The palace was silent as I popped the ring in my mouth and opened my door. But some long-buried instinct hissed a warning at me, and I froze, listening once more. But there were no footsteps, no voices, nothing.
I forced myself into action, my footsteps silent on the stone floor. By the time I got down into the dungeon, my instincts were screaming at me.
I hesitated. Maybe I should come back tomorrow. But the thought of my father, alone in that cell…
I blew out a breath and began making my way down the two hundred stairs. At one point, I stumbled, my thighs jelly after all the stairs I’d climbed at the wyverns’ stables.
The ring slipped dangerously close to my throat as I missed my footing, and I pulled it out of my mouth. If I swallowed it, I was in big trouble.
I trotted down the last few steps and breathed out a sigh of relief as I hit the ground.
My father’s face was ashen. His mouth was open, neck straining, as he threw his head back and roared.
Roared silently.
Someone had created a silence ward. My gaze dropped to his hands, which had been shackled to the bars.
His eyes met mine. “Run,” he said, and the world spun around me as the silence ward dropped.
“Oh,” Lucifer said, and I began to shake. “It’s far too late for that.”
He appeared next to me, his power revealing him, along with Daimonion, several guards behind them. I kept my gaze on Lucifer.
He glanced at Daimonion, who leapt at me, clamped his arms around mine until I couldn’t move. I could feel his pleasure as he watched this little scene play out.
“My son and my granddaughter, conspiring against me,” Lucifer mused.
“We weren’t conspiring,” I snapped, my heart pounding so hard, I wondered how it was still in my chest. “I just wanted to see him. To know him.”
“If I’d wanted you to meet him, granddaughter, I would have invited him to court.”
I swallowed. “Please—”
“Silence.”
I was going to vomit.
“Danica.”
My vision narrowed to my father’s face. He refused to even look at Lucifer, his gaze on mine. “I’m so proud of you,” he said.
Lucifer shifted next to me, and I glanced at him. I knew that expression. I choked out a breath. “Please, grandfather. I’ll doanything.”
“I had almost forgotten you were down here, Agates,” Lucifer mused, ignoring me. “How… absentminded of me.”
I shook my head, my breath sawing in and out of my lungs. There had to be some way to stop this. Some way to convince him.
“Danica,” my father said again. He was looking at me with a mixture of pride and love and sadness. “You were the best thing that ever happened to me. And you were worth every second in this place.”
A sob choked out of me, and my vision blurred. I blinked, desperate to see his face. To memorize every inch.
“Touching,” Lucifer said, his voice bored.
I wanted to fold in two. To beg, to plead. But my father’s gaze was steady on mine.
I’d thought I understood what torture was. Thought I’d seen it on earth, and then truly understood it when I was in Lucifer’s court.
I hadn’t had the first clue.
