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“She had my protection,” Lucifer hissed. “Your nose should’ve smelled it my miles away.”

Alessandro took a deep breath and motioned towards her retreating figure. “Lucifer, I claimed the woman five days ago. How strong is my smell?”

Lucifer narrowed his own eyes as he sought the scent out and shock eased some of the tension off his shoulders. “That can’t be.”

“She’s like a filter for power, cleansing it out of any other ownership and claiming it as her own.” Alessandro shook hishead. “Her chakra paths are repairing themselves at a rate that within a month she will be back to one hundred percent. Before that happens, I need to understand what she is, because she’s not just a succubus or an elf. What did you set up to protect her from?”

Lucifer’s eyes pulsed with a sheen of red that Alessandro associated with the most reckless violence he’d ever witnessed.

“I was hiding her from my asshole siblings. She’s the first demon Blessed. I’m going to have to figure out some new way of hiding her.”

Alessandro frowned. “But she has divinity. They wouldn’t harm one of their own descendants.”

Lucifer narrowed his blood-red eyes and raked them over the dragon. “She’s mostly a succubus. Any divinity you sense is negligible.”

There was something about his tone that made the Dragon King’s hackles rise. He was attempting to be duplicitous. But Lucifer never lied. Instead, he tried to shroud answers in shadows.

Alessandro cocked his head to the side and glanced back towards the collection of white-haired guests.

“It’s faint, but she overcame demon poison. That’s not negligible.”

“Maybe the demon poison wasn’t pure enough. You might have been mistaken. It’s not the first time it’s happened. You remember that hellish night when you swore three bottles of ambrosia-laced whiskey wouldn’t affect you?”

He wouldn’t take the bait. The one and only time Alessandro had truly allowed himself to let go with Lucifer, and the night thathad sealed the friendship were the same. Though they argued often about the details, neither really knew the full story of what occurred that night.

All Alessandro knew was that when they awoke, they’d been in another dimension with a pack of satyrs and that never boded well.

Chasing away the images and the stench of that day, Alessandro focused on what Lucifer was trying to conceal.

It was easy to pick up on divinity once someone realized it was there. Alessandro had assumed the trace of divinity in Rowan came from her father’s side as the idea that a succubus as strong as Annabelle, even without the usual markers of wings, horns and tails, having any divinity, was absurd.

A spell of misdirection protected her genetic status from much less trained spellcasters, but Lucifer’s brand of magic was familiar to Alessandro and he navigated the spell to show him the truth.

Annabelle Dahl was a third generation divine.

Bright white specks colored her aura, and when he glanced over at her daughters, he realized why he had initially missed the presence of divinity. The first time he sought Rowan’s magical signature, he’d noted that the colors of her demonic and elemental magic were brighter than usual. Lucifer had somehow hidden the white of divine magic behind them to saturate their appearance.

“What have you two done?” Alessandro hissed, turning his wide eyes to the devil.

Lucifer’s nose flared, and his eyes flashed ruby. “You should have walked away.”

Unaffected by the show of his anger, Alessandro pressed on, “How?”

Lucifer rolled his eyes, “When a mommy and a daddy…”

“Cut the shit, Lucifer. Rowan didn’t know. Why wouldn’t you tell her?”

Lucifer shook his head. “It should never have happened. When Lilith realized what she’d done, it was too late to reverse it. All she wanted was to see what a child between us would look like. What she did with Adam out of hatred, she wanted with me out of love. It fucked her up emotionally and you know how dangerous that is for someone with her power of creation.”

Alessandro clenched his fists. “So, your little love child created an elf-demon-divine?”

“Yes, Annabelle.”

“And Rowan is your great-grandchild.”

“You can see why I am displeased with your attachment,” Lucifer hissed.

Alessandro leveled him with a glare. “I don’t recall you ever telling me you had a child, much less a great-grandchild. I might have taken precautions against landing in bed with her!”