“Fuck…” Hecate breathed, and I grit my teeth together in rage.
“Ares might not be smart enough to figure out your little insurance policy, butRazsure fucking would be,” I growled.
Gabriel was watching me closely in that way that always made me feel like I was completely naked.
I retreated deeper into myself.
Mask, mask, mask. Hide, hide, hide.
“Who? Who is Ares working with?” Gabriel asked, his voice dark and full of a strange sort of protectiveness as if heknewsomehow that I was fuckingterrified.
How did he always see right through me?
The thought of Gabe finding out about what Raziel had done to me made me feel so sick I could have fucking puked, which was so embarrassinglyhumanI hated myself for it.
He needed to back the fuck off.
What was his obsession with uncovering shit that was better left buried and dead?
Why wouldn’t he just leave me the fuck alone?
Anger swirled in my gut at the way he keptstaringat me, and I found I couldn’t answer his question. I just swallowed.
Forcing myself to stay calm, I did my best to ignore him.
Hecate turned to face the raven demon, her face grave. She answered for me.
“Ares is likely working with Raziel, God’s first angel.”
The home I had planted myself in was destroyed.
The second we realized that Ares was working with Raziel, we rushed next door to check on my other halves, only to find they were both gone.
There were clear signs of a struggle.
A pang of sadness twanged through my chest as my boots crunched on the remnants of the smashed mermaid lamp.
All my human memories had been fabricated with a cloaking spell I had cast on myself to help me blend into this human world. Though they still feltreal.I still felt like Astrid and my grandmother were my family, which was somewhat ridiculous. They weren’t real people. They were clay golems I had crafted and animated with pieces of my soul to use as decoys.
But still. The memories of us living together in this house felt real, and they weregone.There was a strange, quiet sadness in my chest as I took in the trashed house that I had temporarily called my home.
Shemhazai was quiet, and I knew he was angry at me for being so foolish. I hadn’t been thinking about Ares when I had hiddenmyself here. I had done it as part of a four thousand-year-long game of cat and mouse Shemhazai and I had been playing.
It hadn’t occurred to me that I still had scarier monsters to worry about than the chaos demon. Now, I was paying for it.
I should never have tried to play mortal. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be in this situation, and from the way Shemhazai was glaring at me, he agreed.
“You’re a fuckingidiot,” hehissed at me, his green eyes burning with rage as we stood in my wrecked house.
The pictures had all been torn off the walls, and my couches were shredded. Glass and cutlery were strewn across the floors, and my kitchen table had been split in half.
The golems had clearly put up a fight, but against the seraphim and the literalgod of war, they hadn’t stood a chance.
“I didn’t think—” I muttered, and he hissed at me. Literallyhissedlike the cat he was.
“No, you fuckingdidn’t!I would have kept you safe if you had just stayed in Hell andwaitedfor me when you woke up.”
“I was playing the game, Hazai,” I snapped, and he narrowed his eyes on me.
