Page 16 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

That pile of black mud might look unappetizing to Bex, but to demons who weren’t queens fueled by the fires of life, sin was food.

This place was full of food, and the demons weren’t allowed to touch a crumb of it.

She could see the hunger in the children’s eyes as they emptied their buckets, but even though the food was right there, right in reach without a single warlock in sight to guard it, not a single one of the runners tried to swipe a handful.

Bex couldn’t imagine fear strong enough to keep a starving child from reaching for food, but she hated it.

She hated this whole ugly place where her people—Ishtar’s precious creations—were treated like sin-making machines.

They slaved in silence, starved in fear, and worked until they died in an ugly, dark cavern that smelled of smoke and death.

And she hated it.

“I know,” Lys whispered, reaching back to stop the growl Bex hadn’t realized she was making. “I feel the same, but we have to keep it together. We’re almost in.”

As always, Lys was right. They were on the final elevated boardwalk that led to the tower’s golden doors, which were properly lit for once with bright, sorcerous lanterns instead of smoky torches.

That didn’t bode well for their costumes, but Lys didn’t hesitate.

They just strode straight ahead, marching right up to the pair of war demons guarding the door like they meant to walk straight through them.

“You two,” they announced in a sharp, annoyed voice that, even if it wasn’t how the dead warlock actually sounded, matched Lys’s stolen body perfectly. “Out of the way.”

That probably would’ve worked on the kids they’d faced before, but these were mature soldiers with four arms and an apparently unflappable demeanor. Their faces stayed as still as actual bronze statues behind their golden visors, though Bex still swore she heard the taller one sigh.

“Writs are required for access, sir.”

Lys went deathly silent for a moment, then they dug into the white robes with the huff of a pompous man doing something he thought was excessively unnecessary.

It was flawlessly acted, proof yet again that Lys was the best at what they did.

The petty display of annoyance also kept the war demons’ eyes on them instead of Bex, Iggs, and Kirok, who were all much less good at this.

Fortunately, the war demons didn’t even seem to suspect them.

They mostly just looked bored, watching in long-suffering silence as Lys retrieved the gilt-edged, cuneiform-covered paper they’d taken from the dead warlock earlier, placed their thumb strategically over the bloodstained corner, and then shoved it at the taller war demon’s face.

“There,” they said impatiently. “Now open the damn door before I name you into doing it by way of a pirouette.”

Bex held her breath as the war demon looked over the paper clutched in Lys’s transformed hand. It must actually have been what he was looking for, though, because the guard stepped out of the way at once, opening the golden door and bowing his horns to Lys without another word.

“Finally,” Lys snapped as they stomped through. Bex was about to follow when one of the war demons reached out and grabbed her by the arm.

“Sir?”

“ What? ” Lys snarled, whirling around only to go still when they saw the demon holding Bex.

“There seems to be something wrong with your slave’s collar,” the guard explained quickly at Lys’s blistering look. “Would you like us to check her?”

“No, I would not,” Lys replied, pulling their warlock to his full height, which was nowhere near tall enough to look down on a war demon but still got the point across.

“I would like you to shut up and stop wasting my time. You’re both one word away from a write-up, so if you don’t want to go back to the forges, I suggest you learn your place. ”

A write-up sounded like a pretty mild threat to Bex, but the war demon let go of her arm the moment Lys mentioned it, snapping back to his post like a spring.

“Good,” Lys growled, giving the guard a final long glare before snapping the warlock’s fingers in Bex’s face. “Let’s go.”

Bex obeyed at once, scuttling behind Lys with her face parallel to the ground both because that was what an actual terrified slave would do and because it kept the headband with her fake horns out of the guards’ line of sight.

Iggs and Kirok tromped in right behind her, which was scary in its own way since the gaps in their ill-fitting armor were a lot more obvious in the bright white light of the tower.

They were also all carrying bags, which Bex realized belatedly wasn’t something people did here.

Yet again, she really wished they’d had more time to put into their costumes, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

They were already walking into the brightly lit tower’s main floor, which was set up like an airport security checkpoint.

The whole thing was one big circular room with a long table in the middle where an important-looking warlock was sitting.

Behind him was the entrance to a grand spiral staircase that went up the center of the tower like a corkscrew.

The spiral was open in the middle, giving Bex a view of what had to be thirty floors of white-robed warlocks working at desks, talking by windows, or managing huge racks of spare chains.

The quiet murmur of conversation and shuffling papers even sounded like an office, but while it was obvious that this was the stairway to Heaven they’d been looking for, Bex didn’t see any stairs going down.

That was odd. She’d heard Kirok mention the Lower Hells earlier, but while this was clearly the main stairwell, there seemed to be no way to get to the lower floors.

Bex supposed that didn’t really matter since they were going up, not down, but it still seemed strange.

She was wondering if there was another staircase hidden somewhere else when Lys’s warlock came to a sudden stop.

Bex followed suit immediately, slamming her boots into the ground six inches behind the heels of Lys’s shapeshifted white boots.

When Lys didn’t start moving again and didn’t say anything, Bex lifted her eyes off the floor she’d been studying—both because it was strange and because she couldn’t look at anything else while pretending to be a meek, downtrodden slave—to see a man coming down the spiral stairs.

A young-looking man in golden armor with olive skin, dark curling hair, and gleaming, mirrored eyes.

“ Shit, ” Iggs whispered before Lys frantically waved him back into character.

Bex didn’t see the point. That was obviously a prince, which meant they were screwed.

The warlock at the security table was already leaping out of his chair to greet him.

Lys took advantage of the lapse to whirl around and start marching everyone back out the way they’d come.

They’d almost made it to the door when Bex glanced over her shoulder to make sure the prince hadn’t spotted them and saw something that stopped her dead in her tracks.

The unknown prince was still busy talking to the security warlock, but he was close enough for Bex to see the black chain dangling from his golden gauntlet. It looked like a sin-iron dog leash, and at the end of it was an all-white woman with a black cage wrapped around her carved ivory head.

The sight sent a shiver down Bex’s spine.

She’d never heard of a restrained princess before.

Aside from the square of blue silk that had been draped over the Princess of Sorrow’s shoulders, she’d never seen one wear anything other than the clothes Gilgamesh had carved onto their bodies.

But while Sorrow had seemed to treasure her blue shawl, this princess looked like a muzzled dog.

In addition to the cage over her face, there was a thick sin-iron collar around her neck where the prince’s leash attached, along with manacles at her wrists and ankles that were chained together to inhibit her movement.

That was why she’d lagged behind her prince on the stairs, but Bex didn’t understand the point.

With the exception of War, who was crazy in her own way, every princess she’d ever met had been a slavishly loyal sycophant who’d happily die for their prince.

Bex didn’t know what this one had done to deserve the prison treatment, but the disconnect gave her hope.

If this princess wasn’t a brainwashed Gilgamesh fangirl, maybe she would help them.

This wild optimism was still running away with her when the princess turned her caged head and met Bex’s eyes. The moment their gazes locked, Bex knew that she’d been wrong. This princess hadn’t been chained to keep her loyal. The restraints were there because she was insane.

Her eyes were so wide they looked like two golden balls rattling inside a carved white skull, and her face—which should have been lovely—was a flat, expressionless mask.

All of Gilgamesh’s princesses were doll-like, but this was the first one Bex had seen that actually felt like an inanimate object.

Her blank face and jerky, hobbled movements were so deep in the Uncanny Valley that just looking at her sent shivers running all over Bex’s body, but the true terror came from her eyes.

They were still huge and unfocused, but the interlocking golden rings that made up her eyeballs were spinning like wheels about to come off their tracks.

They were turning so fast that Bex could actually hear the high-pitched squeal of the gold grinding against itself like the world’s most expensive cement saw.

This went on for a full five seconds, and then, all at once, the princess’s hard, emotionless face split into a jaw-unhinging grin behind her sin-iron cage.