The house is empty. Silent. Foreign.
I recognize it for what it is; a kind of a shock. Not the numbing kind but the opposite. The kind where calm seems very far away.
Showering becomes a near impossible task, but the impossibly is overcome by necessity—one that's far beyond any logical interpretation.
I check the locks three times. Locate my gun.
The police cruiser with two unis is still parked out front; standard protocol for victim found; perpetrator at large.
It's still dark out; wee hours of morning, but sleep is equally out of reach.
When the knocking starts, I'm already across the room and wrenching the door out of the way.
"Lucifer," I croak once again, and I'm falling apart now—not because I'm any less okay, but because now I know I can, and if this isn't more proof of what I already know, than I don't know what is. Perhaps it's the way Lucifer looks angry and I don't care. Or the way he takes my arm to draw me backward so that he can step inside, closing the door on the prying eyes of the unis parked outside. The way he demands to know where Pierce is, to know why Pierce left me alone. The way he's growing angrier by the second and I still don't care. The way he finally wraps his arms around me and it's a full body kind of embrace; me tucked easily beneath his chin because my feet are bare and he's so tall, drawing me into him from all directions, solid and warm and safe, and nothing has ever felt so right.
His hand comes up, pressing my face into his chest, the damp from my hair seeping into his shirt, and I realize that my darkest moments were his too. All the hours upon sleepless hours he would have spent looking for me, for my captor, because there's no question that he did.
My knees buckle and Lucifer catches me, dragging me over to the sofa, demanding once again why Pierce left me here alone.
I tell him that he didn't.
That I sent him away.
That I ended things.
"What happened?" Lucifer immediately asks, angry again. "Did he do something? Did he hurt you?" he demands to know, and it seems strange that this is the first thing he asks, before I'm remembering he warned me once, about Pierce, and as I conjure up Pierce's face from earlier I wonder if there wasn't more to the warning after all. "If he hurt you I swear to Dad I'll—"
"Lucifer, no," I cut in, my voice still dry and oddly foreign, "He didn't. Nothing…happened."
The confusion in his eyes cuts through me like nothing else has. "Then why…?" He breaks off when he takes in my face, the tears burning my eyes.
"Isn't it obvious?" I ask, the words barely comprehensible, my voice breaking, because how can he not know? How can he not know when, in the wake of such darkness and pain and fear, nothing has been clearer?
Slowly, I watch his face transform as he takes in my own.
He knows.
I see it now.
He does know.
I see it, even when he shakes his head slowly, his face crumpling. "Detective…I…can't," he says.
"Why?" I choke on the word, because I'm crying now, the tears hot on my cheeks.
The agony in his eyes goes far deeper than I can comprehend. "Because…" he says, "because he doesn't deserve you….And neither do I."
Something in me snaps. There's surprising vehemence to my voice now, even though I can't stop crying, even though the rest of me is still breaking. "Don't you dare. Don't you dare tell me what I deserve, Lucifer. Not after I just spent hours and hours locked up in the darkest pit of hell wondering if—"
I don't get to finish.
Because Lucifer is kissing me; kissing me as if the universe has imploded and I'm all that's left.
And I don't care that I'm still battered and throbbing with pain.
Or that there's something deep and dark and tortured in the way he's kissing me that I can't even begin to understand.
Or that there's millions upon millions of things about him that I can't begin to comprehend.
I don't care.
Because Lucifer wants me too.