Cipher

by Larissa Ione

  Sure, because jeans were great fighting gear. But they did look amazing on the guy, ripped and stained as they were. Months of captivity read like a horror novel on his pants, but the real story was told in the spark of resistance in Cipher’s watchful blue eyes and the cocksure way he carried his lean, muscular body.

  He hadn’t broken yet, but he would. At least, he would if Bael didn’t get him killed first.

  Lyre glared at Bael, an ancient fallen angel whose impulsive cruelty and recklessness made him as stupid as it did dangerous. But his chaotic, bloodthirsty nature was exactly what had allowed him to excel as one of Satan’s top generals.

  “If Cipher dies, you lose your best shot at getting Azagoth’s attention,” she pointed out.

  “Oh, I have The Grim Reaper’s full attention.” Next to her, Bael smiled coldly, his ebony gaze fixed on the battle below. “And Cipher isn’t my only ace, my love.”

  She forced a smile of her own, but damn, she hated it when he called her, or any female, that. He knew nothing of love. All he knew was hate.

  “I’m sure you do,” she said, hoping he didn’t notice the catch in her voice as Cipher dove to the blood-soaked ground to avoid a swing.

  Cipher rolled and swept out his leg, catching the Nightlash behind the knees. Bael nodded in approval as the Nightlash hit the ground hard on his back. The five hundred or so demons in the stands booed. Demons always sided with demons over fallen angels.

  Lyre generally didn’t give a shit either way, but as Cipher wrenched the aural away from the Nightlash, she gave a mental sigh of relief.

  Not that she gave a shit about Cipher, of course. She hadn’t known Cipher when they’d been Heavenly angels, so she had no prior relationship with him, and while she hadn’t been a fallen angel for much longer than he had, she already knew to never get attached to anyone. Sheoul, the demon realm humans called Hell, was a violent place, and no one could be trusted.

  So while she couldn’t afford to care about Cipher, she did like her job as his handler. She’d balked when Bael had first tasked her with what she’d viewed as a punishment. But it turned out that being assigned to gain Cipher’s trust had been a welcome break from her usual duties as Bael’s errand girl.

  Errand girl.

  So mundane. Such a waste of her talents. So not the reason she’d willingly submitted to one of Hell’s most powerful warlords after losing her wings.

  She wanted revenge on a lot of people, and if Bael played the board right he could make it happen.

  But not if he kept sacrificing game pieces.

  Cipher plunged the aural into the Nightlash’s throat, and the crowd erupted in cheers as blood spewed from the demon’s mouth. They might root for the demon during the fight, but they were happy to see anyone die.

  “He’s good,” Bael grunted, a rare note of admiration in his hell-smoked voice. “But his hand-to-hand combat abilities are not the skills I need from him.” He turned to her, his eyes glinting with black ice, his handsome face and mundane slicked-back chestnut hair concealing the monster that lived behind the mask. “I need what’s in his head. I’m growing impatient.”

  “Impatient?” She snorted. “You once spent an entire century torturing someone for information.”

  His gaze turned inward, his full lips twisting into a cruel smile as he relived the incident she’d only read about in the history books of Heaven’s Akashic Library.

  “That was back when the idea of Armageddon was merely a dream,” he said. “Now we know we have fewer than a thousand years to prepare for Satan’s release from the prison that Revenant, that fucking traitor, put him in.”

  It was best to not let Bael focus on his hatred for Revenant, especially since, publicly, he professed support for the current ruler of Hell. If he realized he’d spoken aloud, he’d punish her for his own mistake.

  The narcissistic asshole.

  Quickly, she diverted his attention back to the victor of the fight and gestured to Cipher as he shoved to his feet in the arena below. He’d shown such remarkable resilience no matter what Bael threw at him—extra remarkable, given that with his wings bound, his body’s natural ability to rapidly regenerate should have been reduced. But somehow, he healed quickly and maintained his wits.

  “Time is short,” she admitted. “But Cipher has been here only a few months. It could take decades, even centuries, to turn him. You knew that. It’s that very quality, his loyalty to Azagoth, that you desire for yourself. If you want it, you’ll have to break him slowly.”

  “It’s not just his loyalty I desire. I need information.” He reached out and dragged a finger along the length of her black braid.

  She said nothing, gave no reaction as his knuckles brushed the exposed skin of her shoulder, leaving a stinging trail of welts everywhere he touched her. Today was not the day to have worn her favorite camo-print tank top. At least she’d gone for black tactical pants instead of shorts.

  “Since you can’t seem to get what I need from Cipher, I’m sending in Flail. Maybe she can seduce him into giving me what I want.”

  Lyre bit back a curse. Of course it would be Flail. That skank always seemed to find a way to screw her.

  “She’s welcome to try to get something from him,” she said. “But he hates her for betraying him. If not for her, he’d still be comfy-cozy in Sheoul-gra with his friends and working for Azagoth. The only reason he’ll lay his hands on her is to strangle her.”

  “If he’ll give up the information I need, he’s welcome to throttle her. Hell, I’d like to see that.” He gestured to the guards below, signaling them to take Cipher back to his cell. “Tell him I’ll make that deal.”

  Well, now. Wasn’t that interesting? Sycophantic fallen angels like Flail didn’t come a dime a dozen, so for Bael to be cool with her death in trade for intel, it meant he was either desperate or Cipher held some seriously important information. She wondered if Cipher would consider the offer. Even under torture, Cipher hadn’t spilled anything of use against Azagoth, but he might just change his mind if he were allowed to kill the female who was responsible for every minute of his misery.

  Lyre pondered that while she watched as he was escorted, limping, from the arena, blood streaming from dozens of wounds. His blond hair, shorn short when he’d first arrived, hung around his cheeks in limp, damp tangles. He shoved it out of his eyes and scanned the crowd, his gaze rapidly zeroing in and locking with Bael’s.

  The fuck you, I’m not dead message in Cipher’s expression was unmistakable.

  Lyre’s lips twitched in amusement she hoped Bael didn’t notice. But Cipher did.

  His eyes shifted to her, and was it her imagination, or did he look...disappointed?

  Her breath caught. If he was disappointed to see her at this spectacle, it must mean that he was softening toward her. Maybe she could finally get some useful information from him. Something that would earn her Bael’s favor and help her get much desired revenge.

  It was a small hope, but it was something.

  Bael’s hand clamped around the back of her neck, startling her so thoroughly she nearly yelped. “You need to step up your game, Lyre. I expected more from you.”

  Nettle pain stabbed into her skin like a million biting ants. He could turn it off if he desired, and it pissed her off that he chose not to. She’d served him faithfully for more than two years now, and she’d been patient as she waited for the day he fulfilled his promise to her. The day he would deliver pain to those who were responsible for her expulsion from Heaven and the death of the male she’d loved.

  But Bael’s promise was taking too long.

  Snarling, she twisted out of his grip and nearly collided with one of Bael’s Ramreel bodyguards. The odiferous, ram-headed beast stomped his hoof in irritation, but she ignored him.

  It was a little harder to ignore his barnyard stench.

  “Maybe if you allowed me to do what I’m good at,” she snapped, “you’d get better results and I’d be closer to getting justice
.”

  “I don’t give a hellrat’s ass what you’re good at.” A three-eyed raven landed on the railing, and Bael reached out to stroke his pet’s shimmering feathers. “What do I need an expert in demonic history for? I lived it. You learned it from books written by angels.”

  She’d explained this to him a million times, so hey, what was one more? “At the Academy of Angels I also studied the various political factions in Sheoul,” she reminded him. “Later, I was one of the intelligence department’s top analysts. It’s why I came to you after I fell. I can help you build alliances with other warlords as we move toward a confrontation with Heaven. I know who supports Revenant and who plots a coup against him to seat themselves or to re-seat Satan—”

  Pain went off like a bomb in her head, a sudden crack of agony that made her empathize with broken eggs. But instead of yolk, warm, sticky blood oozed from her nose and ears.

  Bael’s voice scrambled her brain inside her shattered skull. “You do not speak of such things in the open, stupid whore!”

  “I’m sorry, my lord,” she rasped, dropping to her knees as the misery wrapped around her entire body and burrowed deep into her bones. She hated submitting to him, hated being so weak and vulnerable, but she’d lived like that in Heaven too. She’d had a lot of practice. “I—I’ll do better.”

  “Yes,” he growled, “you will.”

  He grasped the top of her head and forced her to look up at him as he laughed, his fangs visibly throbbing as he got off on her pain.

  And this, she knew all too well, was merely the foreplay.

  Chapter Two

  Cipher’s nightmares had teeth.

  Lots of them. Hell, even the dreams in which he was living in a Heavenly palace of crystal featured gaping maws lined with rows of razor sharp fangs. The only difference was that in those dreams, the teeth were beautiful instead of dripping with saliva, blood, and bits of flesh.

  And the only thing worse than the nightmares was waking up.

  Cipher groaned as he came to, naked except for the threadbare blanket wrapped around him on the glazed-ice floor of the cell he’d called home for...how long now? Six months? Seven? A hundred?

  Fuck.

  But not to be a total whiner, he did get breaks from the cell. Sometimes he got to visit the Isle of Torture, which was exactly what it sounded like. Lord Bael, the fallen angel who ruled the region, had constructed an island in the middle of a lava river and dedicated it to the art of pain. The question, every time Cipher was put in chains and led from Bael’s glacial palace’s dungeon to the scorched island, was whether he’d be a participant or a spectator.

  Cipher generally preferred being a spectator. But every once in a while Bael would drop him into the arena and force him to fight for his life, and that...that gave him a fucking rush. Who wouldn’t love a chance to brush up on fighting skills and let off some steam? Not to mention the fact that his change in status from an Unfallen angel into a True Fallen angel had given him an appetite for dishing out pain to his enemies.

  Not that, as both a Heavenly and an Unfallen angel, he hadn’t enjoyed serving up some well-deserved death. But now he enjoyed serving his opponents their own innards before they died.

  So yeah, the arena gave him a brief taste of pleasure in this realm of perpetual misery. But even during those precious moments of ecstasy, when his opponent grunted in pain or bled from a wound, two voices whispered in his mind.

  The first belonged to his buddy Hawkyn, laden with disappointment as he uttered the words Cipher imagined Hawk would say if he knew how much evil was seeping into Cipher’s body with every new day spent in Sheoul.

  This isn’t you. You’re decent. Honorable. An idiot, yes, but an honorable one. Fight it, Ciph. Don’t give in to evil. You know what it did to Satan. And Lucifer. And my father.

  No shit. Cipher hadn’t met the first two infamous fallen angels, but he’d worked for Azagoth, the literal Grim Reaper, long enough to have seen what eons of exposure to malevolence did to a person.

  And now he could add Bael and his bastard brother, Moloc, to the list of sadistic, evil-ravaged fallen angels he had firsthand experience with.

  Which brought him to the second voice that spoke in his head when he was getting off on beating down demons in the arena.

  Don’t die, Cipher. Don’t. Die. If you die in Bael’s realm, your soul won’t be whisked away by griminions and taken to Azagoth. It’ll be trapped here, where Bael can torture you for eternity in ways you can’t even imagine.

  Lyre had told him that, but she was wrong. He could imagine it. He’d seen what Azagoth could do to a soul. Still, Cipher would prefer that his soul reside with Azagoth, who was an ally and the father of his best friend, rather than spend the rest of his eternal life with a sadistic motherfucker who hated him.

  The sound of approaching footsteps outside his cell brought him to his feet. Maybe it was time for food. Or, more likely, it was time for another round of torture. If he was lucky, the torture would come in the form of his newest handler, a pretty raven-haired fallen named Lyre.

  His pulse picked up in anticipation, which was a sad measure of how shitty Cipher’s life was; he was actually looking forward to seeing one of his captors. Sure, she was gorgeous, but what intrigued Cipher most was that, unlike everyone else in Bael’s realm, she hadn’t gone completely rotten to the core with evil. Not yet. Which was awesome, because unlike his two handlers before her, she hadn’t strung him up with razor wire and beat the shit out of him. Yes, she’d shoved him into a pit full of demonic piranha once, but only because he’d done the same to her on the first day of her assignment.

  It had been his twentieth attempt at escape, and it had gone as badly as the nineteen before, ending at the wrong end of a Darquethoth torturemaster’s skinning knife. The weird thing was, Lyre hadn’t attended his torture. She never did.

  But she’d been at the arena last night for his latest death match. Had she hoped he’d win? Or had she wanted to see him die? She’d looked like she was having fun, in any case.

  Gotta love good old family entertainment in Hell. He wondered what the concessions stands served. Probably not popcorn and Red Vines.

  The heavy metal lock outside his cell clanked, and the door swung open. He shoved to his feet as the hulking eight-foot tall Ramreel guard moved aside to allow his visitor to enter.

  Curiosity veered sharply to rage at the sight of the flaxen-haired fallen angel who stepped inside, her thigh-high leather boots clacking on the floor as she strutted to the middle of the cell.

  Flail.

  She might have changed her hair color, but the she still reeked of deception. Hatred unlike anything he’d experienced before consumed him, rerouting all rational thought and leaving him with only one goal.

  “You.” Dropping his blanket, he charged her. “You bitch.”

  He was going to kill her with his bare hands.

  He’d wrench her head from her body and impale it on that shard of ice over there, and then he’d—holy fuck!

  A red-hot bolt of agony detonated inside his chest, blasting him backward like a rag doll. His spine crunched into the ice-glazed wall, and he crumpled to the floor. The impact shook the massive icicles that hung from the ceiling like monster fangs, and he cursed his impulsive mistake as dozens broke loose and rained down on him.

  “Hello, baby,” Flail purred. “It’s been a while.”

  “It hasn’t been long enough,” he growled as he sat up, clutching his throbbing chest and wondering where she’d stashed the sledgehammer. “But remind me, how many months has it been since you got me dragged down to Hell?”

  Demons had done the actual dragging, but she’d been the one to call them in when he left the safety of Azagoth’s realm, Sheoul-gra, to help Hawkyn’s sister kill a seriously dangerous demon. As a wingless, powerless Unfallen angel, he’d been exposed and vulnerable, and Bael’s minions had done a grab-and-go. He’d been forced to watch helplessly as his friends ran toward him in a futile
attempt to save his dumb ass. Twenty-four hours later, he’d morphed into a True Fallen angel, with fangs, wings, and no hope of Heavenly redemption.

  Making it worse, the lone benefit of becoming a True Fallen was the restoration of powers, but because his wings had been bound with enchanted twine, he couldn’t access either. He didn’t even know what talents he’d gained. Some might be the evil counterpart to their Heavenly versions. Some might be unique to Sheoul. He had no fucking idea.

  The most maddening part was how he could sense the power inside him, the strength that ran through him like lit kerosene, but he couldn’t touch it. Couldn’t bring it streaming to the surface in the form of a weapon or a healing wave or a telepathic conversation. It sat there, frustratingly out of reach, like a donut in the window of a closed pastry shop.

  Man, he missed donuts.

  “Well?” he prompted. “How many months have I been without donuts?”

  “Seven, I believe.” She shrugged, and one of her breasts nearly popped out of her tight crimson corset. Why did all fallen angels wear those things?

  Not all. Not Lyre.

  No, Lyre was all about being ready for battle, from her boots to the dagger holstered at her hip to her sexy BDU pants or cargo shorts that emphasized a seriously perfect ass. And always a tank top. She could have stepped out of an action RPG, like his Mass Effect character come to breathing, beddable life.

  If his existence ever stopped sucking long enough for him to get an erection even once, she was going to provide him with some serious fantasy material.

  The way Flail used to, before she turned out to be a traitorous evil slutbag.

  “Seven?” He gulped a pained breath. “You don’t know?”

  “Like I keep track.” She rolled her eyes. Her traitorous evil slutbag eyes. “You were one of dozens of Unfallen I’m contractually bound to deliver to Bael and Moloc.”

  The mere names of the twin fallen angels was enough to terrify any sane person, and they weren’t a threat to be sneezed at.