Page 42 of Angel I Am Not

My gaze jumped between him and Luc. “What do impossibilities bleed?”

Nick’s mouth tightened. “There aren’t enough of us for that to be a useful fucking question.”

Well. Fantastic.

Luc brushed his thumb gently over the uninjured side of my face before finally letting me step away. I grabbed my phone from the pocket of my dress and glanced at Dante’s message again. We had already picked apart everything Nick and Luc knew about Zel, and none of it made me feel any better.

I moved closer to Luc as he started collecting the larger pieces of whatever he had destroyed. “What are you not saying?”

His hand stopped over a shard of wood as Nick’s expression shifted.

I pointed between them. “That. Both of you just did the thing.”

“What thing?” Nick asked.

“The thing where you both decide something for me and then pretend there’s nothing to explain.”

Luc straightened slowly, rubbing one hand over the back of his neck. “I don’t think Dante sent you here just because he thought you might be our mate. We know he expected some kind of reaction, but moving you through all seven of us feels bigger than that.”

Nick folded his arms across his chest. “Dante doesn’t play Cupid. Whatever happens with the bonds might be useful to him, but he wouldn’t build this whole fucking deal around getting us laid.”

I had spent days trying to understand what Dante wanted from me, and somehow every answer kept circling back to the same thing. He knew more than he was saying and kept putting me exactly where he wanted me. “So I’m being used again.” Luc’s expression softened, but I kept going before he could try to make it sound better. “Why? What possible reason could Dante have for dragging me through seven demons if the bonds aren’t the point?”

Neither of them had an answer. The silence gave an older thought room to surface, one buried beneath twenty-eight years of Heaven telling me exactly who Dante was and what he had already tried to do once.

“Is he trying to take over Heaven again?”

Nick’s arms dropped slightly as he glanced toward Luc. “Fuck, I hope not.”

Luc looked around the wreckage of his room, his expression tightening as he set the overturned lamp upright on the dresser. “I don’t know what happened the first time. Dante never talks about it, and most of what everyone believes came from Heaven.”

I frowned. “Everyone knows he challenged God and ended up ruling Hell. How am I supposed to look at that and come away thinking he isn’t evil?”

“Because ruling Hell and being evil aren’t the same thing.” Luc finally looked at me again. “He manipulates people. He keeps secrets. He’ll bury the truth under enough technicalities to make you want to strangle him. I’m not defending any of that. But whatever happened between him and Heaven, I don’t think the version you were taught is the whole story.”

The certainty in his voice shut down the immediate argument sitting on my tongue.

Everything I had learned in Heaven had been built around lines that suddenly weren’t as clean as I remembered them being. “Right.” I rubbed both hands over my face before remembering the blood on one of them and stopping. “So if I’m connected to all seven of you, what happens then?”

Nick’s mouth twitched before he glanced at Luc, and whatever passed between them made both of them start laughing.

I stared at them. “What?”

“Nothing,” Nick said, which obviously meant the exact opposite.

Luc shook his head, still smiling, and it took me another second before the rest of the problem finally clicked into place. The pull I felt toward Pride and Wrath wouldn’t necessarily stop with them if Luc was right. Gluttony. Lust. Envy. Greed. Sloth. Seven different demons, seven possible bonds, all of them somehow tangled around me.

I looked between the two assholes still trying not to laugh and pictured seven demons crammed into one apartment. The logistics alone sounded like a nightmare, and that was before I even got to the sex. “Oh.”

Nick’s grin turned downright filthy.

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face did.”

Luc chuckled as he stepped around another pile of broken furniture and came back toward me. His fingers brushed lightly beneath my chin, careful of the cut. “You don’t have to decide how you feel about any of it tonight.”