La Tunda - jacanas - Lucifer (TV) [Archive of Our Own] (2024)

Chapter 1: The Favor

Chapter Text

The car was a cheap rental from the airport with no frills or special features. It did have a CD player, the one amenity she valued above power windows or fuel efficiency. The woman pushed a burned CD in and waited for it to load. Manuel Medrano’s voice filled the car, crackling with the dying speakers. The car jittered and bounced on occasional potholes and the CD skipped each time. She sang along quietly with a softly accented voice.

Her face was round, her cheeks plump. Black, thick hair was knotted in a messy bun on top of her head, strands flying loose each time she turned her head. Her eyes were the same color, almond-shaped and brightly expressive. Every time she smiled at the music, crinkles appeared near her temples and in between her eyebrows. A strong worry line stretched down the center of her eyebrows, giving her a wizened countenance.

She pulled into the parking lot of a simple motel with no more than fifty rooms. In the backpack next to her, a soft chime resonated. She dug a small hand through the various items strewn through the bag, sighing as the search lasted longer than she wanted. She pulled free a small flip cell phone and swung the top open to view the message. The smile lines across her face eased into bare crevices, all hints of pleasure gone. She clacked the phone closed and exited the car, dragging the backpack with her.

She looked up when the motel bell rang as she entered what passed for a lobby. The room was ten by ten feet, barely big enough for the two fabric chairs and sad weeping fig in the corner. It likely hadn’t been watered in weeks. Most of the leaves had hardened into brown little crinkles scattered around the plant in a sad circle of botanical despair.

She turned away from the wilted display when a clerk appeared behind the bulletproof glass shield separating him from the dangers of a shoddy motel’s clientele. He was young, perhaps not even twenty, with bright green hair raised in prominent spikes down the center of his head. Her smile returned, delighted at the style. She spoke in quick, enunciated Spanglish, pointing at his head.

“¡Pero que cool ese pelo!” That hair is so cool!

He beamed proudly at her praise, slipping into accented Spanish as he sorted her room. She rummaged through the backpack and offered a Colombian passport for his review, along with cash for the room. Her name, Mariana Gómez, sat next to her photographed blank expression, date of birth, and various other forms of narrowing her exact identify down to an assortment of letters and numbers.

She smiled kindly throughout the exchange, even offering a generous tip for his kindness. He repaid her by gently returning the excess money and then launching into a tourist-educated explanation of American tipping customs.

“Ah, sí, ya veo.” She paused, taking a moment to gather her thoughts. “I see now,” she said with a thick accent. The clerk – Felix, according to his name tag – held out an electronic key card and wished her a pleasant stay. She’d booked three nights for the cheapest rate, which gave her a room with a bed, a bathroom, and a TV which worked about thirty percent of the time.

She walked back out to her car and pulled into the space right in front of her home for the next few days. The backpack was draped over a single shoulder. She pulled a single suitcase from the back seat of the car, ignoring the trunk for now. The room opened after three tries with the key card, her grunt of irritation and increased pressure against the sensor finally forcing the red light to switch to green.

The bedding was scratchy and faded, the walls stained in odd locations and various colors. The carpet was a nightmare of crisscrossed lines and dirt, some intended and some left from previous occupants. She set her suitcase on the single chair in the room and tossed the backpack onto the bed. She was already itching to leave, but she needed to get ready first.

Preparation for the night was a relatively simple affair. Her packing was neat and compressed, only the bare essentials and plenty of room in the suitcase for souvenirs. She unpacked a cream, flowing sleeveless dress with red flowers sparsely patterned along the entire print. It was summery and fun, and it swished when she walked. She enjoyed these kinds of simple pleasures, taking advantage when she could.

The shoes were cream wedges to match the dress. Together they comprised the most expensive bits of her available wardrobe. Tonight was a night to look at least somewhat formal, but also practical. She had a goal in mind; there was a reason she had come to Los Angeles.

It was nearly midnight. LUX would be open for a few more hours.

She stepped into the bathroom to freshen up from the airport travel. A splash of foundation, a smudge of blush, two swipes of eyeliner, and a deep red lip gloss transformed her from a jetlagged traveler into a young woman looking for fun. She pulled down her messy bun and shook out her thick hair, letting it fall into a glossy black blanket across her shoulders. She pinned the hair up on either side with cream pins with red flowers as the accents. Everything matched; everything was ready. She stared at herself in the mirror, dressed up, ready to leave. Her arms were exposed in this dress, the muscles tightly corded when she flexed them.

She stepped back into the room and pulled a red clutch from her suitcase. She fumbled a bit with the final addition to her ensemble, sliding it neatly into the clutch.

She called a taxi using the room phone and pulled enough cash out for both the ride, a generous tip, and the cover charge for the club. It would take at least fifteen minutes for the cab to pick her up, so she pulled her research out from her backpack again, spreading it across the bed. A picture of Lucifer Morningstar pulled from a quick Google search; pictures of the exterior and interior of LUX; carefully hand-written notes detailing the favors she’d managed to discover through those same quick web searches. The man wasn’t subtle about granting favors, and some who received them weren’t either.

She reread her notes while waiting for her cab, tapping a finger against the edge of the topmost picture. She’d memorized the look of him weeks ago, before setting herself on this mission to approach him. She was ready to explain if needed – a sister, a ransom, Colombian politics and the FARC. It terrified her to think of how close she was to ending this. Would he be kind? Would he understand? How much would he need to know? He had a reputation outside of favors which made her skin shiver. How much would he ask in return?

She swept the papers into the palm of her right hand and tore them straight down the center – once, twice. She unbundled the now-thicker sheafs and tore them again, and again, until a small pile of paper remained. The room phone rang. She answered, listened, and hung up. Her cab was waiting.

She poured the slivers of notes and photos into her clutch along with the money. The phone remained in the room, along with the backpack. Tonight was about unburdening herself.

“LUX, por favor,” she told the cab driver. The man nodded and pointed up, a universal symbol of got it, then pulled out from the lot. She cracked the window once they reached the highway and dropped clumps of the torn paper through the slit, scattering her notes into the night.

Her skin felt tight. They were close now. She could see the building looming in the distance, proud against the murky Los Angeles skyline. She missed the stars.

She was dropped off right at the entrance, though the line started at least a half-block down. She tipped the driver anyway, thanking him for the trip, and paused outside of the wide entrance. Her eyes widened as she tipped her head back, music flowing outside to the street. The lights, the volume, the people – she bit her lip, the picture of overwhelmed. A breeze kicked up from a passing car, her dress whispering delicately around her calves and thighs. A bouncer spotted her and waved his hand to catch her eye. She looked young and lost; he gestured for her to approach.

“You can go in,” he said. His hand swept her through as she beamed her gratitude. She rooted through her purse and presented the cover charge in cash; he shook his head, similarly kind as Felix in the motel, and pressed her back gently.

“Pasa,” he said. Go ahead.

“Gracias.” She touched his shoulder in thanks, smile lines enhanced. He nodded and returned to his work while she stepped into the club and froze in the entrance.

The music was louder, the lights flashing. A stairway separated the entrance from the club proper; she stepped aside to let others pass her by, scanning the crowd. She needn’t have bothered. He was in the center, at the piano, playing a lively tune and fully animated. There had been several videos of him on YouTube and other sites, recorded by patrons on camera phones of varied quality. Now she watched him perform live, no more than fifty feet away, and her heart pounded in time with the staccato beat.

She descended the stairs and pushed herself into the closest to a corner she could find, tucked behind a small bar top and next to the end of a couch. She watched with the others, rapt by the performance, by the sheer life flooding out from his fingers into the air surrounding them all. He was energy, he was excitement, he was likely very high.

She clenched her fingers tight on the clasp of her clutch. She thought she could lose her nerve if she waited too long. She would approach, as soon as he finished – just as soon as –

The song ended with a flourish and a round of inebriated cheers. He saluted his patrons, spinning in a circle, both hands raised in joy. The comedown took several minutes as he spoke with patrons, flirted, accepted a finger of bourbon which he quickly finished, only to be replaced by another three. It was nearly twenty minutes before he approached the bar itself, speaking quickly with the bartender in a raucous voice. He wasn’t one to hide.

She looked across the club and saw no one else approaching him for now, though many kept him in their sites. His reputation for favors was only overshadowed by his sexual exploits. Her skin shivered.

Would he be kind?

She walked closer now, dodging through the crowd. She was small and swift, able to cut around and through gaps in the crowd. When she reached his back, the top of her head barely reached the center of his chest. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, anxious to interrupt a conversation she only partially understood.

“Señor Morningstar,” she said to his back. If he heard her, he ignored her. She stepped to the side so that the bartender could see her. She bit her lip again, shuffling her weight, terribly nervous and painfully shy. The bartender pointed over his shoulder and he turned, eyes sparkling with mischief and drink. His suit was tailored to perfection, a small gray pocket square peeking from the blue fabric. His hair was messy with sweat and spirits, ruffled from the recent performance, and the fourth finger of bourbon was nearly gone already.

His smile scorched across her, setting her skin ablaze with gooseflesh. He took her in from head to toe, pausing in all the spots which quickened her breath.

“My my, mamita,” he purred. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“Necesito ayuda,” she said quickly, her voice low. I need help. He paused while bringing the glass to his lips, eyes dancing with mirth.

“Ah,” he said. “¿Con que?” With what?

She shifted from foot to foot, her eyes darting around the bustling crowd.

“¿Podemos hablar arriba?” Can we speak upstairs?

His eyes gentled enough that the gooseflesh stopped burning. Her fear was palpable, her shyness irresistible. His smile curled into a kinder expression, and he nodded.

“Por supuesto, ¿señorita..?” Of course, Miss..?”

“Mariana.” She offered a hand to shake, and he delicately brought it to his lips.

“Mariana,” he said with that same gentleness. The drink and drugs seemed all but gone now, his eyes clear and focused. She bit her lip and followed as he led her to the stairs again, this time turning toward an elevator.

“Gracias, Señor Morningstar,” she said. Her relief made her feel dizzy; she stumbled a moment on the steps, uncertain in her wedges. He righted her with a hand on her arm, which shifted to the small of her back as they approached the double doors. He pressed the button and smiled down at her.

“Llámame Lucifer, si quieres,” he said. Call me Lucifer, if you want. The elevator pinged a moment later, and they stepped through the opened doors. She ran a finger across the clasp of her clutch, nerves starting to win out. A slight tremble shot through her hands as she unlatched the small metal link, just opening the clutch. The elevator rose swiftly. He had it serviced often; it was the primary way in or out of his penthouse.

They reached the top in a few silent moments. She wondered what he thought she might need. What might have brought this shy, scared young woman to his club to ask for help and beg to speak in private. He had no lock on the elevator; he had no doors in the penthouse. Everything was open, honest, forthcoming. He might have secrets, but he lived publicly.

She took a breath through her nose, out through her mouth. The doors popped open with a ping. Her eyes shone when he looked down at her. She could see he wanted to help; she could see that whatever she asked, he would try to give her. He stepped out of the elevator and clapped his hands, turning for the massive bar to the left.

“Ya,” he said, turning to meet her eyes “¡entonces! Que de-” Now then! What do you de–

She drew the gun and fired twice. Once in the center mass, right for the heart; the second for the head, above his eyes, dead center to blow out the brain. He fell, of course, because what else could he do? Her eyes shone brightly as she pressed the button to return to the club. The smell of gunfire drifted powerfully in the elevator cab. Her eyes watered. When the doors opened to the bottom floor, she stepped out and across, heading for the entrance and the Los Angeles night.

She never looked back.

In the penthouse, two bullets clinked against the ground on either side of a prone figure. Twelve full seconds passed before his eyes flew open and he gasped loudly, sucking in as much air as he could in a sudden shock of consciousness. His eyelids fluttered in confusion, then annoyance, then –

“Bloody hell,” Lucifer snarled. He sat up and grabbed at the front of his suit jacket, poking a hole through yet another ruined three piece. He hadn’t even been on a case this time, and he found this terribly unfair. At least when he knew there might be bullets flying, he could plan his wardrobe accordingly. Today, though, the Detective hadn’t needed him as she caught up on paperwork, and so he’d planned for a night in, such as it was.

And now, of course, he had a crime to solve, didn’t he? His own attempted murder! He considered calling the Detective – but no, she was swooning over that plank of wood Pierce – and besides, how would he explain two bullets and no wounds? She wouldn’t believe him if he told her the truth. And if all he had were spent bullets, she couldn’t make a theory from that anyway.

He called the lift back, just to be certain Mariana hadn’t left any obvious evidence. If that was even her name! The little minx had fooled him – oh, she had downright deceived, playing to her trembling gender and pleading eyes. He’d be offended if he weren’t so impressed. Now, though, he had to find her and set the record straight. She’d tried to kill him, would have succeeded had the Detective been near enough. She’d at least earned a stern talking to. It was lucky the Detective was the opposite of spontaneous. If she had been here tonight, poof! All of Amenadiel’s past dreams come true.

He was grumpy, and he had a headache now. A double tap, honestly. The hole in his tailored Kiton was bad enough, but she had to add a migraine to the mix. And now his lift smelled of gunsmoke, noxious and sharp and he needed a whiskey, now.

He staggered once, his feet uncertain as his head pounded. His fingers traced against his forehead, irritation adding to the pain there. Knives were so much easier; they just snapped with enough force. He considered adding a sign to the interior of the lift: Assassins, please use knives! It was only polite.

He drank one glass, two, several. He rubbed a hand over his face, considering his options. He could ignore the whole affair. He was the only one who knew what had just happened, outside of a very small, very devious woman. She was efficient, too – no hesitation on that one, just pop pop and Bob’s your uncle.

He could ignore it, yes, pretend that nothing happened tonight, pretend that he hadn’t been bamboozled by a minx in a summer dress. He preferred this solution as it suited his own personal need to never speak of this again. But there was no justice in that, was there? And besides, if she learned she’d failed, she might try again. She might try again when the Detective was near, and she might not care about things like collateral damage.

She might succeed, too, but he wasn’t nearly so concerned about that.

So no, he couldn’t ignore this. This needed to be addressed, investigated, solved before he could move on with his life and find a way to accept the new wooden board the Detective insisted on calling a fiancé. And no, he couldn’t accept it, but he had to, didn’t he? The Detective deserved to make her own choices – her own terrible, horrible, unspeakably bad choices – and he would support her and smile and what had she been thinking?

No, he couldn’t ignore this. He needed answers. He needed to know why Mariana wanted to kill him, and he needed to know why the Detective made the choices she did, and he supposed he needed to know if he was still a walking target, but really, why did she say yes?

He sighed.

So then, a case it was! Without the Detective. Because for one, he couldn’t explain the bullets – and for two, he couldn’t trust her judgement. She was so intelligent most of the time! He supposed even the most brilliant humans sometimes found blocks of granite fascinating. There was a whole field dedicated to the science of rocks, and belatedly he wondered why Cain had never taken it up. He and the other bores of the world could quibble for hours on the benefits of sediment. Clearly he’d missed his calling.

Lucifer left the bullets where they fell, uncertain if their placement might be important. He pulled out his phone and dialed, foot tapping impatiently, fingers drumming the bar. Ms. Lopez answered on the third ring, her voice sloppy with sleep. He beamed.

“Ah, Miss Lopez! Thank you for answering. Yes, yes, everything is quite fine – well, no, it’s not fine, but it’s fine – well anyway, I need a favor again. Utmost discretion, yes – there’s two bullets to look at. No, no hiking to freaky grave-sites I’m afraid. Excellent. I’ll be waiting.”

He hung up and looked down at the two offending bullets, shining dully in the light of the penthouse. Miss Lopez would be here within the hour. Until then, he intended to drink.

Chapter 2: Night and Day

Chapter Text

Ella in fact arrived nearly two full hours later, sporting her kit from the department, a Monster drink, and a black shirt with the words PREPARE FOR STARBURST splayed across the front over what looked like a demented multi-armed blue manta ray. Lucifer didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know.

Despite the hour, and despite the surprise call, she managed to be chipper as ever, though perhaps a bit shaky. She set the canned beverage down on the bar next to his who-knows-what-number pour of whiskey and dropped the kit to the ground at her feet. A yawn escaped her mouth with such force that both of them startled.

“Don’t judge,” she said. “I’m doing the best I can at crazy o’clock in the morning.”

Lucifer raised both hands at the wrists, a miniature surrender. “Far be it from me,” he said. “I’m grateful you’ve come.”

“Yeah, well, you know I don’t do it for free,” she said. She dipped into her sack and pulled out two fresh pale blue gloves, snapping them into place on each hand. “Ash Wednesday is coming your way.”

He huffed. “I hardly see how allowing some sex-repressed wanker smudge a burned plant on me is a good use of my time.”

Ella removed a notepad and pen from her kit and worked on sketching a rough diagram of the room.

“I won’t make you go up,” she said. She bargained even as she began the work itself, knowing he would give in. Lucifer sighed a dramatic, haughty breath. Ella smiled behind her pen. She sweetened the deal anyway because what were friends for?

“I’ll even let you make fun of my ashes,” she said. Lucifer flicked a finger upward and nodded.

“Deal,” he said. They understood each other well.

“Ok, so, two spent bullets on the ground. They definitely made impact. What did they hit?” Ella turned in a slow circle, trying to find some indication of what happened here. “You hiding a giant metal sheet or something? Kevlar suit?”

“I assure you, Miss Lopez, my suit is quite permeable to bullets.” He popped a finger through the hole in his suit jacket. He tried not to show his disdain for the damage while Ella stepped forward and poked her gloved finger through.

“Uh…” She blinked and pulled open the jacket to find another matching hole in the shirt itself. In a sudden panic, she grabbed a handful of the shirt and jerked up to force the fabric free of his belted pants. Lucifer raised both hands, unsure if she intended to remove the entire ensemble as evidence. Ella stared at his unmarked chest in open confusion, then dropped the shirt. The fabric bunched awkwardly along his waist.

“So…where’s the vest?” Ella went back to scribbling notes.

“Vest, Miss Lopez?”

“Yeah, you know,” Ella waved her pen in a circle, gesturing generally around the penthouse. “Bulletproof vest, whatever you were wearing. Where is it?”

“I…” Lucifer glanced around to follow her non-specific circle.

“I need to see it, it’s part of the crime scene,” she said.

“I don’t have a vest,” Lucifer said. Ella sighed.

“You could at least not compromise your own crime scene,” she mourned. “Alright, walk me through it.”

Lucifer tucked in the unruly sliver of fabric still sitting braced against his waist, then straightened his jacket and tugged at the ends of his sleeves. Finished preening, he took Miss Lopez’s shoulders and walked her backwards to the lift, standing her inside where Mariana had been.

“She was there, and I…I was here.” He adjusted his footing and placement just so, angling himself appropriately. He was faced away from the lift for the moment, hands hovering around his hips, gauging distance for accuracy.

“I turned and began to ask her what she desired,” he turned as he narrated, mimicking his motions from a few hours before, “and she rudely interrupted. Two shots, right away!”

Ella looked at the two bullets on the ground. She noted their locations on her sketch, fighting a significant surge of confusion. Next came the camera. She began walking around the scene in between watching Lucifer’s reenactment, from the elevator to the bullets themselves.

“I fell here,” Lucifer said. He was engrossed in his story, gesturing with both hands over a long invisible outline. “Quite unconscious at this point, but I can assume she pressed the down button. When I woke up, she was gone.”

Ella took a deep breath before taking photos of his ruined jacket and dress shirt. She was fighting through caffeine, exhaustion, and curiosity to focus on the whole picture. Instead of asking any of her current questions, she leaned close to the elevator button and noted its curved shape. She took a picture for her records, then walked to her kit and pulled out her fingerprint powder and AccuTrans gun to begin the process of dusting and lifting the prints she found.

“Ok, so, you brought lady killer up for a good time –"

“Miss Lopez!” Lucifer sounded offended. She looked at him in between carefully applying the AccuTrans to the curved surface of the elevator button, eyebrows up.

“She said she needed help,” Lucifer said with a scoff. “She asked to speak in private – well, upstairs, which I took to mean private –"

“You brought her up, she popped two off, and then down she went,” Ella finished. She glanced around the carriage, particularly in the corners.

“Do you have any cameras in LUX?” she asked. Lucifer managed to look even more offended.

“Certainly not,” he said. “My clientele know their proclivities are private.”

“But people do take videos,” Ella said. “I follow some users on Wobble. There’s one lady, SukiSue, she posts almost every night.”

Ella finished waiting for the AccuTrans to set and carefully peeled the silicone from the button. A clean but demoralizing litter of bundled prints was preserved. Maybe she could get a partial.

“Ok, so, did you go back downstairs? Hit this button at least once after she left?”

Lucifer nodded and shoved his hands into his pockets. Ella grinned, amused that his body seemed to know what was coming. She stored the silicone first, then removed alcohol swabs, black ink, and an FD-258 to collect every kind of fingerprint she could. Lucifer watched with growing unease, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He had seen this process enough times in the precinct to know her ultimate goal. When she set the ink pad and form on the bar top, he scowled.

“You can’t expect me to dirty my hands,” he said.

“Out with them,” Ella said. She held her own out, one holding an alcohol swab, and gestured with her fingers. Lucifer scowled as strongly as he could manage. Ella was unimpressed.

“Come on, out!”

“I want my protests noted,” Lucifer said with a sigh. He presented his long fingers for her scrutiny. Ella wiped both hands down carefully, then pointed at the ink pad. He shot her a sad stare in a final attempt to plead mercy. She quirked her mouth to the side and winked.

Lucifer fussed and huffed through the entire process, and she handed him a full Clorox wipe when it was all over.

“Didn’t I do this already?” he complained. “These should already be on file!”

“Considering how much you touch all the time, everywhere, yeah.” Ella didn’t bother disguising her own amusem*nt at his expense. “I want a fresh set.”

“Liar,” he said. “You wanted to watch me squirm.”

Ella pulled her long tweezers and two evidence bags from her kit. She pulled out a ruler as well, which she laid next to each bullet before taking a picture. She plucked both bullets from the ground with the tweezers, then dropped them each into their own evidence bags. She labeled each with a Sharpie for later processing.

“Alright, you’re packing a bag and coming with me,” Ella said, keeping her eyes down as she wrote out the labels. Lucifer jerked his head, startled by the order.

“But Miss Lopez, I don’t need protecting,” he said.

“A rando comes in and tries to kill you in your unlocked penthouse? You can’t stay here.”

“But –“

“Come on,” Ella said. She grinned way, way up at him, excited at the prospect. “We’ll have a sleepover, it’ll be awesome.”

She pulled out her phone and waggled it at him before he could sputter another protest.

“I need your help looking through the videos for her,” she said. Lucifer glanced at the phone and began to look resigned. Ella pushed her luck. “Most of them are of your performances.”

Lucifer immediately brightened, preening at the realization of some level of stardom.

“Are they?” he crowed, clapping his hands together. “Well then!”

“Bag first,” Ella said, waggling the phone again. “At least three days to start, OK? I don’t think you should come back here unless you need to.”

“Why ever would I avoid my own home?” Lucifer’s honest bafflement at her request made her shake her head.

“Because it’s dangerous,” she said.

“I assure you, Miss Lopez. I am the most dangerous thing here.”

Ella shook the two evidence bags at him. The bullets clinked dully together within the plastic barriers.

“Safe, huh?” She waited him out, not responding to any more of his excuses until he finally grumped and disappeared into his room to pack what was needed. While he grumbled through the process, she repacked her bag, careful with the camera and AccuTrans gun. She figured he would take a while, prissy as he was, and took another look around for any evidence of what exactly he’d used to keep himself safe from two shots fired only a few feet away.

There was nothing obvious, but this was Lucifer – nothing would be obvious. For all she knew this was part of the eternally baffling devil role he practiced every second of every day. She hoped Lucifer hadn’t brought her out here on one of his more detailed delusions. Chloe’s patience with him was legendary in the precinct, but Ella was who he went to when he had a weird creepy grave or an ex-wife’s supposed murder to investigate. He trusted her to keep this under wraps, and she would, but third time was the charm on her willingness to help without much backstory.

When Lucifer strolled from his bedroom with a suitcase and a glower, she beamed at him and gave him two solid thumbs up.

“Sleep tonight, interview witnesses tomorrow,” she said. LUX had closed over an hour ago at this point, which meant that the staff who might have seen Lucifer’s mysterious would-be murderer had gone home for the night. It would have been better to go down and interview them as soon as possible, but she needed to prioritize processing the scene before Lucifer’s ignorance ruined any evidence left.

“Yes, yes, I’m coming,” Lucifer said grumpily. “And not in the fun way,” he added when she looked surprised.

“There he is,” she said. Ella grinned and hefted her kit onto her shoulder, pushing the down button with a gloved finger out of old habit.

Chloe Decker wasn’t the kind of woman to scare easily. She’d been held at gunpoint and knife-point enough times that either option barely caused a flinch; she’d been poisoned and nearly shot to death. She’d stared down her own daughter’s kidnapper and lost her father at an early age. Her first husband had left her in a barren wasteland of isolation from her peers, knowing all along that she’d been right and deserved to be treated that way.

She’d suffered through many of her worst fears already, the paralyzing terror and grief haunting her late into dark nights and informing her daylight passion for justice. Her father’s memory followed her wherever she went. She often wondered what he’d think of her life, her choices – she wondered what his face would say when she told him about Dan, and always longed to hear his advice.

To hear Lucifer tell it, she would see him again one day in Heaven. She wouldn’t admit this out loud, but she was quietly touched by her partner’s absolute certainty that should Heaven exist, her father was clearly there, and Chloe would one day join him, and they would spend the rest of eternity together.

So no, fear wasn’t a bedfellow of hers. If anything, those jolts of panic pushed her toward dangerous decisions. In life, in roommates, in romance.

Marcus, then, was an obvious step up. He was predictable; he was reliable. He followed the rules and made an effort.

And maybe when I stop lying to myself, I’ll feel better about this.

Ok, well, he wasn’t exactly predictable or reliable. He’d refused her initially, then changed his mind, then changed his mind again, and then proposed. A lot of the efforts he'd made to win her hand were fixing his own mistakes. He ran hot or cold depending on mood swings she couldn’t read on his impassive face; he’d bowled her over when he told her it’s just not worth it and stormed out of her apartment – one moment smiling, the next a blank slate, and finally pushing her out of the way to tear out of her life.

And then, the next day, shoving back in.

Still, he hadn’t vanished and returned with a wife. No, his solution was to try and make her his wife. He’d filled her car with roses, he’d apologized for his mistakes. He baked lemon bars and came to her with a ring she had no say in, a ring that he must have purchased that very day because a man who intended to propose wouldn’t leave when the woman he wanted nearly confessed her love, would he?

Maybe only if it’s me.

She’d told Ella it had happened before. It was a pattern, really. Men liked to be near her, liked how she made them feel, but they didn’t commit to her. They didn’t prioritize her or think of how their actions might devastate her. They enjoyed her body, and they appreciated her brain, but they didn’t take care of her heart. They didn’t throw her a private prom she hadn’t asked for because they knew it would make her happy; they didn’t give her a necklace bearing an extremely personal story between just the two of them. They certainly didn’t tell her that her father would be proud of her, even when their own relationship with their own father seemed like a Shakespearean-level tragedy.

Right.

It was always about Lucifer, and she hated herself a little for it. Every decision she made with Marcus was tailor-made to convince herself that Lucifer was bad for her. She did honestly enjoy Marcus’ company, and she had loved him right before he shut her down and ran away. And while she could convince herself that Lucifer had done exactly the same thing, he hadn’t really. He’d sat by her sick bed and waited for her to chat before he ran, and when he came back (with a wife) he charmed his way back by making himself useful to the case.

Really, they were both terrible choices. One of them she couldn’t trust because he focused on fixing mistakes of his own making, and the other she couldn’t trust because he was a bonkers cartoonish nightmare.

Whom she had kissed.

Twice.

Ugh.

The ring on her finger protected her, she thought. Somehow. Some way. Maybe. Well…perhaps it was more the idea of protection, an invisible force field made of large biceps and sandy hair. Whatever the intention, it would work: Lucifer wouldn’t try to talk her out of the engagement, as she expected (hoped) he would. He would accept her decision regardless of his own thoughts about it. He wouldn’t fight with (for) her.

And that was good.

It was good that he wouldn’t fight, and it was good that he would keep his jealousy contained, and it was good that he wouldn’t storm into Marcus’ house and attack him immediately, and it was good that he’d move on eventually and find ninety-two new sexual partners to console him through these dark, dark days.

Right.

All of these musings served her no comfort as she watched Lucifer and Ella get out of the same car.Her car. Which meant they had come from her place, together, in the early morning. Which meant they had spent at least part of the night together, and at some point Ella offered Lucifer a ride to work, and Lucifer accepted, and Lucifer climbed into the seat where he normally sat for Chloe, and they drove together and talked together and laughed together –

Chloe ran her thumb against her engagement ring. What she felt wasn’t fear, it couldn’t possibly be that. Lucifer had his chance. He brought her into his fancy penthouse, and sat her down at a fancy table, and then opened his mouth and ruined everything.

No, that wasn’t right, was it? He didn’t ruin anything; he opened the door for something better. Something with untrustworthy, unreliable Marcus Pierce, who knelt on her floor and insisted he would spend the rest of his life making up for his mistakes. And then probably make more mistakes and make up for them too. She could see the endless cycle ahead of her of Marcus eternally making mistakes and Chloe eternally having to forgive him, again and again, until a headache began pounding at her temples and she wanted to go home and crawl under her blanket and sleep until Trixie was in college because that was the right time for divorce according to horrible couples the world over. Stay together for the kids, divorce freshman year!

Chloe sat herself down at her desk and tried to convince herself that she wasn’t afraid, and she wasn’t disappointed, and she certainly wasn’t having even a single second thought and why were Ella and Lucifer together in the forensics lab? Why were they huddled together, oblivious to her staring them down? Her blanket at home enticed her strongly. She looked up toward Marcus’ office instead. That was where she should want to go for comfort, wasn’t it? That was where she should go now, right this moment, to get away from the sight of Lucifer laughing at something Ella said and now he was touching her arm and –

Chloe stood up and forced herself to walk the trek up to Marcus' office. She kept her back straight and her ears closed. This was her second (third) office romance and would soon be her second office marriage, but Palmetto made her immune to the opinions of her peers. When she was right, she was right, and even if this didn’t feel right, it had to be right.

She knocked on the side of his door-frame and stepped inside. Marcus flashed her a winning smile that crinkled his eyes. If he did that every day for the rest of his life, he might convince her she loved him.

“Detective Decker,” he said, the smile bright. Triumphant, even. “How are you feeling today?”

Now wasn’t that a terrible question. Chloe didn’t want to talk about how she felt today.

“Excited, of course,” she said, because Marcus wouldn’t care if she lied. “And maybe a little overwhelmed? We’ve got a lot to plan.”

“We do,” Marcus said. He began listing wedding necessities – DJ, minister, bar considerations, caterer, flowers – she sat across from him and tried not to look as anxious as she felt. So many stories of wedding planning involved the bride, her mother, and lots of drama; so few involved the groom. Marcus had thoughts, though. He had opinions and lists and a preference for an open bar.

“I need to get a dress,” she said with a grimace. Marcus raised both eyebrows; the smile didn’t falter.

“I could help with that if you want,” he offered.

“Isn’t that against tradition?” Chloe didn’t get weddings but even she knew the groom wasn’t supposed to see the bride in her gown before the ceremony. Marcus, however, shrugged.

“We make our own traditions, Chloe,” he said. Her heart fluttered the smallest bit, a slight surge of the love she’d felt for him before he shut her down. Maybe this could work. Maybe they could make their own traditions. Would Marcus want to ignore other traditions too? She suddenly imagined him crawling across the dance floor to some awful, horny music, reaching up against her thigh and pulling down her garter in front of friends and family. The image was awkward, and awful, and suddenly Lucifer was crawling instead, and it wasn’t awful, and people would scream they needed a room because the heat between them was too much for a crowd, and Maze would salute them from the corner with a twinkle in her eye.

“Good idea,” she said through a smile. “This is 2021; our wedding is what we want, yeah?”

Marcus leaned forward onto his elbows, beaming at her easy agreement. In her mind’s eye, Lucifer wasn’t using his hands for the garter at all – he was using his teeth, his face so close to the juncture of her thighs, sliding down past her knee and calf and ankle and tickling against the bottom of her toes –

“I know this is a lot in a short time,” Marcus was saying. “Lucky for us, someone has weeks of unused leave.”

Chloe laughed and shrugged her shoulders in a show of modesty. She thought that was what Marcus expected, and he didn’t disappoint.

“Take a few days and focus on planning,” he said. “I’ll help when I get off work.”

“Perfect,” she said. She meant it. With days off, she could curl under her blanket and pull up wedding websites on her laptop and pretend she was incredibly invested in the color arrangements of linens. Maybe she could take one of the precinct’s white boards home and create her own wedding murder board. Lucifer would get a kick out of that.

I have to invite him to the wedding.

She felt like cold bucket of ice water suddenly washed over every inch of her skin. He was her partner and her friend. They had worked together for years; he’d been the only partner on offer for months. She couldn’t possibly exclude him.

Her thoughts spun with the implications. Her, walking down the aisle to Marcus, given away by no one, seeing Lucifer standing to the side in a three piece and blank mask, armor fully intact –

Lucifer bringing a date, maybe Ella as a (not) friend, dancing and throwing all his considerable energy and attention into another woman while she sat next to Marcus and sipped champagne or wine –

Their first dance as husband and wife. Marcus’ hand pressed into the small of her back, pulling her flush to him, while Lucifer watched from the side and shut down entirely. All masks and walls back in place, a cigarette dangling from his mouth which his date, maybe Ella, pulled from his mouth with a light scold. Chloe swaying with her husband as her heart hardened too, forcing herself to accept the man in front of her and put Lucifer behind her with Dan and Jed and all the rest.

It was all too much. It was all too hard. And it wasn’t even real yet.

“Have you thought about the guest list?” she blurted out at the tail end of her thoughts. She met Marcus’ eyes after she said it, watching him take on a pinched, dissatisfied air. He knew why she was asking.

“We’ll invite anyone you want, Chloe,” he said, neatly skirting the elephant standing on his chest and trumpeting into his ear. “Think about a list and we’ll figure out the seating arrangements together.”

There it was, his concession: he would accept Lucifer’s presence, so long as he could sit him as far away from Chloe as whatever venue they chose allowed.

Chloe stood with a smile, gave him a hug and a kiss, and left his office. She paused just outside and pulled her cell phone from her back pocket. She typed out a text to Linda begging to meet for lunch. And then she slipped out of the precinct entirely, avoiding everyone and heading straight for her car.

Chapter 3: Truth

Chapter Text

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Chloe asked as they waited for their food. Linda sat across from her at an outdoor café, legs crossed under the table. She sipped from a straw at a colorful co*cktail with an orange slice on the rim of the glass. Chloe had avoided giving in to temptation, though she’d taken a taste of Linda’s drink and agreed it was delicious. She needed a clear head today, even though she was on leave and had a sham wedding to put off.

“Who you invite is up to you,” Linda said carefully. “You can have as many or as few people as you want there.”

Chloe watched the people strolling by, wondering how many of them were carrying similar emotional burdens. When she’d first arrived, Linda had already claimed this table, out on the patio and next to a railing. She’d shown Linda her ring and delivered the news with an attempt at an optimistic smile. Linda had inspected the ring with raised eyebrows and a faint upward tilt of her lips.

Chloe’s optimism had steadily trickled out until she pressed her lips together. Now she was skirting around the issue, circling ever closer to the drain. Inevitability weighed heavily on her; it was only a matter of time before Linda punctured her fantasy.

It was Linda who’d joined her in Lucifer’s penthouse when she needed the support, and it was Linda who’d helped Lucifer grow as a person, and it was Linda who he called when he needed to talk through his bonkers nightmare stories, and now it was Linda who met her eyes and asked the question Chloe herself didn’t want to consider.

“Chloe,” Linda said, “are we happy about this?”

And that was a bomb dropped into her chest. Not are you happy or how do you feel. No, Linda wanted to know if we were happy, if she needed to slap on a smile and support Chloe’s decision regardless of her own feelings on the matter. Do I need to lie for you, that’s what Linda was asking, and Chloe didn’t hate lying like Lucifer did, but this was different, wasn’t it? This was Chloe putting her friend in a bad position – this was Chloe asking Linda to lie, and with that asking her to pick apart the emotional fallout during Lucifer’s sessions.

“Is he worth it?” she blurted out. Now it was out in the open, where someone could see it and poke at it and look at her with pity. But this was Linda, both friend and psychiatrist with questionable ethical boundaries who did not believe feelings were stupid. Linda hadn’t scoffed when Chloe needed her as emotional support to see if Lucifer had run away again, and she didn’t scoff now. She pursed her lips, thinking over Chloe’s question with focused attention. She gave the matter serious, worthy thought. And then she said:

“That’s a complicated question, Chloe.”

“Of course it is,” Chloe snapped. “It’s always complicated with him.”

Linda hummed quietly, sipping her drink.

“It’s also a question I can’t answer for you,” she said around her straw. Chloe sighed and leaned back in her chair. She flattened a hand against the table, chewing at her bottom lip. She was engaged to Marcus. She was wearing Marcus’ ring. She should be happy – no, she should be thrilled. She should want to text all of her friends a picture of the ring in front of her smiling face and laugh at their happy responses.

Chloe remembered Dan’s proposal and her excitement. She had looked forward to being his wife, to sharing their lives and careers with each other. Imagining life with Dan had been a pleasurable daydream. Imagining life with Marcus…

Choe sighed.

“Shouldn’t I want this?” she asked. She met Linda’s eyes just as two sandwiches were placed in front of them both. Linda thanked the server while Chloe pulled the toothpick from the top of her club. A simple, predictable sandwich for a simple, predictable life. She and Marcus would share their lives while Lucifer eventually, inevitably faded into the background. Marcus would make sure of that. He hadn’t even been able to tolerate a necklace gifted between friends. Chloe reached up to her neck to touch the bullet which wasn’t there. Her eyes watered. Linda watched her quietly, knowing when to let thoughts run their course.

How long did she have left with Lucifer? Would their friendship survive the lead-up to the wedding? Would the implied seating arrangement far across the room from Chloe be the catalyst? Would he take the not-so-subtle hint and begin removing himself from Chloe’s life entirely? From Trixie’s life? Would Maze leave too?

She was crying before she realized how much her spiraling thoughts hurt. Imagining her life without Lucifer was hard, yes, but imaging Trixie’s questions – imagining explaining to her canny daughter that Lucifer wouldn’t be coming around anymore, as Marcus entered their lives – knowing that one day Trixie would figure it out, might even understand immediately that Marcus was the reason for Lucifer’s absence –

“Chloe?” Linda’s calm voice cut through the spiral; a napkin flashed into Chloe’s eyeline. She reached out and wiped her cheeks with a murmured noise of embarrassment.

“You should want this, yes,” Linda said. Her expression hovered between sympathy and frustration. “You should be excited.”

I’m not. Chloe’s throat closed around the words. I want to take it back.

She couldn’t say it out loud. Not even to Linda, who watched her with a therapist’s patient understanding. Linda reached out her hand, her expression kind. Chloe reached out and took her friend’s hand. She breathed shakily, closed her eyes, and squeezed. Without a word, Linda squeezed back.

The woman who called herself Judith Esperanza stood against a railing of Santa Monica pier and stared far out into the Pacific. She marveled at how, this far up, she couldn’t smell the ocean itself, as though humanity had pushed the ocean’s force away from the pier. She ate scoops of a bright red raspado purchased from a street vendor, sometimes pausing to click the edge of her plastic spoon against the front of her teeth. The ice cooled her well enough for the temperature.

Her own homeland shared borders with the Pacific and Caribbean oceans, vastly different in temperament. She didn’t like to think of her homeland often, though she sought out its comforts where she found them. Los Angeles had more familiarity than expected, so long as she avoided certain areas overrun with gríngolas. At each vendor, in each store, she alternated her pattern of speech – sometimes Venezuelan, sometimes Chilean, rarely Argentinian for how difficult she found the accent – but always she reverted to her native Colombian when she stood by herself, observing the people around her.

She was lonely and starved for the company of others. She pushed that yearning deep, as she did every moment when surrounded by those who could never be company. She finished the raspado and tossed the cup and spoon into the first trash can she found. She wiped her sticky fingers on a napkin and walked down the wooden pier, stood underneath the Route 66 sign, and asked a passerby for a photo with her disposable camera.

He grimaced and spoke to her in German, indicating he didn’t understand what she wanted. She gestured with the camera, pointed to herself underneath the sign. He smiled with a quiet “ahhhhh” and took the requested picture. She thanked him, Ecuadoran for a flashing moment.

Last night’s dress, shoes, and barrettes were discarded in the early hours of the morning. She’d found a twenty-four-hour store and purchased black leggings, an oversized pale-yellow t-shirt, and green flip flops. When she’d returned to the motel, she’d dug through her suitcase for the pair of scissors she kept sealed into a side pocket and took to her hair with sure fingers, cropping the length to just over her shoulders. She’d pulled out a pair of glasses with unaltered glass, which she’d set on the bathroom counter for use today – two large, round frames which covered her face down to the top of her cheeks.

Now, the sun glared against those same glasses, and she squinted down at the beach. She’d added a gray fanny pack to her wardrobe before leaving the motel at ten thirty in the morning sharp, where she stored her cash for the day, a fresh disposable camera, the flip phone, and a passport with her newest identity. The beach called to her, its waves beckoning from a distance. She walked until the sand ground between her foot and the rubber flip flops, and her feet sank a few inches with every step. She stopped when her toes reached the edge of the wave’s path and smiled when the water washed over her ankles. Here the smell of the sea couldn’t be held back; she inhaled deeply, expanding her chest with sea salt air. For this moment, alone and free, she felt terribly powerful.

The phone chattered from her hip where the fanny pack had shifted as she strolled down to the beach. She answered after the first ring, saying nothing into the speaker. A voice murmured into her ear; her brows twisted together.

“No puede ser,” she said. It can’t be. The voice persisted. She pulled the phone away from her face and snapped it closed. Her eyes looked out over the ocean, all sense of power crumpled away. Her expression was blank, though inside she roiled as strongly as the waves lapping at her legs. For a long moment, she considered walking forward into the ocean, as far as she could, then abandoning her feet to swim until her arms stopped working and she sank into the depths. She turned instead and walked back toward the road, sand sloshing from her soggy flip flops. She slipped on the water and grit trapped between her toes a few times but kept the flip flops on. She liked the discomfort they brought her, the grounding annoyance.

Lucifer Morningstar hadn’t died last night. He had reported to work this morning, earlier than usual and very much alive. No apparent injuries or struggles to move. He was healthy and safe.

The woman called Judith stood on the sidewalk near the pier, staring back into Los Angeles. Her hands hung at her sides, fingers slightly clawed and twitching. Anger flashed through her; she pulled in a sharp breath, blinking in the sunlight.

She needed a new plan.

Lucifer was holding Ella’s favorite pipette and twisting the end back and forth. She had given it to him ten minutes ago to keep him momentarily busy as she ran the most prominent sections of fingerprints she’d been able to preserve. Somehow he’d managed to be distracted by the increasing and decreasing numbers indicating milliliters of liquid for a whole twenty-eight seconds before snorting and starting to bother her again. She’d given him a ninety-nine well plate, a case of clean tips, and a petri dish full of water to practice, then turned the entire thing into a challenge by simply questioning if his fingers were really as dexterous as he claimed.

“I’ll have you know that not a single lover has left dissatisfied,” he’d declared, before settling into the task of wrangling his larger hands into doling out measurements of fifty milliliters into ninety-nine tiny wells using an instrument he’d never held before. At the third well he’d depressed the plunger so hard that the tip fell off the pipette; at the seventh he somehow managed to pinch his fingers. By the fifty-sixth he only cursed every few times, otherwise intent on his task to prove her wholly wrong about something he couldn’t properly remember now.

Ella ignored him in favor of watching her monitor. None of the prints were a strong enough hit to be promising, except for Lucifer’s own thumbprint. She’d asked last night if he could try drawing the woman and hadn’t bothered bringing the stick figure holding its stick gun to the precinct. She might sit him with a sketch artist; he might work through favors, but Ella worked through cheeriness. She knew she could swing an afternoon if needed.

The bullets provided ballistics from a single gun, giving her something to match if they ever found it. They still needed to review videos from LUX; last night she’d only managed to watch three before her eyelids had insisted on finishing her interrupted sleep, and Lucifer had spent more time complaining about her inadequately long couch to focus on anything else.

Now, with the fingerprints a bust, the videos were the last piece of evidence she had to analyze. She needed Lucifer’s eyes for the task since she couldn’t tell much from an angry stick figure in a square dress. She looked at him, tongue against his upper teeth, as he oh so delicately aliquoted a minuscule pool of water into the seventy-eight well.

“Alright, Wobble time,” she said. She tapped his shoulder, earning a grumpy huff and a flapping hand to shoo her away. She pulled up the website and clicked on the latest SukiSue video, uploaded in the early hours of this morning. Related videos included others from LUX from different days, a group of women walking on a sidewalk at night somewhere, and a bar fight.

The video started way louder than she expected; she flinched and scrambled to turn the volume down as Lucifer cried out in exasperation. She looked over to see that he had hit the plate with the heel of his hand, splattering droplets of water everywhere.

“Bollocks!” He looked at Ella, annoyed. “All that work, now gone to pieces!”

“You could start over,” she offered with a cheeky smile. He scoffed.

“It’ll have dried before I get halfway done. I assume my dexterity’s honor is defended, anyhow.”

“Good,” she said. She waved him over to stand in front of the monitor with her. He left the mess on the bench, standing next to her, hands buried in his pockets. At sight of LUX’s interior, he brightened.

“Ah, yes! My adoring fans and their not at all creepy videos, uploaded for the masses.”

“Right.” Ella dragged the video back to the beginning. “Watch close, tell me if you see her.”

“Well, she was only there for a few moments, really.” Lucifer watched anyway, studying the faces drifting in and out of the camera’s view. The camera remained trained on him, regardless of his location – sometimes close up, sometimes far away, but always with him in the center.

A few minutes in, Lucifer sighed.

“I do appreciate myself a great deal, but even I can admit this is boring, Miss Lopez,” he said. “How long does this go on?”

Ella rolled her cursor over the video. “An hour and forty-three minutes.” She looked up at him. “Anything you can help narrow this down with?”

“I had just finished Notorious, a bit of Duran Duran for a slow night.”

Ella skimmed the video ahead with the cursor, watching for when Lucifer approached the piano. Once he was playing, she let the video resume.

“I can't read about it, burns the skin from your eyes!” the Lucifer in the video sang. The one next to her hummed along, tapping his foot to the beat. He protested when she began skimming forward.

“No appreciation,” he murmured when she stopped at the end of his performance.

“Now what?” Ella watched as video Lucifer spread his hands, soaking in the adoration around him. Definitely an actor.

“I go to the bar for a drink, and our femme fatale comes to speak to me.”

They watched as video Lucifer did just that, slamming back enough drink to make Ella’s stomach growl in sympathy. As he raised the fourth glass to his lips, the camera suddenly zipped closer on the back of a long-haired woman standing nearby. She was in profile to the camera, her features nervous, and she shifted from foot to foot.

“Hello, Mariana,” Lucifer hissed.

The video began trembling as video Lucifer turned to acknowledge her, gleaming with mischief. She never turned fully to the camera; her apparent fear was noticeable even from this distance. Ella watched her friend turn from leering miscreant to gentle benefactor in a few brief sentences, and then he gestured her toward the elevator. They turned and he guided her across the club, camera trembling ever harder, until they summoned the carriage and were lifted away.

“Welp,” Ella said. She skimmed backwards and took a screenshot of Mariana’s profile. It wasn’t ideal for facial recognition, but it gave them a place to start.

“Anything else you remember?” Ella looked up at Lucifer, whose face had taken on a frustrated glare.

“She spoke Spanish,” he said. Ella jotted that down in her limited profile notes.

“What did she say to get you with her?”

“She said she needed help.” Lucifer sounded vaguely betrayed; Ella sighed and shook her head.

“Oh, buddy.” Ella stretched her arms and wrapped them around Lucifer’s middle; he grunted and squirmed. “She shouldn’t have taken advantage like that,” she offered as he pulled away and straightened his jacket.

“Yes, well, she did, and I dare say –"

“Lopez!” Lieutenant Pierce popped open the door to her lab, making her jump at his abrupt tone. “You flirting or working in here?”

“Uh…” Ella stood mute, eyes wide. Lucifer drew up to his full height at her side.

“She hardly needs checking up on,” he said. He waved a hand at the Lieutenant, dismissing him. “Run along now, Pierce – I’m sure you have somewhere to be that isn’t here.”

Pierce scowled for only a moment; his lips turned upward, ever so slightly, and suddenly he was downright satisfied.

“You’re right,” he said, casual air and snide tone, “wedding to plan and all.”

He closed the lab door and strode away while Ella perked up and Lucifer furrowed his brow.

“A wedding,” he murmured.

“A wedding!” she cried. She pulled her phone out and checked her messages – nothing from Chloe yet. “Ohmygosh! Decker!” She started to call her friend, then stopped and looked up at her other friend, and suddenly she was having a serious crisis of loyalties as Lucifer’s face clearly did not say hooray I’m so happy but instead I would very much like for that man to disappear and oh nooo…

“Uh…” Ella stood flummoxed again. She was happy for the prospect of beautiful Pecker babies, but Lucifer just looked so…so something, and also he’d maybe kind’ve been shot at last night, and besides, Chloe hadn’t told her yet, so technically she didn’t know.

“So!” she said too loudly, hands waving to force Lucifer’s eyes back down to her. “Mariana!”

“Mariana,” he agreed.

“We need to talk to your staff from last night,” she said. Lucifer began the process of dialing his manager on duty to figure out the schedule and begin asking after who they needed to speak to. Ella checked her phone every few minutes, waiting for Decker’s call.

Chapter 4: Lucky

Chapter Text

Amenadiel was very, very lucky.

The first time he’d returned Samael to Hell, his younger sibling had cursed and screamed in rage. He hadn’t fought, though – he’d never fought, not once in thousands of years. He’d whined, huffed, bargained for even a few minutes more, but he’d always returned.

The two-hundred and fifty-third time, Samael had rolled his eyes and snarked, though there was no fire behind the words. After eons of Hell, his younger brother’s moods fluctuated more often, leaving Amenadiel to always wonder which version of Samael he would cast down.

Still, his brother always returned, and Amenadiel returned to the Silver City until forced down to Earth again to collect him.

In his five-hundred and sixty-second visit, Samael refused to answer to his name any longer, hissing in anger when Amenadiel used it. God’s mightiest warrior considered his options, particularly how willing he was to argue a point which might make his younger brother harder to wrangle.

Amenadiel hated this task, so he asked for Samael’s chosen title. His younger brother had sucked in a sharp breath and peered at Amenadiel in outright suspicion.

“No lectures?” he’d demanded, emotional hackles raised. “No reminding me of my place? You’ve gone soft, brother.”

He had lived outside of their realm for millennia by then, Amenadiel’s occasional interactions his only remaining connection to home. He’d affected a mask most times they met, scowling behind the face of an obtuse stranger, but Amenadiel still saw the flickers of truth in the twitch of his shoulders, the state of his feathers when unfurled, the slightly widened eyes.

Samael had always been the most extroverted of their siblings. He’d shared his emotions, so often veering toward jovial and passionate, with anyone who dared listen. He had rejoiced in lighting the skies, his excitement contagious to all the choirs of angels – and his fury, too, had spilled throughout the Silver City as he was cast from their presence, his enraged screams echoing through all the corners of the realm.

The eldest of God’s children had long learned that Samael expressed fear through incitement. He hadn’t known what his younger brother feared in this instance, only that he feared at all, and while he’d hated his task and what Samael had done, he had not yet savored the look of his younger brother’s fear.

The decision to accept Samael’s declaration was easy enough. Amenadiel had raised and spread his hands, acquiescing to the request without a fight.

“What shall I call you then?” he’d said, voice low and clear. The younger angel had stared for several minutes, waiting for something Amenadiel couldn’t guess. Deception? An attack? Samael had rejected God’s love long ago; rejecting his given name was no great loss.

“Lucifer,” he’d said, then vanished into a realm without light.

The languages he spoke, the moods he rode, the clothes he wore – every part of him changed each time they met, but always there was the unspoken tension of who might collect him should Amenadiel fail. The eldest didn’t have to threaten often, and in fact learned to bargain time instead. If Samael – Lucifer – were given ten more minutes, it spared both of them an hour’s worth of stalling. If he were busy learning an instrument or a song, Amenadiel had stopped demanding his immediate return to avoid Lucifer’s fury.

Once, Amenadiel found him clutching a long-dead woman, her body ravaged by the same open boils covering the bodies lining the dismal streets. He’d sung a song over the corpse, a lilting, sad melody, and laid her next to the body of her husband and children.

Lucifer had never told Amenadiel why he’d been so affected, but he never sang that song again.

Their relationship dipped and curved over the years. Each time Amenadiel unfurled his wings to bring himself to Earth, he vowed this is the last time. Sometimes his conviction remained firm in the onslaught of Lucifer’s anger; sometimes the younger sighed in resignation and went on his own, leaving Amenadiel with a pang in his breast. But it was always the times when Lucifer was overjoyed which were the hardest - the undeniable reminders that Samael’s joy had never died, it had only been turned askance to newer discoveries. Lucifer lit humanity as he’d lit the stars, and his excitement was forever contagious. It was those times, with his eyes shining in merriment and joy, when Amenadiel’s faith wavered the most.

Hell contained neither light nor joy.

Lucifer bedded thousands, coated himself in their stink, and he remembered all of their faces and names. He glowed with intrigue at human inventions, praised civilizations, marveled at their ingenuity, their drive to persist.

“See how they migrate, brother!” he’d cried as they took to the seas and discovered new islands. The eldest had found him swimming that time, wings out and splashing in the clear ocean water. A new settlement was forming a mile away, the humans having landed not three full days before. Their spread across the world seemed inevitable, and Lucifer delighted in the magnitude of life.

And yet, as the human population rose, so did that of Hell. Lucifer adapted as the eons passed below. Billions of years witnessing the darkest impulses of Father’s most beloved creation took their toll; his joy morphed and swayed, amusem*nt coming more often at the expense of, rather than in companionship to, those he encountered. He intermingled but remained distant, his need for connection steadily scabbing over under the crush of mortality. It did not matter how ingenious, how happy, how cruel, how cold – they all succumbed to Azrael’s task, and their civilizations too. Impermanence and change with no hope of more. Such was Lucifer’s lot.

God’s eldest watched these emotional shifts with stoic resolve. He had no place questioning God’s punishment, and so he didn’t; he had no impulse to cavort with these creatures, the closest to God’s image Lucifer could come. Humans, Amenadiel, and the demons of Hell – Lucifer’s only companions, his family forever forbidden. He consorted with humans and demons alike, taking the demon Mazikeen into his bed.

With the weight of Hell upon him, Lucifer grew more openly disillusioned, outright blasphemous. He questioned God’s strength to the humans around him, and for every ten who would not listen, another would spark with uncertainty. Chittering doubts, the tiniest of fears sewn among humanity – the very seeds of perdition.

He asked question after question of Amenadiel, forever forcing the eldest to assert that God was not to be doubted, even as he himself began to wonder deep in the pit of his belly.

Their siblings sewed seeds as well, whispering Prince of Lies, Abaddon, Satan, Most Unclean. They spun tales of temptation and soul collections. Amenadiel himself likened Lucifer to a goat.

The mortal rifts were formed, and wars were fought. Their siblings remained ever distant, uncaring of the fate of humans; Amenadiel witnessed human war and suffering through his task, followed his brother to the Children’s Crusade, watched as midwives were burned for their kindness and service. Hell housed so many more of them, suffering for new guilts built upon the lies of their siblings, and Lucifer’s apathy to mortal plights grew – how could it not? Millions of souls suffering eternally, trapped by their own guilt without reprieve, with Lucifer witness to their torment, regardless of the crime.

“They deserve their punishment,” he’d said to Amenadiel, his face scarred red. “Otherwise, why would they be here? It is not I who keeps them.”

Demons had taken to rising through the bodies of the damned, howling and foaming at mortal mouths. Disabled human children were named possessed and chained outside homes, away from their families, their cries unheard or ignored. Lucifer banned the practice when Amenadiel informed him, the barest spark of sympathy lighting his red eyes as he watched a muddy child plead for its mother in the cold rain.

Amenadiel hated his task, but he’d understood why this was his burden to bear. As the eldest, he’d been responsible for Lucifer’s fall; he should have watched his younger brother for the signs of discontent, should have prevented the rebellion and Fall of God’s favored. His failure was personified: a younger brother lost to the ravages of Hell, a jubilant child scoured away by ash and torment, with God’s eldest alone as God’s direct witness. Lucifer had Fallen, yes; but more, Lucifer had changed, and angels did not change.

It was Amenadiel’s fault, again, when it happened once more. He lost his necklace – a precious possession gifted by his father, but also a divine object which mortals could not be exposed to. He’d attempted to use human means first, remembering Lucifer’s insistence on their cleverness. The mortal he encountered had mocked him openly. And so Amenadiel had no choice but to ask Lucifer for help.

No, that wasn’t true – he’d a choice. His pride had stalled his prayers for help from other siblings, and no one in the Silver City would hear the story from the Fallen. In his desperation he’d stooped to an open-ended deal, a terrible error that had drastically changed both of their lives.

Angels didn’t change. And yet, here they were.

The changes weren’t so gradual, in terms of immortals. A few years meant nothing to eternity. Still, time among humans softened Lucifer’s edges to the point that he cared for some of them, at least a little. Enough that he yearned for justice on their behalf, even saved a human life through direct actions.

Amenadiel had seen a chance to rectify his greatest mistake, leading to the murder of innocents and his ultimate Fall. He’d stood shocked and beaten, staring at his ruined wings, fear writhing in his belly. He’d been trapped on Earth, his only links to home a mother who’d also been banished and a brother he’d tried to have killed.

He’d hid his ailment, too proud to admit the truth, too afraid to admit weakness, until he had no choice but to reveal himself. To Uriel first, who immediately took the opportunity given to nearly beat his oldest brother to death – and then to Lucifer, who of the two had far more reason to attack the eldest without remorse.

And Lucifer hadn’t touched him. Hadn’t raised a hand to him. Had taken no advantage of Amenadiel’s mortality. The younger had tried to drive him away with cruel words, certainly – but he rarely menaced, and only when pressed.

Now, as Amenadiel pressed the button to visit his brother’s penthouse, he mused that Lucifer held exactly one lasting grudge in his long life, and it wasn’t toward his eldest brother.

Amenadiel was very, very lucky.

The woman tossed Judith’s passport from the window of her cab, thinking hard about her next move. The driver dropped her off just outside of her motel room, and she tipped him generously before letting herself in. She dug out the next identity – Grisela Muñoz – and tossed the passport onto the bed. She then pulled out her gun and got to work.

She dissembled the entire firearm, cleaning the chamber, checking the trigger, clicking the safety. She spent a full hour examining every piece as thoroughly as she could think to. She emptied the remaining bullets from the clip and cracked each one open, ensuring she had no blanks, half-convinced she’d been set up by someone else.

Nothing. No signs of tampering – no signs of why a man would survive a bullet to the head. A vest could explain the other shot, aimed for center mass, but surviving the head shot had no explanation she could immediately see.

She sat back on the floor, the ground littered with gun parts and a towel coated in gunpowder. Was it really gunpowder? Perhaps that was where the deception started.

She emptied the small motel soap bottle, washed it out, shook out as much as the excess water as she could, and used the tiny hairdryer attached to the wall to dry it. She scooped a handful of the gunpowder into the container and threw the capped bottle into her fanny pack. When night came, she stepped out of the motel and walked to the back, shaking the towel out into the nearby grass. She threw the towel into the motel dumpster and went back to her room to wash her hands.

She stared at herself in the mirror. From the main room, the cell phone chirped. She waited until the third ring before stepping out of the bathroom and answering the call.

Ella scanned over the various databases pulled up on her screens, ready to dismiss them all with a defeated sigh. She froze when she spotted results on one screen, blinked, maximized the screen, and whistled.

“Whoooa,” she said in wonder.

“Lucifer, we got something!” She tugged him all the way to the computer screen, where she clacked and clicked until an image of a body pulled up next to the associated file.

“The ballistics match a murder, three years ago, here in LA!”

Lucifer examined the crime scene photo while remaining just outside of the excited scientist’s circle.

“You are far too excited about this, Miss Lopez.”

“But look!” She tapped the monitor, which wobbled precariously. Lucifer reached to stabilize the screen. “They think it was a hit! Like, like a cartel hit!”

“Hmm.” Lucifer sounded neither impressed nor intrigued. Ella jabbed a finger into his chest.

“That means you might be a hit you dingus!”

“I suppose that’s less boring,” he said. Ella huffed.

“We need to bring in the department,” she said. Lucifer straightened and scowled, already opening his mouth to protest. She pressed a finger over his mouth. “Nuh uh, you might need protection!”

“I can protect myself far better than the bloody LAPD,” he snarled around her finger. She dropped her hand and skimmed through the murder file, shaking her head harder and harder as she read more of the details.

“Nope,” she said, “too risky. You’re not leaving my site, mister, and we are not going back to LUX.” Ella pulled out her cell phone and unlocked the screen. “I’ll let Decker –“

Lucifer snatched the cell phone with a hiss. “Absolutely not. We are leaving the Detective be.”

Ella stared up at him, open-mouthed and annoyed.

“She’s a wedding to plan after all,” he said with a grimacing smile.

“She’s your partner,” Ella said. “She might be a target too.”

Lucifer flinched, his resolve wavering at the simple yet undeniable fact that merely being in proximity to him was once again putting the Detective in grave danger. The timing was truly atrocious, with the Detective’s attention surely distracted by wedding anticipation to the clay lump now occupying her thoughts. Why did she say yes?

“One day,” Lucifer bargained. “A full twenty-four hours, and then we’ll alert the Detective and…let her decide how to proceed.”

It was risky. The more clever humans involved in this investigation, the worse. Perhaps he should’ve asked for Dan to be the detective on the case instead.

Ella had a sly, calculating look on her face, and Lucifer realized his mistake too late.

“This Wednesday,” she said with a smile. He scowled.

“In addition to Ash Wednesday,” she finished, and he huffed loudly.

“Very well,” he conceded with a scowl. Ella grinned from ear to ear, raising a hand for a high five. After several seconds, she waved the hand.

“Don’t leave me hanging!” she demanded. Lucifer grimaced, and shifted, and was visibly not pleased, but he tapped his palm to hers in a perfunctory slap. Ella kept right on grinning, already planning the fun sleepover activities they could do, including and most especially getting him blind drunk and asking him how he really felt about Chloe’s engagement. She had it on good authority that Snuggies and ice cream were the way to the man’s heart, and she intended to abuse that knowledge.

Amenadiel stepped off the elevator into the quiet penthouse and immediately knew Lucifer wasn’t home. He’d stayed alone in the penthouse many times now, waiting for his brother’s return to have whatever new difficult conversation was needed between them. Today he’d come for an update on the situation with Chloe and Pierce, a baffling union that Lucifer was taking great pains to pretend wasn’t bothering him as deeply as it was.

The eldest was hardly surprised at Lucifer’s total inability to open himself to others. He had been denied any acknowledgement of kinship or friendship for far too many eons to suddenly accept help for his plight offered with the best of intentions. The fact that Amenadiel’s assistance was explicitly offered as God’s intentions escaped the eldest; he only knew he needed to help in God’s plan for Lucifer, and Lucifer was accepting that help with relatively little fuss.

The elevator pinged an arrival, and Amenadiel turned to face his brother.

“Luci, I –“

Instead of Lucifer, a small woman emerged instead, pausing when she saw him. Her dark eyes scanned the entirety of the penthouse viewable from the angle she stood at, and then rested on him.

They peered at each other for several long seconds, both debating how much to read into the other’s presence. Amenadiel took in her shoulder-length bob, her yellow flip-flops, and her rather large glasses. She was shorter than Linda, though not significantly so – just enough that he noticed. She did not look like someone Lucifer normally hosted. She looked…lost.

Her fingers flexed once, twice, and then a smile lit up her round face. It didn't reach her eyes.

“¿Señor Morningstar?”

Amenadiel produced his most calming smile.

“He’s not here right now,” he said carefully. Her expression changed only a little, her eyelids flickering as he continued. “I’m Amenadiel, his brother. Do you need something?”

“I need help,” she said, her voice cracking on the last word. Her accent was terribly thick, but Amenadiel didn’t know enough about human languages to pinpoint it. “Can you help me?”

Amenadiel squared his shoulders, taking on the burden without a second thought.

“Of course,” he said, his smile evening out to something less calming and more prideful. “What do you need?”

“You will come?” She gestured at the elevator behind herself, eyes glistening wet and expression painfully hopeful. Amenadiel considered. Lucifer might not return for hours, and this woman needed help now. An easy decision, really. He stepped forward and followed her into the carriage with a nod.

“Tell me what you need,” he said as the doors closed on them.

The elevator pinged, and the penthouse was quiet again.

Chapter 5: Hopeful and Terrified

Chapter Text

Well, Linda thought, Chloe certainly has a type.

The doctor sat across from the detective, watching her friend struggle with the bone-deep realization that she did not want to marry Marcus Pierce. A man who the doctor knew was in fact Cain, first murderer and famous Biblical figure. And Chloe’s other immediate choice, the man looming over this entire conversation, was the Devil. The Devil, a completely different species, billions of years old and barely past his angry teenage years due to a disrupted adolescence enacted by the most powerful beings in the universe. There was a joke in there about a rock and a hard place, but given Cain’s choice of murder weapon, Linda’s thoughts shied away.

What a mess.

It wasn’t that Chloe had an affinity for immortal Biblical men – she had a penchant for difficult men. Men who lied, who withheld, who hurt her with all the best intentions: Dan, who’d left her alone against the constant onslaught of hatred from her fellow officers; Marcus, who’d boomeranged from a cold breakup to falling to one knee; and Lucifer, terrified of his own devilish shadow and Chloe’s inevitable fear of him.

Linda couldn’t force Chloe to just talk with Lucifer, especially since Chloe was understandably afraid that Lucifer might freeze or run. Perhaps a comical combination of the two. Either way, Linda could only provide guidance as either a friend or therapist. She chose to be a friend for now and let the therapist side of her settle for a moment.

“You don’t have to choose either of them, Chlo’,” she said. Chloe’s eyes widened; she blinked, creased her brow, leaned back in her chair. She huffed a small burst of air, a sudden expulsion of stress via a soft “huh.” Linda watched the realization take root in her, expand through her until Chloe looked downright relieved.

Wanting a man didn’t mean she had to want these men.

“Linda, you’re the best,” Chloe said. Strongly, with enunciation and feeling. Linda saluted her with the fruity drink.

“That’s what they pay me the big bucks for,” she said between sips. Chloe’s relieved sigh eased the doctor’s mind. Chloe didn’t need to feel pressured about this decision. She didn’t need to make any decision. And while Linda was mostly helping her friend, she also knew that if Chloe chose the Devil, and he realized sometime later that she’d felt pressured…

Linda had more than one friend’s well-being in mind today. Lucifer would tear himself apart if he thought Chloe were forced into a decision to be with him, his own desires be damned. Even when holding back tears at his own disastrous attempt to convince Chloe into a choice he couldn’t properly articulate – even then, he’d held himself back from begging, because what if Chloe didn’t have a choice.

The thought always haunted his actions with her, causing emotional whiplash which a human woman could only stand for so long. He couldn’t see how his actions drove her away because this was all new to him, and though he was always honest, he was never fully truthful with her.

Chloe couldn’t be blamed for not knowing what he was willing to do for her. He’d never told her. And because he hadn’t, Chloe’s choice was inhibited. She only saw Lucifer’s behavior without the full context, and though it was all symptomatic of a man terrified of even the hint of intimacy, it was also reflective of an immortal nonhuman protecting a mortal human from a slew of deadly celestial threats. And Chloe might not believe that he was The Devil, but she knew he was holding back – so she held back too.

Chloe didn’t know, and Linda couldn’t tell her. Is he worth it? she’d asked her friend who also knew Lucifer better than any other living being, human or celestial. She’d asked because she wanted him to be. She wanted Linda to sing his praises, perhaps share some sex tips. Ease the discomfort of knowing she’d fallen for a man who might not be capable of sticking around and was certainly capable of withholding information. For someone with Dan’s lies in her past, Chloe couldn’t fully trust that Lucifer was on her side without proof.

And he wouldn’t tell her.

Linda took a bite of her sandwich to suppress her frustrated groan. Lucifer was the physical embodiment of show don’t tell, and Chloe had been hurt by a lack of communication too many times to just trust that his concealed actions were well intentioned.

Chloe dug into her sandwich, chewing thoughtfully. She’d been applying so much pressure to herself; the sudden rush of realizing there’s no rush here left her somewhat drowsy. Lucifer seemed like he would wait indefinitely, and Marcus…

Well. She might need to have a conversation with him. Because even though she didn’t have to choose, here she was, still balancing Lucifer’s existence with the rest of her life.

You’re a detective, Decker. Get with the program.

Whether he was worth it or not didn’t matter. It wasn’t her heart that was struggling with this; her head was spinning, trying to justify her recent choices, trying to force a square-jawed peg into a bonkers nightmare hole.

She’d lived the steady, stable life for years with Dan. Had experienced it again with Marcus, briefly. Lucifer’s ranting jealousy aside, it was Marcus who’d broken their relationship and left her reeling in pain from the blow.

It’s just not worth it, he’d said, letting her stumble through I'm not worth it without correction, leaving her gutted as he stormed out of her house.

She couldn't see Lucifer doing that. When he ran, he disappeared before he could watch her eyes fill with tears.

“Linda,” she said quietly. A fleck of lettuce flew from her mouth to the plate in front of her. Linda reached across and offered a hand. Chloe took it, her expression both hopeful and terrified.

Linda had one tidbit she could offer, outside of therapy and with knowledge of both friends.

“Tell him,” she said, letting Chloe decide who him might be. “He’ll listen.”

Chloe squeezed her hand. Hopeful, and terrified. There was only one way to settle on one over the other.

She pulled out her phone and sent two identical text messages – Can we talk? - to two very different men. Linda’s slurping at the last of her drink provided the soundtrack to what she hoped could be the rest of her life.

Still no text message from Chloe.

That could mean a lot of things, Ella reasoned. That could mean Decker was busy, or distracted, or maybe possibly avoiding the very tall very I’m not jealous why do you keep looking at me like that British man who'd haunted her lab for the entire morning.

They were riding their way back to LUX now, Lucifer pouting at the side mirror while she navigated the turns. Traffic was generally okay, which helped ease the tension in a car a tiny bit. Still, Lucifer’s general agitation was getting to her. She wanted to be happy for Chloe, but she couldn’t while Lucifer was failing to be noble.

She should talk about something totally unrelated. They had some shared interests. She could talk his ear off about the PCR analysis running back in her lab. She could regale him with tales of Bob the turtle’s adventures. She could –

“Why don’t you like the Lieutenant?” she blurted. The car swerved slightly, her hands reacting to her impulses, and Lucifer turned his glare from some poor pedestrian to right into the side of her cheek.

She could make everything worse.

“I mean, well, it’s just that –"

She wasn’t looking at him because she couldn’t bear to meet his eyes, and also whoa traffic was suddenly very interesting, and she thought that if he stared any harder her cheek might actually burst into flames.

“I want to be happy for Chloe,” she said, now rambling into the silence, “but I don’t want to be happy at you, that’s super not cool, and you’re my friend too, and this is just all so awkward –"

“Breathe, Miss Lopez,” Lucifer said. She snapped her lips shut and vowed to never speak again. His glare had softened enough that her flaming cheeks were only her own embarrassment. She chanced a side eye and saw an honest, if small, smile on his face. Downright fond, and not at all insulted.

Ok. I can work with this.

She broke her vow immediately.

“I want to know why.” Ella felt a rush of courage, reminded herself that Lucifer didn’t lie, and plunged right in.

“Why don’t you like Pierce? Is it just because he’s with Decker?”

“No,” Lucifer said. He wasn’t looking at her anymore; he was watching the road, using the same distractions she was to keep the conversation bearable. Ella shifted her palms against the steering wheel.

“Something happened,” she said. “You were best buds for a hot second. You were fake married."

Lucifer seemed to find the traffic signs absolutely enthralling.

“He and I made a deal,” he finally said when she let the awkward silence sit long enough. “I hate to break a deal, but our actions put the Detective in danger.”

And there it is. Ella huffed.

“Buddy, friend, pal, I gotta say – you are the worst at getting a clue,” she said. Lucifer’s eyes darted from the road to her; he looked downright baffled if her peripheral view could be trusted. Then, given enough time, he looked insulted.

“I’m the best at clue getting!” he insisted. “I’m a police consultant!”

They were almost at LUX, which meant that Ella might be able to play this for an epic final word.

“Maybe at murders, which like, hey, relatable,” she said, “but you and Decker both drive me wild.”

“The Detective made her choice.” Lucifer’s insult had carried over into a petulant scoff. “Baffling and terrible though it may be, I will respect it.”

Ella laughed, once. Loudly. She was pulling into the parking spot right now, and she couldn’t have timed it better.

“Tell her you almost died last night, buddy,” Ella said. Her hand slapped the car into park. “I bet that ring comes flying off.”

She didn’t give Lucifer a chance to turn that into a euphemism, shoving her door open and popping the trunk for her kit in one graceful movement.

It was ridiculous, really, that the same trick worked on both of these men. If they were truly brothers though, it made sense. The woman stood next to the far larger man, sometimes glancing up at him through her dewy eyelashes.

“Lucifer’s brother?” she said. It wasn’t the most relevant question, but it passed the time as the elevator descended. The doors were opening while he rumbled a reply.

“Yes,” he said, “I was looking for him when you arrived.”

She nodded, keeping her eyes wet and her posture hunched. She’d been mildly surprised that the penthouse wasn’t blocked off with police tape when she arrived today, but all of her previous research had prepared her for an eccentric who hated locked doors. There were enough photos and accounts of every square inch of the penthouse from hundreds of lovers over the years; she was able to navigate LUX with ease, grateful for Lucifer Morningstar’s aversion to privacy.

None of her research had turned up this brother. Amenadiel. An unusual name, which meant it might be easier to find him. Although…

“Amenadiel Morningstar,” she said lightly, her accent thickly Peruvian. The man walking at her side made a face and raised a hand, rejecting the surname.

“No, just – just Amenadiel.”

So maybe not brothers by birth, but by strong friendship or adoption.

“Just Amenadiel,” she said with a hesitant smile. They took a seat together in a booth, her twisting her hands in apparent nerves and fear, him doing his best to look as non-threatening as possible.

“What’s your name?” He kept his voice soothing and warm. She let herself respond with a tentative smile.

“Grisela,” she said. She extended a hand, trembling slightly. “Mami called me Gris.”

He wrapped his fingers around her own, surrounding her hand in a safe warmth. Her mind sparked with new possibilities while Grisela sat halfway charmed already, ready to accept whatever help Amenadiel, her rescuer, had to offer. He responded of course, as good men did, protective instincts rising to the surface to keep him gentle, calm, patronizing. He might pat her head if she let him.

“Tell me what’s happened, Gris,” he said. She spun the tale she’d prepared for Lucifer Morningstar: a sister, a ransom, Latin American politics. Things Americans wouldn’t know enough to question, things media would have them believe were unanimously true across South America. Amenadiel listened closely, asking questions when expected, directing her to revealing more of the story than she appeared to want to. The conversation was going well.

A loud ruckus interrupted them; she recognized one voice for the accent alone, and shrank into the booth with a look of abject terror and a despairing, silent plea to the man she’d chosen as her protector. Amenadiel fell so easily, she felt a twinge of regret.

“Wait here,” he murmured, gesturing her backward to hide her slight form from sight. He stood and approached his raucous brother and someone else with cheerful greetings – Ella, Miss Lopez - she filed the information away, listening closely to what she could hear.

“You could join us, I suppose,” Lucifer Morningstar was saying. Ella Lopez agreed, and the ping of the elevator summoned them.

“I’ll join you soon,” Amenadiel said. He revealed nothing of his guest, his self-assigned responsibility. The twinge became an ache. She never liked to trick good men.

The elevator doors closed, and now Amenadiel was back. He gave her assurances, told her he would help her as best he could, asked her if she still wanted to meet Lucifer. She shook her head, letting fear flutter over her face again. Amenadiel reached out a hand to help her stand, and she took that warm safety with a grateful smile.

“Let’s go somewhere safe,” he said. She nodded.

“I’ve been staying somewhere,” she offered, and they left together.

“What are we doing here?” Lucifer looked longingly toward his closet, wishing he could dive back into his wardrobe for another ten sets of clothes. Ella was walking the full perimeter of the penthouse with slow, careful steps, counting to herself as she went.

“Wanted to see it in the daylight,” she said. “I might’ve missed something.”

Lucifer’s resulting scoff was downright flattering, and Ella smirked at him from a distance.

“I appreciate the faith, but I want to make sure.”

“Of course, Miss Lopez.” Lucifer poured himself a drink as he waited, taking a long swig while Ella paced into the bedroom.

“It was quiet there last night,” he called to her. “No company, except for your lovely presence of course.”

“Yeah ok,” she said. Her voice was somewhat muffled due to the wall between them, and he heard faint knocking against stone.

“What are you doing?” His curiosity drove him into his bedroom, where he found Ella knocking a knuckle against the Assyrian wall.

“Checking for hollow spots,” she said. “You’ve gotta keep the vest somewhere.”

“Ah,” Lucifer said. He took another sip of his bourbon to avoid saying anything further. He’d forgotten her secret bulletproof vest theory.

“I assure you,” he relented, “I would not hide it in the wall. That would hardly be convenient.”

“Closet, then.” Ella turned and started toward the wide-open closet; he reached his hand forward, stopping her forward momentum with the gesture.

“Does it matter?”

“It’s evidence.” She raised both eyebrows. “In your attempted murder.”

“It’s not relevant.”

“I say it is.”

“It’s not.”

She quirked her mouth to one side and crossed her arms. Lucifer grasped for what he could.

“You’ve gotten me committed to your blasted services – twice – have I not earned a little faith?”

She rolled her eyes.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” She waved a hand through the air, gesturing to their general surroundings. “Last time you gave me context. I’m upping my ante.”

“Blast and damn.” He scowled.

“Ohhh yeah, we’re snug-and-ice-creaming it up tonight. I hear that’s how to get you talking.” Ella’s grin was downright predatory, her canines crisp white. Lucifer took another sip. She turned and entered the closet.

“Watch out for the drawers,” he said with a leer. “You might like what you find too much.”

“Gross, Lucifer,” she called out with enough honesty that he knew she’d dared open the first drawer she found. He smiled, triumphant, and finished his drink in the same moment his cell phone pinged. He glanced at the preview - The Detective: Can we talk? - and went to pour another drink.

Chapter 6: Qayin

Chapter Text

Charlotte Richards had been checking her office clock for the better part of the past three hours. Amenadiel had texted to say he was on his way to discuss their continued plotting against Chloe’s love life, and he was not the type to keep her waiting.

She pursed her lips and ruffled the papers in front of her. A water polo team was trying to escape charges related to a decidedly immature hazing ritual they’d been caught administering to a new teammate. The case was just this side of boring, and not worth the time of the lawyer she’d once been.

But this was New Charlotte, who woke up screaming from Hell-inspired nightmares and thought maybe if she atoned in just the right way she’d avoid returning.

Sometimes she even wanted to be a better person. Rarely. Mostly she thought of how scared she was of Hell, and how even knowing the King of Hell wasn’t enough to guarantee her metaphysical destiny.

It wasn’t fair. She’d built her career on a kingdom of networking skills, clutching her way to the top of her game and giving herself a reputation which invoked fear and fury in those who stood against her. Lucifer ruled the place she feared; Amenadiel was supposedly God’s favorite son. How was that not a strong enough network?

Whining about it didn’t help. Therapy didn’t help. Helping Amenadiel might help. He was one step removed from Actual Literal God. Helping with his oddly specific mission had to count for something.

She had to believe that; she’d go mad with terror otherwise.

She checked her phone. Amenadiel had texted her nearly three and a half hours ago. This wasn’t normal. If he’d been delayed, he would’ve texted or called.

She texted him to ask where he was, if he needed to meet somewhere, and considered adding a phone call to the effort.

No. Not yet. He might just be stuck in traffic. She wondered if traffic annoyed him more than humans, considering he’d once been literally above means of human transportation. She’d ask him when she saw him again, which would be soon. He was fine. Just a few hours late. Nothing to fret over.

She texted Lucifer to see if one brother had laid eyes on the other. Just a casual check. She watched the words until the seen indicator flipped. Three dots shuffled across the text box. A message was incoming.

Lucifer sent her actual words more often than not, mostly because she’d given him a stern lecture on wasting her time with “child-level cartoons.” His message only included one purple devil emoji.

He left earlier. Busy, will let u know when I see him next. -😈

There, see? She scolded herself. Completely fine. Held up by his brother’s weirdness. Clearly.

She typed a response.

How long ago?

Three dots appeared, fluttered, disappeared. Appeared again.

Miss Lopez says at least two hours.

Charlotte set the phone down. She drummed her fingers and looked at the utterly boring water polo case. She couldn’t imagine God cared very much about this case. Certainly not over His favored son. Besides, she needed a break.

If boredom was the primary reason she picked up her purse and left the office, that was between her and God.

Chloe was old enough to remember the days before cell phones. She remembered passing notes to other children when she encountered them between her tutoring lessons and acting classes. She remembered the advent of pagers, and later phones which could text. She had once auditioned to be the child in a commercial for a Blackberry, with a father who coolly checked his emails while kissing his wife, who was feeding their children cereal for the day ahead.

She remembered learning which numbers carried which letters, and when keyboards were first introduced, how many people insisted they just couldn’t get used to them.

She remembered not being at the beck and call of a small powerful computer that might be smarter than her. She remembered laughing once with a colleague about how people were starting to respond to text messages and phone calls immediately, and the hurried lives they seemed to lead. She’d told herself she’d never be one of those people. She’d never be so glued to her phone that she was offended when someone didn’t respond to a text within seconds.

Times changed, and so had she.

She stared at the messages she’d sent to both Marcus and Lucifer, watching as both were read in varied amounts of time. Lucifer, of course, read her text almost immediately. He always had his cell phone close at hand and nothing would stop the built-in distraction from taking a moment of his time.

Of course, Detective.

Of course, he said. She mused that he and Ella must not be busy at the moment. She shut that thought down and pushed the jealousy away.

Name the place and time.

Making it seem like he was coming to her, giving her control over the meeting, and efficiently absolving himself of judgment should she neglect to provide the details.

My car is at Miss Lopez’s.

Oh.

I will need to collect it.

Ok.

Miss Lopez says I can be available by 4 pm.

Oh, she did not like this feeling at all. She typed a response through gritted teeth.

LUX, 7:30 pm?

That way they could try to work around the worst of the rush hour traffic. Trixie was with Dan this week, and while Chloe had a hot date with a fuzzy blanket, she thought maybe this was more important.

I’ve been informed by Miss Lopez that I cannot return to LUX.

What did that mean? She was a detective; she followed the clues. They started with Lucifer and Ella came to work today and ended with Ella told Lucifer he can’t go back to LUX and the only conclusion was that they had clearly done something so unspeakably obscene that the penthouse needed to be aired out by an industrial cleaning crew.

Obviously.

While Chloe pondered another location, Marcus responded. He’d taken thirty-seven minutes. She and Linda had parted by the time the read receipt flashed. Marcus actually worked, though. His delay could be understood and forgiven.

Sure. You at home?

Ever efficient. She responded that she’d be home in about thirty minutes. She knew Marcus would meet her then; he’d once smugly explained that the “LT” meant he didn’t have to explain himself, including excusing himself in the middle of the workday.

It had pissed her off. She’d thought he was a complete asshole, and when he’d complimented her a few hours later, her head had spun. She’d loved hearing it, though, and even now the memory of him calling her “one of my best detectives” made her puff up a little. She’d been the department pariah, a punching bag everyone hated. Even when vindicated, she was only accepted because of the charming partner at her side. She wasn’t used to recognition of any kind from her coworkers.

She had eaten it up, and when he’d proposed, the memory of the pleasure she’d felt at his honest compliment had pushed her into a “yes.”

She was nearly home, which meant she needed to stop brooding and start planning. It was good that they’d have this conversation first. She needed to break this engagement off as soon as possible, regardless of whether Ella and Lucifer were now converting Ella’s apartment into another biohazard zone. She didn’t have to choose either of them, but if she had a choice at all, she knew Marcus wasn’t first in line.

She stepped into her apartment and was overtaken by memories. Marcus had knelt there not a full forty-eight hours ago. Maze had cuddled with Trixie on that couch. Trixie had covered that wall in drawings to hide Maze’s knife marks. Lucifer had laid there with a unicorn glittering on his cheek.

Lucifer had been upstairs only once, shouting about who knew what while blood poured from her nose. Marcus had been in her room many times.

Marcus had a tolerant attitude toward Trixie, who had told Chloe “He seems nice.” Trixie’s relationship with Lucifer, though…it was deep, and complex, and while she didn’t accost him every time she saw him anymore – a casualty of growing up far too fast for her mother’s comfort – she considered Lucifer a friend, even sought out his comfort and advice. Something she’d done almost immediately after meeting him, which was the start of her odd and equally deep friendship with Maze.

Chloe gave herself a mental shove. No brooding. Planning. She needed to think through exactly how she would break the engagement with Marcus. She needed to be firm, and clear, and not give him any wiggle room. She reasoned that she’d left him an in last time by not cursing his name and blocking his number from her cell phone. I’m not worth it. Her eyes prickled with tears. Lucifer had said those exact words once, referring to himself, telling her that she deserved so much better than someone like him. Whether he was right or wrong –

Stop. Brooding.

Right. Marcus. She checked her phone. She hadn’t replied to Lucifer yet. She quirked her mouth, then grinned at her idea.

That restaurant you stood me up at. She smirked, imagining his scowl. You owe me that dinner. I hear the food is amazing.

He read the message within seconds. She could hear him rolling his eyes.

Very well. I will make a reservation.

And a huff of prideful irritation. She could imagine him showing the message to Ella. She pushed the thought aside. She didn’t feel like laughing anymore. She replied while chewing the side of her bottom lip.

You better show.

He didn’t need to know she was currently fighting a wave of jealousy, anger, and sadness. If it was over, it was over. She was a grown woman. She’d been through a divorce and was about to end an engagement. She could handle this.

There was a knock at the door. Chloe took a deep breath and went to dismantle a second marriage before it could begin.

Thousands of years ago, a baby was born to a young couple who’d never heard of a baby.

When Eve felt the first flutters of his life inside of her, she reasoned that she had eaten something odd and her belly was full of gas. The movements were soft at first, easily missed in between the duties of learning to live outside the Garden. Adam had planted their own garden for food by the time the kicks began.

Fear coiled deep inside of her. She hid herself away at first, terrified of what might be happening, uncertain of how Adam might react. He found her on the fourth day in a copse of trees, weeping silently, babbling about the creature inside her. He carried her home and bathed her in the nearby river, then laid her down in their shelter. She showed him where the movements were, and terror gripped him too.

By then, they had both seen parasites emerge from the posteriors or mouths of animals. They did not speak of what might be happening to her. If she died, it was God’s will.

As her belly swelled over several months, Adam thought that God might be exacting a new vengeance upon them. Perhaps his second wife would be taken by the creature growing within her; perhaps a new beast would erupt from her, and kill him too.

He might not love his wife, but he was fond of her. He did not want to live alone, without companionship. He fed her boiled grasses and thick lamb. He wove her a bed of wool, the softest he could manage. He tended to her swollen feet each morning and evening, rubbing the thick toes and heels as she whined in pain. Her breasts became heavy and sore, and what they thought was pus oozed from her nipples.

She was scared, and he was too. But he couldn’t let her see that.

When water poured between her legs, he thought this might be the end. That she would die before him now, writhing and weeping, and he would be left alone. She screamed and screamed, her breaths staccato in between. She clutched at the ruined wool bed; she bit her tongue. He could do nothing but watch her agony, hold her hand, try to hide his anguish as she slipped from him.

Eve did not die. Instead, a small creature slid from her onto the wool. Adam might have some small instinct, as he moved to pick up the creature, to detach the cord from Eve’s and its body, to clean its mouth of debris. After he finished these tasks, he stared dumbly at the tiny babe. He did not know what to name this animal. He did not know its name.

Eve might have been created with some small instincts too. She was the one who first realized it needed a covering to protect it from the cold. She directed Adam to cut a clean section of wool and wrap the babe, her eyes misted over with pain and exhaustion. The small creature wailed as its mother had moments before. She took it to her breast, and its mouth found her nipple, and it quieted as it nursed. The first mother and father met each other’s eyes over the tiny infant’s body.

Eve and the babe slept soon after. Adam cleaned the space around them and began weaving a second wool bed to replace the ruined one beneath his wife. He still had not thought of a name.

The child grew, as children will. In time he was old enough to toddle after his father, who brought him into the fields and showed him how to plant seeds where they could grow, away from weeds and vermin. He showed his child how to divert water from the river to irrigate the land. The child broke a reed from the riverside and presented it to his laughing mother.

“A little qaneh,” she’d said, and Adam found his name: Qayin.

Cain.

A brother came close behind. This time, Eve knew what was happening. She prepared Adam for their second child, and they worked together to ready their home for another screaming babe. Neither of them warned their son of what was coming. They were the first parents; they didn’t think to.

Cain watched his mother’s body change. He watched her moods swing. He watched his father’s fear grow, watched his mother shift in discomfort and pain. He wept when his mother went into labor, certain she was about to die. When the tiny creature emerged from her body, he vomited.

And then he had a little brother.

Cain was the first son, and the first brother, born to the first parents. God was never far from them, and His influence touched every aspect of their lives. The boys grew up knowing God had judged their parents and would judge them as well. They grew up knowing that paradise had been taken from them. Cain grew up knowing the horror Abel’s arrival had unleashed on their mother, never knowing that he himself had unleashed worse simply by being first.

Eve favored Abel. Cain never knew why. Perhaps because Abel was younger, or brought her baby lambs to pet. Perhaps because Abel had a softer temperament, while Cain took after his stoic father. He didn’t know that Abel’s birth had been less traumatic for both parents only because they knew something of what to expect. He only saw that his mother’s eyes brightened for Abel in a way they didn’t for him.

Jealousy speared his heart. He’d anointed Abel in resentment the moment the child emerged bloody and screaming from his mother. That resentment settled in him, cloaked his every action. It tinged his speech with anger; it tainted his looks with ire.

He couldn’t pretend to love his brother, this first son of a man who didn’t love his wife. And when God demanded their offerings and found Cain’s wanting, he snatched up the rock and beat his brother to death.

Marcus Pierce knew what the text message meant. He had lived long enough and known enough humans throughout his years to recognize the intention. He’d wanted Chloe to love him again, had hoped that his attempts to reconcile swayed her. He’d pushed her away from Lucifer, not bothering with subtlety; he wanted it clear that the man who called himself the Devil would not be welcome in his home.

It was a terrible, gut-deep instinct, learned as a child and carried through his ancient life: the feeling of second-best. Of knowing he would be found wanting, that God’s judgment would never smile upon his bloodied hands.

He’d entertained the thought that perhaps God hated his own rejected son more than the first murderer. That perhaps, in this one situation, God might grant him mercy, shine a rainbow of promise into his darkened heart. With his mark gone, he thought God might be sending him a sign: this is the time. You are no longer alone.

God remained silent as ever, and now Chloe was ready to leave him. He considered that he had more than one chance now; he reminded himself that he was mortal now and could fall in love with another. The world was no longer so grim, so full of poisoned dreams. He could step outside and die today. He could take a chance.

But it was Chloe who removed his curse, her love which had given him this chance at a life, and her presence which he craved. He couldn’t accept another in her stead. No one could compare. He loved her, and perhaps, with convincing, she might love him again.

He’d ridden to her apartment within minutes of receiving her message. The ride gave him time to think through a strategy. The simplest solution was to get rid of Lucifer. The challenge was to do it in a way that she could mourn with Cain at her side, never knowing his involvement.

Easy enough. He had a massive network at his disposal, and some of the arms had gone too long without a job. He would weather this storm now, and return when Chloe no longer had a choice.

If he must be second-best, he knew how to fix the problem. He’d done it before, after all.

He dismounted his motorcycle, set his helmet on the handle. Straightened his hair. And went to knock on Chloe’s door.

Cain was never certain that the murder itself doomed him. After the blood had dried in the dirt, God asked where his brother was, and Cain lied, just as his parents lied about their transgressions in the Garden. God cast him from mortality as He cast Adam and Eve from the Garden.

Cain wandered, yes. He suffered. He also built. He was human, despite his curse, and he craved civilization. He fathered Enoch first, his own first-born son, and then built a city named Enoch as well.

Time passed.

His first spouse, his own sister Awan, died long before the city of Enoch crumbled. He buried her near the original Garden and wished her peace. His son’s namesake crumbled hundreds of years later. He grieved the loss of humans he knew, his own children, his spouses, any semblance of a human life.

Cain fled the region, seeking out new mortal comforts.

Each destination brought joys at first. His interests rose and waned with the tide of human life around him. Humans were not meant to endure beyond a single mortal lifespan, and God had gifted him no additional mental fortitude. He felt the pain of loss over and over; he felt the repeated agony of death. He lost hope as the centuries passed, unable to remain in a single location longer than a few decades, unable to form lasting connections with the humans around him. Inevitably, they died, and he lived on.

With hopelessness came bitterness. He felt his mark was born from cruelty, and he embraced necessity as his master. He steadily built an empire in the shadows, taking young orphans under his wing and training them to be loyal to him alone. He changed the origin, his name, his identity – but the empire continued to rise. He accumulated wealth and power, tucking both close to his chest. He murdered men he’d raised from boys, bedded women whose names he never bothered to learn. He became apathetic, his emotions dulled to the point of non-recognition. He was both efficient and bored, and his silent empire needed protection. He gravitated toward those who investigated crime: he needed to learn their methods, to keep up with new ideas and technologies to stay ahead of them. This mission became his primary focus, his only sense of worth in an ever-changing world.

He was weathered but ultimately the same. And yet, when he heard of a woman who made the Devil bleed, a flicker of hope pierced the ever-present despair of perpetual life.

Chloe opened the door to her fiancé with a strained smile.

“Hi,” she offered. He returned the smile, matching her quiet mood. She stepped back to let him in, and Marcus passed her by with the slight scent of Earth and oil.

Chloe shut the door and collected herself. She was psyching herself up for what she thought would be a hard conversation. When she turned, she found that Marcus was standing near her, jacket still on, a file in one hand. She looked at the file, eyebrows raised, then met his eyes.

“We need to talk about Lucifer,” Marcus said.

Chapter 7: Abaddon

Chapter Text

It would be easy to kill him, if she wanted to.

The woman considered the man sitting across from her. The coffee shop he’d suggested was bright and airy, the day warm. They’d taken a window together. He’d bought her a chai latte, which she sipped in between watching the people pass by outside. She kept her demeanor demure and halting. The man across from her responded strongly to her apparently nervousness. He was large, but sat comfortably slouched, hands relaxed. He was making an effort not to intimidate her. His kindness made her ache.

She couldn’t bring him to the motel. He was too large of a presence to blend into the background, even with an outward-facing door. As he’d walked ahead of her, she’d texted once on her flip phone, and now felt the vibrations of a returned message against her abdomen. She slid one hand across the pack there. An address was waiting now, but her drink was still warm.

She was in no hurry.

She wrapped both hands around the glass container. The warmth seeped into her fingers. Her palms were on the verge of burning. She shifted her grip with a sigh. Her eyes stayed focused on the table in between them.

“Do you like it?” Amenadiel asked. He’d settled on a lavender tea and tipped the barista well. His smile was as gentle as his manners. She met his eyes for a brief moment and managed a small, shy smile.

“It’s good,” she said, Peruvian still. She needed to stay consistent while speaking with him. “I’ve never had this.”

He beamed. He believed he was providing her with a new experience, emotional comfort, and protection. She kept her gaze down.

“How can I help you?” he asked. “Tell me what you need.”

She produced a soft flinch. Fear radiated around her.

“I don’t want you to be hurt,” she said. Honesty filled the words with conviction. “If they know who you are…”

Amenadiel smiled with pride.

“I’m God’s greatest warrior,” he said with confidence. There was a pause, a slight flicker of pain across his face, then the confidence and pride returned. “I’ll do my best to help you.”

She unzipped her pack and checked the phone’s screen. Blocky letters beckoned. She folded the phone closed and settled it back inside the pack. She tapped a finger against the table, nervous. She cleared her throat and nodded. Part of her story was the absolute ultimatum of no police involvement. She hadn’t said that much yet and didn’t think she’d need to. She would find out in another moment.

“I know where they are, here,” she said. Syllables cracked in an apparent show of the tension cording through her. “Could you…help me?”

It was dangerous, of course it was dangerous. She was taking a risk that he was the type who would want to see the threat for himself. God’s greatest warrior, he’d said. A soldier at heart. Possibly reckless, certainly arrogant. She knew she had him when one broad hand rested on the table, close to her own but not touching - respecting her unspoken boundaries while offering a source of strength.

“Yes,” Amenadiel said, “when you’re ready. I’ll keep you safe.”

She resisted a full-body flinch. She liked him too much. It might make her sloppy. She needed to regain control of herself. She met his eyes through her lashes, turned the corners of her lips up in the smallest gesture of hope. She lifted the drink to her lips, sipped, and hummed under her breath. There was time to finish their drinks before she betrayed him.

Cain understood how to build, and he knew how to raze foundations to the ground.

Chloe had already been looking for an out from Lucifer Morningstar’s orbit. She’d begun distancing herself before Cain began his courtship. The courtship itself opened a wide gulf between them. He’d watched her fumble through avoiding telling Lucifer the truth about her new relationship, watched her stumble over herself trying to make sure Marcus Pierce knew he was her priority.

Chloe and Lucifer shared a devastating personality trait: neither of them could just talk to each other. Cain could feed her any information he wanted, secure in the knowledge that she would never just ask Lucifer to confirm or deny for fear of what her supposed best friend would say.

She’d agreed to marry Marcus Pierce once; she could be convinced again. Especially if he could push her to the truth.

Chloe plainly cared for Lucifer, but she was also emotionally cautious with him. She’d given up the gifted necklace, and she’d let Marcus Pierce fill the space in her heart she might have reserved for Lucifer.

Cain held all the advantage. He understood humans in a deeper way than Lucifer ever could simply by being one. He’d lived among his own kind, fallen in love, built several legacies. He understood the basic human instinct to commune with each other, to share a culture, to be one of many. With cultures rose stories, and with stories rose myths. Cain’s shadow was cast the world over, his underlying humanity granting him sympathetic portrayals. A tragedy in human form, the first murderer, both outcast and lost son of God’s chosen.

Lucifer was no human.

Cain’s past meant that he knew the truth about divinity, and Lucifer had planted to seeds of his truth with Chloe over their years-long partnership. Chloe was a good detective; she only needed enough evidence to come to her own conclusions. He didn’t need to embellish the truth or lead her far. He just needed her to believe what Lucifer already insisted was true, and the power of underlying cultural significance would finish the job.

Lucifer was the Devil, and Chloe was a good person. Cain knew her nature, having seen it before. If she believed and did her research, she would find little cultural sympathy for the Prince of Lies.

Abaddon.

Satan.

Most Unclean.

Cain had already collected the data over the decades, keeping tabs on Lucifer’s movements, his actions, he general presence in Los Angeles and before. Cain removed a few documents, not wanting Chloe to know about the Devil’s vulnerability around her or the Devil’s earnest attempts to die. She might come to a compassionate conclusion if she knew those details, and Cain saw no need to take chances.

As a result, the folder he presented her didn’t precisely match the file he’d pulled from his records. And yet, it wasn’t a lie either.

Chloe deserved to know and accept the truth.

And he deserved to provide her with the support he knew she’d need.

Ella huffed in exasperation. They’d just finished chatting with last night’s bartender, who confirmed Mariana’s appearance but otherwise had nothing of note to add. She rubbed a hand over her face, exhausted from the past twelve hours of stress combined with Lucifer’s constant presence. His energy was all over the place with distractions. Normally she’d be able to keep up easily as he flickered between thoughts like a drunk mayfly, but today she was operating on less than an hour’s sleep and a truly unhealthy amount of caffeinated sugar.

She wasn’t irritated, per se, but she did grab his knee and squeeze it when he bounced it so hard it thunked the bottom of the bar.

“Cool your jets, man,” she said. She barely managed not to beg. His jitters were out of control. He poured three drinks and downed them in quick succession. Ella didn’t have the heart to stop him. She was sleep deprived and grumpy, but he’d been shot at. Oh, and maybe Chloe had gotten engaged to a guy he couldn’t stand.

Ella checked her phone for probably the hundredth time in two hours, sighing when once again she found nothing from Decker. If she was engaged, why hadn’t she texted Ella? Or the group chat with Maze and Linda? She should be beside herself with excitement, blowing their phones up with pictures of the ring and questions about the bachelorette party.

Unless she wasn’t excited.

Lucifer was busy texting more staff from last night, asking them to either come in or give him a call. His phone pinged with a new message, and she watched his eyebrows rise. In another moment his face fell and he tapped two messages, a slight pause between the first and second, before setting the phone on the bar with a grimace. He caught her watching him and immediately snapped his expression back into a genial smile.

“Who’s next, Miss Lopez?”

Ella grabbed his phone and swiped across the screen. Like his penthouse, Lucifer had no lock on the phone – a fact she often took advantage of to take selfies around the precinct when he left the device on Chloe’s desk.

Lucifer didn’t protest, instead watching her with a bemused and somewhat befuddled expression. He probably expected her to take a selfie with the two of them, and well, now that she thought about it, she gestured him closer and pressed their shoulders together and they both made a wacky face as the camera clicked.

“Gonna text that to myself,” she declared, partially because it was true and partially to cover snooping in his messages. She finished sending herself the photo, then quickly clicked into his message history to see what exactly had caused that kicked puppy look.

The Detective: Can we talk?

Lucifer Morningstar: Of course, Detective.

A line, indicating the pause she’d seen, before -

Name the place and time.

It was the last message he’d sent, and didn’t this all sound dire. Ella chewed a bit at her bottom lip, considering all the evidence she had, then laid the phone back on the table. She cleared her throat and shifted on her bar-stool, her feet dangling nearly two full feet above the ground.

“So,” she said, injecting as much I’m so casual just pointing out something totally normal please don’t be angry into her voice as she could, “Chloe wants to talk.”

Lucifer snorted and downed his fourth drink in ten minutes. She pitied his liver.

“Indeed,” he said. His voice was nasal and slightly high as he tried to disguise his mournful tone with fake ambivalence. “No doubt to tell me she had no use for me any longer, now she has the stump at her beck and call.”

Ella blinked.

“Uh-what? You think – you – Lucifer, what?”

He twirled the empty glass between his fingers, pondering another pour. “It’s obvious enough.” He didn’t say anything else. She thought his smile might actually crack his face in two if he tried to keep it up.

“I don’t think – Lucifer. Come on. She wouldn’t.”

He raised both eyebrows as he committed to the pour. It was far more than a finger, and pushing the boundaries of two. Another drink down the gullet. Ella reached for the bottle, which he let her take with the same bemused expression as before. She slid it on the counter behind her back and leaned as far as she could, outside of his elongated reach. He huffed.

“Alright, mister,” Ella said. She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. She had grown up wrangling her brothers; one strange lovesick blockhead was a breeze. “Talk.”

“I see no need,” he said. “Fighting would only delay the inevitable, you know. He won’t tolerate the Devil in the Detective’s life.”

“Something is going on.” Ella thwapped his thigh with the back of one hand. “Spill! You’re the second-most stubborn person I know! And that means something, because I’m Hispanic!”

Lucifer laughed outright, which was her intention. She didn’t grin because she was still serious about this and wanted him to talk. She raised both eyebrows, tilted her head down slightly. He huffed and mumbled, just under his breath, too soft for her to hear and just loud enough to piss her off.

“What was that?” she snapped. “A little louder please?”

“She stopped wearing the necklace, didn’t she?” Lucifer was eyeing the bottle on the counter behind her, apparently trying to judge if he could reach it should he just lie on the bar top and slide. Ella leaned her body forward to block his path. He grumbled.

“The one you gave her?” Ella remembered seeing it on Chloe the day after her birthday and had asked for the story. Chloe had told her it was from Lucifer without much more context, but she’d touched the pendant the entire time. It clearly meant something to her. She’d worn it every day since, until recently. Ella hadn’t commented on the change, assuming it was the normal jewelry transitions women made over time. Only now she realized that Chloe hadn’t actually replaced the necklace, just removed it.

A gift from Lucifer, removed and not replaced. Pierce and Lucifer clearly at odds now. Lucifer calling her instead of Chloe last night. Oh no.

Ella flinched.

“Oh buddy,” Ella said. She unlocked her crossed arms and slide from her stool, sliding against him in a hug which he couldn’t easily dodge without tripping over the stool itself. He scoffed and tensed and made his protests clear, but he didn’t pull away. Another bad sign. She pulled away for him and he straightened his jacket.

“Look, you don’t know what she wants to talk about. The only way to find out –"

“Is to submit myself to the firing squad, yes, I’m aware Miss Lopez.” Lucifer gave up on the bottle behind her and instead tugged at his cuffs, self-soothing the best he could without the ease of a drink to swallow. Ella was impressed with his ability to sound offended and blasé simultaneously.

“Not…exactly…what I was – but sure, OK. You can’t go until after four, though. We need to finish these questions out.”

“Of course,” he said. He picked up the phone again and sent a few more messages. One, two, three, and then he focused that awful genial fake smile on her. She frowned. The phone pinged again.

“Ah,” he said, “she’s suggesting LUX at –"

“You absolutely cannot come here!” Ella trembled and flailed a hand in front of him. “No!”

He blinked at her, then typed out his response. He held the phone for a few minutes, waiting for the reply, then began to set it down. It of course pinged the moment it touched the wooden surface. He pulled it back, read the message, and the blasé fell away to outright offense and a scowl.

“She’s accusing me of – well look!”

He pushed the screen in Ella’s direction. She read the message, then smirked at him.

“You totally stood her up, didn’t you?”

He huffed loudly.

“That is beside the point!” He grumbled his way through the next message, irritation flowing from him in waves. It was better than the fake dignity before at least.

Ella turned when she heard footsteps clomping down the staircase behind her. Another dancer from last night, busy checking her phone but giving them both a friendly wave. Lucifer’s staff members were remarkably friendly.

“Alright, let’s finish this up so you don’t have a repeat performance,” she said. Lucifer’s exasperated scoff was music to her ears.

Chloe stared down at the documents before her and struggled not to show how affected she felt. She’d investigated Lucifer herself before and made a conscious decision to just accept his eccentricities and let it go, the physical manifestation of her decision a discarded blood sample in the station trash can.

Now Marcus had shoved a folder full of evidence in front of her – pictures, testimonials, dates and times. It was compelling. But what he wanted her to believe…

“You know me, Chloe,” he said. He was sitting at her bar top, the file’s contents spread scattered in front of him. His hands rested two feet or so apart, containing the paperwork to a small area. There was an assortment of impossible evidence lying between his hands.

He was right. She knew him, a man of logic with a calm demeanor. He kept his feet firmly on the ground, not prone to the slightest flights of fancy.

If it weren’t Marcus, she could’ve dismissed the folder and everything inside of it. Now, she twirled his engagement ring and narrowed her eyes at the papers spread on her countertop.

“Set however you feel about me aside. Look at this objectively,” he said. Her earlier conversation intentions had dried up when he placed that folder in her hands, even though he seemed to know what was coming today. She’d entertained a moment’s thought that this might be his final plea to force her to accept him, but he wasn’t pushing any more than the evidence itself. Instead, he was sitting quietly, watching her, giving her time to process and come to some conclusion.

The expression on her face wavered between outright denial and hesitant doubt.

“You’re saying,” she began, “that Lucifer…is the Devil.” She stared him square in the eyes, waiting to see some sign of jealousy, of hallucinatory indication, of anything other than his steady, unwavering look.

Marcus didn’t waver.

“I’m saying I’ve been looking into him, and something doesn’t add up,” he said. He was gentle in tone, patient in demeanor. He wasn’t presenting anything other than evidence for her perusal, and Chloe would always follow where the evidence led her.

“I – I need to think,” she said. She was still twirling his ring. Twirling and twirling, around and around, her fingernails clicking against the metal. Marcus stood and began to put on his leather jacket. He’d ridden over straight from work, and he’d return now that he’d laid this land mine at her feet. He’d leave her to decide whether she would step off of it willingly or rot on the spot. How considerate.

He looked at the ring she continued to twirl, then met her eyes. He wanted to ask; she could see it. He wanted to bring that conversation out into the open and force her to admit something. But he also knew she had a lot to process, and so he let her be.

“Let me know when you’re ready,” he said, and left the apartment. The door clicked behind him. For a long moment, Chloe stared at the door, half-convinced Lucifer would burst through cackling and declaring ah-ha, I’m found out! Now to Hell we go!

He didn’t. She reached a hand forward and turned a picture in her direction. It was slightly blurry but very clear: Lucifer, without a shirt and with two white wings sprouting from his back. He was lying in a desert, near the spot he’d dragged her out to a few days later when he returned from what she’d assumed was another sabbatical from life. The date on the photo confirmed his story – the entire story. He’d been taken by someone, and then his wings had come back.

He looked hurt in the picture. Covered in sand, grime, and heat blisters forming in the heat of the sun. The burns looked painful.

If this picture was to be believed, Lucifer had wings.

Lucifer had wings.

Alone, it could’ve been faked. Compiled by Marcus and presented as one piece of evidence among hundreds, it was just part of the timeline.

Chloe was a detective. She followed the evidence. She began moving the pieces in front of her, assembling the timeline as best she could. Much of the information happened decades before she was born, photos and testimonials and other hard to verify documents. The newer evidence, circling around Los Angeles, was easier to parse. He’d arrived with his brother and gotten involved in a case she recognized. She’d used that case to take initiative and show she had the chops to become a detective, but there was one moment that had stayed with her for years.

Running through the park, turning a corner to find money fluttering in the breeze and Gil nowhere to be found. She and Dan had searched the area for only a few minutes before he reappeared, kneeling and sobbing his confession of murdering Aiden Scott.

He’d been easy to process, repeating his confession every few seconds until he’d been given a sedative. It was a familiar pattern now, something she’d seen enough times over the years that she simply stopped taking note.

Marcus hadn’t, though. He’d taken note of every instance over the past few years, taken statements, made meticulous notes of the consistent details carried across the years. The specificity of it all stood out the most: always the same descriptors, the same fears, the same face.

She stared at the timeline, her face blank, her mind spinning. She glanced at the microwave clock. It was almost one.

Six and a half hours to go.

He supposed it was fair play that the Detective had yet to show.

Lucifer had ordered a fine red wine and poured two glasses with his own hand, waving the server away. He’d not touched his own, waiting for the Detective to arrive before sharing the taste together. He wanted to savor such shared moments while he could.

He imagined her that night, years ago, sitting quietly for hours. Texting him repeatedly, asking where he was, eventually giving up and going out to nearly die at his mother’s hand.

An encapsulation of why she shouldn’t come tonight. He told himself he shouldn’t be disappointed. In another moment, he reached for his glass of wine, brought the glass to his lips, and only stopped when he saw her walking toward him across the room.

Pleasure bloomed inside his chest. He couldn’t stop the smile which jumped to his lips, the immediate consideration of her presence. She’d chosen a white sweater, dark slacks, and a large purse undoubtedly full of some case file she refused to leave alone for even an evening. Her hair was loose, flowing around her shoulders in the breeze from her movement.

She wasn’t smiling, but she often wasn’t around him, more often found with a smirk or scoff or pensive pursed lips as she chased a lead. He was fond of all her expressions, and when she stopped at the table across from him, he started to rise to pull her chair free.

She raised a hand and shook her head, keeping him in place without a word. He still smiled.

“Hello, Detective,” he said, raising his glass to toast her.

Chloe reached into her bag, pulled out a thick manila file, and dropped it in front of him.

Lucifer peered down at the file with a confused half-smile and a slight chuckle. He met Chloe’s eyes; she stared back at him, hard, her mouth a firm line. She looked like a contained storm swirling just out of reach. The half-smile fell away.

She said nothing.

He looked down, now noticing the label on the file: Lucifer Morningstar, not written in the Detective’s hand.

The old fear rose wailing from his core. His Detective had asked him for some sign of the evidence now sitting on the table between them many times. His own cowardice had always held him back. He had tried in earnest, once, several months ago right after Cain’s botched kidnapping attempt.

But only the once.

Now Lucifer tapped his fingers on the table. He glanced up at her; her expression hadn’t changed. He hesitated another moment, then flipped the file open.

He glanced at her again. Anger was building underneath her skin. Her face was flushed. He kept his gaze down after that, flipping silently through still after still, meticulous notes, transcripts from interviews with multiple suspects. They all portrayed or described the same things: red eyes. Red face. Burned away skin. Over and over, without deviation. Dozens of testimonials, starting with a murderous boxing coach nearly a decade ago.

He swallowed thickly. The waiter hadn’t interrupted their silent stand-off. When he glanced up, he saw that the Detective was scowling mightily at the poor bloke, who dared not approach until beckoned. When she noticed that Lucifer was looking at her again, she turned the furious stare to him instead.

Lucifer had ruled Hell. He had borne witness to many a deadly glare in his time ruling Hell’s demons. He’d spent eons perfecting his own cruel visage to inspire terror and awe in both the demons and the human souls under his ward. Even now, when met with a fierce glare, his immediate instinct was to return the intensity in kind, to swell as the grander threat. He was powerful and to be feared. He was stronger than all the demons of Hell.

He didn’t want to match Chloe stare for stare. He never wanted her to fear him. He shifted nervously instead, in part relieved by the pure rage he felt emanating from across the table. Anger wasn’t fear; anger he could work with.

“Detective,” he began. She raised a fisted hand and placed it on the table. She slowly uncurled the fist into a flat hand, fingers splayed. He thought she might be trying very hard not to launch herself across the table at him. Perhaps even imagining wrapping her hands around his throat.

He could only hope.

“Show me,” she said quietly, and oh yes, she was furious. Her tone was deathly cold. He cleared his throat and glanced around the restaurant.

“Now,” she said. He snapped his attention back to her, swallowed again. She might actually shoot him if he tried to delay, but…

“I can’t,” he said. She let loose a scoff loud enough that the diners at the tables surrounding them glanced her way.

“I can’t,” he said again, trying his best to sound apologetic. “My Devil face –“

“Lucifer Morningstar.” Chloe might burst into flames any moment. She was edging toward the physical embodiment of wrath. “If you don’t show me right now, I am never working with you again.”

“You’d still work – work with me?”

He shouldn’t have said it. He should have thought up a better reply, something witty to calm her down enough to see reason, something to try and convince her to at least leave this very public venue. But he could only ever be himself, poison to all he touched, destroyer of every possible good thing in his life. She’d made an ultimatum; his response had not been compliance. He flinched after he spoke, certain that she would leave at once and never speak to him again.

Yet somehow, it had been the right thing to say. A glint of amusem*nt broke her deadly stare, the tiniest flicker of fondness for his bumbling shock that indicated somehow, some way, this might not be the end.

“I don’t mean to – that is, I wouldn’t demand –“ Lucifer sucked in a sharp breath, counted to ten, and tried again. He abandoned that line of thought. She’d made a request and he’d bought himself a moment’s mercy.

“Detective, I can’t show you what they saw,” he said carefully. She watched his lips moving, capturing every word he spoke. Taking stock of what excuse he would use this time. He pushed ahead past his own terror of losing her forever.

“I’ve lost that ability.” The fondness was gone. He watched her begin to close off. Her hand slid from the table; she was starting to push herself away.

“But I can – I can show you something else, if you’ll – if you’re willing –"

“Willing to what?” The hint of amusem*nt was back, as though she expected him to make a lewd comment. He nearly did out of old habit. He bit back several, in fact, before settling on:

“If you’ll come with me.” Lucifer fought hard not to slant his words into innuendo.

Chloe regarded him from across the table. Silence stretched on a thin thread. If she left now, that thread would break, and he knew he would lose her. He wouldn’t hold it against her. The amount of trust he was asking of her, when she demanded proof of what he was now – it was too much. She couldn’t possibly grant it to him. He hadn’t earned –

“Alright,” she said. She stepped away from the table, eyes narrowed and suspicious. Lucifer stared up at her in shock, taking several seconds longer than she liked to process her reaction.

“Well?” she demanded, snapping him from his thoughts. He stood abruptly, his chair screeching against the floor.

“Yes, ah, it will just be a moment.” He waved at their server, drawing the nervous man over.

“Save our table, will you? We’ll be back shortly.”

Lucifer turned and started toward the back of the restaurant, weaving through the staff’s sections for the back door. She followed him willingly. Her heeled boots clicked against the floor. She took two steps for every one of his. He wondered if she had her gun strapped to an ankle. His brave Detective.

He waved to the chef once, flashing a bright grin, and pushed the heavy metal door open to the outside. The back alley was the opposite of romantic. The dumpster was full enough that the smell leaked into the entire alley. Trash was scattered around. A small animal squeaked its way through a pile of unidentifiable rubbish several meters away. Otherwise, it was just him and the Detective. He turned to face her. She stood at least six feet away, watching him. She was still angry. She was beautiful.

He shrugged his shoulders and let his wings unfurl behind him. He watched her gasp and step back, away from the bright lights now erupting from his back. She looked from one to the other, mouth open, breathing hard. She looked at him. Her face was pale, her pupils tiny pinpricks. She looked back at his wings, again at him. Her mouth clamped shut. Her hands balled into fists again.

Chloe turned and walked away. She didn’t look back once.

Chapter 8: He Should Be Glad

Chapter Text

Six and a half hours earlier:

Chloe had six and a half hours to think herself into a roiling fury.

The first anger, directed at herself for her willful blindness, was the easiest to process. It was the same anger she’d felt when Dan had confessed, the same anger from when she’d realized she didn’t want to marry Marcus at all. It wasn’t a roaring fire but simmering coals, left to heat over time and eventually barbecue her alive.

She set that anger aside for now, intent to stow it away with the other assorted hurts and pains of loving men who lied. She could hear Lucifer’s sputtering denial, his insistence that he never lied. But she’d heard his confession in the dead of night, thinking she wasn’t aware of his presence. Lucifer bluffed, all the time. And wasn’t that the same as lying?

The timeline sat assembled before her, front to back, more recent years more robust than those before print media was available. Chloe was glad Marcus had left her to stew alone. She had questions she already knew he would avoid. She didn’t think Marcus knew exactly how much Lucifer actually told her, knowing she wouldn’t believe him.

The timeline had holes. Significant ones. The evidence was all centered around Lucifer’s identity and presence, and that was it. Amenadiel appeared in brief moments, just enough to provide necessary background context. Charlotte Richards, Lucifer’s supposed “step-mother,” didn’t appear at all.

Marcus had taken a fine-tooth comb to the folder, ejecting the information he didn’t want her to see. It might be mercy. He might want to shield her from the greater ramifications of what this all meant. The existence of Hell and Heaven, angels, God – when her thoughts slowed, the immensity of it swirled behind her eyelids and she took deep breaths to keep the panic down.

But Chloe had loved Marcus, just as she’d loved Dan and now loved Lucifer. And Chloe knew that she loved men who lied.

She didn’t want to drink herself silly, but she didn’t want to be fully sober either. Decision made, she got to work.

Chloe first pulled out a fresh box of wine which would make Lucifer gag and Maze cackle. She drank a third of it before she began her stilted research, searching the internet for answers for twenty minutes until the images combined into a wide-mouthed bright red creature with horns and hooves and red wings splayed behind it, devouring souls with glee. The combination had her hooting with laughter as she imagined Lucifer’s offended sputtering.

She couldn’t speak for his previous billion years, but her Lucifer wouldn’t be caught dead looking like this. Some of them didn’t even have hair.

She’d need to ask about the horns.

Chloe was two thirds through the box when she texted Linda. She’d debated the text contents for nearly fifteen full minutes before sending it along and was gratified when Dr. Martin called almost immediately.

“You could’ve told me,” Chloe said in greeting. Her words weren’t slurred but they were sad, dimmed and disbelieving. Linda stayed quiet for long enough that Chloe took another sip of wine and coughed.

“’Complicated,’” she said. The wine was sweet and had a strange aftertaste. She sighed. “Complicated.”

“Do you want me to come over?” Linda sounded patient, humoring. Not the least bit guilty for her role in this. Chloe was angry. She wanted to scream at Linda and blame her for Chloe’s own blindness. You should’ve told me, she wanted to shriek at the top of her lungs.

Chloe wouldn’t have believed her. She hadn’t believed Jimmy Barnes, or dozens of other suspects cowering away from that face. She certainly hadn’t believed Lucifer.

“No,” Chloe said in belated reply to Linda’s question. Silence stretched. Linda let it, her training keeping her from interrupting Chloe’s thoughts before she had time to decide on her next words.

“Why didn’t I believe him?”

Linda hummed in sympathy.

“Neither of us did,” she said. Chloe scoffed.

“You did,” she said, some of the anger leeching into her voice. She snapped out the two words, punctuating their ending consonants with a click of her tongue. “’Non-traditional guy’ my ass.”

Linda huffed out a laugh.

“Not at first,” she said. She took a breath, gathering her own thoughts. “He showed me something.”

An awkward pause. They both burst into laughter.

“Other than that,” Linda said, the humor still lilting in her voice. They both enjoyed the burst tension for several moments, fondness hovering between them on the line. Chloe considered what they’d both found so amusing. Linda had slept with the Devil, and here she was, amused and calm and not running and screaming at all.

She dragged herself back from the edge of that thought spiral and forced herself to focus.

“How did you make him show you?” This had Chloe stumped. She’d asked, over and over. She’d pleaded and insisted and practically begged, and yet Lucifer kept hedging, never giving in after that bullet cut into the flesh of his leg. Whatever he feared, it wasn’t pain. He’d been so adamant that he was immortal, and then so confused when her bullet hurt him. Even she could follow those dots.

In retrospect, anyway.

Chloe looked down at the abandoned search strings, the photos and testimonials, and the size of it all threatened to eat her from the inside out. Or maybe that was the anger. She was still pretty angry.

“I told him I wouldn’t see him anymore unless he was completely honest with me,” Linda said. “I regretted it for a few weeks. I refused to see him at first, and then I…took some time to adjust.”

I told him I wouldn’t see him anymore.

Chloe laughed to herself. It was such an obvious way to force his hand. Threaten to take away his human toys. Some detective she was.

“Is he dangerous?” Chloe had to know what Linda thought. Linda knew him better than anyone, or at least they all thought she did. He insisted he didn’t lie, but maybe he did?

Linda’s reply cut off her impending spiral.

“Not to us,” Linda said, and wasn’t that a terrifying answer. Not to us. But he was dangerous, yes. He was terror and power and Hell itself. He’d defied God Himself and taken his punishment with all the pettiness of a creature who knew he couldn’t be destroyed. Not to us, Linda said, but who was “us?” Was Trixie on that list? Ella? Would he hurt Dan if Dan pushed him too far? Kill him?

Ella. A true believer, the ripest harvest the Devil could reap according to all the church sites. He was immortal; he could play the long con. He could toy with them all until the moment they passed into death, then sweep them away to his realm, torn away from God’s light just as he’d been however long ago.

She tried to picture Lucifer so cruel. She squinted at the effort, her eyes blurry. He was so very gentle with Trixie, so overly fond of Ella. He’d never hurt Daniel – well, outside of a stray punch and barbed words. He’d never hurt Chloe physically, and Linda didn’t consider him dangerous to whomever “us” was. Linda had slept with him, multiple times. He knew her intimately, could hurt her in ways that made Chloe’s toes curl in fear. But Linda wasn’t afraid of him.

None of this meant a thing. Chloe was a detective. She’d seen the acts people put on, sometimes for years, even decades. Swindlers, hustlers, and murderers all lied to their partners when necessary to maintain the illusion. Serial killers had families. Lucifer’s kindness made her like him, but it didn’t make him innocent.

She needed more information. She pushed the papers here and there as though expecting another file to manifest underneath them with all of the answers she sought. It didn’t. Chloe sipped her wine, smacked her lips. She looked at the photos again, pulling the one she couldn’t stop revisiting closer. The picture of Lucifer unconscious, half-naked, wings out. Blistering alone in the sun. Had he woken up afraid? He’d come to her for help, insisting she follow him even though she told him flat-out she doubted his story. And even full of those doubts, she’d followed him, certain this was another of his bonkers nightmare attempts to explain away his latest vanishing act.

It hadn’t been. He really had been taken, hurt, and left to die in the desert. He’d come back to her alive and well enough, though angry about the wings.

“What’s with his wings?” she blurted out. “Why does he hate them so much?”

Linda hummed again, this time in slight resistance. Doctor-patient confidentiality. Right. Chloe tossed her a chance to skirt ethics just enough to mollify her concerns.

“He told me he cut them off.”

“Oh, he did. Several times.” Linda hadn’t liked that; Chloe could clearly hear her disapproval.

Chloe looked at the photo. She sipped her wine.

“His scars,” she said. Linda adjusted her grip on her phone with the slight click clack of jewelry tapping the receiver. “He wouldn’t let me touch them.”

“Gone now, I imagine,” Linda said. Chloe hummed then, considering all the information Lucifer had told her over the years. Far more than just his identity. Too much to parse in a single phone call and a single box of wine. She planned out her next several days in a flurry of thoughts: write every snippet he’d told her that she could remember; separate the data into levels of importance; drink. Ponder over the implications of what she’d learned, what she’d forgotten, and what she’d stowed away in her brain. Drink more. Not enough to forget, but enough to soothe the burning anger simmering away in her core.

“Maze is a demon,” Chloe said. She exploded into laughter again, tears making her eyes burn. “Trixie’s best friend is a demon.”

“So is mine,” Linda said. Chloe laughed harder.

“One thing that makes sense,” Chloe managed in between breaths. Linda chuckled along with her.

“You have no idea, Chlo’,” she said. “Maze is a trip.”

“I know a little. I live with her.” They both considered the horrors of living with an actual demon, and Chloe had to admit it wasn’t nearly as chaotic as others might think. Maze might be a demon, but she loved Trixie enough to reign it in.

Sort’ve.

Chloe was still angry, but she had a plan now, and that made all the difference.

“I’m meeting him tonight for dinner,” she said.

“Oh?” Linda sounded surprised, even a little envious.

“Pre-existing plan,” Chloe said. She didn’t mention the original intention. If Linda could keep secrets, Chloe could, too.

“Do you need some pointers?” Chloe shook her head, then remembered Linda couldn’t actually see her right now.

“No,” she said, “I think I’ve got this one.”

“I’ll have my phone with me if you need me,” Linda said. “Call if…if you need me.”

“Will do,” Chloe said. She toasted Linda in the air in front of her, made her goodbyes, and ended the call. She glanced at the clock, the red fog of fury rolling back in.

Five hours to go.

It wasn’t a warehouse, but it was being used for storage regardless.

The woman led Amenadiel inside through the alley door, moving like a skittish colt. They whispered when they spoke at all, her voice trembling in semi-feigned fear. After three steps he moved before her, pressing a broad hand back against her clavicle, keeping her safely behind him. Her fear for him spiked. His hand was warm when she moved close enough for his fingers to brush against her. He did nothing with that gentle touch. He hadn’t made one move to touch her out of turn, flirt openly, show her what he expected from this arrangement. He appeared to be helping her out of kindness alone.

Her fists clenched, once. She relaxed her hands. He didn’t deserve this.

“Do you see anyone?” she asked his back. The whispered words triggered a flurry of silent movement behind her. Men with guns thrilled to serve their master, driven by promises of money and power and the occasional dollop of fear.

She pulled her gun from the pack on her waist, the metal solid and heavy in her hand. She gripped it by the barrel, a deadly weapon converted to an ill-advised hammer. She stepped forward before the men could overtake her, stretched to her toes, and slammed the grip of the gun against the broad back of his skull.

Amenadiel stumbled forward with a sharp cry, staggering at the force of the blow. She followed his momentum and shoved at the small of his back, forcing him forward to his knees. She whipped the grip against his head again, harder this time, thrusting the weight of her body into the blow. He grunted and fell, crumpled on the floor. He hadn’t turned in time to see who attacked him. He would trust her still, if she let him.

An approving grunt preceded the sound of weapons being lowered behind her. She turned to take stock of the men who’d joined them. Three, all tall and broad, raring for a fight. She watched in silence as the point man stepped closer to her, eyes on the man sprawled on the floor, groaning in dizzy pain.

“Boss did say to soften’im up,” the apparent leader said over her head. There was an amused leer there which made her close her eyes. The leader kept speaking, ignoring her for now.

“Get the cuffs,” he said to the others. “You know where to put’im.”

He turned to her now. A hand raised and clasped her shoulder, the pressure just tight enough to hurt. A reminder.

“Good job,” he said. The leer was still there. She looked down to watch as Amenadiel was cuffed at the wrists and ankles, dragged away by men who didn’t care if he died.

He didn’t deserve this, she knew. But then, neither had she, once upon a time.

Now:

Lucifer watched the Detective go, his wings fluttering slightly behind him. Their light rippled against the grimy walls. A bit of divinity stuffed into an LA alley. He hadn’t wanted them; he hadn’t asked for them. He didn’t want what they represented, how they forced him to acknowledge his intended role.

As with all his siblings, he’d been created whole cloth from nothing, etched from the fabric of the universe by parents whose love was conditional. Even with a twin, these limbs set him apart – the only angel whose wings glowed white with divinity. Even in Hell, his light brightened the darkest reaches of the realm when he bothered to let it shine.

He had, at first, desperate for some sense of the creature he’d once been. He’d pulled on his energies and birthed stars to shine in Hell’s sky. Hell’s cruel climate sapped them within years, a moment’s time on Earth, and they died moaning their agony into his mind.

He'd stopped soon enough. To spare both them and him the continued agony of creation without mercy. His wings were the only source of lasting light in that blighted place, and he kept them furled often to protect them from the ash and despair around him.

He’d loved his wings, once upon a time. He’d loved sharing flights with his siblings, his twin; he’d loved the sensation of air rushing across his body as he rode currents through space and time. He’d sacrificed them to defy his Father, as his Father had torn his life away and cast him into the dark, alone. To cut off his wings had been more than a slipshod decision made in the heat of angst. He’d deliberated the decision, thought on an eternity without them. Maze had wept as she’d torn them from his body, knowing the depth of hopeless defiance spurring the action on. She’d understood how deeply this action would scar him, though she was just a demon.

Lucifer had wanted, badly, to rise to the Silver City when they’d first returned. To face his Father again, to force answers he’d been denied for billions of years. He couldn’t without being eradicated entirely. Denied retribution forevermore.

He’d been enraged at the defilement of his choice. Again. He’d cut the accursed things from his back so many times the pain had stopped making him flinch away from the blade, trying to remove both the temptation to use them and the fluttering symbols of his repeated failure. Each time he felt their twinging return, he’d recoiled.

He couldn’t hate them. He wanted them. He could hate his weakness for wanting them, though – and what was one more reason among so many?

He’d been weak for years. Amenadiel had been right those years ago; Earth softened him, made him want to bend to human needs. To her needs.

The Detective had asked for honesty many times. He couldn’t claim she’d avoided the issue. She’d tried to press him many times over. He denied her repeatedly, refusing to give her the final push necessary to believe him. The wings were the better way to find out, he reasoned. They were beautiful and holy, not scarred and burnt.

Lucifer told himself he wanted to spare her everything that came with knowing. She wasn’t a believer, never went to church or prayed. He wasn’t just the Devil; he brought an entire world of complications with him. A terrifyingly omnipotent Father who’d rejected him; a powerfully manipulative mother who’d threatened her life multiple times. A multitude of formidable siblings, all bent on his utter exile, all decided on his evil. Even Amenadiel believed it once, until very recently in their time as siblings. Might believe it still, for all he knew. He had no faith in his siblings, least of all his ambivalent warden.

Knowing his truth brought terrible dangers into her orbit. Keeping her ignorant of those dangers prevented her from demanding to join him in his struggles against fate. Now, with his wings shifting on his back, he felt fear again curdle through his belly.

Now the Detective knew. If she ever returned to him, she would want to be involved. It was for the best she’d left, really. It was the safest option for her. He shouldn’t feel this way. He should be glad.

Lucifer shrugged his wings back into nothing. He knew he should’ve expected this and been glad for her rejection. He fought the disappointment swelling in his chest down until it made his stomach lurch.

It was to be expected. This was for the best. She’d said yes to Cain, who at least had been human once. He would give her a human life. They could have human children, and she would die a human death and he would follow her soon after to the rest he’d once craved. They might rise together and live out eternity in peace while Lucifer remained below.

His kingdom, forevermore.

He shouldn’t have come here, to Los Angeles. He should’ve chosen another city, another country, the other side of the bloody world. He could be enjoying the opera in Sydney, or Vietnamese shadow puppets. He could be anywhere but here, returning through the staff door of one of his favorite restaurants in LA to pay a bill he shouldn’t have incurred in the hopes of one final shared drink between friends.

He really should’ve known better. He really should be glad.

At least this time Amenadiel wouldn’t force him back down to his prison. Lucifer wouldn’t have to endure the excitement of his legions, thrilled at the return of their king. He wouldn’t have to wait long to find a moment of privacy to lick his emotional wounds and bury the latest pains beneath eons of agony. One more hurt wouldn’t break him. He shouldn’t be hurt at all. He should be glad for her. She was free.

He should have known better. He should have known better. He pushed the kitchen door open and slumped to their table – his table – where he would flag down whichever server appeared first and request the bill.

He stopped when he saw her, sitting there, drinking the wine he’d poured for her. She wasn’t focusing on anyone around her, totally lost in her musings or the wine itself. Perhaps both. Had she expected him to return? Should he leave? He could slide out of sight, back into the kitchen, and tell the cook he would square away the check soon. She probably didn’t want to see him, certainly not like this – she wouldn’t want him near her. She would be terrified, lock her door and refuse to take his calls as Linda had done. She wouldn’t come back though, as Linda had done.

He should be glad.

He was frozen. A busser bumped him with the kitchen door with a yelp, which drew several eyes his way, the Detective’s included.

Chloe fixed him in place, semi-lucid but intense. She was still angry; her nostrils flared, her eyelids narrowed. She looked at the seat across from her, then at him. Her fingers drummed against the wine glass she held.

Lucifer pushed his legs into motion and sat across from her before he’d decided on the action. His movements were slow and steady, quiet, non-threatening. He dared not utter a sound lest he frighten her away. This should distress him. She should leave, now. She shouldn’t be here.

He tugged at his cuffs. He didn’t know what to do.

She watched him, anger and something else fighting across her expression. She still wasn’t terrified, or if she was it was buried under layers of shock. He wondered if she would indeed shoot him before the night was done.

“Is Trixie safe?”

She was quiet, so quiet he strained to hear her above the general din around them. Every table near them housed its own couple enjoying a nice evening together. Lucifer envied them. He should be glad.

“Yes,” he said. He thought of adding more information, of pointing out that the child’s closest friend was a demon from Hell who would not allow any harm to come to her. He didn’t want the Detective to make that cognitive leap just yet though. He didn’t want her to leave, regardless of how desperately he tried to tell himself he did. Forever selfish, forever terrified. Shame clogged his throat.

“I feel tricked,” she said into her wine glass. She set the wine down and shook her head. “I guess I should – that’s what you do, right? Trick humans?”

Lucifer remained quiet. He felt like a person caught in front of a deadly snake, frozen in place, hoping the creature wouldn’t strike its poison into him.

She laughed at herself. She wasn’t looking at him at all now. He wondered if this was her first or fifth glass. A glance at the bottle revealed nothing; the glass was too dark to make out the liquid inside.

“You told me Marcus is Cain. Is that – is – “

“Yes, he is,” Lucifer said. She hadn’t run yet. He chanced more words.

“He lost his –“

“An immortal murderer and the Devil,” Chloe said, interrupting him. Message received – he was to remain silent unless asked a question, and his answers needed to remain short and clear.

She wanted to ask all sorts of questions. He could see them piling up in her eyes, in the way the tip of her index finger stroked around the rim of her glass. A dull hum echoed between them, the only sound breaking their stand-off.

“Why did you let me find out this way?” Chloe’s voice was cracking now; she was crying. Thick tears glittered down her cheeks, and he realized she’d been crying all along. Her misery was silent, painful, and sharp. Lucifer was frozen, staring at her pain, unable to help.

“I shouldn’t have found out like this,” she said, her volume rising. The couples in the tables nearest to them turned to watch whatever this catastrophe was unfold. “I deserved better. You should have shown me!”

She yelled the last sentence at full volume, standing to give herself height. She jabbed her finger at him, anger searing the air between them.

“You knew you should’ve!” She slammed her hand on the table. Their glasses rattled, the candle in the center flickering left and right. “I shouldn’t have found out from him!”

His ring caught the candle’s light when she slammed her hand down. Her voice gave out; her distress overflowed. She yanked her purse from the back of her chair and turned to leave him. Lucifer sensed from her posture, from her fury, that if she left now – if he let her leave without a word - he’d never see her again.

Dread consumed him. His thoughts swirled in scattered patterns. He should be glad. He had nothing to say. He’d been wrong. He should’ve told her. He should’ve proven himself to her. He couldn’t live without her. He should let her go. This was her chance for freedom from him. He’d never talk to her again. He –

“Someone tried to kill me last night,” he said to her back. It was all he had left. He cursed himself a coward; he should’ve let her leave, let her walk back into a life where the Devil didn’t consume all her kindness and compassion until she was a worn husk of a woman. Shouldn’t have said anything at all.

She’d frozen when he spoke. She shook. The ring, he noted, had yet to fly off her finger.

“Who?” she asked, just barely loud enough to hear. Relief and indignity crashed through him in equal measure. He was such a coward.

“She called herself ‘Mariana,’” Lucifer said, just as quiet. He remained in his seat. “Miss Lopez has been helping me investigate.”

Chloe turned around, offense written all over her face. Lucifer shifted in his seat.

“That’s what you’ve been doing all day?”

She was staring him down, purse still slung onto her shoulder. Lucifer spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

“I didn’t call you because you were distracted,” he said, his standard tone returning to him out of old habits. She didn’t soften, but she did offer an olive branch.

“Which is to say, Ella’s been working and you’ve been distracting her?” Chloe was trying. He could see the effort those words had taken. She didn’t want to hate him, and she didn’t want to fear him, but she also didn’t know what to do with him.

“I’ll have you know I’ve done my part,” he said. The anger still thrummed between them, but the hint of fondness had returned to her gaze. Relief. Indignity. He didn’t deserve her.

“She took prints! I’m certain she did it just to dirty my hands.” He was still put out by that. Chloe rolled her eyes. The fondness remained. She sat back down, purse sliding from her shoulder back onto the chair behind her. She was still angry, and she was still sad. She was also still the Detective.

“Tell me everything,” she said, and he knew what she meant. His heart stuttered with old fear. His own Father couldn’t accept him; his own mother saw him as a means to an end. The Detective did as well, of course. She still wanted to work with him. He was useful, after all. They would work side by side, her accepting his stories as fact now, him distracting her from her thoughts and making the days less boring.

He should be glad.

He should.

Chapter 9: Pescador de Hombres

Chapter Text

Amenadiel’s head was pounding. His vision was blurry, his limbs heavy.

The woman, Grisela, was quietly working at a metal table across the room from him. He couldn’t see her hands, but he could hear the sound of liquid pouring into a container. When she turned, she held a red plastic cup. The color was so bright he squinted. It hurt his eyes.

He could hear Lucifer scolding him even now, the voice in his head calling him a series of demeaning names for daring to trust this stranger so easily. He hadn’t hesitated a moment, believed every word she said, believed the pain and fear she presented. Now all emotional indicators were gone. She regarded him with a blank expression, not even coldly detached. Simply blank. Her eyes were dull, her shoulders down. Almost as though no one inhabited the body.

Useless, Lucifer’s voice hissed into his head. Colossally naïve. Ignorant lout.

Amenadiel sighed and shifted his weight. The chains binding his wrists and arms were latched to the seat between his knees, holding him relatively still. Lucifer’s voice scoffed in his head.

Even the phantom version of his prickly younger brother couldn’t let a chance for criticism go unwasted. Worse, his headache made him agree with that voice. He’d spent his entire life being both invulnerable and God’s greatest warrior, a force to be obeyed without question. He’d rarely interacted with humans outside of dragging Lucifer away from them until only the past few years. He’d never learned caution as Lucifer had; he plowed ahead, a bullheaded wall, believing himself the personification of right.

Once, he had been. Now, he wasn’t certain how long it would take for the lights to stop whirling in slow, starry patterns across his vision.

Lucifer, he thought with purpose, I could use a hand.

Prayer hopefully begun, he focused on the woman who called herself Grisela. She had paused directly in front of him, holding that painfully red cup, and seemed to be waiting for him to meet her eyes before offering the drink.

“Is it water?” he asked. She nodded and pressed the flimsy lip against his mouth. He sipped carefully, then greedily, unwilling to waste this opportunity. He might not be offered water again for days.

I don’t know where I am, but I’m chained to a chair.

The prayer continued as he divided his attention, relaying as much information as he could to a hopefully listening Devil.

“Thank you,” he said when he’d managed his fill of the water. She lowered the cup and turned to walk back to the table. He noticed that a white pitcher was the only adornment, joined by the red cup and her hands in another moment as she leaned against the table. There was a long, painful pause as she gathered something within. He watched her shoulders twitch, her upper arms tense. The muscles were wiry there, now that he was sizing her up as a threat; he was reminded of Remiel.

I was led into a trap and they have me restrained. Lucifer hadn’t replied yet or shown up, which could mean he was ignoring Amenadiel’s call for help. There was one sure way to make sure that Lucifer reacted to the message, if he was receiving it.

I’m hurt, Amenadiel said. I can’t fight them.

“I am sorry,” the woman said. Her accent sounded similar to before, but not enough that he would have recognized her voice without seeing her. Amenadiel shoved thoughts of how much had been real aside; he knew acting. He’d done improv with Dan, watched countless movies, been raised by God and Goddess. He understood that this woman had lied to him, but there had been truth there, too. He wanted to know how much, and he might never get another chance to ask.

Instead of responding to her apology, he asked the question he most wanted the answer to.

“There really was a sister, wasn’t there?”

Not quite, but there was someone. Her shoulders hunched too quickly for it to be a complete lie. She turned and met his eyes, that same blankness haunting her gaze.

“No,” she said. He shifted in his chair; the metal links rattled. No response from Lucifer. Either he hadn’t received the prayer, or he wasn’t listening. Amenadiel began repeating the message, hopeful that just one prayer would make it through.

“What’s your name?” he asked the woman. Amenadiel assumed it wasn’t Grisela. By her sudden thoughtfulness, he knew he was right. Still, she thought longer than expected. When she finally spoke, his heart sank with pity.

“I don’t remember,” she said. She started to say more, then stopped herself with a sharp intake of breath. She hadn’t meant to say even that much, it seemed. Amenadiel had a choice: press forward or fall back.

He could only ever be who he was.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said with real sympathy. “Is ‘Gris’ alright then?”

She seemed at a loss for words. He wondered if she’d ever had a conversation like this with a previous victim.

“I’ll call you ‘Gris’ until you tell me a different name,” he said. He smiled as he said it, making himself as real as possible. She was troubled by whatever was happening to him, and he didn’t want to lose whatever advantage this might give him.

The door to this small room opened, and Gris stepped to the side to give the newcomer space. Whoever he was, he took stock of the entire scene in a single moment: the pitcher, the red cup with droplets on the inside, and Gris looking ever so slightly wary of his approach.

“Ándate,” he snapped at her. She left the room without glancing in Amenadiel’s direction. The man scowled at the water. Apparently, she wasn’t supposed to give him any.

“La Tunda has a soft spot for you,” the man said with amusem*nt. His accent was closer to Gris’ current version; perhaps they came from the same land. “Qué lástima.”

Amenadiel didn’t have Lucifer’s gift for human languages, but the man’s mocking tone was obvious enough. She was in trouble, and he’d said he’d protect her. Trick or not, he would follow through as best he could. It was, as ever, who he was.

“Why do you call her that?” He didn’t try to pronounce the name. The man chuckled anyway, shaking his head.

“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “She’s the – ah, lo que usan pescadores…ah, lure. The lure.”

“The lure for what?” Amenadiel shifted again, purposefully drawing attention to the chains. The man clearly enjoyed feeling superior, powerful. Amenadial would oblige him to get as much information as he could.

“You,” the man said with good humor. His eyes were shining with mirth. He was enjoying whatever this was. “And she’s good at it, you know? She changes forms, changes names, talks to people, pulls them in. La Tunda.”

The last part was said with finality. Not a name, then, but a title. Amenadiel understood titles, too. Lucifer had once been the Lightbringer, and had chosen two of his other titles for his name now. Titles had power to them. They provided identity, purpose, even function.

Amenadiel pressed this new title deep into his thoughts to remember for later research. He didn’t consider that he might never escape this place.

“What about you?” Amenadiel watched the man pour more water into the red cup, then begin sipping it himself. The action was possibly meant to taunt a prisoner, but Gris’ kindness meant that Amenadiel was spared that torture for now. The man’s eyes flickered to him in annoyance. He stepped closer, holding the cup in one hand, looking like a friend coming to chat about last night’s episode of some popular show.

“Me?” His voice was still amused. “I’m the bridle. You know? She needs someone to guide her.”

The amusem*nt was mixed with something darker, colder. He winked one dark eye at Amenadiel, who felt a slight chill slither down his spine. There was something unsavory implicated here. This man set his nerves alight with the instinct to attack him.

“Guide her?” Amenadiel regretted asking the question as he watched the man’s face twist into an amused leer.

“Never kiss and tell, my friend. Now. You’ll be here for a while. Comfortable, eh?” He gestured the cup at Amenadiel’s chains. “Only the best for the guest of honor.”

“Why am I here?” Amenadiel wanted to take as much advantage as he could of the man’s apparent chatty nature. The more information he gathered, the more he tried to communicate with Lucifer in his head. He had yet to receive a reply. He didn’t dwell.

“Ah, to die,” the man said cheerfully. “Well, to be killed. It’s a very specific request, no?”

The former angel considered this declaration. He’d been lured here by Gris, who this man claimed was a killer. Whoever wanted him dead didn’t want her to kill him. They wanted to do it themselves.

Amenadiel often had sudden realizations dawn upon him. Despite Lucifer’s insistence that he was “as useful as a box of rocks,” he had a canny intelligence for picking up on small clues and extrapolating from them. Now, he was presented with the knowledge that someone wanted him dead, and they wanted to kill him personally.

He immediately knew who had done this. It was a sudden, snapping knowledge that made him sigh slightly. Like many of his revelations, he didn’t have all of the evidence; instead, he had a certainty, a fierce instinct which insisted he was right.

Cain. Cain had done this. He knew Cain was the Sinnerman; Lucifer had told him. And Cain had already tried to kill him several times. He’d only lost because Amenadiel was more skilled at combat and didn’t care to repeatedly kill a human who wouldn’t stay dead.

Cain had lost his mark through a show of selflessness. He had claimed to want death, but after living for so long he might be regretting the change. Perhaps this was some kind of effort to regain God’s judgement. He’d received the mark the first time for killing his own brother. Perhaps killing God’s first and favored son would earn him that same ire.

The logic was so clear, and so very damaged. Amenadiel felt a swelling of pity for the man, which he’d certainly never felt in the past for any action taken at God’s command. His Fall had changed him tremendously, giving him the opportunity to see the consequences of his unquestioning actions. Cain’s misery in the face of hopeless centuries hadn’t bothered him until this moment – it was Lucifer’s ingrained inability to accept that Amenadiel wanted to help him which impacted him most.

His younger brother tolerated him, even seemed to like him some of the time – but he couldn’t trust Amenadiel. His instant snarling anger when Amenadiel pressed on even the slightest wound was evidence enough of that. He’d never called upon his elder brother for help in the many instances when Lucifer could have used his support. He would rather suffer than ask Amenadiel for help. He perhaps couldn’t imagine that Amenadiel would want to help.

It hurt to know that their relationship might never recover. It hurt the same way that remembering Lucifer’s expression when Amenadiel forced him back to Hell in the middle of a joyous occasion hurt.

He’d gotten lost in his thoughts. He glanced at the man and that red plastic cup; the man was watching him with that same jovial smile.

“Pondering death, hm?” he said. “You can pray, if you want. Call out to God for help. He’ll come, I’m sure.”

Taunting, smirking, and cruel. The man was enjoying this, had likely enjoyed this many times before. Amenadiel wanted badly to lunge from his chair and attack. Instead, he continued his praying in the hopes that Lucifer might hear him.

Luci, I could use a hand…

Mazikeen’s anger rode two distinct waves: either she’d been recently betrayed by someone, or she’d recently spoken to Lucifer.

Over the past few weeks, her temper rode both waves in equal measure. When she’d thought Lucifer might express something other than selfish need for her presence, then dashed her hopes, she fumed. When Chloe scolded her for some arbitrary human rule Maze had no way to know about, she scowled. When Linda and Amenadiel betrayed her trust, she raged. When Trixie burst into tears…

Maze snarled and punched the wall behind her with a closed fist.

This was Lucifer’s fault. He should have taken her home when she asked. He should have understood she didn’t belong here. Hell was home; Hell made sense. She expected backstabbing and selfishness from her demon siblings. She anticipated it, even reveled in it, and participated in it herself. She’d never felt one moment of the emotion she’d felt when she turned and saw Trixie’s scrunched-up nose, the hurt in her expression. The little human had turned and ran, Dan following after her, and Maze left as quickly as she could.

She was hurting every human she’d gathered into her small, rabidly protective circle. She was pushing them as far away as she could, trying to force Lucifer’s hand. He’d take her home once he realized she was hurting all of their small circle of friends. He’d give in and open those pretty wings and fly her down where she would stay forever.

Linda’s voice echoed through her memories. What Amenadiel and I found was completely unexpected, but 100% real, Linda had said, and Maze felt a wall of guilt and self-loathing crash over her again as she was reminded of something she could never have, something she’d stolen from her supposed best friend. Linda was awesome; Linda put up with her beyond reason. Linda was kind and could die any day, from any human malady, and the worry which choked Mazikeen’s throat when she thought of the many years she’d live without Linda in her life sometimes made her see stars.

So human, and weak.

Hell was home. It always made sense because it made no sense at all. She would be better off, and so would everyone else.

Trixie hadn’t sent a single text since that day. No emoticons, no silly memes about violence. No requests to come and glare at a certain teacher through a window. Nothing.

Maze didn’t need them. She’d lived millions of years alone, and she would live millions more. This was fine. Everything was fine.

Trixie’s little face, which she so adored, crushed and crying. The demon swallowed hard.

This was an easy fix. If Lucifer wouldn’t fly her home, and Chloe wouldn’t arrest her and lock her away for a human lifespan, she would leave. Maze had places to go; she’d accrued a network over time, taken homes from her bounties. She sometimes slept in the open, but not often; she preferred drug dens when she could find a spot to hunker down in. The smell, the suffering – it all reminded her of home. A place she might never see again, but found small spots of here on Earth.

Her phone trilled. She looked at the screen and saw Charlotte’s face glaring back at her. It wasn’t Charlotte in this picture; Maze had taken a picture of Goddess and never bothered to change the photo once Charlotte regained her body.

She was sometimes mildly annoyed that Lucifer had banned demons from entering the bodies of the damned while humans were apparently just fine to crawl back up from Hell. Sliding into a fresh corpse and rising from the ground to chase their screaming loved ones had led to a series of hilarious games over the years.

Pleasant memories. She pushed them aside and answered the call.

“Yeah?”

She never identified herself.

“Maze,” Charlotte said. She sounded worried. Maze felt a sigh brewing in her throat, and let it loose.

“What?” she said. Her annoyance was barely contained. Charlotte didn’t appear to notice.

“Have you talked to Amenadiel?” Charlotte said. Maze tightened her fingers around the phone, cracking the screen. A small shard of glass tried to embed itself in her cheek. She scoffed.

“No.” She didn’t bother hiding her anger. The phone was barely holding on.

“Have you seen him? Any contact at all?”

Charlotte sounded worried, which made Maze smirk. Maybe her ex-lover was having an affair with Charlotte. Wouldn’t Linda just love that? Maze sure would.

“No,” she said again, propping one foot up against the wall behind her. She couldn’t bring herself to care beyond a single syllable at a time.

Charlotte made a sound, and Maze found herself tensing up. She’d heard that sound from Linda, Chloe, Dan, even Amenadiel at times. Chloe and Dan made it when they worried about Trixie; Linda made it when she worried about any of her friends. Even Amenadiel made it sometimes when he worried about Lucifer’s reckless tendencies.

It was a sound humans made when they were afraid someone was hurt and didn’t want to show it. Maze perked up.

“Why?” Her interest pitched her voice. “Do you think he’s hurt?”

And oh, wouldn’t that be fantastic. She could drag his sorry carcass to Linda’s doorstep, ring the doorbell, and yell surprise! when her former best friend opened the door. The look on Linda’s face –

“If you hear from him could you let me know?” Charlotte wasn’t trying to hide her worry anymore and made sounds like she was about to hang up. Maze called out to her, trying to get her attention back. The lawyer paused.

“You want me to find him?” Maze could do that, for the right price.

“Yes,” Charlotte said, her voice abruptly firm. This wasn’t Charlotte, Worried Friend; this was Charlotte, Badass Lawyer. “How soon can you start?”

“For you?” Maze grinned and traced a finger against a demon blade. “As soon as you promise to pay my fee.”

“Right,” Charlotte said, and the deal was done.

“I’ll call when I find him,” Maze said. She hung up and slid the broken phone into her pants, pushing off the wall in the same movement.

Time to find an ex-angel asshole.

“Hey boss.” The voice was tinny; the phones weren’t high quality.

“Well?” Cain wasn’t one to fraternize, and neither were his forces. They were all trained to do their assignments without complaint, and report back without excessive descriptors. Now, the man on the other end of the line reported in efficient, short sentences.

“She met him for dinner,” he said. “They spoke. They’re leaving now.”

Cain hadn’t expected that. They both were critically incapable of opening up to each other. Had she decided Lucifer was just a man? She’d maintained a strong sense of denial for so long that she might not be able to adjust her thinking. He’d given her as much as he could without revealing information he didn’t want her to know. Now she was with Lucifer, as though nothing Marcus provided her meant anything at all.

Anger swelled slowly inside of him, a rising tide which washed through his entire body. He didn’t see red or tense; his heart rate remained the same. This was an old anger, a familiar feeling of betrayal, of being found wanting. He’d grown accustomed to the feeling over the millennia, focusing his anger into his organization. He was powerful, and wealthy, and very, very dangerous, but he was now also just a mortal man.

His first instinct was always to eliminate. He’d never grown away from this impulse, instead following it where he needed to go to secure his own place in human society. He’d been born long before modern sensibilities, and his ethical code was flexible.

He needed an advantage. Right now he could die, but so could Lucifer. It was a matter of timing, and a sniper with good aim.

That wouldn’t be satisfying, though. Cain’s first murder was by hand, his fingers bloodied with his younger brother’s cooling gore. He’d felt the weight of that blood for centuries after, wondering if his parents ever forgave him, never feeling remorse for his actions. He’d been rejected by God Himself; he felt entitled to bitterness.

Now he was being rejected by the woman he loved in favor of God’s worst son. The son so foul that he was cast down from Heaven into Hell itself. God had never second-guessed that decision. He’d never reached out or offered absolution. Cain suspected that Lucifer broke at some point, that he begged and pleaded for his Father’s mercy. Cain had too, once upon a time.

But God never forgave those He cast out of His favor. Moses wasn’t allowed into the promised land, Lucifer wasn’t allowed into Heaven, and Cain wasn’t allowed to die.

Until now.

For a shining, glorious moment, Cain thought he might have a reason to live. Chloe’s love was so tender and pure, her emotions sweet and deep. She’d loved a bad man before, married him and had his child. Cain’s hope flickered so brightly when she accepted his proposal; he could live with her, grow old with her, die and join her in Heaven. He could see his siblings, his parents, his children and their children’s children. Most of his family waited above, and Chloe would be there too. In his dreams, it was perfect. It was absolutely divine.

And not a full day later, she changed her mind.

He hadn’t let her say it yet. He’d done the only thing he could think to do: throw doubt on her relationship with the man he knew she was rejecting him for.

And yet.

The part of him that remembered God’s rejection had known it was coming. He was always second-best; that was his true legacy. His identity began and ended in that moment when God looked upon two brothers’ offerings and made a choice. Now he’d offered stability, familiarity, an overlap of personal interests. He’d offered sexual prowess and the occasional kind word. He’d brought cake to a child he hardly knew.

Cain’s greatest disappointment in himself was allowing that flicker of hope to spark at all. He hadn’t in thousands of years - why start now? He’d rejected the advances of thousands of women, uninterested in the pain knowing and connecting with them would inevitably cause. He’d tried, once, to marry again, and had loved as deeply as he could; yet his mark remained, she died, and now her tomb was overrun by new human development.

Never again, he’d sworn.

“Keep following her,” he said.

“You want us to put someone on him too?”

Cain smirked. “Don’t waste your time. Where she goes, he’ll go.”

Like an annoying, awful pet that didn’t know its place. He’d tried a few ways to get rid of Lucifer. Now it was time for an old approach. Ancient, even.

Once he had his mark back, he’d face Lucifer head-on. He knew how to make the Devil heel.

Chloe would need to be there, and she might even see what happened, and a part of him – the ancient, hardened part which slithered through his innards and felt no remorse at the blood on his hands - wanted to watch the expression on her face as he beat her partner to death.

Ella rode down in Lucifer’s elevator with him. They alternated between teasing each other and discussing their elusive case. Lucifer insisted he’d not been wearing a vest when he was shot. Ella considered her options, following him out from the doors into his garage.

Her car was sleek and clean, prompting Lucifer to lament the Detective’s lack of automotive cleanliness. Nerves dashed across his expression as he spoke. Chloe’s text, can we talk, had activated a full onslaught of masculine trepidation. Ella wondered if Chloe had used those specific words on purpose, giving Lucifer a taste of what it was like to worry and fret over someone else’s intended meaning.

Ella would never tell him, but she respected Chloe for the move, a little.

She decided to show him a smidge of mercy.

“It’ll be fine, buddy,” she said to the taller man as he strode toward his Corvette. He didn’t turn to look at her, but he did scoff.

“We shall see, Miss Lopez,” he said. She flashed him two thumbs up, he smirked, and then he was in his car and gone. He’d assumed she’d leave right after him and was too distracted by Chloe’s message to worry about why Ella might not be climbing into her own car already.

She counted to sixty, waiting to see if he returned. He didn’t. She returned to the elevator, pressed the button for the penthouse, and rose into his empty quarters for a more thorough and less distracted investigation of her own.

She’d insisted for the past twenty-four hours that he not return here because of the inherent danger of returning to the scene of his own potential murder. Ella wasn’t immune to fear that she herself might become a target if the mysterious Mariana made an appearance, but she was too curious and willing to take advantage of his absence to miss this opportunity to search the entire penthouse from top to bottom.

She divided the penthouse into segments, focusing first on his closet contents and bathroom before moving outward to the bedroom, the living area, the balcony, the kitchen, and the wall of books and his desk. She was methodical and precise, making a mental grid in her head which she overlayed across each section. She encountered the locked safe embedded behind the truly astonishing painting of a mermaid and filed the knowledge away for later. His bed was neatly made, his possessions neatly stored and categorized. The closet contents were color-coded. The Devil apparently liked order in his possessions, preferring to keep his actions chaotic instead.

Ella wondered if part of the attraction for Chloe was knowing that her house would be forever spotless and in order if Lucifer lived with her. Ella felt no attraction to Lucifer, finding the very idea a bit nauseating. He was a brother figure for her; she wanted him happy, and she hoped the conversation tonight went well enough that her own work-life balance could start to even out again. She missed the easy camaraderie from before Marcus Pierce became their lieutenant.

She drew her thoughts away from her infuriatingly stubborn friends and continued her search. Her thorough methods turned up every illicit substance he kept in the apartment, all organized and some even labeled and dated to note their age. Ella wondered idly if Lucifer had always been so fussy, or if something from his childhood made him this way. The man was a series of quirks strung together with desperation. She wouldn’t be surprised if his parents had been hoarders.

She finished her full search in an hour and a half. She chewed her lip, considering, and started again. She figured that if Lucifer returned here tonight, she could scold him for coming back here and ignore his inevitable accusations of her own hypocrisy.

“I’m not the one who got shot,” she’d say, and he’d scoff and huff and straighten his cuff-links in annoyance. Ella smiled. He was so predictable.

And unless he kept the vest in the safe she couldn’t open, he really didn’t have a bulletproof vest.

Ella chewed at her bottom lip, considering. She was a scientist, yes, and a damn good one; but she was also a fervent Catholic. She believed. She was best friends with a ghost. And despite her unwavering claims that Lucifer was a method actor, she sometimes couldn’t help a twinge of maybe.

The trail was short and easy to follow: Lucifer was incredibly strong, although she’d not personally seen any of his more incredible feats of strength. He was apparently magnetic to everyone; she had seen his eye trick. He was also terrifying somehow. She’d seen suspects reduced to pleading puddles of remorseful goo after just a few seconds in his presence.

And Lucifer was adamant that he didn’t lie. He’d never denied her theory of method acting, but he’d never agreed to it either; whenever the topic came up, he insisted he was the Devil.

Ella had grown up in Detroit hearing the tales of actors in Los Angeles. She’d seen enough while living here that it was easy to dismiss Lucifer’s insistence as part of the role. She’d seen all kinds of costumes while walking and driving around the city and was used to having to take different routes because of a film or TV show crew closing up large swaths of road for filming.

It made sense, sure. Lucifer was charismatic enough to be an actor, and definitely loved the attention the role brought him.

But...

Ella chewed and chewed, her thoughts bumbling about through a lens of science and faith. She’d seen the bullets and the holes in his shirt. They’d definitely hit something, and he had all the marks of being the target save for the wounds.

“Huh,” she said. She glanced up, once. “Huh.”

She thought of texting him the cursed words: can we talk. But she didn’t need a long chat, not really. Lucifer skirted truth like a champ, but he wasn’t great with direct questions asked in earnest. She pulled out her phone and typed out her question:

So like, you’re really the real devil? Actually really? Y/N

She climbed into the elevator and started the journey home, tucking her phone into her back pants pocket for now. Lucifer was probably busy, and she had a bottle of tequila at home calling out for a reunion.

Chapter 10: A Man Like Him

Chapter Text

Tell me everything, she said. Lucifer paused, uncertainty passing over his face. Chloe waited to see what he’d do. Rather than guess at what she meant, he asked.

“Where should I start, Detective?” He had already slipped into his more normal bantering tone, responding to the fondness in her expression rather than her lingering anger. “There is quite a lot of history to go through.”

She tapped her nails against her wine glass. The quiet tinkling settled between them as she considered her options. She could ask him anything right now, but they were in public and she was enough of a latent celebrity that she didn’t want a camera phone picture of her punching LA’s most lusted-after club owner square in the jaw popping up on any websites. Best to steer clear of any big revelations and avoid her temper getting the better of her again.

She nodded to herself, a slight tilt of her chin, and met his eyes. Linda had slept with him, and she wasn’t afraid of him. Chloe could be unafraid too. He’d given her a case; she decided to work it.

“Someone tried to kill you?”

The Devil, the actual Devil, leaned back in his chair with a dramatic sigh. How old was he? How many historical figures had he met? Had he been watching Chloe for years? Had this all been a decades-long plan to worm his way into her life? He presented himself as impulsive, immature, and terribly insecure. Was any of that real? Would –

Lucifer burst into her piling questions with a truncated retelling of his last twenty-four hours. He told her about “Mariana” approaching him in LUX, her request for help in Spanish, her efficient attempt on his life. He told her about calling Ella for help at an absurd hour of the morning and her inspection of his penthouse. He complained again about having to dirty his fingers with ink. That would apparently be a sticking point for him. Chloe wondered if he was planning some kind of practical joke revenge on Ella, which triggered spiraling thoughts of his antics at work: eating Dan’s pudding just to annoy him; bringing snacks and coffee regularly to her coworkers with casual, friendly banter; fighting with the vending machine for cool ranch puffs and tiny doughnuts. Had he really ruled Hell? This guy? He couldn’t even fend off the hugs of a small girl.

Lucifer was still talking, and she was mostly listening, but she was watching him too. He was gesturing along with his story and watching her carefully. He never leaned closer to her. He never offered to refill her empty wineglass, which would have brought his hands within reach. He was carefully animated. Restrained.

He was trying not to scare her.

Again, Chloe thought of his gentleness with her daughter. These memories mingled with that picture of him, alone and burned in the desert, to cause a flutter of hurt in her. She was a parent; his Father was, by Lucifer’s own account, God. She’d always heard God was all-knowing and all-seeing. God had watched His son be taken, dumped in a desert, and left alone. God had watched Lucifer’s skin burn and peel away into red welts. Chloe thought of Trixie, lying alone and baking to death in the desert. Her stomach churned with anxiety and wine.

For a delirious moment, she was grateful Dan was Trixie’s father instead of someone like God. Dan would never choose to leave his child baking to death.

“You said there was another murder?” Chloe forced herself to focus exclusively on Lucifer’s present again, ripping herself from her own head.

“Miss Lopez found a three-year-old cartel job,” Lucifer said. Chloe’s hands stilled their nervous tap-tapping against her wine glass.

“A cartel hit,” she said, torn between a question and declaration.

“Indeed,” he said. He drummed his fingers on the table, once, then sighed. “Terribly boring, I know, but the ballistics-“

“A cartel tried to kill you?”

Lucifer wasn’t following her sudden extreme concern. She remembered his total bafflement when she’d been worried about a gang war in the past. Surely a man who ingested as many drugs as he did had some idea of where they came from.

A man like him…

“Do they go to Hell?” she asked, unable to stop herself. The wine was loosening her lips in a way that was probably a bad idea. She really should focus on his attempted murder, but he was also the actual real-life Devil and she had quite a few questions.

“Who?” Lucifer’s tone was cautious, quiet. He was treating her like a rabbit ready to bolt. She hated it.

“Cartel members,” she said. “Drug dealers, murderers.”

He didn’t like this topic. She could tell by how he watched the wine bottle on the table, as though he could will the bottle into distracting her by jumping up and dancing across the table. She wondered if he could actually move objects like that. She waited to see how he’d dodge the question.

“Some,” he hedged. “I’m not sure it’s relevant to, to this.”

Oh no, he did not like this topic one bit. His face fell into a nervous sort of sadness when she hit too close to something he preferred not to discuss. His gestures calmed down, and a type of stillness washed over him. She knew the signs. She decided not to push. He’d given her a case.

“Ok, so a cartel might be targeting you. Any ideas why?”

He scoffed.

“Many of them owe me, you know,” he said with a scowl. “One would think they’d appreciate my unwillingness to give every one of their names to the LAPD.”

She rolled her eyes and he beamed at her. He’d never threatened her for her constant impertinence, for bossing him around, for telling him to shut up or stay or any of the other dozens of orders she threw at him on a daily basis. The King of Hell looked more like a scolded puppy than the wicked bringer of the end times when she told him off.

It explained other habits of his, though. He was terrible at following directions. He often made brash decisions which put her on the back foot, always running to catch up with his latest impulsive decision. A king would be used to doing what he wanted, when he wanted, and not thinking of the consequences for others around him - or expecting any consequences to be cleaned up for him.

His relationship with Maze suddenly snapped into focus. If Maze was a demon, then he was her king. Their relationship had shifted over time, but there was always a level of deference in Maze, and Lucifer issued her commands without thought, expecting immediate obedience.

He never did that to Chloe. He teased her, annoyed her, disobeyed her, and pissed her off. But he never expected her to follow his lead. He complained about her stubbornness with annoyed respect. The fact that Lucifer, former King of Hell and Actual son of God, listened to her at all, followed her lead, waited for her agreement – these were all signs of his regard for her. He respected her intelligence and her instincts. Or at least he claimed to.

His phone chimed with a text message. He reached into his jacket, wholly unable to ignore the device no matter what the conversation was about, and checked the message. His face fell until he glanced her way, then slid his mask back into place with a smooth smile. He set the phone on the table next to his still empty plate, and looked at Chloe.

“Now then! According to Miss Lopez, the little vixen who tried to ruin the sex lives of many a devotee might be someone called ‘La Tunda,’ which is a terribly troubling reference to – Detective?”

Chloe looked at the phone.

“Who was it?”

Lucifer glanced down at the device and waved a hand, producing a tight little huff of laughter.

“Miss Lopez, presenting me with a problem for another day.”

“Lucifer,” Chloe said. She looked at him. He sighed and handed the phone over for her to read the text.

She read the message and laughed. His face pinched with offense. He reached out to snatch the phone back.

“I’m so glad you’re amused by Miss Lopez’s existential crisis,” he huffed, and Chloe laughed harder. His scowl dropped away into mild confusion. He glanced at the screen to make sure the message was the same as before.

“What?” he finally demanded. “Share with the class.”

Chloe heard his tension and calmed herself as much as she could. She cleared her throat, smiling at him, and nearly lost herself to another laughing fit at the sheer befuddlement on his face. She cleared her throat again and pointed at the phone.

“She’s got you pegged,” Chloe said. She watched Lucifer make a mighty effort not to crack a joke. “A direct yes or no question.”

Another of his weaknesses, although his continued confusion made his own ignorance of that fact clear. Linda had threatened to drop him as a client; Chloe had threatened to end their partnership. Ella went right for the simple binary, which he couldn’t squirm out of without giving some hint of which answer was correct. Lucifer might be some ancient being of untold power, but the human women of his life knew how to get exactly what they wanted from him when they needed to.

“So, how will you respond?” Chloe was still smiling. Her irritation at him bled away the longer he continued to be himself – ridiculous, socially naïve, and often baffled by humanity’s many quirks. She wondered what humans seemed like to him, who had been alive before the planet even existed.

“I believe this is a conversation that should happen in person,” he said, somewhat miserably. Chloe knew this was a big night for him: first her own confrontation, leading to a somewhat awkward conversation as they began the work back toward a new normal. Then Ella, with her keen observations and inability to sit on a sudden realization. Chloe couldn’t count the number of times she’d received a 2 AM text message from the forensic scientist with an informed theory or pertinent clue. Now Ella had pieced together Lucifer’s identity, and of course her first action was to text the man himself for confirmation.

Lucifer’s resigned sigh cut into her thoughts. He was replying to the message, his face grim. Chloe raised her eyebrows. Lucifer looked very much like he was about to walk the plank.

He set the phone down with the screen against the tabletop. The phone buzzed three times, then stilled. He made a valiant effort to fix all his attention back on Chloe. She glanced at his phone, and he gave in. He snapped the device up, read the replies, and cleared his throat again.

“Detective, I’m terribly sorry,” he said. He pushed back from the table, giving her a sad smile as he rose to his feet. “I believe I must take care of this right away.”

This being whatever Ella’s reply had been. Chloe stood along with him. He paused, tugging at his sleeves and straightening his jacket.

“I’m coming with you,” Chloe said. Lucifer scoffed.

“I assure you, Detective-“

“No,” Chloe said. He stood with his mouth open, uncertain of what to say. She pointed at him.

“You’re my partner. I’m coming with you.”

Lucifer clapped his mouth shut. He drew to his full height, bewildered but unwilling to risk this apparent truce with clumsy words.

“Besides, you’re my ride home,” Chloe said. His bewilderment melted into a tender smile.

“Of course, Detective,” he said. “I am your willing chauffeur.”

He tossed a wad of cash on the table, likely covering the meals of everyone eating in the restaurant tonight, and followed Chloe as she made her way to the door.

Cain was disappointed.

When he’d reached out to his network to resolve a discrete matter, he conveyed both the urgency of the situation and the very specific requirements to fulfill the contract. The Ruiz empire had answered the call, even cutting him a deal once they realized who the target was, taking this as an opportunity to send a message to Detective Decker for daring to try and take them down. He lended them one of his Los Angeles buildings with plenty of storage rooms for their use, some full of priceless smuggled artifacts waiting for processing. He’d counted on their need for vengeance to ensure Lucifer was killed. It was a perfect hit, with a perfect cover. He’d never be suspected.

He now knew that they’d only taken him at part of his word. He knew of La Tunda through reputation; he knew her success rate. They’d taken his warnings about the target’s ability to talk his way out of bad situations seriously if they’d sent their most effective killer.

But they either hadn’t believed him about Chloe’s presence being essential as well, or they hadn’t relayed that information to their contract killer. Whatever the cause, a crucial element of their agreement remained unfulfilled.

They had at least satisfied his second request. The former angel Amenadiel, God’s firstborn and millennia-long enforcer, was somewhere in this building, right this moment, stewing in his own thoughts. Cain hoped his thoughts were painful. He hoped they burned. He would let the former angel sit in captivity for as long as he could. Let Amenadiel know what it was like to be at someone else’s mercy for a while.

Cain was trailing behind one of the Ruiz’s men, two of his own following his heels. The man hadn’t said much when Cain asked after their prisoner. Cain was more interested in his newest acquisition, anyway.

“I want to see her,” Cain said. The man laughed and fluttered one hand in front of him.

“Yes, I’m sure you do,” he said with a chuckle. “You all do.”

He led them down a corridor, heading toward the storage rooms toward the back of the building.

“A pleasure to meet you, Sinnerman,” he tossed over his shoulder.

“You have a name?” Cain asked. The man he was following shrugged.

“Guzmán,” he said. It only might be his real name. Cain didn’t need to know either way. Guzmán led him to a dusty storage room. Boxes lined the walls and parts of the floor, making the space feel cramped. Some of the boxes were still open, the tops of paintings and other artwork peeking out like fossils barely exposed to the sun. This room contained an incredible wealth of artifacts from across cultures and time periods. Not one of them was legally obtained.

Guzmán raised one finger at Cain, quietly asking him to stay in place, and called into the room.

“Tundita,” he crooned. “Ven.” Come here.

Cain watched as a woman rose from behind the furthest boxes, her expression blank. He started to wonder what she’d been doing. Her fingers twitched as she approached them. Whatever she thought of this encounter wasn’t present in her expression. As she approached them, she showed neither fear nor trepidation. She raised her eyebrows at Cain in mild curiosity, then looked to Guzmán for her next instruction.

“Bien,” her apparent handler said. Good.

Cain considered the woman before him with a critical eye. She was smaller than Lopez by several inches, the very definition of “compact.” Her features were round, from her face to her eyes to the gentle curves of her body, and she peered up at him with a nearly serene detachment.

Her fingers were no longer twitching. Nothing gave her inner thoughts away, not even the flicker of an eyelid when Guzmán reached forward and cupped one side of her face. He turned her head with a gentle push and then dropped his hand, giving Cain a side view of her profile. She blinked, and otherwise remained still.

“La Tunda, right?” Cain stood ramrod straight, arms crossed, muscles bulging. She was smaller than half his frame.

She turned her face forward, meeting his eyes. Her feet were braced slightly apart. She kept her eyes on his.

“Yes,” she said. “Hello, Sinnerman.” Her accent was somewhat hard to place – Peru? – but she spoke clear English.

“Right.” Cain glanced at the two men standing behind him. Her handler was smirking at her. Cain’s men watched him for hand-signaled commands.

Cain looked at Guzmán, whose smirk shifted into a sneer.

“Lucifer Morningstar is still alive,” Guzmán said. She turned her head to look at him, a puff of irritation flickering for an instant.

“I am still,” she began. Guzmán stepped forward and grabbed her shoulder. She huffed a slight gasp of breath, her only sign that the grip was painful. He shook her once, forcing her to release a tight-lipped hm. She clenched her jaw and turned her head forward again. Her hands moved behind her back, likely clasped together to restrain her own movements. Cain was impressed. She was a well-trained dog.

“I’ve made a new deal,” he said. She looked up to meet his eyes again. She shook her head once, sucked in a breath as Guzmán tightened his grip. She unclasped her fingers and brought them forward.

“No trates,” her handler hissed at her. Don’t try it. She dropped her eyes. Her fingers curved at her sides. Guzmán shifted his grip on her shoulder into a looser hold. She glanced at Cain. He knew he looked impassive, uncaring. She looked back down.

“What do you know about me?” Cain meant the question as a simple test to see how much she might already know. He raised his eyebrows when her gaze darted to her handler, once, before fixing on him again. She looked at his right bicep next, covered by his sleeve. She swallowed.

Interesting.

“Answer him, Tundita” Guzmán said. She closed her eyes at that, just slow enough that Cain saw the flash of irritation she was trying to hide. She must hate this man deeply, to have that flash of emotion escape her careful façade.

“A new deal,” Cain repeated, “which included an outright purchase.”

She met his eyes again, her own carefully blank. He lifted the index and thumb of his right hand from his bicep. He pinched the ends of both fingers together, then smoothed them flat on his arm again. Behind him his men straightened. The tension of restrained violence permeated the room. There were a lot of ways a deal like this could go terribly wrong; Cain was prepared for her to run.

Her handler was enjoying the moment, though. His glee fluttered in the air around them as he made a small show of pushing her, ever so slightly, in Cain’s direction. Cain wondered what she was thinking, in this moment. Was she relieved that she might be free soon? Or did she fear what would surely be a fresh hell?

She remained silent, unwilling or unable to protest.

Thousands of years ago, his empathy might have burned for her. He might have felt a twinge of regret, might have even shown mercy and freed her the moment the deal was struck. Now, he waited as Guzmán explained that she now belonged to the Sinnerman’s network, and therefore the Sinnerman himself. The offer itself had been an even exchange of favors between the Sinnerman and Ruiz empires: they gift him with one of their most effective killers, and he does them the favor of forgetting their initial blunder of his instructions. Cain knew his power, and he knew how to bludgeon. Buried beneath his offer was the tacit knowledge that his “forgetfulness” included not using his own network to finish what Detective Decker started months ago to annihilate the Ruiz family’s tequila, drug, and human trafficking branches.

The entire transaction had taken less than ten minutes from Cain’s stern offer to the Ruiz empire’s acceptance. Less than ten minutes to own a human being. Cain remembered a time when it took a mere moment. In many terrible places the world over, it still did.

Now he held this deadly instrument in his ever-growing network. She appeared lax, her arms loosely draped at her sides. Her eyes met his with unwavering apathy. Whomever she had been in the past was gone. Now, only a quiet shell watched him, waiting for orders from her new owner. Did she even care who held her leash at this point?

Cain traded in loyalty and trust with his closest assets. He’d raised many of them from childhood or contributed to their lives as a committed mentor figure. Every one of his soldiers who knew him by his current name would die or kill for the man they thought of as a father figure.

He needed her to trust him, too – to owe him a debt deeper than finances, stronger than blood. The bond of an adopted family had served him well for centuries. He expected it to work again.

“Do you remember your name?” He kept his arms folded. She looked at the doorway, just beyond him, and he wondered if she would try to escape. The other three men witnessing this exchange shuffled in the quiet that followed his question. She looked up, eyes flicking between the two men flanking Cain. She settled.

“Tundita works fine, if you’ll respond to it,” he said. She watched him. It would have to do. He decided to take the plunge now.

“You know me; let me tell you what I know about you.”

She looked bored, save for that steadfast stare. This conversation was too important for her to ignore.

“The Ruiz family funds a program called ‘Nuevos Días.’ The program works with orphaned siblings and works to keep them together throughout their time in the system.”

At the program’s name, her eyes dropped to the floor. He could see her jaw muscles clenching.

“It’s a front,” Cain said. “The kids aren’t always orphans. They’re sold in. The oldest is taken and trained. They’re told that if they disobey, the younger ones will suffer. They’re sometimes shown pictures of their siblings as a reminder. They’re told if they fail, they’ll all die, but the oldest will watch the younger ones die first.”

The apathy was gone. She was struggling not to react. She kept her head down and her fingers curled. He continued.

“You watched your little brother grow up on Polaroids. Is that right?”

She nodded at the ground. None of this was a shocking secret amongst the assembled company. Guzmán may have been the very person she was sold to.

“There’s something you should know, Tundita,” Cain said. She was listening, even if she wasn’t looking at him anymore. “They tell you your little brother will die if you refuse their orders. They’ve told you that for eleven years.”

The sense of impending violence increased as he spoke. The woman - Tundita - was completely still, the very image of docile - but something howled beneath her skin. He was ripping old wounds down to the bone, forcing them into the dusty air. Guzmán had begun to realize where these statements might be going. He seemed to consider the door, possibly contemplating pushing past Cain and his men. Cain ignored him. His men could handle it if needed. He needed to focus. It was important that he be earnest in this moment. She needed to believe him.

“They’ve been showing you pictures of someone else, Tundita,” he said. “Your brother died of pneumonia six years ago. In a hospital in Bogotá.”

He spoke the words gently and paused to see her reaction. Her hands had clenched into tight balls against either side of her waist. Her outward signs of stress trembled in the air between them. She might believe him, but she needed an outlet for her shivering rage.

“I can’t give you back your brother,” Cain said. He shifted to uncross his arms, reached behind his back, and pulled a Remington R51 from his waist. He offered the gun to her grip first, fingers wrapped around the barrel. Guzmán scoffed to her left.

“There’s no one for her to kill here, Sinnerman,” he said with a tightly amused smirk.

“Go on,” Cain said, ignoring her former handler. She looked up at Guzmán’s tone, fixating on the weapon. She licked her lips. Her eyes were wild.

“Take it,” Cain said. She stretched out a hand and wrapped her fingers around the grip, reflexes easily guiding their placement into the correct positions.

“Deal gone wrong,” he said to her. For her. “I’ll swear to it.” And then she would begin to trust him.

“Ah-" Guzmán shook his head and started for the door. The three men barricading him in didn’t move.

Cain released the barrel then, relinquishing control of the weapon. Trust was earned, not given.

Tundita ejected the clip and checked the number of rounds, then slid it back into place. She flicked the safety off. She turned those wild eyes to Guzmán, the physical representation of the life she’d been sold into. Of those who’d sold and bought her, who’d taken her brother from her. Who’d lied to her.

She raised the gun. Her hand was steady. Guzmán’s face drained of any vestiges of humor. He raised his hands slowly as she watched, index finger loose against the trigger. His eyes were fixed on the gun in her hand.

“Don’t be like that,” she said to him. “Look me in the eyes.”

Her tone made the words sound like a faded reflection drawn from a memory. Whatever she was referencing, Guzmán opened his mouth to say something.

She fired without flinching. Four in the torso, ripping three holes in Guzmán’s sternum and one shoulder. He fell back, his body twitching, and the barrel followed him down. Three more in the head. She stopped pulling the trigger after the seventh round. The magazine was empty, and she was, after all, trained.

Gunsmoke wavered in the air around them. The smell of burned flesh hit Cain right after the scent of discharged gunpowder. They stood together, three men and one woman, all watching blood seep from the body across the floor. The edge of the puddle reached the nearest box and began to soak into the wood. The stain spread slowly, a grisly ink blot across the pale beige surface. Cain sighed.

“That box will need to be replaced,” he said.

The drive to Ella’s place was punctuated by two dinging notifications from Lucifer’s phone which he pointedly ignored. Chloe looked between the passing buildings and Lucifer’s profile, amusing herself by quietly critiquing the Devil’s driving skills.

Blinkers are for passing. Yellow means yield, not speed up. Do you even see the other cars on the road? Pedestrians have the right of way. Speed limits are not suggestions.

The night was warm and the Corvette’s top was down. Wind rushed over them as he wove among traffic. As a child, Chloe liked holding her hand outside of a window, palm flat, and tilting her fingers up and down against the rushing air. Trixie did the same now on longer trips. Did he keep the top down because he liked the feel of rushing air?

“Is this what flying is like?” she asked.

Lucifer drummed the fingers of one hand against the wheel. He knew what she was doing, it was obvious enough, but his anxiety was filling even the open space of the car.

“A bit,” he allowed, giving in to her attempt to distract him from his ever-increasing nerves. “Certainly more fun than skydiving.”

“What about paragliding?” Chloe asked. He shuddered theatrically and pursed his lips.

“Certainly not,” he said. “I am not a Pteromyini.”

“Of course you’d know the Latin name,” Chloe said, rolling her eyes. And then, of course, more questions popped into her head. There wasn’t any danger of being overheard by other diners in the Corvette. Chloe considered her options.

“Do you really speak every language?”

Lucifer glanced her way, surprise and a splash of childlike hope giving him a bright expression.

“I’ve yet to find one I didn’t,” he said. “It’s imperative that I be able to communicate with anyone.”

The end of the statement faltered. He’d meant to keep going but had stopped himself from finishing the thought. Chloe followed the logic easily: the Devil needed to speak every language because it was necessary for the job of torturing souls from across cultures, countries, and eras.

She shivered.

“Are you cold, Detective?” He began fussing with the Corvette’s controls, apparently intending to put the top up while the car was in motion. Lucifer’s hyper-awareness of her comfort level activated at the strangest moments. Sometimes she felt as though she was screaming into a bullhorn and he couldn’t hear a word. Other times, like now, he could stand to be a little less attentive.

“No, I’m fine, Lucifer,” she said. He stopped fiddling and moved his hand back to the wheel. Another notification pinged. He flinched and tried to cover it with a sniff.

“Give me your phone,” Chloe said. She held out her hand.

“My my, Detective! But aren’t both hands supposed to be on the wheel? Safety first.” His teasing tone was laced with a version of the fear he’d had during their dinner. No matter how relaxed he tried to appear, he was worried about the impending confrontation with Ella. Rather than argue, Chloe reached into her purse for her own phone. She sent a text to Ella, letting the forensic scientist know that she was coming with Lucifer. Ella saw the message and immediately replied:

Come to the precinct.

“Lucifer, she wants us to go to the precinct.” Chloe looked at him after she replied to the message with a thumbs up, noting the slight clench of his jaw.

“Of course,” he said. “Tell me, Detective, where do they keep the tank?”

He swerved across the road, changing course for their new destination. Chloe had expected it and held on to the door to keep herself stable. She kept her attention on him. She wanted to comfort him and assure him that Ella would never hurt him, but the truth was, she wasn’t certain. Ella was vocally, proudly Catholic, and Chloe knew well enough that their views on the Devil weren’t exactly favorable. For all she knew, Ella might be concocting some Catholic-style exorcism to perform right in the middle of the precinct.

Chloe couldn’t imagine Ella turning so quickly against Lucifer, but with the dual revelations of Marcus’ and Lucifer’s real identities hanging over her head, she didn’t want to assume and possibly get him killed. Devil or not, he was a civilian and she was a cop, and this was a potentially hostile situation.

She decided to take charge.

“I’ll go in first,” she said as the parking garage came into view. Lucifer scoffed.

“Absolutely not,” he snapped. He would have continued, but she cut him off.

“No,” she said, her voice firm. He closed his mouth and breathed a loud, exasperated sound through his nose. She ignored him. “I mean it. You stay in the car. I’ll go in first and let you know if it’s safe.”

She could see that it hurt him, to know that she had a point. If Ella planned to douse him in holy water and yell Latin in his face, he wouldn’t take it well.

Speaking of...

“Can holy water hurt you?” She tried not to sound as silly as she felt asking that question, but she couldn’t remember seeing him interact with any supposedly holy artifacts.

“I assure you, no holy relics pose me any threat, Detective.” He’d pulled into the parking garage and was maneuvering into a space close to the stairwell and elevator. Ella’s car was several spots away. Chloe nodded. The moment the car stopped, she opened her door and climbed out.

“Good.” She raised a hand at him as he stood from his seat. He froze mid-motion, blinking at her.

“Sit. Stay.” She pointed at his seat until he did just that, his expressed bemused.

“Good Devil,” she finished. He rewarded her with a bright smile. He wouldn’t stay. She knew he wouldn’t stay. But he would wait until she was out of sight to disobey, which would buy her just enough time to get a read on Ella’s mood.

She reached out and placed her hand over his on the door, a gesture of comfort and friendship. He froze and stared at her hand. She squeezed lightly, then let go. He swallowed, loudly, and looked at her.

“I’ll text you,” she said. “Stay.”

His startled expression drifted into another smile, easier than the last. She could do this. They could do this. He was still Lucifer, her bonkers nightmare of a partner. He ignored speed limits and orders. He respected her judgement. And if his nervous fidgeting was to be believed, he cared deeply for the humans he’d allowed into his circle.

If it was all an act, it was a damn good one.

Chloe exited the parking garage and began an internal timer as she waited for the elevator to take her to the precinct. She knew she had five minutes max to find Ella before Lucifer burst into the building. She needed to be fast.

The moment the elevator pinged open, she rushed inside and down the stairs, scanning the scene before her. The night shift and late-night stragglers ignored her in favor of coffee and paperwork. The lab lights were on, and Ella was jotting something down on a clip board. Chloe strode across the precinct and stepped into the lab, keeping an eye out for any Home Alone style traps. Ella looked up when the door opened and beamed.

“Decker!” Ella glanced behind her, confused. “Where’s Lucifer?”

“He’s on the way.” Chloe shut the lab door and began pulling the blinds closed. “We need to talk.”

“Uh…”

Chloe turned after the last blinds were closed. When she turned around, Ella still looked confused. Chloe was suddenly consumed with doubt. How does one start this kind of conversation? Hey, so I know Lucifer is the Devil too. We’re the Devil club.

“Lucifer told me about what you’ve been looking into for him,” she said instead. Ella looked downright guilty.

“I’m sorry, Decker, I told him we should bring you in sooner. But you know how he is.”

“It’s fine,” Chloe said. It was. Her jealousy had been misplaced. Their closeness over the past 24 hours was a symptom of their friendship, nothing more. Now, though, all bets were off. Ella seemed as perky as she ever was, but she could be faking it. She was open and honest with those around her, but she’d also once stolen cars. Maybe a cool head was something she could deploy at will.

Chloe was running out of time. Lucifer was likely already in the building, seeking out Miss Lopez for their chat. Chloe decided she’d had enough of secrets for the day. Ella had gone straight to the source when she’d figured it out. Chloe could be brave too.

“Look,” she said, “Lucifer and I talked tonight. He showed me his wings.”

Ella’s eyes widened.

“Whoaaaa. His wings? Are they like a bat’s?”

Chloe blinked.

“No,” she said. Ella looked at her expectantly. She wasn’t sure what else to say. This conversation was nothing like she’d imagined it would be. Ella waited another long moment, then dropped her hands, still holding both pen and clipboard. She sputtered an exasperated groan.

“Is he brooding?” Ella huffed and shook her head. “He’s brooding, isn’t he? I told him not to brood!”

As proof, Ella produced her phone and showed Chloe the messages Lucifer had staunchly ignored on their way over. She started at his last message, which mirrored what he’d said to her tonight:

I believe this is a conversation we should have in-person, Miss Lopez.

And then Ella’s responses began, three in quick succession, then three more spread out over the past thirty minutes:

🙄

Don’t be weird about it.

It was a y/n ques

Ur brooding arnet u?

Don’t brood its not ur style

Precinctt. Now.

The lab door opened behind her to admit the Devil in question. He froze upon seeing both of them, halfway inside of the room, uncertain of his welcome. Ella made that exasperated sound again, then waved the clipboard at him.

“Come inside, ¡pendejo! Stop brooding!”

“I am not brooding,” Lucifer said with a sniff. He stepped inside fully and let the door close behind him, then rooted himself to the spot. “Amenadiel broods. I ponder.”

Ella fixed him with a stare that Chloe had seen on siblings’ faces. That stare was not a compliment. Lucifer, predictably, bristled under the implicated criticism.

“I’m far handsomer when I do, as well,” he added haughtily, eliciting an eye-roll from Chloe and a snicker from Ella.

“Yeah OK,” she said. “I want to see your wings later. Right now I need to show you both something.”

Was that really it? Chloe looked from Lucifer, who looked stunned, to Ella, who was setting her clipboard down and moving to her computer.

Lucifer cleared his throat.

“Miss Lopez…”

“Sh.” She hushed him with a sharp noise, making him clap his mouth shut. He looked at Chloe, eyes wide and lost. Chloe gave him a small smile. She suspected he and Linda would need to have a very in-depth conversation about this later. She made a mental note to text his therapist a fair warning as she focused on Ella.

“I knew I’d heard of ‘La Tunda’ before,” Ella said. She typed and clicked at the computer until she found the file she wanted and maximized it on the screen. “She’s supposedly an exclusive contractor. Look who she’s thought to work for.”

Ella pointed at the relevant sentence and waited for Chloe’s eyes to catch up. Lucifer remained close to the door of the lab, apparently unable to accept that Ella was OK.

Chloe read. Her heart pounded. She glanced at Lucifer, eyes wide.

“The Ruiz family,” she said. Lucifer tilted his head.

“Ah – the tequila magnates? Among other things, if I remember. Ghastly operation, that. Didn’t you take them down, Detective?”

“Not quite,” Ella said. She clicked through a few more documents. “A big, powerful cartel like that doesn’t go down so easily.”

Lucifer stepped further into the lab, close enough that Chloe felt his presence behind her. She’d gotten used to that presence, even relied upon it on days where she felt uncertain about her own abilities. Chloe felt sick as the pieces clicked into place. If Lucifer was their target, the message was for her.

“Bianca Ruiz is in jail,” she said, “but the Ruiz empire wasn’t taken down. They transferred holdings to other offshore accounts and regrouped under her cousin.” She looked at Lucifer, who seemed both impressed and confused.

“I’ve kept an eye on the proceedings,” Chloe said to him.

“Organizations like that don’t take threats lightly,” Ella said behind her. She turned back to the forensic scientist. “They don’t forget, either.”

“They’ve been regrouping since Bianca was arrested and her sons killed,” Chloe said.

“I guess their finances are back where they want them,” Ella said.

“Which opens them up to pursuing past wrongs,” Lucifer said. “I suppose their revenge is best served ice cold.”

“Charlotte might be in danger,” Chloe said with a jolt. “She was their lawyer and she flipped.” She dug out her phone and dialed, unwilling to wait. As the phone rang on the other end, Chloe stepped out of the lab and into a side hallway to take the call. Ella raised both eyebrows at Lucifer and pointed at a stool.

“You, Mister, are going to sit right here. I have so many questions!”

Lucifer tugged at his sleeves and fiddled with his cuff-links. He looked at the stool, then Miss Lopez. He wanted to ask if she really wasn’t afraid. He wanted to ask if she needed him to leave. He sat instead, spreading his hands in an open book sort of gesture.

“You realize you dragged me to church, hm?” His eyes twinkled with mirth as the realization dawned across Ella’s face. “The Devil himself, Miss Lopez. How positively wicked.”

“You still owe me Ash Wednesday, buddy,” she said, and he laughed. The grin which flowed between them was natural and lighthearted. And then, for her, it wasn’t.

“How do prayers work?” she asked. “Do they work? Does He hear them at all?”

Lucifer fluttered the fingers of one hand at her.

“Indeed,” he said, “and others too. I couldn’t say what happens when you pray to the saints – dowdy old fellows, the lot of them, save for the women and Augustine of course – but we can hear humans well enough, should we want to.”

“You can hear prayers?” Ella perked up and pulled a second stool over, sitting across from him. “Show me how!”

Lucifer stared at her. She reached out and pushed at his shoulder, trying to encourage him.

“Come on! This is so much cooler than texting. Can I hear you too?”

“No,” he said. “And I – I normally don’t listen to prayers directed my way, Miss Lopez.”

Her mouth scrunched to the side. She chewed her bottom lip.

“Because they’re awful?” she asked, all wide-eyed charm and curiosity. He burst into a short spurt of laughter, unable to resist her energy.

“Yes, well, I’m the Devil, after all.”

“Tell me what to do. I’ll send you puppies and rainbows.”

He produced the most dramatic, long-suffering sigh he could muster.

“Very well,” he said. “First, let me draw my focus to –"

I’m hurt. Amenadiel’s voice rang in his head, a directed prayer from a sibling. Though his voice didn’t ring as strongly as when he’d been an angel, he was Lucifer’s brother, and the prayer rang true. I can’t fight them.

Lucifer surged from his stool, eyes flashing red, at the same moment Chloe burst through the door. Ella nearly fell back in her stool, startled by the sudden motions.

“Charlotte’s on the way,” Chloe said to them both, her eyes focused on Lucifer’s. “She thinks Amenadiel is missing.”

Chapter 11: Showoff

Chapter Text

Charlotte was trying her best not to break every traffic law in existence while heading toward Marcus Pierce’s domain. She had already secured enough evidence of his shady dealings to know that she didn’t want to be arrested and processed by his precinct. He’d seen her the day she tailed him, even confronted her, and she didn’t want him to start making connections before they had a proper chance to take him down.

She wasn’t afraid, not really. She’d grown accustomed to working with incredibly shady people and the threats which came along with that. She’d been killed once already, and death itself wasn’t what scared her. What came after, though – now that had her heart in her throat.

She was worried about Amenadiel because he was her friend, yes, but the gnawing guilt also drove her forward. She’d gotten him into this mess, really – she’d agreed to do the investigation based on how it could help her. Now an angel of God was in danger. That probably didn’t help her ledger any.

She glanced up at the sky and sighed.

“Look,” she said, “I’m doing my best here. Can I get a little credit?”

No answer. It was a little insulting now that she knew He was really up there. She was approaching one of the longest red lights in LA, notorious for the frustration it caused. The light was yellow and flipped to red as she slowed to a crawl, then a stop. She sighed and leaned her elbow against the window, bracing her chin against her palm.

The light flipped to green. She sat up straighter, glanced back and forth. It was late enough that no traffic was caught up in the sudden changed pattern. She looked up again, considering, then nodded.

“Showoff,” she said.

The passage of time on Earth, in some ways, was a novel experience for Amenadiel. He’d come to enjoy the experience during his time as a mortal: sitting to watch a sunset, savoring a flavorful drink, enjoying a lovely harmony. While not every aspect of mortal life was enjoyable, he’d learned to focus on the positive.

He’d come to discover that a pounding head slowed down time to an agonizing crawl. Every heartbeat was accompanied by a pulsing beat of pain in the back of his skull. Combined with nagging hunger and the discomfort of sitting in a single position for multiple hours, he was experiencing a plethora of new and unpleasant experiences. The chair he was confined to wasn’t meant for long-term sitting, or at least wasn’t meant for taller inhabitants. The edge of the seat stopped well before his knees. A cramp had settled into his mid-thigh. He tried to stroke the heel of his palm against the muscle, but his movements were restricted by the chains locking him to the chair.

He was distracted from the present by the throbbing pain from the back of his head, the cramps plaguing his legs, and his persistent internal mantra directed at Lucifer. He had yet to hear a response, wasn’t certain he even could while Fallen. Lucifer had retained his abilities even when cast down to Hell. Amenadiel was, as far as he’d discovered, entirely mortal.

“It was my brother.”

Amenadiel looked to the corner of the room, blinking the blurriness away, surprised. Grisela was there on the floor, sitting with her elbows on her raised knees close to the door – she must have entered while he foundered in his head. It was a dangerous reality that he was struggling to focus on the here and now as his mortal body increased its complaints. In this way, Gris’ presence was a gift; if she spoke to him, he would listen and keep himself grounded in the here and now. He thought of replying to her. He kept silent instead; his assorted pains were muddling his thoughts, and she had the look of someone who needed to speak without interruption.

She had her fingers laced together in a loose pattern. Her index fingers sometimes moved, the nails sliding against each other with a soft tick. She stared at them blankly, bereft of apparent emotions. Her cheeks were dry. When she blinked, the movement was slow, even deliberate.

“My little brother,” she said to her hands. Amenadiel considered her words and dredged the memory from some time before, perhaps this morning, perhaps yesterday – he didn’t know how long. She was answering his question. There was no sister, but a little brother instead. God’s eldest understood the compulsion at least. He had hundreds of younger siblings, had grown enough to want them safe without conditions. Even Lucifer, who he'd spent so many thousands of years angry with - even Lucifer deserved to be safe, whatever that might mean for the Devil.

Lucifer, I hope you can hear me.

The words were starting to jumble together. He skipped phrases and forgot to include pertinent information. In another moment, he stopped the prayers entirely. He was tired enough that malaise crept in.

Gris’ nails tick, tick, ticked together, like a steady drip from a broken faucet. The sound drew his full attention. She hadn’t moved.

“On my quince, my father came into my room and said we were going for a trip.” She smiled faintly, the first sign of any feelings at all. “In our family, the father would take his daughter to buy the dress together.” She huffed a quiet laugh and glanced at him. “I was so excited. I asked if my brother could come.”

She dropped her glance to her knees. Her lower jaw rotated once; her teeth clicked together. Amenadiel was struck with the realization that she’d likely never spoken of this before.

“He said yes, and he took us to…to a bus station. I thought we would go to a city. A big city with big shops.” Another quiet laugh. She unlaced her fingers and let them dangle instead, becoming still. Any signs of emotions receded. She might have been a statue, save for her quiet, unrelenting voice, the subtle shift of her jaw.

“He put us on the bus. I don’t know how much we were sold for. There were a lot of kids. Kids from the country. We could just disappear.”

Amenadiel shifted his legs. Her eyes shot to his feet.

“They took us to Nuevos Días. They said it was…an orphanage. To keep us together.”

She closed her eyes, floating through memories now. Amenadiel shifted his legs again and she didn’t react.

“I told them I wouldn’t learn,” she said. “I told them I wouldn’t kill. Not for anyone, not for them.”

Amenadiel saw Lucifer shouting his protests before their Father, refusing to do as told. His siblings watched in horror, unable to conceive of the same actions. Amenadiel watched in fury, his hands fisted. Lucifer would learn his place, as soon as Father gave his eldest the command.

“They took me to a room and tied me down. They brought my brother. They told him what happened was because of me.”

You bring this on yourself, Samael. Michael’s voice, full of spite and the beginnings of hate. Samael’s shocked expression as judgement was handed down. Amenadiel had laughed at his fear.

“They beat him.” Gris’ voice blended with the memories; his siblings beat a small child with her dark eyes. “They wouldn’t stop. They took his eye.”

Samael’s broken wings and bloodied face flickered with the child Amenadiel had never met. They both collapsed, unable to stand.

“They laughed,” she said. Amenadiel laughed in his memories. The child – his brother – the child couldn’t lift his head.

“They told me if I said no again, they would kill him in front of me.” Gris’ voice drew him to the present. She hadn’t opened her eyes.

The child lay broken, surrounded by strangers. He had Samael’s eyes. Amenadiel looked at Father, whose furious expression had not changed. Amenadial felt no pity. Their brother had deserved this. Michael cast the child down, Samael’s cries fading into nothing.

“I couldn’t say no,” she said. “I thought I was keeping him alive.”

She stopped. Her breaths shuddered and her fingers curled.

“He was eight when he died,” she said. “I did that to him. I asked Papá if he could come. Maybe if…”

Her voice warbled; her throat seemed to close. They sat together in the quiet. Amenadiel remembered the first time he’d returned his little brother to Hell, casting him down into the pit. Samael’s ancient rage rang along with the pounding headache. Amenadiel tried to stretch a leg to relieve even a little bit of pressure.

“Lucifer Morningstar,” she said. “Is he really your brother?”

Amenadiel hesitated. She huffed that quiet laugh.

“Do you love him?”

She was looking at him now, meeting his eyes. He found it difficult to match her stare; she was so blank, so empty, even now when her words held weight. She blinked. Samael’s pranks in their youth had sometimes made Amenadiel roar with laughter. He remembered listening to the Lightbringer’s tales of the universe, the very same universe he himself lived in translated into a wondrous adventure. Samael’s joy mingled with Lucifer’s voice. It is not I who keeps them, a burned face said while jovial laughter rang out over the Silver City.

“They want me to kill him. They’ve told me how.”

No. They didn’t know. They couldn’t. Except…except that Cain had orchestrated all of this. Amenadiel remembered now. The first murderer had come here trying to die, and now he wanted to live again. That was why he’d had God’s firstborn brought here. But why target Lucifer too?

His shoulders twitched, an old habit which reflected his deepening thoughts. If he’d still had wings, the feathers would have rustled in a soft wave, glistening gray and black in the dark room.

Lucifer was prickly and stubborn and sometimes terribly cruel, but he had obvious weaknesses to exploit. He worried for his oldest brother in his newfound mortality with a quiet intensity they both refused to acknowledge. If Cain took advantage and killed Amenadiel, his little brother would hunt the man down and subject him to the worst tortures in his repertoire, regardless of whether the man would stay dead. If his physical body died, though, he’d have to wait for Cain to join him in Hell before exacting revenge.

That couldn’t be all, though. There was something else here. Cain wanted Lucifer killed to tie up a loose end, but also…but also…

Chloe.

Cain wanted Chloe.

Lucifer had told him about their growing romance, fighting hard to conceal how much it bothered him. Lucifer was a terrible liar and worse at concealing his hurt when it came to the Detective. Cain knew that Lucifer wanted Chloe, and he knew that having Chloe hurt the Devil deeply. It was petty, and it was vicious, and it was true. Cain would kill Lucifer and be the shoulder Chloe cried on, forever lost to Lucifer as he was trapped below while Chloe developed her life, grew old, died, and went to the one place Lucifer could never follow.

That was what Cain wanted: to murder God’s favorite son, and to watch Lucifer realize he’d never see Chloe again. God’s favored sons both felled within days, even hours of each other. He would have taken his revenge on Amenadiel for placing his curse, Lucifer for his failure to lift that curse, and God for the curse itself.

It was impressively efficient.

“Do you love him?”

Gris watched him reorient himself to the now with that same blank stare. She had asked this question twice. The answer mattered to her.

His father had never said the words, but his mother had tried her best. Samael’s eyes met his through Gris’ face. A sibling separated from their family, forced to survive a brutal environment, and now faced with having killed their brother.

She needed to hear it.

“Yes,” he said, as quiet as her. Her expression broke with a flicker of doubt. She couldn’t trust love. She might not know what it meant.

“He’s my little brother,” he said. Samael’s laughter echoed in his memories. Or was that Lucifer’s?

The doubt was gone. She braced a hand against the floor and stood. Her hand slid along the wall as she rose with a soft hissing sound of flesh on plaster.

She looked at him for several silent seconds, then opened the door and left the room. Lucifer’s laughter had morphed into Samael’s screams. The screams of a child, beaten and broken.

Lucifer, Amenadiel prayed with renewed desperation. Stay away.

Chloe was sitting at her desk in the precinct, watching Lucifer pacing back and forth inside Ella’s lab. The two women had watched the Devil work himself into a shivering frenzy as he transformed from a bumbling nervous man into an enraged archangel needing an outlet for violence. They’d decided to keep him in the lab with Ella while Chloe waited at her desk for Charlotte. Ella had experience dealing with temperamental brothers, and Chloe wanted to appear as normal as possible until Charlotte arrived and they could begin to work on a plan together.

Still, she watched her partner stalk Ella’s lab with worry. He’d never admit how deeply he cared for Amenadiel, and Chloe wondered if the two brothers had ever expressed any kind of love at all for each other. In the hours leading up to her confrontation with Lucifer, and the hours now following, she’d been running through the many odd facts he’d presented her over the years about his estranged family.

Amenadiel and Lucifer had not been kind to each other at first. She remembered finding Lucifer with noticeable bruises which he credited to his brother. Even now, Lucifer mentioned Amenadiel in passing, and rarely by name. She’d half-suspected that he only tolerated his brother out of some kind of lingering family obligation. Now, watching his agitated gestures, it was obvious enough that whatever their history, Lucifer did not appreciate his brother being in danger.

The worst part of Lucifer’s emotions, when they hit hardest, was how thoroughly his defenses slammed into place. Only a few hours before, he’d been open enough with Chloe to show her his wings – something he’d refused to do for months. The moment he’d heard Amenadiel’s pleas, any vulnerability he’d displayed tonight dried up. He was all spines and barbs, angry that they had to wait for Charlotte to arrive. He’d called Maze several times and left her increasingly frustrated voicemails to compliment the text messages Chloe sent. Now he was pacing a hole into the floor of the lab while Ella skillfully moved around his aggravated path.

Amenadiel was hurt and unable to defend himself. That was the only information Lucifer gave them before attempting to reach Maze. Combined with Charlotte’s fears that he was missing, the puzzle was easy enough to construct: Amenadiel had been taken.

That both brothers would be targeted within 24 hours of each other couldn’t be a coincidence. Chloe had no evidence to tie the two events together, but cartels often targeted family members as part of a broader message to communities. It was an easy and ruthless way to eliminate future threats.

Chloe was spending her time at her desk alternating between researching the Ruiz cartel’s patterns and watching Lucifer through the lab windows.

Dan passed by her sight on the way to his desk. She watched him drop a few items off before approaching her with raised eyebrows.

“Hey, Chlo’,” Dan said as he leaned against the front of her desk. She blinked up at her ex-husband. It was late, late enough that he should be home with Trixie. Despite his casual and somewhat confused posture, her head was filled with crime scene photos of the aftermath of families who’d become cartel targets. Her fear spiked.

“Is Trixie OK? Where is she?”

Dan raised both hands.

“Whoa there,” he said. “She’s with my parents. Charlotte called and asked me to meet her here.”

It was nearly ten at night, which was late for parents of a preteen. Charlotte was a mother, despite having limited access to her children, and would know not to make such a request so late unless there was an emergency. Dan’s eyes drifted to the lab, where Lucifer and Ella appeared to be debating something. The troops were being summoned, and Dan was detective enough to know something was up.

“What – “

Chloe shook her head hard. Dan looked at the files and images underneath her hands.

“Chloe – “

“In the lab, now!” Charlotte breezed past both detectives on her way to Ella’s lab, stroking a hand across Dan’s back and arm on her way. Dan jittered a moment, thrown off by the sudden contact. Affection lit his eyes as he watched Charlotte walk away from them. Chloe smiled. She’d sometimes wondered if Dan would ever have that look for another woman, and she was glad to know he’d found that kind of happiness with someone else. Even if she was Lucifer’s stepmother.

Chloe paused. If Charlotte had been married to Lucifer’s Father...

She filed that away under the ever-growing mountain of questions to ask Lucifer when they weren’t in the middle of a crisis. Chloe gathered her files and followed Dan, who was trailing behind Charlotte. She stepped into the lab and heard the tail-end of what must have been a long diatribe about whatever topic Ella had chosen to distract their progressively more edgy Devil.

“Detective!” He proclaimed her title as she stepped into the lab, affront on every line of his face. “Would you please explain to Miss Lopez that my wings are neither veiny nor bat-like?”

Dan scoffed.

“It would be pretty badass,” Ella said while typing away at a keyboard. Lucifer huffed and glared at her back. Ella was playing on his vanity as a distraction from his brother’s potential peril. Chloe was once again reminded that Lucifer was painfully easy to wrangle when necessary. She hadn’t forgotten that he’d been the initial target. There was a high chance that taking Amenadiel was an attempt to get Lucifer into a vulnerable position. She hadn’t figured out how yet, but she’d seen him bleed. He could get hurt; based on their partnership and what she’d witnessed herself, she was less clear on how he’d survived being shot.

Charlotte closed the lab door behind Dan, then locked it. She began to move to the other door, but was beaten by Ella, who caught the drift quickly.

Now they were locked in together, and Chloe suddenly realized that this conversation was going to be difficult to navigate. She and Ella were partially in the know now, but Dan and Charlotte –

“I asked Maze to find your brother,” the lawyer said. Lucifer bristled. “I think he’s been taken.”

“He most certainly has,” Lucifer snarled. “Maze has yet to answer a single call.”

Charlotte waved a dismissive hand. “I’m paying her, she’s on the clock. We need to talk about Marcus Pierce.”

All eyes fell on Chloe. Both Ella’s and Lucifer’s dropped to her hand, where Marcus’ engagement ring shone in the fluorescent lights. Chloe tried to sound sure and brave despite feeling small.

“What about Marcus?”

Dammit, even her voice sounded small. Charlotte and Dan had both followed the other gazes, and an awkward tension filled the relatively small space. Charlotte, of course, recovered first.

“It’s related. He’s the Sinnerman.”

Chloe felt a sharp gust of breath burst from her mouth. Her head spun. The lights above her twinkled. Had Lucifer really made the stars? And why was she feeling so dizzy?

“No,” she said. Her ears rang. Marcus at the beach, laughing in a way he never did in a crowd; Marcus in the hospital, telling her she was his best detective; Marcus in her home, Trixie snuggled against his side; Marcus at her counter, handing her a file full of the Devil’s handiwork.

Chloe was a trained first responder. Panic didn’t easily overcome her. Instead, when she received an emotional shock, her first impulse was to think. Synapses fired wildly, making sudden leaps which were previously buried.

Marcus was Cain. Marcus was the Sinnerman. She raised her hand and looked at the ring he’d given her. It was pretty enough, not at all her style. The diamonds were one of her least favorite cuts. He’d never asked her about what she might want in a ring, a relationship, a marriage. Why had he asked her to marry him? Was it just to hurt Lucifer? Viewed through that lens, the past few months clicked into place. Marcus had been steadily separating them, pushing the partners apart despite their incredibly high closure rate. He was pragmatic and results-driven; he hadn’t pushed them apart because Lucifer was a cartoonish nightmare. He wouldn’t do that if he were thinking of results.

Chloe looked up to find Lucifer watching her closely. He was worried, and there was something else there too. She could name it; she could feel it. Now, however, was not the time.

She came back to the conversation to hear Ella recounting her investigation over the past day, complete with the revelation of the attempt on Lucifer’s life. She left out the details of his survival. When she finished, Dan muttered quietly:

“I’d just get rid of the cat.”

Lucifer turned to him with an approving look.

“A good decision. Vile little things, quite unsanitary.”

“No, no,” Dan said. “When someone tried to frame Maze. He and I, we were…talking about you, and Chloe, and…”

Chloe had crossed her arms. Lucifer waved his hand in a circle.

“Well, get on with it then.”

“I-I said it’s like, when a woman has a cat…”

“Then you’d remove the cat?” Lucifer seemed shocked. “Daniel, I can respect the urge, but really, if she’s attached to her pet, that’s quite cruel.”

He wasn’t following, and Ella seemed confused too. Charlotte’s eyebrows had raised to her hairline. Chloe shook her head slowly.

“You’re saying he threatened Lucifer,” she said.

“Not outright,” Dan said. “I thought he was joking!”

Lucifer suddenly barked out a laugh.

“Of course!” His eyes gleamed with understanding. “That wanker already tried to kill Amenadiel.”

“He what?” Ella yelled. “He what?! Why didn’t you tell us that?!”

“It didn’t work,” Lucifer said. He sounded outright baffled about why not mentioning their boss’ attempted murder of his brother was a problem. “Besides, that’s my brother’s business.”

Ella looked like she might explode if this conversation continued. Chloe looked at Charlotte with desperation, wholly unable to find the words. Her current fiancé had tried to kill her partner’s brother, and likely also her partner, in tandem with the Ruiz cartel, because he was the Sinnerman, and suddenly the ring on her finger was far too tight. She tugged at the band until it slid off and stared at the stones embedded into the metal. It could’ve been pretty, for an entirely different person.

Whether from mercy or having enough of the brewing argument, Charlotte spoke up.

“I tracked him with Amenadiel yesterday. He bought a package, and we wanted to see what it was to see if we could link him to the Sinnerman network.”

“What kind of package?” Dan asked. He, at least, was still present in the current conversation.

“Small, whatever it was,” Charlotte said. “It fit into a small manila envelope. We…found the package later, but whatever was inside was gone. He took it home, then left again right away.”

“What time?” Chloe asked. She already knew the timeframe. She already knew what he’d bought. The diamonds gleamed. She didn’t wait for an answer.

“We need to figure out if these diamonds are stolen,” she said to all of them at once. She couldn’t meet any of their eyes. Her discomfort and shame would give her away.

“I know a guy,” Ella said. Chloe handed the ring over. She never wanted to see it again.

Hell might have been home, but there was nothing quite like the sweet smell of a living human’s fear. Maze was the only demon to come to Earth and experience the sensation of hunting and torturing living people, and despite how angry she was at Lucifer, she could thank him for the pleasure she was feeling right now as she twisted a man’s arm until it nearly popped out of his shoulder socket.

“God stop!” he screamed, which always made her roll her eyes. God had nothing to do with this, and he would never show up to stop whatever she did to one of his precious creations. This sensuous pain was between her and whoever this dirtbag was.

“Scream a little more for me,” she purred into his ear. He shuddered and whimpered. He definitely wasn’t enjoying this as much as she was. Luckily, his enjoyment was entirely optional.

Her phone pinged for what felt like the 30^th time in ten minutes. She growled and wondered when people became so needy. The devices hadn’t appeared in Hell until more recently, in terms of Hell time, but they featured in many Hell loops as someone was plagued by the constant notifications or missing an important call. Human had survived just fine without immediacy for thousands of years, but give them a chance to harass each other in a socially acceptable way and no one was immune.

She was holding her target by the same arm, jostling him as she pulled her cell phone out of her jacket pocket. He whimpered again and she shushed him, checking her text messages. Several from Chloe. She filed those into the whatever column in her brain. At least twelve voicemails from Lucifer. Normally she’d file those into the same column, but Lucifer wasn’t needy like humans were. He normally stopped after five calls.

She dialed him back, giving the man in her other hand a good shake and another hush. He cried out at the same moment Lucifer answered the phone. There was a pause, and then he said:

“Busy, are we?”

“What do you want?” Maze was already done with this conversation.

“I hear you’re looking for my brother,” he said. Maze scowled at the man in her grip; he was still whining, and while they could have this conversation with the noise – it was nothing new between them – it was annoying. She dropped him to the ground instead. He fell into an assortment of limbs of groans. She planted a foot in the middle of his back and held him down.

“Yeah,” she said into the phone. “I’m working on that right now.”

“Is whoever you’re working on responsible?” Lucifer’s voice snapped with authority, and despite her years of independence, she responded by reflex.

Sort’ve.

“Yeah, why?”

“Because Amenadiel is hurt, Maze,” Lucifer said. “Wherever they’ve taken him, he’s hurt and unable to fight.”

Maze nearly broke her target’s back then and there, an impulse born of fury, but she resisted. No matter how pissed she was at Lucifer, she liked Amenadiel just fine. He’d helped her save Linda’s life, and he was a decent lay.

“I’ll have a location soon,” she said. She crouched down over her prey, barely concealing her glee. The man’s fear spiked. “A few minutes at most.”

“Excellent,” Lucifer said. Maze hung up and hissed directly into the man’s ear.

“Well, Paul,” she licked his earlobe. “Time to talk.”

Lucifer took Maze’s return call a few minutes later, listened for a moment, then hung up again. He rattled off the address – some loft building with plenty of rooms for stowing away smuggled goods and former angels. As the assorted humans began formulating a plan which he would promptly ignore, Amenadiel’s voice rang out again in his head, urging him to stay away.

Ignorant lout, he prayed in return. How could you be so naïve?

Ignoring his own naivety in immediately trusting his own assassin, of course.

If Amenadiel could hear him, he had yet to reply. Lucifer had tried multiple inquiries, including where are you? and Answer me, you overgrown clown! That second message had been suggested by Miss Lopez, and Lucifer had to admit that it had a certain charm to it.

He found that the more he focused on his irritation with his brother’s mistake, the less he focused on his growing terror that Amenadiel wasn’t answering because he was already gone. Lucifer tolerated his brother well enough, but they couldn’t be called friends – and yet here he was, surrounded by humans who were invested in the former angel’s return. Lucifer could tell himself that his own emotional attachment was merely a side effect of listening to their chatter. He could even convince himself that it was neither worry nor fear he felt at the thought of Amenadiel injured and unable to defend himself; the very thought of Amenadiel grievously injured should have made him incandescently happy. Was this not the brother who forced him back into his cage thousands of times over? Was this not the brother whose heart he’d threatened to consume? Lucifer should hate him, should be reveling in this newfound weakness of his.

Instead, Lucifer thought of the night he’d tried to teach Amenadiel the benefits of drinks other than the incredibly inappropriate Cosmo he’d been drinking. The entire night was a joy to remember – Amenadiel’s terrible dancing, his drunken honesty – but that moment, where his brother met his eyes and insisted Cosmos are yummy, stuck most clearly in his mind. His brother’s slight affront and guileless insistence on his preferences was a thing to behold. For a man with such an incredible amount of pride, he had no issues claiming his preference for something so terribly asinine.

Lucifer envied him that openness. The Devil could not afford to outright prefer such things in the modern day; while the stigmas were wrapped in ridiculous gendered notions, he was too used to modeling himself to the least vulnerable version of himself to admit that he, too, might enjoy a Cosmo or other fruity, delicious drink. The association could cause a moment’s doubt or shame in the modern man, and those were just the type of imposed weaknesses which could get a demon ripped apart and a King usurped.

But there God’s eldest, God’s favored, God’s fury had stood, defending that same drink against the Devil himself. It was ridiculous in how small of a moment it was, but Lucifer remembered it with fond jealousy. From that one statement, he’d decided to start paying closer attention to his brother’s activities on Earth, to make sure his stay on this plane was as pleasant as possible. He’d ordered in higher quality vodkas so that his brother could enjoy the best possible version of his favorite drink. His brother was truly stuck here, unable to vacation in paradise as Lucifer had been able to fly from Hell as he pleased. Lucifer wanted Amenadiel to like Earth. And if he were honest with himself, in the quietest hours of the morning, he would miss his brother should the former angel regain his wings and leave.

He very much did not want his brother to die. He would never see Amenadiel again if the eldest was stuck in Heaven.

Now that they had an address, the team was planning their approach. Ella was on the phone with a brother, discussing the diamonds in Chloe’s ring; Charlotte was strategizing with the Detective and Dan, figuring out several angles to plan for. The Detective had a list of truly heinous acts committed by the Ruiz cartel, and the Sinnerman’s network was direct competition. They couldn’t expect mercy from that network just because the man at the top had feelings for Chloe. Indeed, those feelings could quickly become the most dangerous to those around her.

Their collective priority was her daughter’s safety, a fact which Lucifer understood intellectually but had some trouble following in practice. Dan was busy arranging a trip for his parents and daughter in Arizona. Apparently the offspring had never seen the Grand Canyon, and now was as good a time as any for the trip to happen. It would remove the three of them from the immediate vicinity, and Dan would alert the authorities nearby about potential dangers to his family. An outright protection detail would be too obvious, but a call between comrades could simply be seen as an overprotective father looking out for his child.

Lucifer kept closest watch on the Detective. She’d slid Cain’s ring from her finger and handed it to Ella with disgust and contempt. He thought she might have shot the ring itself if they didn’t need it as evidence. She still might, once this was all done.

Lucifer watched the Detective take control of the situation, as he’d known she would. He was relieved; while he wanted to save Amenadiel as quickly as possible, he also lacked a way to quickly find the former angel. He continued praying to his brother, hopeful that at least one insult would make it through.

The Detective pulled him aside now, her tone laced with concern.

“Is there anything else you can do?” She wasn’t trying to be cruel with the question, though he flinched. She’d only just learned of his divinity, and already it was infecting how she approached cases. She would always investigate every possible angle, and now there was a new, untested angle to consider.

Lucifer shook his head.

“I cannot locate him as I once could,” he said. The Detective nodded.

“Alright,” she said, “we do this the old-fashioned way.”

“Detective…” Lucifer hesitated, as he always did. She watched him. She knew him. She was still working with him. He took a deep breath.

“Are you OK?”

She met his gaze for only a moment more before crumbling into shame. Her face folded in, her eyes glistened, but she withheld her tears. She was trained to show no weakness in a way very similar to him. She couldn’t crack now because she might never reform.

“A smuggled ring,” she said. Ella’s brother – some arbitrary letter of a name, very strange – wouldn’t be able to check the diamonds until tomorrow at the earliest, but they all knew what that ring was. Charlotte had tracked it from delivery to receipt, and only lost the trail once Cain removed the item from the envelope and took it to Chloe’s doorstep.

Cain had presented her with stolen goods. If ever there was a sign of his complete disregard for who Chloe was as a person, that gesture outdid them all. A smuggled ring, possibly blood diamonds – the very embodiment of cruelty, greed, even slavery, slid onto her finger as though she could accept all of that along with the man himself. The symbolism was impressively overt, and she hated herself for falling for the con.

“Detective, none of this is your fault,” Lucifer said. He thought this to be true and so found the words comforting, but her face fell further. She shook her head, looking away from him. She suddenly turned shy, unable to meet his eyes.

Curious.

“We’ll talk later,” she said to him. She stepped away and raised her voice. She was all business now.

“Alright – Dan, Lucifer and I are going. We can’t call in backup because Marcus would know. Maze is scoping out the building now, she’ll let us know how to approach once we’re there.”

She pointed at Ella.

“Get that ring to Jay as soon as you can. It might be our only evidence of anything at all, if Pierce is as good as we think he is.”

Now the finger moved to Charlotte.

“Get to your family, make sure they’re safe. Start preparing for this case and lay low.”

She swept her eyes across them all. Lucifer tensed at the severity of her expression.

“Everyone clear?” the Detective said.

“Very clear,” he said. It was time to get moving.

Amenadiel, you bloody pillock, we’re coming.

Chapter 12: She Hated This Plan

Chapter Text

Cain answered his burner phone on the second ring. He cleared his throat when he pressed the earpiece close, a simple signal that it was safe to speak.

“She’s headed your way.”

He considered for a long, long moment. Long enough that the caller risked a tentative, quiet “Boss?”

“Alone?” He hated that he knew the answer. Chloe couldn’t have found them on her own. Even Lucifer couldn’t have managed it. But Maze was more than capable, and he’d pissed her off.

“No,” the voice said. He repressed a sigh. “Two men are with her.”

Chloe's ex-husband and her partner. Of course. And here he was, having thought he might convince her. He’d spent centuries watching people make irrational decisions for love, and when caught in the same web, fell to the same patterns as everyone else.

He looked to the left, where his men stood flanking his newest weapon. Tundita stood with her arms loosely folded, watching him with vague interest. She was a weapon who’d been controlled for years by an exploitable weakness. Chloe had weaknesses too. She was bringing two of them along now.

“Tell me when they’re ten minutes out,” he said. He clicked the phone closed and looked at his team.

He addressed Tundita first.

“You know how to take out Morningstar.” She lifted her chin slightly, acknowledging the unspoken command. He looked at the men behind her.

“If Mazikeen Smith shows up, open up on her with everything you’ve got,” he said. “Don’t kill Decker and Espinoza. Take them alive. Tell everyone.”

“Sure boss.” They began doing as told immediately, speaking quickly into their earpieces to alert everyone in the building. Cain offered a full clip to Tundita, who reloaded the gun he’d given her with quick, flicking movements. She offered the empty clip to him, which he took with a slight nod. He appreciated her ability to communicate through silence. He felt ever more confident in his decision to bring her into his network.

She met his eyes, then turned and left the room. He trusted her to do her job and focused on preparations. They needed to be ready for what was coming their way. He considered his options. He’d meant to wait, had a full plan for when and how to kill Amenadiel. This threw all of his plans out of alignment. He could die right now. He was unused to considering his own mortality as part of his plans. If he were immortal again, the Devil could do anything he wanted and Cain would survive. He could handle pain, and he was used to waiting for opportunities. He could only do that with his Mark.

He made the decision and flexed his hands. A thorough beating would take too long. Lucky for Amenadiel, he needed his Mark back now. A bullet to the head wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying even if it was the most efficient use of his time.

He sighed with disappointment but didn’t hesitate to head for his prisoner. There wasn’t time to waste.

Lucifer was completely focused on the building ahead of them. His eyes were wider than usual, a wild tension filling the space of Chloe’s squad car. She’d rarely let him drive her squad car before. Before taking the wheel, he’d hesitated, watching her closely. She’d told him to remember that this wasn’t the convertible and couldn’t move as quickly, but he could turn on the lights and drive ten over the speed limit.

His shock at the offer had quickly morphed into intensity. His brother was in danger. He’d slipped into the driver’s seat while Dan sat in the back, keeping silent in response to the tightly wound consultant. They were all tense and worried. Amenadiel was Dan’s close friend, and Dan was struggling with the thought of the larger than life, naively optimistic man being in real danger. He was always so confident and certain, so warm and open. Who would even want to hurt him?

“Detective,” Lucifer said. There was a long pause when Chloe looked at him. He seemed to be preparing himself for something.

“You should stay here,” he finally said. Chloe’s expression said everything Dan was thinking.

“No,” she said. Lucifer glanced back at Dan with some kind of unspoken message. Chloe huffed in anger and shoved her door open. Lucifer followed suit, and the two of them made their way to the front of the car. Lucifer’s gestures and Chloe’s crossed arms indicated a verbal sparring match. Her stubborn refusal began to waver after Lucifer gestured at her sidearm. Whatever he said created a moment of stunned silence on Chloe’s part. Dan recognized the looks of her starting to give in under protest. He’d seen the expression and body language enough during the end of their marriage, though the affectionately annoyed look she shot Lucifer when he turned and left her at the car was unique to the consultant.

She was still grumbling when she opened the driver’s side door and settled in. Dan considered for a moment, then moved himself to the passenger seat. If Lucifer came back with Amenadiel, they’d figure out the rearrangement.

Assuming they didn’t need an ambulance.

“Wanna talk about it?” He looked at Chloe with raised eyebrows, pointedly not looking after Lucifer’s retreating form. Chloe sighed.

“Yes, but I can’t,” she said.

“Cryptic answers, huh?” Dan shook his head. “You sound like Lucifer.”

“Yeah,” she said. Another sigh. “Talk about perspective.”

Whatever that meant.

“Ok, so what’s the plan?” He didn’t believe for a moment that Lucifer was in charge of this operation.

“He and Maze are going inside,” Chloe said. She was watching the building in front of them with a scowl. “He’ll call when it’s safe.”

Dan could believe that Maze would clear the entire building on her own. He’d seen Lucifer fight briefly, too. The consultant had taken less than ten seconds to get out of handcuffs and take out two goons. The two of them could handle themselves well enough, but neither Chloe nor Dan enjoyed being sidelined. Her jawline was tight with frustration. He shook his head.

“They’re not even cops,” he said. ‘It seems like that should make a difference.”

Chloe huffed a quiet laugh.

“I don’t think Lucifer’s worried about proper procedure.”

Dan leaned back against the car seat. He glanced at Chloe’s bare hand, where an engagement ring had been less than an hour ago. Her expression as she’d pulled the metal band off had been a distinct mixture of disgust and contempt. He’d seen the same expression when he’d confessed his involvement in Palmetto.

“You ok?” He kept his tone casual to make sure he didn’t launch into an interrogative tone. They both had the training, it was a hard habit to avoid.

"I'll be fine," Chloe said. More cryptic answers. Dan sighed and turned his focus to the building. Chloe wasn't one to distract easily, but he wanted to make sure they didn't miss any kind of signals from Lucifer and Maze.

"Tell me about it when you're ready," he said. Chloe didn't reply.

“You must walk,” Gris said. She pulled at Amenadiel’s arm, her motions just shy of desperate. “I cannot carry you.”

Amenadiel sucked in a sharp breath. His arm was draped across her shoulders, a position which would have been impossible if he hadn’t been slouching so lowly. His head pounded. His shoes scraped the ground as he struggled to raise them enough not to drag against the floor. His feet were heavier than they’d ever felt. His hands tingled as blood refilled the digits. The cuffs had been too tight around his wrists.

“Here,” Gris said. She’d opened a door. He didn’t remember the noise of it opening, or the movements she must have made to open it while under his arm. He didn’t remember her releasing all of the chains from his body.

She pushed him into the room she’d chosen, so full of boxes that he couldn’t see the back of the room well. A pool of thick, dark liquid coated a portion of the floor. The toe of his shoe caught an edge, displacing the viscous liquid. She cursed, once, and pulled him to the side.

“To the back,” she said. He wanted to ask why she was helping him, why she was doing any of this at all. He wanted to ask if she would kill his little brother. He tried to speak and found his tongue nearly as heavy as his feet. Gris guided him to the back of the room, leaned him against the wall, and helped him slide to the ground. She stood again, looming over him. He tilted his head back, using the wall as support.

“Stay here,” she said. “Stay quiet, and do not leave.”

Why are you doing this, he thought muzzily.

“Are you going to kill my brother?” he slurred.

The edges of her eyes crinkled slightly. Was she amused?

“Stay here,” she said. “Stay awake.”

Staying awake sounded like an unachievable task. He could feel the fog of unconsciousness. He would have asked her to help him, but she was already gone.

Lucifer, he thought. Not strong enough to be a prayer. He tried again.

Luci. Still not good enough. His focus was fading. This was important. He pulled on all of his strength, shoved his aches and pains back, and shot one targeted prayer as far as he could manage.

Don’t come, he ordered. They’ll kill you.

He drifted away to the remembered sound of the Devil’s roar.

The woman sometimes called Gris watched Amenadiel for several moments, uncertain of leaving him in this state. She couldn’t do anything else to help him though. This was not her skillset.

She left him there, hidden behind the same boxes she’d used as a refuge before. She glanced at the dried red pool near the door, the slight trail scraped by the tip of his shoe as he dragged his feet. She scuffed the mark as best she could. There wasn’t time for more.

She stepped from the room and made sure the door latched. She didn’t have a key. Her hand rested on the door handle for several seconds as she considered her options.

Her best plan was to keep them all as far away from this door as she could. That would be easy enough. She just needed the fight to start somewhere else.

Gris pulled her hand back and turned to walk down the hallway. She stopped after her first step, pulling her extended foot back in line with her planted heel. Mazikeen Smith stood barely ten feet away, curved blades in both hands.

They stood in silence. Mazikeen’s blades glistened as she adjusted her grip. Gris quickly recognized the signs of a trained fighter – the stance, the relaxed tension, the focus. She wasn’t in a hurry.

Gris drew her lips in slightly. Mazikeen’s nostrils widened, sniffing the air.

“Smells like blood in here,” she said. “Did I miss the fun?”

“Mazikeen Smith,” Gris said, her accent solidly Colombian for the first time in years. “They’ve been told to kill you immediately.”

Mazikeen narrowed her eyes and tilted her head. She laughed, a quiet scoff in the back of her throat.

“’They,’ huh?” Mazikeen twirled both knives and smirked. “And who are you?”

Gris looked to the side. Her fingers flexed. She rested one hand on a hip, considering the question. She met Mazikeen’s eyes again, shook her head once, and shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

The hand on her hip shot out of sight and back, re-emerging with the Remington and raising in the same moment the bounty hunter shot forward. Mazikeen was faster than expected; Gris barely managed to aim and fire a shot before she was forced to dodge a blade slashing for her throat.

She dropped the gun, abandoning the weapon which wouldn’t help her in close quarters, and braced her palms together for an elbow strike to Mazikeen’s stomach. The bounty hunter barely grunted, though the force pushed her back a single step. Gris aimed a punch driven from her core at Mazikeen’s face next, trying to drive the bounty hunter back. Mazikeen turned her face enough to take a glancing blow across her ear. She drove a knee into Gris’ stomach instead, driving her back against the wall. Gris used the wall as an anchor to raise both legs and push her feet into Mazikeen’s waist, forcing the bounty hunter’s body to bend in half and stagger backwards into the opposite wall.

Gris already knew she couldn't win this fight with strength. She was still struggling to regain her breath, far longer than she ever had in the past. She loosened her legs to fall to the ground, tilted her body to the right, and slipped her fingers into position on the dropped Remington’s grip and trigger. She raised the weapon and fired twice before one of the curved blades clanged into the metal with enough force to make her fingers ring with pain. She dropped the gun with a grunt, tried to reach with her other hand, and missed when it was kicked out of reach. A thick boot shoved her fully onto her back and planted squarely in the center of her chest, holding her against the ground.

She dropped her head back, meeting Mazikeen’s eyes again. Between the earlier knee strike and the boot on her sternum, she rasped heavily. One of her hands grabbed the toes of the boot holding her down. Mazikeen smiled, flipping the knife she’d kept around one finger. Her foot shifted slightly as she readjusted her balance. Gris jolted her other arm up into the back of Mazikeen’s calf and twisted her body into the curve of the bounty hunter’s knee, forcing the joint to bend. Mazikeen fell to one knee and Gris tried to keep her weight pushing forward and down to pin the stronger woman on her front, the best position to nullify all four limbs.

Mazikeen rolled her thigh forward and allowed her upper body to crash backward, driving a sharp elbow into Gris’ cheek. The smaller woman huffed a sharp breath through her nose and twisted her face, half-blinded by blood now flowing from a split eyebrow.

Mazikeen’s weight lifted a moment later. Gris wiped at the blood with one hand and tried to push herself up with the other. Her gasping echoed in the hallway. A hand grabbed her shoulder and rolled her onto her back again. She lashed out a fist, unwilling to give up. This fight was too close to Amenadiel’s door.

She didn’t hit anything. Her fist fell to the ground; the blood gave one eye a red mist. She blinked away as much as she could and saw that Mazikeen stood near her legs, this time outside of range. Gris pushed herself back against the wall and the bounty hunter let her; she forced herself to sit up, wiping blood every few seconds, meeting stare for stare. She felt strongly that if she broke eye contact for even a moment, she would die.

“I think we need to talk,” the bounty hunter said. She licked her tongue across the front of her top teeth. Her eyes raked down Gris’ body, then back to her face. Gris felt the violence coming before it struck.

Mazikeen stepped forward in another moment and snapped her boot down, striking Gris’ calf with a sharp crack. The bones inside gave way; Gris clawed at the ground and wall and gasped at the pain. She didn’t scream. She’d been trained better than that.

“Stay here,” Mazikeen said while Gris sucked air through her teeth. And then she was gone.

In the course of a single day, Chloe’s life had turned into a circus of biblical nonsense. It hadn’t been twelve full hours since she’d been forced to acknowledge the truth about her partner, and now she was sitting outside of the Sinnerman’s Los Angeles hideout while the Devil and a demon went to confront Cain, the first murderer and son of Adam and Eve.

It was ridiculous. It was impossible. It was entirely true, and she was a bit desperate to tell Dan the reality of the situation, if only to commiserate about how quickly her life had descended into celestial shenanigans.

She’d had enough time this afternoon to think about why Lucifer concealed his identity for so long. She’d created a document on her laptop and begun listing out all of the stories she could remember him telling her, from cutting off his wings to Pierce’s true identity and everything in between. She’d created a table, with one side labeled “sore subjects” and the other labeled “misc info.” The wings and his father – Father? – were under “sore subjects,” along with whatever had been bothering him both times he tried to entice someone into shooting him. She added “whatever Candy was about” to that column too, though she doubted that was a sore subject for him.

Creating both lists had steadily increased her irritation until it morphed into burning anger. So many stories made both more and less sense with her newfound context. How did the Devil get kidnapped? Was Charlotte Richards really his stepmother? What was with Candy?

And now she had another topic to add to the “misc info” column: vulnerable around me.

Why? Why? What a completely random, unnecessary development which also explained a shockingly large number of past events between them. His shock when her bullet hurt him; his quick healing and general fearlessness of pain; his demand she leave the room to pursue a serial poisoner while he did something involving a room filling with deadly gas.

He was vulnerable in her presence, and she didn’t know what to do with that information.

“How long do we need to wait?” Dan was watching the building with far more alertness than Chloe, lost in her thoughts as she was. She pursed her lips. She hated this plan because she hated sitting and waiting. They couldn’t call for backup because Pierce was the Lieutenant, which meant the entire precinct was compromised. She couldn’t go in because Lucifer would be in danger with her there, and he wanted the upper hand for this fight. She couldn’t tell Dan why she couldn’t go in because it would sound like she now believed Lucifer’s stories – which was true, but she couldn’t admit that to Dan. She didn’t think he’d take it well.

Muffled gunfire echoed from inside, and Chloe hated this plan even more. Lucifer had given her a good reason to stay away. A solid, undeniably reasonable request. Every part of her still wanted to draw her gun and enter the building. Her scowl was growing teeth.

“Chlo’,” Dan said, “are we really gonna just sit here and wait?”

“We have to.” I can’t go in.

“What did Lucifer say to you?” Dan’s voice was tense with suspicion. “He can’t order you around, you’re his partner.”

“He didn’t order me, he – "

She stopped. He needed her to stay outside of the building because she made him vulnerable. That was…not fine, but understandable. But Dan didn’t, and Dan was a trained cop too.

She turned to her ex and saw that he’d already started opening his door. More muffled gun shots echoed against the concrete around them. She stretched a hand out and waited until Dan met her eyes.

“Be careful,” she said.

“You got it,” Dan said. He closed the door quietly, knowing better than to slam it closed during a semi-stakeout, and followed Lucifer’s path. He was inside the building moments later, gone from sight, and Chloe took deep, calming breaths. Both men who meant the most to her were inside that building, and only one of them was supposedly invulnerable. She was at least used to worrying for Dan’s safety; being married to a cop wasn’t less stressful just because she was a cop, too.

She couldn’t help them from inside, but she could secure the building from the outside. She climbed out of the car, gun at the ready, and began to quietly clear any door she found. She decided to stay on this side of the building, since this was where both Lucifer and Dan had entered. She slid close to the door they’d both used, a side access for employees and shifty criminals to come and go out of sight of the main road. She would wait here, guarding the door and feeling less useless for it.

Her decision was rewarded less than ten minutes later when the handle of the door rattled. It slid open on well-oiled hinges, silent and smooth and staying open without a doorstop or mechanism to prop it open. Chloe stayed hidden behind the door, waiting to see who was revealed. She assumed she wouldn’t be lucky enough to point a gun right in Marcus’ face, but she did hope.

A tight gasp of breath indicated pain on the part of whoever was exiting the building. Their steps were laborious and slow, even dragging. They were injured, which made Chloe’s job that much easier.

She counted to ten, giving the person a chance to clear the door. When the breathing was far enough away, Chloe slammed the door closed with her foot and raised her gun.

“LAPD! Freeze!”

The person, a woman, leaned heavily against the wall, one leg angled in a way which Chloe knew meant there was a break under the jeans. One hand remained in place against the wall; the other twitched, then rose slowly, trembling. The breath remained tight and heavy. Her entire body was shaking. Based on the break, Chloe thought this might be from shock rather than fear.

She circled around, gun steady, until she caught sight of the woman’s face. She was pale despite her dark complexion; her face was partially bloodied due to a split eyebrow. Her breathing was ragged and there was a developing bruise on one cheek. Her eyes were shockingly present.

“La Tunda.” Chloe didn’t recognize her face, but process of elimination meant that this could only be one person. She matched some of the descriptions, although the hair was the wrong length.

“Please let me go,” she said in an accented, tensely painful tone. Chloe felt pity surge inside of her despite herself; this woman had shot Lucifer point blank, causing a cascade of events resulting in the Devil and the Detective standing several feet apart in a filthy Los Angeles alley while his wings glowed behind him. In some small way, Chloe did owe her for learning the truth. Unfortunately for this woman, she had killed countless others on behalf of the Ruiz cartel. Chloe couldn’t let her go. And the look on her face seemed to know this.

She slumped against the wall, some level of fight leaving her entirely. She blinked baleful, tired eyes at Chloe. Her jaw was clenched, her leg raised slightly from the ground. Chloe glanced down at the unnaturally held leg. The break must be bad if she didn’t try to attack or run.

“Can you walk?” She plainly could, but Chloe didn’t want to assume that whatever willpower had brought her all of the way here was still going. The woman sighed and shook her head once. Chloe wondered if this was a trick. This was LA after all, and special effects makeup wasn’t out of the question.

“Will you help someone?” The woman’s eyes were thick with water. When she blinked, a tear rolled down one bloodied cheek, leaving a ragged trail. She wasn’t crying; the shock was wearing off, and she was in a tremendous amount of pain. Chloe felt that surge of pity again.

“Who?” Chloe asked gently, keeping her voice even. Outside of signs of pain, the woman showed nothing – no fear, no anxiousness, not even a tremble of murderous intent. Instead there was a slight hopefulness, even relief. Perhaps she was tired of all of this.

“A-Amenadiel,” she said, the word slurred. She was starting to pass out. Chloe made a decision and holstered her gun. She stepped in close and took the free arm, leaning the smaller woman against her.

“Come on, let’s sit you down,” she said. She suspected that once they reached the car the woman would need to sit stretched out on the back seat, which was fine – Dan and Lucifer would figure out seating arrangements when all this was over, because they would both return and be completely fine.

She guided the woman to the cruiser. Every step was more of a struggle as the woman’s adrenaline drained away into a delirious type of grogginess. She’d pass out soon enough.

“Where’s Amenadiel?” she asked. If the woman answered then Chloe would text all three people she knew inside the building and trust that one of them would follow through. Unfortunately the woman was struggling to maintain consciousness, so Chloe amended her question.

“Is he inside?”

“Yes,” the woman replied, so faint that Chloe had to strain to hear anything at all. They were at the car and she opened the back door. She guided La Tunda, murderer extraordinaire, into the seat and helped her arrange herself in a way that wouldn’t jostle her leg with every movement. The woman was out; they would have to talk more later.

The cold press of a gun barrel slid against her temple. She froze, eyes flickering to the side. She couldn’t quite make out who this was from the corner of her eye, but she knew his presence.

“Shut the door,” Cain said. Chloe leaned back and slammed the door as loudly as she could, hoping the sound might alert someone. Cain was still close enough that she could feel his presence. The metal stayed at her temple.

“Don’t move,” he said. He pressed close and gripped her holster, pulling it free from her jeans and tucking her gun against his waist.

“Passenger side,” he said. Chloe considered screaming, until she remembered that if Lucifer burst from the building he might get a bullet to the head. And it would kill him, because she made him vulnerable.

She pulled the passenger door open and slid inside. Cain shut the door for her, ever the gentleman, and moved to the driver’s side. Chloe had five seconds to consider leaping from the car and running. The thought of Dan or Lucifer with a bullet in their head kept her still.

Cain sat himself in the driver’s seat. He turned and looked at the woman in the back seat, considering, and raised his gun in the direction of her head.

“No!” Chloe yelled, reaching out to grip his arm. He was stronger than her by enough that she couldn’t move him, but he did pause and look at her. Would he listen to her, just like Lucifer did? Did she have some kind of power over immortal biblical figures?

“Please, don’t kill her,” she said. She tugged at his wrist, trying to draw his aim away. “She’s no threat.”

Cain studied her, plainly considering this as part of his strategy to keep her in line. He pulled his gun back and nodded. Chloe dropped her hands to her knees and gripped them both. Her palms were sweaty.

“Keys?” Cain was still watching her. She reached into her pocket and pulled them out, dropping them into his waiting hand. He started the car, shifted gears, and began to drive them away from all of her potential help.

“Chloe,” said Cain. “Let’s talk.”

When Cain found Amenadiel’s empty chains, he sighed. It seemed that Lucifer had already found his brother and freed the former angel, slipping past everyone in the building to do it. He had his wings, which gave him dimensional flexibility. It was a setback which required an immediate shift of plans. If Cain wasn’t about to regain immortality, he didn’t need to confront Lucifer today. He needed to regroup and shift focus.

He heard gunfire echo through the building and made the decision to vacate the premises. His men had their orders and were disposable. He could leave now, regroup, and find a better time to pursue Chloe. At this point, his primary focus was getting out of LA and developing a new identity. The only hitch in that plan was ensuring Chloe was by his side, but he was patient enough to work on a new strategy rather than try to force a confrontation now.

If it became too much of a hassle, he could turn his back on the life he’d imagined with Chloe. He wanted her, badly, but not enough to waste the rest of his now-limited life trying to have her. He would sacrifice that dream as he had thousands of others. He anticipated regret, maybe even sadness, but it had to be done.

The thought did hurt, more than anticipated. As he exited the building to leave his men to their fates, he considered that he had loved Chloe, more than anyone in thousands of years. He’d let her in enough that he’d softened, and with that softness came emotions long buried.

It would take time to mourn the life he could’ve had, but ultimately it wasn’t the worst loss of his long existence. He’d buried children, after all.

When he stepped from the building, he considered that perhaps God really had forgiven him and was now making up for lost time. Because there, right there, was Chloe with her back to him, helping a clearly injured Tundita toward her beat up cruiser. The two women were entirely focused on this task, giving him ample opportunity to draw his gun, wait for Chloe to finish settling Tundita into the back seat, and press the gun to her head without being noticed.

Chloe froze. He saw her eyes glance in his direction, and though she probably couldn’t see him, she was smart enough to know what was happening here.

Well, part of it. She couldn’t know the cosmic destinies which seemed to align over them in this moment.

“Shut the door,” he said, and Chloe complied. She was moving slowly but she didn’t raise her hands. She was angry. He told her not to move and disarmed her, though he knew she probably had a knife somewhere on her person. He’d have to keep an eye out for that.

For the first time today, he felt nervous, almost shy. He wanted her, desperately, and as such she was his weakness. He wanted her to want him back, but her presence here meant something dark. She wasn’t wearing his ring anymore, which caused a sharp pain in his chest. He’d known that she made her choice, and he’d known what that choice was, but even after learning Lucifer was the actual God-damned Devil…

He sat in the driver's seat and changed plans again. Chloe would come with him because she understood that she was a hostage. Tundita was injured and of no use to him, and passed out besides. He turned with the intention of putting an end to her misery, and Chloe’s sudden jolt to stop him caught him by surprise.

It shouldn’t have, he knew. She was compassionate, sympathetic, kind. She wouldn’t let him execute someone if she could help it. He’d planned to have Dan as his leverage, thinking in terms of who would keep Chloe the most obedient, but he realized now his error. He didn’t need someone she knew; he didn’t even need a good person. He needed anyone at all, and a grown but brutally injured woman with a slight resemblance to Chloe’s daughter was a solid bet.

His love swelled. He could learn to be better for her. She’d softened the Devil himself; she’d accepted him over time, grown to care for him and love him and choose him despite his flaws. She could do the same for Cain. She would do the same for Cain. He was a patient man, after all, full of thousands of years of experience with manipulation and deceit. He could learn to be better for her, become a better man for her, show her why he was the better choice and even grow old with her and die wrapped in her loving arms.

Just not yet. He asked for the keys, turned on the car, shifted gears, and began to pull away.

“Chloe,” said Cain. “Let’s talk.”