Page 15 of Wicked Believer (Original Sinner #2)

Chapter Twelve

Lucifer

The sound of my footsteps echoes inside the abandoned diner car, the decaying countertop barely keeping me upright where I lean against it.

I light a cigarette, inhaling deeply, before I slump down onto the checkered floor.

Somewhere amidst all the chaos this evening, my shirt was torn, and the sheen of sweat that drips from my hair and torso likely make it look as if I’ve been swimming in one of Hell’s more fiery lakes.

Torture is a physical thing.

Astaroth lies underneath the table of a dilapidated booth nearby, his bloodied, mangled form and the chains that bind him strewn across the bottom of the booth’s empty wooden child’s seat. The chains are for show, really.

This is my realm. My domain.

And here, I am more than a king.

I am a god of my own making.

The end of my cigarette flares, and I flick some of the ashes onto the grease-coated floor, watching as they char a hole into a bit of spilled sugar that’s escaped from a cracked glass dispenser.

All the New Jersey diner’s original contents are still here, replicated for my own amusement. A nice touch of detail, if you ask me.

“She’s going to regret it, you know,” Astaroth rasps, his voice a garbled, disparate thing.

From where I poured boiling fry oil down his throat, only for him to heal so I could do it all again several times over. The methods of humanity’s medieval period still inspire me.

Even if they did blame me for their disgusting little plagues.

I wrinkle my nose.

“ Hmph ?” I grunt, barely acknowledging him as I take another long drag, only half listening.

My pulse is still settling from how I’ve exerted myself tonight, but I’ll be ready for round two shortly.

Astaroth was simply a warm-up.

Even if the information he’s harboring is integral to my plan.

He turns his head toward me, the movement a disturbing and uncanny loll thanks to all the ways I’ve broken him. And will continue to do so for centuries. Longer even.

However long it takes to appease me, considering the bloody bastard went and betrayed me, sold Charlotte to the Righteous for dead.

And for what?

The pressure in my jaw tightens.

It’s one of the few questions that continues to plague me.

“You,” Astaroth rasps, coughing up yet another bit of blood. The kitchen floor is practically soaked in it. “She’ll regret you eventually. Give it time.”

Charlotte, he means.

I stiffen, my cigarette suddenly crushed in two.

The truth in those words coils in me.

“Perhaps.” I feign a calm I do not feel as I stare past him, my expression distant.

I relight what’s left of my cigarette, inhaling one last pull and rising to my feet, before I casually make my way toward him.

The broken glass on the diner floor crunches beneath my Armanis.

At my approach, he recoils, attempting to wriggle away, but in Hell there is nowhere beyond my reach, nowhere to escape me.

I seize him by the hair, stubbing the last of my cigarette out on the whites of his eyes as he screams. His aren’t the only cries that will chorus through Hell tonight.

“You’ll lose her!” he shrieks, his voice growing louder. “She’ll regret you, trust me!”

I cast him onto the floor beneath me.

“You think she won’t turn to His side?” he rasps. “After everything?”

Once she learns what I’ve done, he means.

All that I’ve planned. The truth of her power.

I abandon my stubbed-out cigarette in one of the diner’s ashtrays as I drive the hard part of my shoe into the bloody mass where his balls should be, causing him to black out.

“She already has,” I muse into the quiet, mulling over the idea as I perch on one of the old, rusted barstools. “But I suppose by then, it’ll be too late, really.”