I feel my throat tighten. “She really thought he loved her.”
Slade’s jaw shifts, a dark, controlled movement. “Lucifer can make anyone believe anything he wants. It doesn’t make it true.”
Veda writes of the moment everything shattered. She bore him a daughter instead of a son. Instead of holding her, instead of claiming them both, Lucifer tore the bond apart without hesitation. Not gently. Not quietly. He rejected her daughter. Rejected her. And because their magic had intertwined, because she had opened herself so completely, the rejection ripped through her soul like a blade.
The pain of it nearly killed her.
Slade’s voice softens behind me. “A broken bond like that… it would have felt like being torn out of herself.”
I swallow hard, eyes blurring over the next lines.
Veda describes how she screamed. How the bond snapped like a star dying. How everything she had built, everything she had believed, collapsed beneath the weight of Lucifer’s rejection.
And how she tried—desperately, recklessly—to use the very power he had given her against him.
Not a foreign force, or an unknown entity. Hispower.
She called upon the rites he taught her, the magic he’d anchored in her veins, the bond that still thrummed with the remnants of what they had shared. She reached for the shape of him inside her blood and tried to tear it out, to rip every part of him from her soul.
But she didn’t strike him. The backlash struckher. Her sisters, their daughters—everyonetied to Bellamy blood.
Her grief twisted the magic wild, and it turned inward, snapping tight around the family line like a snare designed by heartbreak itself.
Slade exhales, the sound long and steady. “It wasn’t Lucifer’s curse. It was the consequence of trying to use his power to wound him.”
I turn the page slowly, my fingers trembling. Even the parchment feels warm now, like it remembers the moment Veda wrote these words.
The next entry is frantic, the ink pressed too deep. Veda writes that she tried to sever the bond by sheer force, to cut out the magic he planted in her, to make him feel the devastation she felt. But Lucifer’s power was older than she realized, tied to laws she didn’t understand, and when she tried to shatter it, the magic recoiled.
Slade’s voice lowers, almost a whisper. “This is the moment everything shifted.”
“She was still bound to him,” I murmur. “Even after he rejected her.”
“Yes,” Slade says, expression grave. “The power he gave her didn’t vanish just because he broke the bond. She wielded magic that wasn’t hers to control.”
I swallow, eyes drifting to the next lines.
Veda writes that she begged the magic to take back what she had given. She begged it to punish him, to sever him as he severed her, to tear him from her the way he tore himself away. But Lucifer’s magic didn’t answer to her desire. It answered to its own laws.
“I don’t think she understood the power she was using,” I whisper. “Or the cost.”
Slade nods, slow and grim. “Lucifer’s magic obeys Lucifer’s rules. She tried to weaponize a bond that was already broken. It couldn’t strike him… so it struck everything connected to her instead.”
The grimoire warms again beneath my hand—not ominous, but aware. As though it recognizes me. ABellamy descendant finally reading the truth its pages have held for centuries.
My voice softens. “Slade… if this really started because she used his power…”
“Then we need to understand the bond she had with him,” he finishes quietly. “Because whatever magic she shattered—it’s still echoing through your line.”
The grimoire pulses once beneath my touch. Warm… Patient… Intentional. And I know this is only the beginning of what Veda left behind.
The curse isn’t just a wound. It’s a history of love twisted into ruin. A story of a bond misused, broken, and turned inward until it swallowed generations.
And now?
It has finally opened its eyes for me.
Chapter 22
