“I’m willing to give you a day to consider it,” she said. “But I won’t leave them here with you without a bargain.”
He spoke again, and Khavi snorted a laugh.
“You don’t have any goodwill.”
His gaze moved to her hellhound.
Khavi went still. “I won’t leave Lyta.”
Lucifer’s smile said it all. Either she would choose to leave Ash and Nicholas, or the hellhound—but there would be no bargain if she didn’t choose one to stay.
“Let me take Ashmodei,” Khavi said. “She’s the more valuable to both of us. I’ll leave the Guardian here.”
Yes, Nicholas thought.
Lucifer turned away.
Khavi called out, “Both of them, then! But only four hours to consider my offer. And you’ll return them to me, unharmed, if you do not intend to accept our bargain.”
Nicholas didn’t know what Lucifer said, but the triumph in the demon’s face told him well enough: He’d agreed.
Her hand on the hellhound’s shoulder, Khavi didn’t even turn to look at them. She vanished.
The details didn’t matter. Bargain or not, they were dead.
Unless they got the fuck out of here.
Nicholas focused on that thought as they raced across the frozen field, surrounded by a troop of armed demons. Lucifer had finally called for them—not as backup, but as herders. No one but Lucifer could fly across the frozen field; their wings wouldn’t even form. Nor would Lucifer carry them. So running it was, his feet burning from the cold. Ash’s might have been, too. She’d vanished her boots after her heel had struck one of those frozen eyes, but her heated skin might save her some of the pain.
He didn’t think that mattered, either. In the frozen field, surrounded by silence and screams, Ash probably wasn’t thinking of her feet. But just as she had when Madelyn ordered her to kill him, Ash had concealed her emotions. Terror and anger had to be hidden behind her blank features. She wasn’t going to let the demons know it.
The black tower rose ahead of them, spearing into the red sky. With a base the width of a small city, Nicholas couldn’t see around it. They passed out of the silent, frozen field into a cacophony of flapping wings and demon tongues, the growls of hellhounds. Jeers and laughter followed them to the entrance.
Unharmed, so far. Lucifer didn’t have to keep them that way—his agreement with Khavi at the end hadn’t been a bargain. So Lucifer must be saving the pain up for something bigger than whatever a random demon threw at them.
They passed into the tower—obviously not through the main entrance. A small arch opened to a dark stair, and they were urged up, up, around and around. Nicholas counted steps until they stopped. Eight thousand four hundred and fifty-six. Thank God he didn’t tire anymore.
Pushed out into an unlit stone corridor, they were assaulted by screaming, sobbing. Not the screams of the frozen field, echoing only in his head, but of terror and pain.
“Torture rooms,” Ash said. “How fun.”
Nicholas had to laugh. A demon’s head turned sharply. Never heard a laugh in this place before? Well, he was sure it would be hysterical, sobbing laughter pretty soon.
Lucifer waited at the end of the corridor, a smaller demon at his side. No, not as his side. Just behind him. Clearly subordinate.
The second demon smiled and gestured to a stone door. “The honeymoon suite.”
The what?
Ash closed her eyes. “I’m going to wake up tomorrow and find this is all an absurd trick played by Khavi.”
“You won’t wake up tomorrow,” the demon said. “Go in.”
The small chamber had been constructed of the same black stone as the rest of the tower. But not even black stone, he saw—it was marble, corrupted and pitted, as if after thousands of years of smoke and fire. Not the medieval torture chamber he imagined. Instead of cutting instruments, Iron Maidens, thumbscrews, there were simply two pairs of manacles, hanging from the ceiling by chains, ten feet apart.
A spear at his back urged him forward. But not a spear for Ash, he saw. The armored demons used their hands.
Why the difference? Kinder to a halfling? Something else?
They lifted her. A demon flapped his wings, tightened the manacles—thick steel or something similar. Not much different than the collar Nicholas had used around her neck that first night, he’d wager anything it was too strong for a demon to break. The demons holding her up let go. She fell, hung—her feet suspended above the floor.
God. “You all right?”
“Fine.”
No. No they weren’t. But they couldn’t fight yet. They had to wait. An opportunity had to come.
They lifted him next—and no, it wasn’t bad. This couldn’t strain a Guardian’s muscles, or a halfling’s. Then they turned him around, positioning him to face her, and he knew:
It would be worse than anything he’d imagined.
“The honeymoon suite,” the demon said again, and a short, curving knife appeared in his hand. The others filed out of the chamber, leaving only Lucifer and his subordinate. “Now and again, we’re fortunate enough to receive humans in the Pit who are a matched pair—who truly love each other. For those souls, the torture in the Pit is never as rewarding as it should be. They are able to put the pain away, to take their minds elsewhere. Except, of course, when the person they use to escape the pain is hanging right in front of them. The only sweeter sound than the scream of a human whose gut is being ripped open is the sound of his scream when we rip his loved one open.”
His gaze on Ash, Lucifer spoke.
The demon bowed and scraped before looking to Ash. “He cannot stand the sight of you. Change to your demon form.”
She almost obeyed. Nicholas saw it, the almost immediate acceptance. But Lucifer wasn’t her master; Madelyn had been.
“I don’t know how,” she said.
Not even a refusal. A lie. A clever lie. Because if they escaped this room, her demon form might allow them—her—to escape a little more easily than a human could.
And it was a test. Would Lucifer know?
If he did, what would he do?
“Halflings,” the demon said, and looked at Lucifer. He nodded.
Realizing he had to try, Nicholas said, “Will you consider a bargain that lets her go?”
The demon whipped his knife around, made a long, deep cut across Nicholas’s stomach. Oh, fuck. Painless, for an instant, and he only heard Ash’s scream, the rattle of her chains, felt the warm slide of blood. Then agony struck.
“Do not speak to him,” the demon hissed. “He will not answer. He will not foul his mouth with a human tongue for the likes of you, Guardian. Bad enough that you foul his tower by speaking it, by the spill of your blood.”
All right. Breathing shallowly, using the anguish tightening his muscles to still every other movement, Nicholas nodded. Best not to point out that Lucifer was the one who’d brought them here.