Page 322 of Sorrow & Strangers

“I’ll be fine, I promise,” Rafe says, hugging me back.

I cling to him, thinking of how, while I won’t see him for months, he won’t see me for years. Will I even know him when he comes back? Will he still love me the same? I know many of these doubts stem from what I just realized, and I hate that this moment is being tainted for me. I am furious that I cannot send him off with the confidence he needs from me.

“I’ll keep in touch, promise,” Rafe says, squeezing me. A tear slides down my cheek, and when I pull back, Rafe wipes it away. “Hey, no fair.”

“I’ll miss you.”

Rafe kisses my forehead. “I’ll miss you too.” Rafe looks down at the halo. “You’ll be okay without it?”

“Rafe. It’ll be fine, but promise me something.”

Rafe nods, watching me.

“Don’t trust Lucifer.”

Rafe’s brows shoot up, but I just watch him, trying to convey the severity of my request.

“I promise he’s different around me.”

“He’s still the devil. He engineered this whole deal. Do not trust him. Promise me.”

“He’s differ⁠—”

“No, he’s a liar and a cheat,” I say, my words cutting, and I tighten my fist around the bracelet. “He is the reason that shit in Drãculea happened.”

“I summoned him,” Rafe says defensively.

Lucifer has been the only family Rafe has ever related to, but not anymore, and I need to make him understand.

“Think about it, Rafe. Why did you need to summon him? Because of the dark fae, and I wonder who brought it to their attention. I wonder who was in Dimstraeux’s ear,” I say, and Rafe looks increasingly uncertain. “He’s the only person who had something to gain.”

“What did he gain?”

“You in Hell, Rafe,” Mira says, her eyes flickering with flame. “He’ll have you in his territory without your sisters or your family’s influence. He has two years to convince you to stay, to pull you under his control.”

“You think this too?” Rafe asks, looking at Mira.

Mira nods solemnly. “He is known for his trickery, Rafe. The saying a deal with the devil didn’t come from nothing.”

“Just be careful,” Alice says, her arms crossed, but her gaze keeps flicking back to me. She must be able to smell the blood coming from my palm.

I hug Rafe once more, and Alice says her goodbye before Rafe leans in to Mira and kisses her deeply. We stand together as he steps back, staring at us as he is engulfed in a blaze of internal hellfire and disappears.

The moment he is gone, I run up the stairs to my room, leaving Alice to comfort Mira as she starts to cry. In my room, I fall to my knees and drop the bracelet, sticky with blood, onto the floor next to me. I haul a trunk and a small box from beneath my bed. Opening the trunk, I sift through school letters and transcripts. I finally find what I’m looking for, the letter from the headmaster from the first day of last year.

I open the smaller box and pull out the letter the stranger gave me on Winter Solstice. Holding it up to the light, I see the shimmer of a rune on the paper, as I suspected. With shaking hands, I slice my finger and draw the counteracting rune that comes into my mind the second I see it. He concealed the writing, and I hadn’t noticed, too distracted by everything else that was going on. The words on the paper glow, and the writing changes. When I hold it next to the letter from the headmaster, I can’t contain my gasp at the perfect match of the handwriting.

“Sum?” Alice asks softly, peeking her head around the door, and I glance at her, crumpling the paper in my hands as tears stream down my face.

I am not sure what Alice sees in my eyes, but both her voice and her steps are cautious as she walks toward me and asks, “You okay?”

The stranger is . . .

A memory flashes into my mind of being broken and bleeding in his office after Aqua brought me there, to a place I felt safe.

The stranger is . . .

Another memory, remembering when he was glamoured as Connor. I had let him touch me, hold me, kiss me, all to protect Connor. Over and over, I trusted him.