Page 47 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

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B EX WAS IN TROUBLE.

The second princess had completely blindsided her. Bex didn’t know how she could’ve overlooked a murderous woman made of bone, but the white figure had tackled her through the wall before she’d even thought to duck.

She’d still managed to get a solid hit in with her explosive short sword, but the backblast had sent her skipping across the flooded slave floor like a stone.

She’d landed hard several hundred feet from where she’d started, but before Bex’s regeneration could even start repairing the damage, the princess had tackled her again.

Now she was on her back in the water with a damn white statue crushing her rib cage and punches flying like gunshots at her head.

“You cheater !” the princess screamed as she clawed Bex’s face with her needle-sharp, bone-white nails. “You fraud ! I’ll kill you !”

She was going for the throat when Bex finally got a grip on the slimy stone beneath them with her good hand and shoved up with all her strength to knock the princess off.

She started feeling through the water for her weapon next, but it was no use.

The exploding short sword had gotten knocked out of her hand when she’d gone flying, and unlike Drox, Bex couldn’t call it back.

Her combat knife was still strapped to her hip, though, so she pulled that instead, flipping the six-inch steel blade into a knife- fighter’s grip as she whirled around to see which brainwashed doll of Gilgamesh she’d pulled this time…

And nearly dropped her weapon again.

It was like looking into a cursed mirror.

That was definitely a princess, but the features carved into its white face were Bex’s.

That was her mouth twisted into a hateful snarl.

Her eyes replaced with gold and narrowed in fury.

They were the same height, same size—even the way the princess had braced her sandaled feet on the slippery ground was a perfect copy of Bex’s current stance.

The only things missing were color and her horns, but Bex had always been paper-pale, and she didn’t have her horns right now either.

If her hair had been white instead of black and she’d been wearing some kind of stupid toga wrap dress instead of combat fatigues, they would have been an identical set.

Those were all the details Bex’s eyes managed to pick up before the red of her rage filled her vision.

If it’d been Drox in her hand, this was where he would have counseled caution.

They didn’t know the extent of the enemy’s capabilities, and Bex’s own fighting strength was severely crippled.

The wisest choice would’ve been to run back to the tower and get help, but Drox wasn’t here to remind her of that.

He was on that abomination’s finger. Bex could see the lump of his ring under the white glove that covered the princess’s right hand.

Her stolen hand.

“ Give it back! ” she screamed, leaping on the princess with her knife raised over her head like the villain in a slasher flick.

Despite her blind rage, or maybe because of it, it was a good swing.

Bex hit the white statue square in the chest, but unlike the original, this Rebexa was made of carved bone, not flesh and blood.

Even when she stabbed with all her might, all Bex managed was to break the tip off her steel knife.

The golden- eyed princess didn’t flinch.

She just grabbed Bex’s knife hand with her carved one and peeled her fingers back, forcing the actual Queen of Wrath to drop her broken weapon in the murky water between their feet.

Bex didn’t care. “Give me back my sword, you fake!” she screamed in the princess’s face. “Drox is my weapon! You have no right !”

“I have every right,” the princess snarled back, twisting Bex’s arm until she cried out in pain. “ I’m Rebexa now, loyal servant of the true king and beloved consort to Prince Adrian!”

“You’re a puppet!” Bex yelled, thrashing like an eel in a desperate attempt to free her arm, which the princess was about to twist out of its socket. “Gilgamesh only made you so he could steal my Blade of Wrath, but Drox will never be yours, and Adrian doesn’t give a shit about you!”

“Don’t speak of things you know nothing about,” the princess ordered as she hooked her other arm around Bex’s neck to stop her thrashing.

“Rebexa the Bonfire is the property of Heaven now. Everything that gave you worth—your name, your crown, your sword, your prince—belongs to Gilgamesh, and he gave them all to me. That makes me the Queen of Wrath, but I didn’t want that prison sentence.

Who’d choose to live their life chained to a bunch of dirty, helpless slaves if they had any other option? ”

She tightened the arm she’d wrapped around Bex’s throat, lifting the actual queen off her feet and turning her around to face the closest knot of terrified demons huddling at the end of their chain.

“Look how they cower,” the princess sneered. “And to think these were once Ishtar’s creations, the famous army of the Riverlands. Now they’re just a bunch of dirty, sniveling beasts .” She kicked her carved foot, slinging a grimy wave of freezing black water across the hunkered demons.

“Is this what you died all those times for?” she shouted, kicking again.

“These cowards ? This trash ? They’re not even real living creatures!

They’re pond scum, bottom-feeders bred to eat the sin out of Ishtar’s precious rivers.

You only fought for them because the gods gave you no other choice, but Gilgamesh set me free. ”

She stopped twisting Bex’s arm and whirled her around, using her sorcerous body’s superior strength to grab the flesh-and-blood version by the throat and hoist her up until Bex’s combat boots were kicking an inch above the black water.

“My blessed king removed the burden of Ishtar’s endless labor from my shoulders,” the princess said in a grateful voice.

“He’s done more for me in one week than your ‘divine’ mother has for you in a hundred and ninety-eight lifetimes!

Thanks to the benevolence of Gilgamesh, I have no more shackles, no more endless duty.

I’m free to live as I choose. Free to serve the brilliant Prince Adrian, whom Gilgamesh honors above all his other sons!

Free to live my days in peace and splendor!

I’m the happy ending the ever-loyal Rebexa deserved , while you’re just the scraps of meat she left behind. ”

The princess flashed a twisted version of Bex’s own smile.

“That’s why you can’t stand the sight of me,” she said, pulling Bex closer.

“I’m the incarnation of everything you always secretly wanted to be: unburdened, responsible for nothing, free to put the desires of my own heart first. I live in an eternal Heaven and answer to only two men, while you’re forced to belly-crawl through the Hells in the doomed service of thousands.

You have always and will always be a tragedy, Ashes of Rebexa, but I’m not you.

I’m better , yet another work of the gods perfected by Gilgamesh’s brilliance.

” Her smile grew sweeter. “You should praise him for his benevolence.”

“I’ll never praise him!” Bex snarled, digging her five remaining fingers into the hand the princess was using to hold her throat, but not to pry it off.

The whole time the princess had been spewing her pompous propaganda, Bex had been going for the lump of Drox’s ring under the princess’s glove.

She could feel the familiar smoothness of his black metal band like a promise under the silk, but no matter how hard Bex called out to him in her mind, she got only silence.

His ring wasn’t even warm under the fabric because the princess had no body heat.

She was just an ivory statue, a literal mouthpiece carved by Gilgamesh to spout his self-serving bullshit .

Bex was dead certain about that last part, too, because there was no other way something containing a piece of her would ever spew such crap .

Realizing that made Bex feel a lot better about the other princesses she’d destroyed, but it did nothing to help her current situation.

She’d been counting on her sword to even the power imbalance, but whatever Gilgamesh had done to make Drox sit quietly on the princess’s stolen finger made him deaf to Bex’s calls.

He probably couldn’t even see her since divine weapons only recognized demons by their names, and Bex didn’t have one of those right now.

That made her as invisible to Drox as Nemini had always been, but what was she going to do?

The princess might be a carved doll in a stupid dress, but she was still stronger, faster, tougher, heavier, and in possession of two working hands.

That put her miles above Bex’s present state, but what else was new?

Up until this last summer, Bex had always been the underdog, and she still knew how to fight like one.

She’d been focusing on getting Drox, but he wasn’t responding and she was almost out of air, so Bex switched tactics and hooked her boot behind the princess’s knees instead.

She swung her body weight back at the same time, using her foot like a lever to force the princess off-balance and drop them both back into the water.

They landed with Bex on the bottom yet again, but she was ready for it this time. The moment they splashed into the freezing river, Bex’s hand dropped to the floor to start searching for a chain.

There had to be one. The sin production floor had been a grid of demons chained together into work gangs when she’d walked through earlier. The slaves the princess had just been disparaging were still cowering only a few feet away, so the chain that tied them to the ground had to be—

Yes!