The elevator ride up to Isabella's floor felt like ascending to my own execution. Blood still drenched my suit, and I slowly started questioning why no one asked questions at the electronics store.

  Beside me, Takezo clutched a wrapped bundle like it might save his life. The electronics store bag swung from my other hand, containing a phone and an external battery. I took a phone with half a terabyte of disk space, which would hopefully be able to hold enough anime to rot a demon princess's brain.

  The diesel generator I had in the car was going to keep her powered up.

  The elevator beeped, and the doors opened.

  Isabella sat on a stool in the center of the lobby, still in her black suit and cross accessories from earlier. Her hair writhed around her like Medusa having a particularly bad day. Behind her, I could see a pile of chains with embedded spikes and razors.

  "Explain yourselves," she said, voice ice cold. "Boys."

  I opened my mouth, but she raised a finger.

  "Actually, let me start. You beat two of my less shit people unconscious. You released a high-value prisoner we could have used for information. You revealed to the demons how to use the portal. And you did all this while I was recovering." Her hair lashed out, wrapping around my throat and lifting me off the ground. "Give me one reason not to skin you alive and use your hide as a doormat."

  "We got the proof," I choked out.

  Her hair tightened. "As if I cared about that right now."

  Takezo stepped forward, unwrapping his bundle with careful precision. "I’ve brought you a gift, stolen directly from Kallisto."

  A knife hid in the bundle. Ornate handle, crystalline blade that seemed to drink in the light. Isabella's hair held me up, but other strands snatched the blade from Takezo's hands to bring it to her. She examined it with the intensity of someone appraising a diamond.

  Then her gaze further sharpened. "This," she said very quietly, "is a kitchen knife."

  "No," Takezo snapped, turning red. “It’s a dagger.”

  "It’s a kitchen knife!" She burst her hair towards Takezo, caught all his limbs and throat, and raised him in the air. "Have you brought it to me to make you a sandwich?"

  The delusion of Kallisto, who'd been silent since we returned, burst out laughing. "Oh, this is perfect. Baby girl’s actually mad."

  The hair holding me and Takezo tightened, robbing us of the ability to speak. It pulled Isabella to Takezo. I used the refocused attention to draw my phone to the side of the body away from her.

  “To demonstrate.” Isabella twirled the dagger in her hand, stepped to Takezo, and caught his hair with one hand. “Focus on how it feels now.” She rammed the weapon into his gut.

  He grunted with pain, the hair holding him so he couldn’t move.

  Isabella twisted the weapon in the wound. “Do you feel the handle? I’ve stabbed you with it, but since it doesn’t have a proper guard, the hilt has entered your body. That’s because it’s a knife made for cutting fruit, not a dagger.” She pulled it out and cleaned the knife and her hands on his suit.

  Takezo lay limp in the hair, clearly focused on self-regeneration.

  Isabella stepped away, heading for the elevator. “Off to the torture chambers with you.” Before she reached the door, fire erupted inside through the window.

  Raphael materialized from the flames, looking surprisingly casual for someone who'd just broken into an assassin's home. "Apologies for the dramatic entrance," he said, not sounding sorry at all. "But I’ve heard you’ve got the proof we need."

  Isabella's head snapped toward him. If a glare could kill, Raphael would disintegrate to nothing. “Heard from whom?”

  “I cannot disclose my sources, for an obvious reason.” Raphael motioned with his hand towards us. “And you might need to release them so they can show us the proof of Lillith’s involvement with Kallisto.”

  Isabella went over us with another glare, one filled with the promise of a painful revenge. Very slowly, her hair put us down and released us. We both gasped for breath, and I hid my phone into my pocket. While she strangled me, I texted Raphael.

  Takezo’s blood only dripped from the wound now, the demonic regeneration handling it well. My understanding was that demonic regeneration was extremely good at dealing with a singular wound.

  In case he got multiple wounds, the regeneration split evenly among them, so recovery took a lot longer as he couldn’t focus healing on the most important wound.

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  Raphael walked to Isabella’s side, faintly smiling, clearly trying to redirect the murderous energy in the room. “Is it a video or pictures?”

  “I’ve got a picture,” I said.

  Takezo stepped to him. “Mine’s a video.”

  We all gathered around him. Takezo turned the phone speaker on, and we watched him tour Kallisto’s personal chambers. How did he get there? I mean, sure, me distracting Kallisto didn’t hurt, but my main contribution was getting captured, so I wasn’t in the way.

  Raphael paused the video when it showed a bible in the wardrobe. He zoomed in on the cross on the cover. “See the large cross surrounded by twelve smaller crosses? That’s the symbol of the twelfth crusade, an organization once created by Lillith.”

  “Twelfth crusade?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It doesn’t exist anymore. About sixteen years ago, Lillith had a rough phase of her teenage years and founded pretty much a domestic terrorist organization that she named the Twelfth Crusade. They burned down over four hundred abortion clinics before Azrael stopped them. This bible is one of the very few they printed out, if not the only one, and it’s borderline a conclusive proof of Lillith’s involvement with Kallisto.”

  “There’s more,” Takezo said and pressed the video to continue. Soon enough, we saw what he meant, as he opened the night table, and pulled out the family photo of Shadow, some redhead, and teenage Lillith.

  Wait, Shadow? That was essentially a representation of my father. I turned my gaze towards Isabella.

  She was suddenly looking to the side, scratching her head. Takezo also had somewhere else to look at the moment. I turned to Raphael. “What haven’t they told me?”

  “Many things, apparently,” Raphael said. “Which I find surprising, because I would have expected the fact that Lillith was Lucifer’s adoptive daughter to be something they would have led with due to your connection to him.”

  “Yes, that would have been reasonable.” I smiled, genuinely. “But nobody does reasonable around here, don’t we?”

  Isabella finally turned back towards me, conjuring an innocent smile. “I was waiting for the correct opportunity.”

  “Like three minutes before I fight Lillith?” I asked.

  “More like a few days after it,” Isabella admitted. “You’re already distracted enough.”

  I rolled my eyes, Kallisto’s delusion bursting into laughter to remind me she was still around. “Anyways,” I said. “This should be more than enough, prof.”

  “It is indeed.” Raphael pulled out his business cards from his jacket’s pocket and handed one to each of me and Takezo. The card had a symbol of a cross on a fiery background, and a phone number on the other side. “Send me the video, and I’ll take care of the inquisition and find allies.”

  I stepped a bit aside, and a smile slipped onto my face. I didn’t realize, but Isabella’s gaze instantly sharpened.

  “Let’s see what evidence Peter has,” she said. “The more the better.”

  I drew a sharp breath, but everyone was already looking at me. Only now, I realized I had a smug smile. I wiped it off my face, but that made things even worse. Well, no way out now. I pulled out my phone and found the photo. “I’ve got a picture.”

  They all looked at it, and then eyed me a lot more suspiciously.

  Isabella clicked her tongue. “Why did Kallisto take a selfie with you?”

  It would have been great to have an answer to that. But I didn’t have any. First of all, I was pretty sure Isabella or Raphael didn’t see the chunk of living metal in my throat. If they saw it, they would have commented on it, but they didn’t say a word, so they couldn’t see it.

  That had multiple possible explanations, but the nuance of it didn’t matter right now.

  “She’s willing to talk to me because of my father and all that,” I said.

  Isabella smirked. “And she’s not so bad when you get to know her?”

  “No… I mean, it’s complicated,” I admitted. “I have seen the torture cages, her scientist’s top lab, and also the absolute wasteland her forces leave behind.”

  “But she’s hot, which makes things complicated,” Raphael said. “And she’s surprisingly easy to be around.”

  “Both,” I admitted. “How do you know that?”

  “Fallen she might be, but she’s still a celestial. She’s got the allure of divinity, which is difficult to resist, even if one does try to resist it.”

  Kallisto’s delusion stepped behind me, hanging over me as if hugging me from behind. “Why would you resist though?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Isabella said. “But why does she seem to be so chummy with you?”

  “She’s not.”

  “She’s got an arm draped over you.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “She’s smiling. Genuinely. You both are.”

  I started sweating slightly. "There's nothing between us."

  Kallisto snorted. “We’ll see about that.”

  “But of course.” Raphael smiled. "Regardless of the reasons, we have enough evidence. Send me the picture too, and I’ll arrange the support from the inquisition. We will also devise a plan for trapping Lillith. What we do need from your side is to make sure your corporation doesn’t end up helping Lillith."

  Isabella narrowed her eyes. “Why would you think that anyone from us would do that?”

  “It’s at the level of a rumor,” Raphael said, slowing down his speech, clearly choosing his words carefully. “But the word has it that Lillith and Lucielle have been highly cooperative with each other at the Hand of God. The last thing we need is for Lucielle to arrange her rescue after our potential success.”

  Isabella sighed. “Yeah, we can do without that. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Also, we currently do not possess any practical means of stopping Lillith from using her powers. If you could supply some artifact that interferes with magic at a distance, it would be of great help. We will search for one too.”

  “Wouldn’t you like a peperoni pizza, too?”

  “Two of them, with a large coke and don’t forget the garlic dip.” Raphael smirked, and burst into flames to streak out into the night.

  Isabella watched him go, then turned back to us, her expression surprisingly neutral, lost in thought more than anything else. "Simon has three broken ribs," she said conversationally. "Marge nearly drowned in her own summoned water. You revealed our only advantage with the portal. You brought me a kitchen knife as a trophy." She cracked her knuckles. "I had such creative punishments planned. I was going to hang you by your ankles over a pit of starved rats. I was going to use that kitchen knife to fillet strips of skin from your backs. I was going to have so much fun."

  She stepped towards the elevator, her hair flying behind her.

  “But I’ve got work to do. You two rest. Tomorrow will be annoying.” She entered the elevator, and the door closed behind her.

  I exhaled. The adrenaline that had kept me going since the portal was finally crashing, and my vision started graying at the edges. “Well, we’ve survived.”

  “Yeah.” Takezo relaxed into a broad smile. “And she took the knife with her. This was a great success.”

  “Success? She hated the burrito and the knife.”

  “Hatred and love are two sides of the same coin. They can be flipped. On the other hand, indifference is impossible to work with. She reacts strongly to gifts, so that’s great progress for me.” He headed for his own chambers. “You will be calling me master soon enough.”