Page 22 of Wicked Believer (Original Sinner #2)

Chapter Eighteen

Lucifer

I’m out on the platform of the New York Stock Exchange, overlooking the trading floor, a poorly mixed Harvey Wallbanger in my hand, as I pretend to hobnob with the other executives before the opening-bell ceremony.

The press is out in full force, and the sea of too many white men clapping one another on the shoulder and shaking one another’s hands congratulatorily bores me, but the celebration of the initial public offering of one of our latest subsidiaries is exactly the kind of distraction the media needs this morning.

I take another sip of my drink, frowning slightly at the weak, watered-down taste.

“Lucifer.” One of the subsidiary’s human executives approaches, his hand extended to me, but before I can even deign to consider if I want to debase myself enough to take it, my attention is quickly interrupted by an unexpected touch upon my shoulder.

“Sir.” Dagon stands before me, looking winded and a bit red in the face. Like he jogged all the way up here from the street.

I wave a dismissive hand. “Not now, Dagon.”

Whatever it is, it can wait.

“Sir.” Dagon steps closer, undeterred as he lowers his voice and speaks directly into my ear. “Sir, there’s been a breach.”

My spine runs cold.

“Charlotte, she’s ... she’s gone, sir.”

I don’t ask what exactly the word gone means. My mind is already too busy reeling, remembering.

The feel of her lying limp in my arms.

The sight of her no longer breathing.

The way my stomach felt as if it’d been dropped down into my feet, like I’d been disemboweled, at the sight of her standing there in limbo.

So close to Azrael’s arms, so close to being beyond my reach.

The glass in my hand shatters, the juices spilling over my skin.

The room goes instantly dark, all the light inside it being pulled and sucked inside me until nothing but a pitch-black void remains.

Someone screams, a woman it seems, as the trading floor erupts in chaos, but I don’t stay long enough to gauge their reactions or to excuse myself from the room.

I’m gone in a blink. The tail end of the crowd’s gasps as the lights and electronics come back on barely registers as I become shadow and step through the ether.

The next thing I know, I’m standing inside Xzander’s studio, time frozen around me.

From the second that anthrax was first delivered, I began memorizing Charlotte’s daily schedule down to the minute. But the sight of the body lying upon the floor stills me.

“No.”

A sound I don’t recognize tears from my throat. Something tortured, something garbled and tormented with pain.

But my light, my power, must recognize that it isn’t her before my mind fully comprehends what I’m seeing, because instead of lifting her into my arms, I remain frozen.

I would know if she were dead. I would feel it.

Our connection is still intact. Which means ...

She’s mine. Still.

Now and always.

The nausea that plagued me subsides, and it takes only a matter of seconds for me to regain control, the terror that gripped me giving way to momentary relief before it turns into something far more insidious, far more unhinged.

Fury.

Violent and barely controlled.

I step toward the actress’s corpse, hardly noticing where Xzander, the security team, and the accompanying police remain frozen in time around me. I crouch next to her, examining the bloodied spot in the middle of her spine where the assassin’s blade made entry.

Carefully, I use the edge of my suit coat to lift the custom Dior dress she was wearing—a replica of the one Charlotte wore yesterday—as I take stock of the wound that killed her.

Black spider veins shoot out from the point of entry, squirming and writhing.

Exactly as I feared.

“Fuck,” I snarl.

The confirmation settles in, though no one within the studio can hear me.

I stand swiftly, following the vague scent of Charlotte’s perfume. I can taste it with a simple flick of my forked tongue. I chase the scent and taste down the stairs and into a back alley, the whole city still frozen in time around me.

I come to a stop on Seventh Avenue where, at the mouth of the alley, the trail ends, muddied by the medley of other scents of the city.

I find one of her scuffed Louboutins.

My jaw clenches tight enough to spark pain as I take the abandoned shoe into my hand.

If anyone has so much as laid a hand on her, I will burn down this whole bloody city without a second thought.

With a furious roar, I slam my free fist down onto the pavement, the full weight of my strength opening a massive fissure in the earth. From the hole in the concrete, dozens of large black serpents begin to escape, my lowest demons, summoned to serve me.

“Find her,” I hiss to them, watching as they scatter about the city. “Find your queen.”