“Honestly?” He glanced over at me. “No.”
Heat spread through me like wildfire. “No?” I fired back at him. “Are you freaking serious right now?”
“Deadly.” He kept his gaze straight ahead, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me anymore. “You will always put Lucifer’s interests ahead of anyone and anything. I’m his loyal servant, and I have been for a thousand fucking years, but I would never shit on one of my brothers to please him?—”
“You’re not one of my sisters, Lothar.”
“No shit, but I can’t do my job if you don’t trust me, and especially if you’re keeping important fucking information from me.”
“Not this again,” I said, even as my face heated.
“Yeah, this again. You’re keeping something from me, female. Something big. I can feel it, fucking smell it on you. Death saw it as well. Yet you continue to deny it. So no, I don’t trust you, not in this.”
My nails dug sharply into the flesh of my palms. We needed to work efficiently together. This situation we found ourselves in was my fault. I’d lost control of my emotions, I’d let them get the better of me, and he hadn’t missed it. I had to fix this, or at least try. I had to tell him something, and I had to be honest, at least for some of it, so he’d sense that as well. “Okay, fine.” I shook out my hands. “There are things I’m keeping from you?—”
He cursed.
“Hold up, it’s not what you think. It’s nothing important to this mission, anyway. And FYI, it’s not a lie, it’s an omission. The two are completely different.”
He growled deeply. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means, you need to drop this. There are some things I have no intention of sharing with you. The fact that you can sense it can’t be helped, but you don’t need to know what those things are, they have nothing to do with finding Beelzebub.” For both of our sakes, my secrets needed to stay that way. “No matter how much you grumble, I’m not going to tell you, and you need to be all right with that, okay?”
His frown stayed firmly in place. “No, not okay. I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“And that’s totally fine. Like I said, it has nothing to do with finding B. It’s personal.”
“Female, you are talking in riddles.”
“My secret does not have anything to do with this mission, is that clear enough for you?” I was itching to strangle him.
“But it has something to do with me?”
I pushed a branch out of my way. “I never said that.”
“I fucking know it does.”
“I have no control over what you believe to be true, Lothar. Whether it does or doesn’t have anything to do with you is something you’re just going to have to learn to live with.”
He looked ready to self-combust. “How the fuck am I supposed to do that?”
“Easy. Stop talking about it. Better yet, stop thinking about it.”
“Roxy,” he growled.
“On the subject of hunting down B…” I quickly said to keep the conversation moving, but in a slightly different direction. “There is one thing I have been considering, something I haven’t shared with you yet.” My belly quivered and my heart felt like a frozen lump in my chest. As much as I didn’t want to mention this, I had no choice, because he was right, when it came to finding Beelzebub, or anyone else who could be involved, I had to be fully transparent. I just hoped that Lucifer’s block was still unbreakably strong in Lothar’s mind, because once I said what I was about to say, and where it might lead us, I couldn’t take it back.
“I’m listening, Roxy,” he said when I didn’t immediately carry on.
I cleared my tight throat. “The weapons, the ones the wraiths attacked us with, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something like it before.” Gods, my voice sounded strained.
“Pretty sure?”
Fuck. “I’m positive.”
His eyes flashed. “Where?”
I gripped the straps of my bag tighter. “Lucifer has a battle-axe made of the same steel that he keeps under lock and key. It was gifted to him before he fell...”
