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I swallowed the words, their taste turning my mouth sour. “Lacey?” I was confused. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, Ariella.” She halted right outside the circle. “I’m so sorry. My stupid brother?—”
“Whatever you’re saying about me, you can stop.” Levi walked in, a white bag and a cup of coffee in his hands. He stared at me with his lopsided grin. “Good morning, sweetheart.”
If I could, I would punch him.
“What’s going on?” I asked, and then I remember why she had stayed behind. “Shouldn’t you be with Heidi?”
“She’s much better,” she said. “I was thinking about leaving when Levi called me.”
“Wait. Are you in on this?” I thought Lacey wasn’t as bad as her brother.
He reached inside the circle and placed the cup and the brown bag on the floor. “I can’t leave you alone while I go retrieve your wings, so I asked my sister to come babysit you.”
“For the record, he asked for help. He didn’t give me any specifics until I got here.” She shot him a glare. “He knows I’m against this.”
He held her stare. “And I told her she either behaves, or she’ll join you inside that circle.”
Lacey stood still, clearly afraid of her brother. “I’ll behave,” she said softly.
“Good.” He turned his smile at me again. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a break-in to plan.”
“There’s an easier way to do this,” I told him.
His smile faltered for half a second. “I’ll be back later.” He gave one last warning glance at his sister, then he walked out.
I opened my mouth, but Lacey held her finger over her puckered lips.
She counted to ten before going to the window and spying from under the curtains. “He’s leaving.” She rushed back to me. “Holy cow, I thought he was joking when he told me he had trapped you.” She shook her head. “He can be so stubborn.”
“Stubborn?” I scoffed. “He’s evil. Terrible. I’m disgusted and appalled, and I want to get out of here now!”
Lacey pulled an armchair close to the circle and sat down. “Tell me what happened.”
I crossed my arms and didn’t say a word. What if all of this was a game? What if she was helping him?
But that wasn’t it, was it? Lacey was different. Levi had protected her from their father, from his evil fate. He had sent her away so she wouldn’t turn out like him.
So, I sat down on the floor, grabbed the breakfast I was brought, and I told her. Not everything—I didn’t tell her how we danced at the nightclub, and what happened when we got to the hotel—but I told her all the rest.
“I … I don’t even know what to say.” Her shoulders were down and her voice low. “Our father is evil. He might not be the worst and highest ranked demon out there, but he’s terrible, and Levi lived with him for far too long. He worried he would become like him and at times, he is. A while back, right after Levi left our father’s house, he wanted to make a name for himself. Being a demon was all he knew, so he became the worst one in town.” She paused, clearly remembering those days. “Heidi and I tried hard to be a positive force in his life, and I think that we succeeded, but not completely. Here and there, I know he still uses his reputation to take advantage of people and situations, and sometimes he has to act on that reputation to show others he still has it.” Her eyes misted. “If he was always this evil, then he hid it well from me.”
“We never fully know a person.”
“I would like to think I do know him. I would like to think something is causing him to lose his mind and act out of character.”
I swallowed the last sip of my coffee. “The bond and I are the only variables in his life right now. That I know of.”
Lacey frowned. “Maybe it is the bond. Maybe your feelings are disrupting his, and he is losing his mind and acting out of character.”
That was a plausible answer, but I thought she knew that it ran deeper than that. A person couldn’t be evil one day and good the next. It had to come from somewhere, from something.
Maybe the bond and the broken dam of unwanted feelings were the trigger, but that meant he always had evil inside of him.
“Either way, I’m stuck in here, while he’s going in to get my wings by himself.”
“A few of his demons are coming to help him.”
