Lilith snorted.
“What? It’s true,” he insisted.
“According to you.”
“Well, it’s my truth. I did offer to let you do the talking, Lilith, but you refused, so now you’ll sit there and let me tell my story.”
Merri squirmed in her seat. “This is so fucking uncomfortable.”
For a second I thought she meant the chair, but then I realized she was basically getting a debrief of her new mate’s first love... who just happened to be her relative. Awkwaaard.
“What Lucifer is leaving out is his philandering ways. He did the same thing as Adam. Tossed me aside for the new shiny toy. He seduced her into eating the fruit from the precious tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
“So many ofs in that sentence,” Remi muttered.
“I did do that. She deserved to know what life would be like out from under Adam’s thumb.Iam a feminist. The first, in fact.”
“You are so full of shit,” Lilith huffed.
“Be that as it may, the facts are the facts. Eve was hungry, I provided her with a solution.”
“And your cock.”
“Yes, well. We all make mistakes.”
Lilith shook her head while Merri looked like she was two seconds from running out of the room. Catching Chaos’s eye, I gestured with my head for him to go to her. She needed caring for, stat.
“Just get on with it, Lucifer,” Lilith said, inspecting her nails. “No one cares about the postmortem of our travesty of a relationship.”
“Not true. If there was popcorn, I’d be gobbling it down,” Remi muttered.
“Lilith was so incensed, so thrown into a rage, she stole every piece of fruit and every branch from the tree. I’m surprised she didn’t burn it to the ground, honestly.”
“It wasn’t the tree I wanted to punish.”
Lucifer snorted. “No, that was solely supposed to be me. Only things didn’t go quite according to plan, did they?”
Lilith refused to meet his gaze as she gritted out, “Not quite.”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Hades said under his breath. “The expression had to come from somewhere.”
Lucifer cocked a brow at Lilith. “Well, love. We’re waiting.”
Lilith’s lips were pressed into a tight line, but she lifted her face and stared at a point on the wall behind me as she spoke. “I took in every piece of knowledge as I ate the fruit, leaving nothing behind. It was all that has been and all that will be. Every ounce of truth in existence. An owner’s manual for all of creation, if you will.”
“That . . . you shouldn’t have survived,” Michael said.
“I almost didn’t. If Lucifer hadn’t made me a demon, I wouldn’t have.”
“How did you... The book.” Gabriel’s voice was filled with awe as the truth of what happened dawned on him.
“I made paper from the tree’s branches, knowing that it was the only way to safely restore the knowledge I’d taken and to keep it out of Lucifer’s clutches.”
“That’s why he never went after you. It was your leverage,” Merri blurted.
“I never knew what she did with the information she’d taken, only that it was at her disposal. I couldn’t risk her wrath,” he admitted.
“I lost most of the information to the pages. Only bits and pieces remain for me to use.”
