Bound By Lucifer by Aiden Pierce

Chapter Fifteen

Jess

Limbo – Present

When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was the chill. I shivered in the blanket I was wrapped in, my eyes flicking open. I expected to find the view of my white popcorn ceiling. It was what I always woke to in the morning. So foggy confusion slipped into icy realization as my vision instead focused on old cobblestone covered in algae and dripping with stagnant water.

I wasn’t home.

Then it all came slamming back to me.

Siren’s, Lucifer, the contract, the kiss, the impromptu fingerfuck. My core clenched where the phantom sensation of the devil’s infernal touch between my thighs still lingered. My face burned hot as I remembered what I had let him do.

I had let the devil himself into my panties.

Then the bastard had knocked me out and kidnapped me.

Oh God, oh God.

Melanie had warned me about this. She’d said that one day, if I wasn’t careful, Reckless Jess was going to take a sip of the wrong drink from the wrong guy and end up locked in some creep’s basement.

Only instead of some random serial killer’s basement, I had found myself in the devil’s… Well, wherever this was.

“You’re in Siren’s cellar, Kitten,” a voice called from nearby.

I twisted around on the old couch I’d been laid out on, screwing my eyes up to see through the dark. Sitting on a barrel with a glass of wine in hand was Lucifer. He had shed his suit jacket and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his collared shirt, leaving a window of his muscled chest exposed. He lounged there with one leg propped up on the barrel, his back leaning against the stone wall with his expression screwed up in a way that suggested he was actually worried about me.

Jerk.

“What the fuck, Lucifer?” I bolted upright on the couch, scanning Siren’s cellar for any other sign of life, maybe someone who could help me escape. But we were completely alone.

Siren’s cellar looked to be absolutely ancient, packed with barrels upon barrels of wine and by the age of the wood and the rust on the metal rings holding them together, they had to be older than this country. It looked less like an old church basement and more like an ancient crypt. It smelled old, like centuries-old mold and beneath that, the more pleasant fragrance of aged cedar and spiced wine.

At first, I questioned if this place was really a part of Siren’s because it looked too old to be anywhere close to Seattle. But then I spotted cardboard boxes of Bacardi and Tito’s vodka and a few pieces of PVC furniture that matched what I’d seen in Siren’s club scene. It all looked so out of place against the aged barrels of wine and whiskey.

I scanned the space for any kind of windows, or doors for that matter but was stumped to find old doors, dozens of them, some old and rusted and bolted shut with thick chains with links the girth of my forearms, and others with padlocks that I could only guess had been hand forged ages ago. I wasn’t an expert on Hell; I barely remembered reading Paradise Lost and The Devine Comedy from college. Now I wish I had paid a little more attention. But I didn’t have to be an expert to know this was more than Siren’s storage cellar.

“Smart girl,” Lucifer murmured, a smile on his lips that didn’t reach his eyes. He hopped down from the barrel, straightened his shirt with his free hand and slowly strode over to me. I bristled but held my ground. There was nowhere to run. Even if some of the doors without chains or locks could open—doubtful with centuries of oxidized build-up on ancient hinges—I would get lost. And I wasn’t about to play hide and seek with the devil in his creepy labyrinth. There was no escape for me unless I could talk my way out of this.

“Calm down, Kitten. Your heart is racing faster than a hummingbird’s. I don’t want you fainting on me.”

“Seems like you don’t have a problem with me being unconscious, you fucker,” I snarled.

He bunched his brows, a deep V cutting his forehead. “Jessica, I didn’t want to hurt you. That’s never been my intention. I brought you here for your own safety. You don’t understand what kind of danger you’re in.”

“Oh, I think I’m beginning to understand,” I spat, my words dripping venom. I pulled the blanket tighter around me. I was still wearing the Alexander McQueen dress, and while the evening dress was beautiful, it wasn’t exactly functional against the cold of Satan’s dungeon.

“It’s not a dungeon,” he murmured. “It’s a cellar.”

“Stay the fuck out of my head! You have no business invading my life, making empty promises to save my dad, kidnapping me.” I was shaking now, but this time it was not from the cold. Hot, angry tears stung my eyes, and my captor’s form began to blur.

Normally, fear wasn’t an emotion that I ever let touch me. But anyone in this situation would be scared.

“Jessica,” his voice softened. “I have not lied to you once. I will help your father, as promised. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for you to accept the things I’m telling you. But they are all true.”

He stepped closer, eating up the distance between us with every step and the closer he came, the higher my pulse climbed. What was he doing to me? Why was my body reacting this way to him? He was like a drug, one tiny taste and Reckless Jessica was hooked. Meanwhile, Sane Jess was a sobbing, frantic mess because she realized just how fucked our situation was.

He stopped directly in front of me. He was so close I could feel the heat rolling off of him, seeping through the blanket that I was wrapped in, warming me all over.

The thing that bothered me most about all this wasn’t the insane fantasy he was trying to get me to buy into. It was how right it felt being around him. All the stress of my life, all the tension in my muscles, all thoughts of my dad and the stacking bills just kind of faded away. Lucifer’s presence somehow made me feel…at ease. And it was a bit early for succumbing to Stockholm’s Syndrome, even for me.

“You’re at ease because you and I belong together,” Lucifer murmured.

I glared at him through hot tears. “I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.”

I loathed my stupid heart for making a liar out of me. I didn’t hate him. Even though logically, I should hate him. I was supposed to. He kidnapped me, for crying out loud. He claimed it was for my “safety,” but what psycho dragged a woman to a basement that would look right at home on the set of a Hitchcock movie for her safety?

“Look at you. You’re freezing. I should have taken you to the hotel on the Second Circle. But… I brought you here as a last-ditch effort, hoping you would remember something about our old life together.”

I gave an exasperated scoff, shaking my head. “Yeah, a hotel might have been a tad smarter of an idea. This place looks like the set of some slasher film. The only thing missing is bones and blood, and maybe a bone saw—” My blood froze as his words finally sunk straight to my stomach like rocks. “Wait. What do you mean, ‘the Second Circle?’ I thought this was Siren’s Cellar?”

Lucifer’s shoulder stiffened and his gaze dropped to the wine in his glass. “Well, you are in Siren’s cellar. But you’re also on the first layer of the Underworld.”

“What?”

“You’re in Limbo, Jessica.”

Suddenly, I wasn’t cold anymore. My entire body went numb. “L–Limbo? You brought me to Hell?”

“As I said, you’ll be safer here.”

“From who?”

“From the celestials,” he said, his golden eyes lifting to lock with mine.

My heart tightened in my chest. For some crazy reason, I did feel safe with him. But Sane Jess was telling me that was just Reckless Jessica talking, and that girl was going to get me killed.

“Right… So let me make sure I’m following you. Angels, who work for God, want to save me from the devil? Where’s the part where I’m supposed to think this is a bad idea?”

“God has very little to do with this, Jessica. It’s my incessant brother, Michael, the chief of all celestials, who wants to take you from me. ‘Saving’ isn’t exactly what he has in mind. The last time he got his hands on you, he murdered you.”

I wasn’t buying a single word of any of this. It was too crazy.

“I think I would remember getting murdered.”

“You’d be the first,” he said with a melancholy smirk.

“Right, but if I’d actually gotten murdered, I wouldn’t be here now, would I?”

“I already told you, you were reincarnated, Kitten. That’s why you don’t remember anything.”

This was insane. I was just a regular person. My life wasn’t anything extraordinary or out of the ordinary. I was twenty-six, not some ancient reincarnated Queen of Hell.

I folded my arms over my chest and collapsed onto the couch, glaring up at him. “Right. And why would your brother want me dead?”

By the way Lucifer rubbed his temple, I gathered he was growing irritated with all my questions. “I don’t know,” he growled. “My best guess is that he still has a stick up his ass from when Dad assigned us our first wards. I got a hot, stark naked woman with a love of snakes, and no, I don’t mean the animal, and he got a chubby control freak who loved rules and spending a little too much time with the sheep, if you catch my drift.”

I wrinkled my nose. “So I was murdered because Michael was jealous that you got laid?”

Lucifer’s jaw flexed with anger. “Yes. My greatest sin in Father’s so-called ‘Paradise’ was lust, and I got my wings brutally ripped from my body for the trouble and a one-way ticket downstairs on the ‘Father’s Boot to My Ass’ Express. Meanwhile, Michael’s favorite sin is envy, and what did he get for it? A pat on the butt from Father, and a promotion.”

I frowned. Lucifer wasn’t acting like the villainous devil I desperately wanted to believe he was. On the one hand, being kidnapped by the Satan everyone knew and feared would mean certain doom for me. But if he wasn’t that guy, it meant that maybe the angels really were the bad guys. Maybe they really had kidnapped and murdered his queen for petty reasons.

The anguish carved in his face was proof enough that he had lost her, and the anger and betrayal banked in his eyes could very well be Michael’s doing.

Lucifer sat on the couch beside me, his gold eyes bright through the cellar’s murk. He set his glass on a nearby barrel and rested his hand on my knee. My insides heated. His touch was infuriatingly comforting when it had no right to be. I should have shrunk away from him. Instead, I had to battle the urge not to snuggle closer.

“Let me show you what I’m talking about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me prove that you are who I say you are.”

My heart thundered hard in my chest, making my ribs rattle. What he was saying was absolute insanity. I wasn’t a demon queen. I was an overworked ER nurse who loved to forget her problems in weekend-long benders made possible by cheap cosmopolitans and shitty one-night stands. I didn’t let myself buy into fantasies for too long because I was too grounded in the reality that life sucked. But I survived it because come Sunday evening, I’d always set aside Reckless Jess and tuck her away until Friday evening. Come Monday morning, I’d don my scrubs and get back to the grind.

But this was a dangerous Alice in Wonderland situation going on here. Lucifer was the rabbit, and I had a feeling I was about to follow him down a very dangerous path, one where I might not find my way back. Only it wasn’t the rabbit hole I’d be following him down.

It was Hell. And did anyone ever really come back from that?

He squeezed my hand, a grim smile on his lips. “Tell you what. Let me show you our past. Long ago, when I fell from Paradise, I landed in the Ninth Circle, all the way down at the bottom. I met you. I was too stupid to realize then exactly who you were, but it was still the best moment of my life when it had every right to be the worst. I took the throne from Abaddon and decided I was going to crawl my way out of Hell level by level and rebuild it as I went. You came along with me when you didn’t have to. We rebuilt this place together. Let me take you through all nine layers so that you can see what we built together. Then I will show you a memory of us from back then, so you can see what it was when Abaddon ruled.”

I swallowed thickly. “You… You can show me your memories?”

His lips slowly spread into that infernal smile of his that made my thighs quiver. “It goes hand in hand with my ability to read minds. I can also give you my thoughts and memories.” His eyes gleamed with wicked mirth. “I have lots of memories of us. After I show you the important ones of Hell, I can replay all sorts of our salacious evenings spent together. With my handy trick, you can cancel your PornHub Premium subscription.”

My checked burned hot than hellfire. I was sure if anyone ever discovered that I actually paid for pervy crap like that, that I would die of embarrassment on the spot. Then again, I was in Hell.

“They have the higher production stuff behind the paywall.”

“You don’t have to tell me love. I own the company.”

I gapped at him for a long breath. “You’re not the sort of devil I ever imagined.”

“Your fantasies of me are pretty accurate. Well, with the exception of the scenes where my pants are off. I don’t know what kind of tiny dicked college frat boys you’re used to sleeping with, but you’ve got to give me more credit than that.”

A flutter of lust licked at the place between my legs, and I had to foist my thoughts away from his cock to the offer he’d just made.

I would see in his mind. To me, there wasn’t any sort of chance in Hell that anything I saw would convince me that I was in another lifetime, the Queen of Hell. But all this mind-reading bullshit was getting a tad old, and it would be nice to have it go the other way for once. Besides, how could I resist the temptation of looking inside the devil’s mind? The dark and dirty things I’d see.

Maybe that would clear up the “how big could he actually be” question. And it would be interesting to see what he was like all those years ago, what kind of person this Lilith was. I’d heard the name before, but I didn’t know much about her from the tales. Something told me none of the stories had been right anyway.

Christ, was I actually considering allowing Lucifer to escort me through Hell on some kind of freaky memory tour?

Hell yes!that reckless side screamed in my head. What else did you have planned for the rest of this weekend? Another shitty bar with another shitty guy? More Golden Girls reruns? More porn that could never fill that inexplicable hunger for something… more?

“And you’ll have me back by tomorrow night?”

His grin spread wider at my crumbling resolve. “I promise.”

“I don’t trust your promises as far as I can throw you, Lucifer Morningstar.”

“Would you prefer I sign a contract?”

Yeah, right. I’d had enough of contracts. “Alright, fine. Take me on the freaky tour. Is there a bus or something? Can I take pictures?” I asked with a sarcastically tight smile while scanning my immediate area for the clutch where I had stashed my phone. I was almost surprised to find the clutch sitting on a crate that doubled as a coffee table in front of the couch. A normal kidnapper would have taken away my cell phone. I opened the clutch and reached for my phone, my heart falling in my chest when I saw I had no bars.

Of course.

I glared at Lucifer, who flashed me a smug smile over the glass he’d lifted to his lips, finding it had somehow mysteriously refilled to the rim with wine.

“No reception down here, I’m afraid. Unless you’re on the Underworld’s cell phone service. Perfect for talking pictures, however. As for the rest of our little journey into the past, we’ll make our way down from Limbo all the way to the ninth floor. I’ll first show you the layers as they exist today, and then I will show you the memory from that floor I deem most significant to our relationship. By the time we reach the ninth floor tomorrow night, if you still don’t believe you are my mate, I will return you home.”

My brow crinkled. “Didn’t you say we met on the ninth floor? Shouldn’t we start there since that’s where you first met Lilith? Wouldn’t it make sense to start at the beginning of the story?”

He lifted his hand from my knee and pressed his palm to my temple, his eyelids heavy with wine going half-mast. The moment his fingers brushed against me, my mind began to fill with images that weren’t mine.

“Actually, I’d prefer to start at the end of the story. We’ll start with the last place I ever saw you.”

“Which was here, in Limbo?”

He cracked one eye, peering at me. “Yes. Now close your eyes, Kitten.”