My stomach did a slow, ugly flip. Lucifer, going off the script on purpose, burning down his own future because he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to. That was chaos I understood in my bones. Part of me wanted to be sick, and part of me wanted to stand up and clap, because of course the man who’d rewritten my ending had started by shredding his own. And if he could erase thousands of books with one choice… what the hell did that mean for the story he was trying to write with me?
I couldn’t possibly say that to Barb, so instead, I pulled a classic Dany and deflected while I tried to figure shit out. “You’re talking about him like he’s one of your lab rats Barb and I’m going to need you to take it down a notch.”
“No lab rat, but he was a true miracle to watch. And that’s what I did. I watched. What did he tell you about the garden of Eden?”
So much.
I recalled his sad tale. One written betrayal, pain, and the sort of misery one can only feel when their ability to choose is taken away.
I cleared my throat. “That Eve was a hoe and thought his dick was better than Adam’s so she jumped on it.” The words felt sour on my tongue and I wanted to take them back. There was nothing funny about what happened to Lucifer in Eden. What his father had taken from him was disgusting.
“All you need to know girl is that Eden was not Eve‘s test. It was Lucifer’s.”
The idea of God playing with Lucifer made my lip curl. “To what? Make sure he was still capable of following his daddy’s stupid rules?”
“No, it was more than that. Lucifer is the reason Eve was able to choose between him and Adam. That’s why he is the face of sin, Dany. Don’t you get it?
Barb’s words were the lubrication the wheels in my brain needed to begin turning again. “Lucifer is the father of free will,“ I whispered, therevelation rippling beneath my skin. What that meant for me, I wasn’t sure yet.
“Look at that,” Barb smiled. “She does have a brain in that head.“
“But what has this got to do with me? Why are you telling me this? I am nobody, Barb. There is no home for me, in this life or the next. I am unwanted.”
“And that is why it haseverythingto do with you.” Barb took my face between her palms and gave it a little shake, as if she could force the intention of her gaze into my mind. “Before I followed Lucifer in disgrace, do you know what I did?” It was rhetorical, because she gave me zero time to answer. “I sat in my beloved archive and questioned it all. The purpose of our kind, the intentions of our Father, if there could ever be more than what we’d known… When I was as low as I could get, Lucifer’s tomes called to me. I wandered his shelves for hours, following a voice that crescendoed with every turn. In the end, it was an ordinary, leather bound book calling to me, but it held a revelation. One word. One single, scripted word written in red ink by a hand that was not my own.”
“What did it say?”
Barb’s lips thinned as she pulled my face nose-to-nose with hers. “Niepozadany.”
The word wasn’t unfamiliar; it slipped through me in the exact cadence I’d heard in dreams and half-deaths, the way Lucifer always let it fall: soft, almost fond, like a hand at the nape of my neck even when he was disappointed in me. I’d filed it away as one of his strange endearments, a private name that meant nothing outside the space between us.
“He… He called me that. When–” I started breathlessly.
I recalled the night we’d spent together. How when he finally gave in, when we clashed like fire and ice, he groaned between desperate kisses,“It was you. It was always you, Niepozadany. My Unwanted.”
And another night when he was angry, and said,“I will not coddle you because it is an insult to your strength. I am the god of the fallen, a creator of my own right, and I chose to bring you back,”with such conviction that I’d forgotten to stop and wonder what it could mean.
His hands had been so gentle as he’d healed the swollen cuts and bruises on my face, yet his face was full of raw betrayal. I’d heard the words. I just hadn’tlet myself hear them.
My fingers drifted to my bare wrist, thumb searching for a band that wasn’t there anymore.
“Niepozadany,” I whispered, testing it on my own tongue.
Unwanted.
Except that wasn’t how he said it at all.
He’d torn up his own future. He’d ripped the deal off my skin. He’d threatened me with reliving my Death Day like it was some big, terrible punishment, but the more I turned it over, the more hollow it rang. I was already living it. Every time I woke up and let my fear of Callen and the unknown rule me, I was relieving it.
Hell wasn’t some place Lucifer had sent me.
I was already there.
He had to know that. Which meant that the whole sunrise ultimatum hadn’t been about damning me. It had been about letting me choose. The ledger was closed, and I was in debt to no one.
No one except myself and the freedom I was promised.
And I was free.
