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“What are you doing?” Naamah demands, her eyes flashing.
“We need to help him!”
She yanks me around in front of her and pins me with her gaze. “You want to help him? Then stay the fuck out of the way. You’re a goddamn liability out there.”
A crash shakes the walls of the massive building. She looks back over her shoulder, then turns to me. Her voice is gentler when she speaks again, but no less firm.
“They aren’t stupid, Sophia. Every demon in L.A. knows you’re his by now—and they all know that you’re vulnerable.Fragile. If you go out there, they’ll use you against him. If you go out there, you are going to get him killed.”
Her words make it through the haze of panic.
She’s right. Of course she’s right.
Naamah doesn’t wait for an answer. She can probably see it on my face. Without a moment’s hesitation, she grabs my hand again and starts running, leading me away from the sounds of battle.
I’m not familiar with this part of the building, since I’ve only worked on the upper floors, but I follow her blindly, trusting her to lead me somewhere safe.
After a few minutes, she opens a door to a storage room, races across it, and punches in a code on the opposite door. It slides away, revealing an elevator and staircase. She locks the door behind us, then punches another code into the elevator so it opens for us. Inside, there are only three buttons. One for this floor, one for the basement, and one for Lucifer’s floor.
She hits the bottom one and takes us down.
Wouldn’t Lucifer’s office be safer?
Maybe not. He doesn’t have access codes to get into his space. Still, I’m nervous about going down to wherever she’s taking me, and that nervousness is only amplified when the elevator doors slide open again, revealing a series of rooms that look…wrong.
This is nothing like the modern, sleek office upstairs. The smell of sulfur permeates the heavy stones that make up the walls of this part of the basement. Blackened circles are burned into the foundation, and there are markings on the wall similar to the ones that were painted on the outside of Reese’s building. These marks look more coherent, somehow. Less shock-factor, more utilitarian.
They must be Lucifer’s doing.
That should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.
Naamah turns back to the elevator and locks down the call buttons. Then she moves to the big, reinforced doors and locks those too. We’re barricaded in a concrete bunker now, beneath a hundred feet of glass and steel, tucked away from the demonic battle raging above.
I should feel safer. Naamah certainly seems to feel that way—she’s relaxed, the lines on her face smoothed out. But I can’t calm the racing of my heart. Something about all of this isn’t sitting right with me, and it’s not just the obvious evidence of demonic rituals scattered all around me. It’s something else.
Why does all of this feel so wrong?
“You know, Lucifer really should have thought about that before he let himself get attached to you,” Naamah says, tucking her dark hair over one shoulder.
“Thought about what?”
She smiles at me and walks across the room, taking a length of rope off a hook on the wall. “How fragile you are. How vulnerable. How—” She makes a disgusted face, “Mortal.”
The word has venom to it, as though it’s a curse.
My stomach twists.Why is she talking like that?
She plays with the rope, running it between her hands as she walks toward me, liquid and confident as a cat. I’m trapped. Alarms jangle in my head as she comes closer, looking me up and down with an expression on her face that I’ve never seen before. Her voice drops to something like a purr, making me think of a predatory jungle cat.
“He could have chosen me. He could have had me fighting by his side right now. He could have had a powerful partner, someone who wouldn’t always,alwaysleave him vulnerable to manipulation and attack. Someone worthy of being his Queen on Earth.”
My heart is racing and my mouth has gone dry. Everything in me is screaming to run, but I’m frozen to the spot. And where would I go even if I could move?
“But nope. All those years, and he never saw what he could have with me. Then what does he choose instead?” she asks with a bitter laugh. Her face twists into a snarl. “A fucking human.”
Shit.Another burst of adrenaline kicks my feet into gear, and I surge forward, darting around her and racing for the door. But Naamah moves faster than sight, intercepting me in a blur and pinning me against the wall.
“You see what I mean?” She laughs harshly as she begins to wind the rope around my wrists. I struggle, but she’s impossibly strong.Demonicallystrong. “You can’t even run. How does he expect you to fight? To rule? To sacrifice? You have nothing of value to offer him. Nothing except a mortal pussy, and that will give out just like the rest of you before long.”
