My eyes widened, lips curling in awe—the same expression I’d seen on the female’s face.
Faye was wrong.
That wasn’t a bad place.
It was truth.
Why did something exist if we weren’t supposed to touch it? To taste it?
I returned to the well. The gold shimmered under my breath as I whispered into it. Inside, Eve gazed at a slithering creature as if it spoke. On arms and legs, the serpent led her to the edge of choice. And she reached for it.
She ate the apple.
She ate it for both of us.
“What have you done, Lucifer?”
Faye’s voice cracked the silence. Her lips were parted, like she couldn’t catch her breath. And her eyes…
They looked through me like I was already gone.
Maybe I was.
The change inside me hit just as the consequences rippled across their world. Creatures who once walked beside humans now turned on them. The skies darkened. Wind and cold and weather—pain—entered their land like invaders.
Sickness took root.
Mortality spread like fire.
And to make more of their kind, humans would now have to join in a sacred violence of flesh.
The appendage swinging between our legs? It had a purpose.
One He never intended to use.
Not until Eve bit the apple.
Their world changed.
And I did along with it.
Heaven remained the same. Gilded. Quiet. Empty.
I couldn’t go back. I wouldn’t. Not to a world without taste, without desire, without whatever I should remember.
Others felt the same. Other angels saw what I saw, and they swore to follow me when I rose up to seize something more.
I failed.
And I was cast out.
Lucifer perished—
so the Devil could thrive.
Chapter Eighteen
Kara
