by SM Reine
Their relationship stretched all the way back to her college years.
Fritz was in the front row, too. He didn’t know Ander was there. He was watching the graduation with pride and love and not an ounce of suspicion.
“Can you carry her?”
“Of course I can carry her, you stupid woman.”
Another hard jolt of memory. The images were duller and blurrier. Time was slipping away from Isobel.
Hope walked out of the bedroom in Fritz’s apartment. She could hear her husband arguing with Lucrezia behind her, and she didn’t really care to get involved.
She felt a strange mix of emotions that she didn’t expect. It had been easy to agree to Fritz’s terms of polyamory when she thought she would never care if he slept with other women.
But Hope did feel strange. She felt…possessive.
That was all wrong, of course. Hope had never planned to possess Fritz. She hadn’t meant to stay with him long enough to care if he had affairs with other women.
She only wanted him to belong to her.
Fritz had caught up with her outside his condo, cheek still red from where Lucrezia had slapped him. “Are you okay?” he’d asked, touching Hope’s arm with such tenderness.
“I’m fine,” Hope had replied blandly. “I was just startled.”
“I didn’t think you’d be visiting, else I would have taken Lucrezia elsewhere.” That was his concern—that he’d taken the Italian woman home with him, not that he’d taken her somewhere to fuck at all.
Hope nodded and kissed her husband. She tried to tell herself that she felt so confused because she had been hoping to snoop through Fritz’s condo, not because she had found him engaging in the kinds of extramarital relations that they’d both agreed were fine.
She never quite came to terms with the fact that she was, in fact, jealous of Lucrezia.
Memory darkened.
Isobel felt like she was moving, but she had no sense of which way she traveled.
She was already in Hell. Where could her soul go after that?
Another spark.
Hope was in Fritz’s office at their shared condominium, sliding the bookcase shut. The bolts locked with a heavy click.
“What are you doing?”
She didn’t immediately react to the sound of her husband’s voice, even though her pounding heart leaped into her throat and adrenaline washed over her.
He had discovered her in the office seconds after leaving the hidden room.
If she wasn’t careful, then everything was going to be lost.
She couldn’t let on to the fact that she’d been exploring places that she wasn’t meant to be. She shouldn’t have even known that the secret room behind his office existed, much less have accessed it so that she could travel to the depths of Hell.
Act natural.
At least she wasn’t holding the ledgers at the moment. If she’d spent even a few more seconds studying the ledgers, he would have caught her in the act, and then there would have been no explaining her behavior away.
She returned the book she had been holding to its shelf.
Act natural. He doesn’t know. Just act natural.
Hope had a small smile fixed to her lips as she turned. Not enough to look suspicious—just an expression of pleasant surprise, as though she were happy that Fritz had found her in his office. “You’re home,” she said, wondering if there was any dust left in her hair. She didn’t dare run her fingers through it again. “I thought you had an interview.”
“I did. It went quicker than I expected.” Fritz was wearing a suit, which looked entirely natural on him, even though he complained endlessly about the kinds of events that forced him to dress up. “The Office of Preternatural Affairs wants me to work for them.”
She loosened his tie and dropped it on the desk. Her hands somehow weren’t shaking. “And?”
He laughed. “Not a goddamn chance. Can you imagine that? Me, behind a desk?”
“Not really, but you’d be safer there.”
“There are other benefits, too. The women around the office are hot,” Fritz said agreeably. “The woman who interviewed me, this Italian named Lucrezia…” He gave a low whistle.
Hope gave a little laugh and rolled her eyes because it was what she would have normally done—when she wasn’t absolutely petrified.
Petrified, and furious.
She’d only taken five minutes to flip through the ledgers of slaves bought in the sixties. Five minutes. Ander had instructed her not to look—that he’d get copies of those pages for her to study later.
But Hope hadn’t been able to resist. She had to know what the Friederlings had done to the members of her family they had abducted from Earth.
Now she knew that they had been bought and never sold.
Hope’s grandparents, her aunts and uncles, several cousins—all kidnapped by the House of Belial, and all had died in the mines before being resold.
She tried to surreptitiously glance behind her, making sure that she had completely closed the secret door into the portal room. She couldn’t see any sign that she’d been in there. She would have felt better if she could get him out of the room so she could check again.
Fritz dragged her to him, hands tight around her waist.
His kiss was her absolution. The verification that he’d missed the smell of brimstone on her skin. Fritz had no clue that Hope had gone to the Palace of Dis and taken his grandfather’s ledgers.
Guilt writhed in her belly as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders to deepen the kiss.
She’d accomplished her mission. She’d finally given Ander the information he wanted. It was years of hard work come to fruition, and now she could relax, celebrate, and start on the divorce paperwork.
Why didn’t she feel triumphant?
“There it is,” said a voice, deep and masculine, with far more resonance than any other voice Isobel had heard before. He spoke with total authority. He spoke directly into her mind in present day, separate from Hope Jimenez’s memories.
There was a man crawling inside her head, combing through her thoughts. There was no doubt that he could see the things that she was seeing.
“You took them. You took the ledgers and brought this down on yourself.”
Isobel couldn’t respond. The mysterious voice was right—she had taken the ledgers.
She had done more than that. She had taken a lot of things from the Friederlings. Other files, trinkets from the House of Belial, weapons and artifacts. She had passed them all on to Ander for resale.
It was surprising how many people wanted to buy things from the fabled Friederling family.
And it surprised her how much she had wanted to help Ander do it.
“But why?” asked the voice. “Why did you hate the Friederlings?”
Isobel fell deeper into memory.
Hope Jimenez stumbled through the door of her dorm room, Vena draped over her shoulder. Her roommate hadn’t woken up since being attacked by the incubus, but Fritz had reassured her that she would be fine. She just needed to sleep off the assault and have a big breakfast in the morning.
Fritz Friederling. She felt weird butterflies thinking the name—a strange mixture of attraction and revulsion and fear.
Hope wished she hadn’t met him.
She dropped Vena into her bed, removing her shoes and pulling the sheets up to her chin. Then she closed the drapes and turned on the light beside her bed.
There was a man sitting in the chair at the foot of Hope’s bed.
She froze at the sight of him.
He was a heavyset older man with slitted catlike eyes and a cigarette cradled between two of his fingers.
“I’m Ander.” He’d always talked like that back then, introducing himself as though they’d never met. “I understand that you’ve met someone interesting today. Someone named Friederling.”
“Fritz,” she said reflexively. She glanced at Vena. The girl didn’t move at the sound of t
heir voices.
“Fritz Friederling. Yes.” Ander’s smile broadened.
She sighed, shook her head. Hope didn’t feel up to Ander’s game that day. She was feeling tired and conflicted. “You say that like you didn’t send me onto that yacht with Vena to meet him in the first place. You’re the one who got us the invitations and—”
Ander pushed her hair over her shoulder, patted her upper arm. “We don’t know each other. We don’t have arrangements. Never forget.”
“Nobody’s listening,” Hope said. “Vena’s not even—”
He rested his finger on her lips. “There are always ears.” She nodded mutely, agreeing without speaking. He would have his way. Ander always got his way. “What did you think of the youngest Friederling son?”
Her stomach flip-flopped again.
“He seems okay,” Hope said. “You didn’t tell me that he was going to be there. Warning would have been nice, especially since I only thought I was there to steal these.” She tossed a small notebook at him. It was a list of coordinates the Friederling X had been visiting. She’d taken it from the bridge while Vena had been partying early in the night.
“Okay? Just okay?” Ander asked, thumbing through the notebook. “I thought you might hit it off a little more than that. You’re his type.”
She couldn’t help but giggle. “I gathered that.” God, it was disgusting how much she was swooning over that asshole. The whole Friederling family was evil. She was a traitor just to be thinking about how he’d looked while stripping off his shirt to dive into the ocean.
Ander’s expression clouded at her laugh.
“You haven’t forgotten why we’re doing this, have you?”
“No,” Hope said quickly, smoothing her features. “I haven’t forgotten.” How could she forget that the Friederlings were responsible for the fact that everyone on her father’s side of the family was missing—presumably dead?
Ander was the only way she’d ever be able to get answers.
And maybe a little revenge while she was at it.
“Good. In that case, I’d like to talk to you about your long-term prospects with Fritz Friederling.”
“How long-term are we talking?” Hope asked. “Rest of the semester?”
Ander chucked her gently on the chin. “How about…until death do you part?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
ISOBEL WOKE UP WITH tears dampening her cheeks.
Tears.
She touched her fingertips to her skin, marveling at the moisture. Her pinky finger throbbed at the contact. She pried her eyes open, spread out her fingers, looked at the nails. The nail that she’d torn off at Vance Hartley’s grave was still missing, but now the wound was bleeding fresh blood.
Pain wiggled in at the edges of consciousness, making her aware of all her other injuries. The cut on her hip, the ache in her knees, her burned fingertips.
Pain and blood and tears. The beautiful symptoms of being alive.
“She’s awake,” Ariane announced, seated at Isobel’s bedside. A man loomed in the corner of the room—not Fritz, but Judge Abraxas.
Isobel’s heart sank. “What happened?”
“You almost died.” Ariane helped Isobel sit up and pushed a small potion bottle into her hands. “Drink this.”
The fluid inside the bottle was a faint shade of gold. Cèsar would have been able to identify it—potions were right up his alley—but Isobel had no idea what it would do. Considering that she’d been unconscious and at Ariane and Abraxas’s mercy, she doubted it was deadly.
Isobel drank.
Warmth spread through her limbs. The bleeding at her missing fingernail slowed.
“You should be back to normal after a few days of rest,” Ariane said, patting her knee. “How do you feel right now?”
Isobel took quick inventory of her body. It hurt, but not nearly as much as the realization that she still had every one of her memories. “Terrible,” she admitted.
“Good. You wouldn’t feel terrible if you were dead,” Ariane said.
No kidding.
Isobel couldn’t bring herself to look at the robed figure in the corner, even though his silence was as conspicuous as though he’d been slamming giant cymbals together. “Did the Judge…?”
“When your contract ended, your mind was completely restored for a few minutes as your body shut down,” Ariane said. “At Fritz’s urging, the Judge read your memories, determined the location of the ledgers, and Onoskelis signed off on your revised contract. Here.”
She exchanged the empty potion bottle for a paper.
It was a copy of a new contract. It was very much like Isobel’s original contract with the end date and memory stipulations removed.
There was nothing on it about Isobel being alive.
“I’m still dead. Aren’t I?”
“Considering that you’ve been suspended in the moments before final death, ‘undead’ might be the better way of putting it,” Ariane said. “You were too far gone to do anything else. Even the librarians aren’t capable of necromancy.”
But Isobel wasn’t going to die permanently, she was healing, and she remembered everything.
Including her betrayal of Fritz.
Isobel buried her face in her hands. Those memories felt far worse than any amount of damage inflicted to her body. Now that she knew Hope Jimenez completely—the woman she had been, the kinds of choices she made—Isobel wished that she didn’t.
She had only married Fritz so that she could fuck over his family.
A horrifying thought struck her. If the Judge had pulled those memories from her mind, had he told Fritz what he saw? Did he know that she had been working with Ander the whole time?
She didn’t ask.
“Thanks,” Isobel told the silent, hooded figure in the corner.
Judge Abraxas exited the room. His cloak whispered on the stone as he moved, and it was the only sound that he made the entire time that he was there.
“He’s a good man,” Ariane said after the door swung shut behind him. “Better than most people would give him credit for. And very sympathetic, at times.” She sounded affectionate. Isobel wasn’t stupid—she knew infatuation when she heard it, and the mortal hostess of the Palace of Dis was definitely infatuated with Abraxas. Even if she was also married to the Inquisitor.
Considering all of Isobel’s sins, she was far beyond the ability to judge Ariane for…well, just about anything.
“I guess I owe the both of you,” Isobel said.
“I’m only doing my job as hostess. It’s my job to take care of all humans in the Palace in whatever capacity they require.” Her smile was undeniably beautiful, though a little impish.
“Hell of a job.”
“I enjoy it,” Ariane said. “It’s stimulating.”
Isobel picked at the hem of the blanket folded over her lap. “Where’s Fritz? Have you seen him?”
“He’s gone back to Earth. He indicated that he doesn’t plan on returning to the Palace of Dis in the foreseeable future. He did, however, want me to tell you that the portal in his home will remain open until you follow him.”
Being able to get back to New York was the last thing that Isobel had been worried about.
“Can I ask where you guys found the ledgers?” Isobel asked.
The door to Fritz’s room swung open. “I gave the ledgers to the librarians for cataloging when I heard they were desired.”
Lucrezia di Angelis entered. She had shed her white suit for more traditional clothing appropriate to the City of Dis—veils the same shade of crimson as Judge Abraxas’s robes. The blonde hair and red cloth were striking against each other.
Isobel hugged the blankets to her chest, feeling strangely vulnerable in the presence of the vice president. “You did?”
Her mind whirled. If Lucrezia di Angelis had been able to give the ledgers to the librarian, then…
“We wouldn’t have gotten them quickly enough if Lucrezia hadn’t already been on her
way,” Ariane said. “You’re very lucky, Isobel.”
Lucky. That didn’t seem like the right word for it.
Lucrezia didn’t smile at the praise from Ariane. “I’ll take privacy, Mrs. Kavanagh.”
“Very well.” Ariane patted Isobel’s knee. “If you need anything before you leave, I’m reachable by dropping a word with any of the guards.”
Isobel couldn’t speak well enough to thank her.
Once Ariane was gone, Lucrezia took the chair beside Isobel’s bed. She didn’t like having the vice president so close. There was no reason to think that Lucrezia would try to stab her or something, but the woman stank of smugness—and danger.
“You bought the ledgers from Ander,” Isobel said. “You bought something that belonged to Fritz that was being fenced on the infernal black market.”
“I returned them once a need became obvious,” Lucrezia said. “It’s lucky that I was the one who bought them, isn’t it?”
“I’m sure you’ve kept copies.”
She inspected her manicure. “I did buy them.”
“You’re fucking evil. Fritz works for you. He’s loyal to the Office of Preternatural Affairs. And you bought things that were stolen from his family!”
Lucrezia’s laugh was high and tittering, and Isobel’s cheeks heated at the cruel sound of it. “When you consider that you married a man solely to steal from him, calling any involved party more evil than another is terribly naïve.”
Isobel’s heart knotted.
“So why’d you save me?” she asked. “What do you want in return?”
“For now, I just want to make sure that you know why you’re still alive. I wanted you to know that it was only my mercy that saved you.” Lucrezia stood, rearranging her veils. “This won’t be the last time that you and I have to deal with each other. It will be helpful if you’re appropriately grateful next time you hear from me.” She checked her watch. “I’ll see you on Earth, Hope. Or do you prefer Isobel?”
Isobel didn’t manage to think of a response before the woman swept out of the room, leaving her alone in Hell.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AFTER HER LONG DAYS in Hell, Isobel was relieved to return to Earth.