Page 32 of Hell Bound
“Years?”
“This was never a great place for you. I thought it’d be better to let you hang on to your freedom as long as possible.”
“Then why now? What made you tell Asmodeus where I was?”
Why would you let them drag me back here to literal Hell?
“It’s complicated.”
“No it isn’t,” a woman’s raspy voice chimed in from behind us. “You had no desire to die, and that was the consequence if you failed to provide her location any longer.”
The pure white wolf I’d seen moments ago had shifted back into a slender woman with shockingly silver hair and angular crimson eyes.
She was the only female among the wolves, but she didn’t seem bothered in the slightest that she was naked in a group of males.
Maybe she can give me some tips for the next time Asmodeus makes me enter a crowded room in scraps of fabric.
“What do you mean?” I turned back to Deasley, brows raised. “You were going to be killed?”
“It had been years without me ‘finding’ you, and he must have figured out I was stalling. Or suspected it. If he had any proof, he’d have killed me the second we got back.” He shot a wink at the female wolf. “Good thing, right, Pyp? I know you missed me all that time.”
“More like I missed your stash,” she retorted with an eye roll. “Lucky for us, it’s not that easy to make slave wolves out of Hell nobility anymore, so he’s forced to keep us alive if he doesn’t want to diminish his ranks.”
“All of you were nobles?”
“Are,” she grated, and her eyes flashed with that same fire that illuminated them in her wolf form. “Just because that bastard conscripted us to his guard doesn’t take away who we are.”
“Damn right, Princess Pypentha! And you might be his queen, Lil, but you’re still Princess Lilith of the Ardent Court. Though I guess you’d be queen of your home court by now, too.”
Hearing that struck a chord somewhere deep inside, but I didn’t recognize the note. It didn’t feel familiar, but then… maybe?
Perhaps I was looking for connections to make sense of this place, and I was willing to grasp any straw.
“What courts are you from?”
“I’m from Illicit, which makes me like your big brother.”
“How so?”
“Incubi and succubi have always shared a link—”
“I’m sorry,what?”
“Shit, right, you wouldn’t remember that. You were the heir to the Ardent Court, which is the domain of the succubi. Your father, Duke Saleos, made a deal with the Infernal Court to try to assume power after your mother died. The succubi would never recognize him as the true leader of the court, so he allied with Asmodeus to ensure you’d never be Queen of the Ardent Court.”
Hearing about these supposed parents was strange.
I had parents. Isobel and Miguel Martinez. They’d raised me, molded me into a strong, independent woman. I’d grieved them daily since the night I survived the home invasion that killed them.
Absently, I started to twist the ring I always wore. I found it in my mother’s jewelry box after her death, and though I’d never seen her wear it, it had always brought me immense comfort.
More than once I’d thanked the universe that the men who’d robbed our home hadn’t made it to my parents’ bedroom. My ring might have been lost to me forever.
“Hey, I’m sorry, Lil. I didn’t mean to bring that up, I know this has all got to be insane to you.”
“A little.”Times a thousand.It was a lot to process, and I already had enough on my plate. I turned my attention to Pyp. “What about you? Are you a succubus, too?”
She laughed, her deep, roughened voice like a haunting melody that plays just before the heroine in a movie is found by the killer.
