here.I-I met with the commander, and I?—”
“Cut the shit,” Biast said, fire erupting from his fingertips.
She snapped her head toward him.
“You never fucking met with me.I don’t know who you fuckin’ are.”
Caught in a lie, Raphaela tried to pull away from me, but I just tightened my grip around her wrist.I wrapped another hand around her throat and pushed her toward a torture pit.She squirmed in my grasp, shaking her head back and forth and screaming to the high heavens for me to stop.
But I didn’t.
She had betrayed me.
She had lied to me.
She had hurt my pride.
Shaped like an X, the pit had all kinds of torture devices inside of it.I strapped her wrists to either side of a plank and her ankles to the ones below.
“Where is it?”I asked again, not wanting to do this, but willing to.“Tell me who took it, and I won’t hurt you.”
“You will never get it back, Lucifer,” she said.“I did what I had to do for Mother.I don’t care what you do to me.All this pain is for goodness and glory, to keep the believers?—”
I swiped my nails across her stomach and watched her start bleeding out white blood— angel’s blood.She hadn’t fallen from Heaven; she had chosen to come here to distract me.She was still all holy and good.
She screamed out in pain, a tear racing down her cheek.“Hurt me all you want.It will never hurt as bad as your betrayal.”
Again, I swiped my claws across her stomach—deeper this time.Biast stood next to me, his eyes red with wrath and with excitement.I could tell by the way he stared at her that he wanted to hurt her too.But she was all mine.
Mine to hurt.Mine to torture.Mine to destroy.
Fifty-One
“Who did it?”I asked again, my hands bloody with so much holiness that it burned.
Raphaela shook her head another time, more tears falling from her eyes.Yet she refused to say another word, and I was getting tired of her games.A crowd had formed around us, and people had started chanting to kill the angel.Part of me wanted to do it.I was seconds away from ending her life.
Maybe it would teachMothera fucking lesson—not to send angels to Hell to do her dirty work anymore.It was overrated and wrong, but she knew exactly how to get what she wanted without getting her hands messy.
That was one of the reasons that I had left when I did.
I grabbed her throat, ready to pull it out, when someone yelled, “Stop!”
And I stopped because the voice sounded familiar.I looked over to my left, and people started to part the way.My eyes widened when I saw her, standing in the middle of the crowd with the Crucifix.
As she held the Crucifix in one hand and Eros’s throat in the other, Tonia’s eyes glowed the color of Heaven’s gates.
I clenched my jaw.Tonia had never fallen from Heaven; her wings were never forcefully cut off; the bitch had never banished her.She was still working for Mother, but this time in Hell.
She was trying to steal Eros away from us and turn him holy, trying to convert Dani with the promise of a relationship with her—true happiness.How disgusting.
