I wasn’t buying a single word of any of this. It was too crazy.
“I think I would remember getting murdered.”
“You’d be the first,” he said with a melancholy smirk.
“Right, but if I’d actually gotten murdered, I wouldn’t be here now, would I?”
“I already told you, you were reincarnated, Kitten. That’s why you don’t remember anything.”
This was insane. I was just a regular person. My life wasn’t anything extraordinary or out of the ordinary. I was twenty-six, not some ancient reincarnated Queen of Hell.
I folded my arms over my chest and collapsed onto the couch, glaring up at him. “Right. And why would your brother want me dead?”
By the way Lucifer rubbed his temple, I gathered he was growing irritated with all my questions. “I don’t know,” he growled. “My best guess is that he still has a stick up his ass from when Dad assigned us our first wards. I got a hot, stark naked woman with a love of snakes, and no, I don’t mean the animal, and he got a chubby control freak who loved rules and spending a little too much time with the sheep, if you catch my drift.”
I wrinkled my nose. “So I was murdered because Michael was jealous that you got laid?”
Lucifer’s jaw flexed with anger. “Yes. My greatest sin in Father’s so-called ‘Paradise’ was lust, and I got my wings brutally ripped from my body for the trouble and a one-way ticket downstairs on the ‘Father’s Boot to My Ass’ Express. Meanwhile, Michael’s favorite sin is envy, and what did he get for it? A pat on the butt from Father, and a promotion.”
I frowned. Lucifer wasn’t acting like the villainous devil I desperately wanted to believe he was. On the one hand, being kidnapped by the Satan everyone knew and feared would mean certain doom for me. But if he wasn’t that guy, it meant that maybe the angels really were the bad guys. Maybe they really had kidnapped and murdered his queen for petty reasons.
The anguish carved in his face was proof enough that he had lost her, and the anger and betrayal banked in his eyes could very well be Michael’s doing.
Lucifer sat on the couch beside me, his gold eyes bright through the cellar’s murk. He set his glass on a nearby barrel and rested his hand on my knee. My insides heated. His touch was infuriatingly comforting when it had no right to be. I should have shrunk away from him. Instead, I had to battle the urge not to snuggle closer.
“Let me show you what I’m talking about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Let me prove that you are who I say you are.”
My heart thundered hard in my chest, making my ribs rattle. What he was saying was absolute insanity. I wasn’t a demon queen. I was an overworked ER nurse who loved to forget her problems in weekend-long benders made possible by cheap cosmopolitans and shitty one-night stands. I didn’t let myself buy into fantasies for too long because I was too grounded in the reality that life sucked. But I survived it because come Sunday evening, I’d always set aside Reckless Jess and tuck her away until Friday evening. Come Monday morning, I’d don my scrubs and get back to the grind.
But this was a dangerousAlice in Wonderlandsituation going on here. Lucifer was the rabbit, and I had a feeling I was about to follow him down a very dangerous path, one where I might not find my way back. Only it wasn’t the rabbit hole I’d be following him down.
It was Hell. And did anyone ever really come back from that?
He squeezed my hand, a grim smile on his lips. “Tell you what. Let me show you our past. Long ago, when I fell from Paradise, I landed in the Ninth Circle, all the way down at the bottom. I met you. I was too stupid to realize then exactly who you were, but it was still the best moment of my life when it had every right to be the worst. I took the throne from Abaddon and decided I was going to crawl my way out of Hell level by level and rebuild it as I went. You came along with me when you didn’t have to. We rebuilt this place together. Let me take you through all nine layers so that you can see what we built together. Then I will show you a memory of us from back then, so you can see what it was when Abaddon ruled.”
I swallowed thickly. “You… You can show me your memories?”
His lips slowly spread into that infernal smile of his that made my thighs quiver. “It goes hand in hand with my ability to read minds. I can also give you my thoughts and memories.” His eyes gleamed with wicked mirth. “I havelotsof memories of us. After I show you the important ones of Hell, I can replay all sorts of our salacious evenings spent together. With my handy trick, you can cancel yourPornHubPremium subscription.”
My checked burned hot than hellfire. I was sure if anyone ever discovered that I actually paid for pervy crap like that, that I would die of embarrassment on the spot. Then again, Iwasin Hell.
“They have the higher production stuff behind the paywall.”
“You don’t have to tell me love. I own the company.”
I gapped at him for a long breath. “You’re not the sort of devil I ever imagined.”
“Your fantasies of me are pretty accurate. Well, with the exception of the scenes where my pants are off. I don’t know what kind of tiny dicked college frat boys you’re used to sleeping with, but you’ve got to give me more credit thanthat.”
A flutter of lust licked at the place between my legs, and I had to foist my thoughts away from his cock to the offer he’d just made.
I would see in his mind. To me, there wasn’t any sort of chance in Hell that anything I saw would convince me that I was in another lifetime, the Queen of Hell. But all this mind-reading bullshit was getting a tad old, and it would be nice to have it go the other way for once. Besides, how could I resist the temptation of looking inside the devil’s mind? The dark and dirty things I’d see.
Maybe that would clear up the “how big could he actually be” question. And it would be interesting to see what he was like all those years ago, what kind of person this Lilith was. I’d heard the name before, but I didn’t know much about her from the tales. Something told me none of the stories had been right anyway.
