*Chiara

Chiara wrenched her mind from the thought that after escaping Hell, she would have to escape Logan, the trap of her own making, and concentrated instead on the endless, empty stage. A white spotlight bored into her eyes like the sun in the angelic training arena pummeling head, and casting dark shadows on the ground.

When Chiara had been in training, Daviid and the other commanders brought in a human who had died and been brought back by them, one who had been on the brink of descending to the pits of hell, but had supplicated for a chance to ascend so sincerely that they made him an offer: fight for the angels and earn a place in the Heavens later.

Few humans were ever given such a choice, no matter how much they begged, and this human was spectacularly unworthy, in Chiara's opinion. She couldn't understand why he had been given a chance, and she despised him so openly that Daviid took her aside in the middle of sparring to talk to her in private.

"When you fight the demons, you will understand better. We have rules, we have strict ways of life, but it is all for good reason," he said.

"That human is a sinner, he is foul and disgusting. Why would we ever give him our steel and silver weapons? How could I ever trust him not to turn on me if we stood side by side?"

"It is not for you to decide, not yet, who deserves a place here, and it is because he knows sin and the face evil that we need him in our ranks."

She made a chopping motion. "I don't want him near me, ever."

"He won't be in the ranks like you. He will go alone into the darkest, ugliest, most wretched holes in the Midlands to clean them of demonic infestation. He will do this alone. He will do it because he seeks a way to forgive himself."

She pulled up short, not sure how to respond. "If I don't have to trust him in battle...."

"Chiara," Daviid said, "Many angels here, in the counsel, and throughout Heaven believe that only the purest, most untouchable celestial beings should be allowed to remain, but I don't. Sin is not a reason for being cast away."

"Then what is?"

But another commander called him to mediate some problems between recruits and they never finished the conversation.

She watched the human male training, though, from the corner of her eyes, never getting too close, but always studying him.

Scarring lines criss-crossed his face and his nose jutted at a jagged angle from being broken more than once. But the longer he stayed and the more he trained, the more she respected him. And feared him.

No one believed in angelic rules and regulations more than him. He refused to be healed of his earthly flaws, tattoos, or marks. He trained ruthlessly, pushing himself more than any angel.

When Chiara fell to the ground at the end of the day, wrung dry from hours of sparring, throwing, running, dodging, and being hit over and over again, and the sky was dark with night, he was still there, sweating and bleeding on the arena's sand.

Now, in the depths of hell, steeped in sin and fighting to survive, no matter the cost, she was beginning to understand both Daviid and that human.

"Chiara!" Logan snapped. She jolted, remembering where she was. Hell.

"What? Are the guards already searching this hall?" The stage was still empty.

"Yes, so pick up the pace, because more will join them."

"How many?" she asked.

"All of them. The horns summoned the revelers in the Halls as well as the guards. With luck, only demons will answer the summons."

"And without luck? What happens?"

"What do you know of the Four Horsemen?"

At that, she was instantly back in the training arena, standing at sharp attention in her row among a centuria of recruits like herself, except the others were male. Dust swirled golden and the mesmerizing odor of steel and silver mixed with angel sweat intoxicated her. She wanted to draw her sword and scream her righteous fury. Every muscle hummed taut and electric for the fight. The Four Horsemen.

Daviid shouted instructions for encountering different kinds of enemies. The rules for engaging in battle with the Four were perfectly clear.

"I know not to face them unless I have a trained legion of angelic warriors in full angelii form with me." Her voice was raw as if she had been screaming.

"Then you know enough," Logan said.

Oh, what a naïve little fool she had been. If she had known then half of what she knew now, she would have stayed training in the arena until her feet and hands and body were bloody and bruised, and kept fighting into the darkness of the night with that human. But she had believed herself to be so superior.

That human man pushed himself because he knew what he would be facing.

If the Four came for them, they would never make it. She walked faster.

***

*Logan

The fake armor and cheap underthings provided by the Hall of Pride, or the Theater as many called it, rubbed in all the wrong places.

Not that there were right places for chafing. It nagged him, though. He was better than this. He deserved more than this.

He deserved a place at the head of armies. He deserved legions following him to battle, chanting his name until fear shook in the bones of his enemies, those ange—

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Never had he been so caught up in the sins when going through the halls, except possibly Lust. That was an indulgence he gave in to at any opportunity. But this?

Pride making him want the things promised by the lurkers in the tunnels? Pride making him want to terrorize and conquer angels? His glance slid sideways.

Chiara, despite the gaudy, worthless costumes the Theater adorned her with, was magnificent. Her long legs were sheathed to the knees in black, albeit fake, leather boots, the toga wrap replaced with a loose, sleeveless shell and short, flared skirt, cinched at her narrow waist by a wide belt. Her natural curves—full hips and rounded, heavy breasts, swayed with each step. A cloak hung from her shoulders, between her wings and trailed behind her on the stage.

It was the most clothing he'd ever seen her in, except when she was first brought to the dungeon. His stomach clenched, remembering Lucius's hands on her, tearing it off.

If he could change one thing in his past, he would make Lucius's death last much longer than it had at Chiara's hand.

Chiara's voice pulled him from his thoughts.

"He didn't even try to find me," she whispered so softly Logan wasn't sure if she was talking to him or herself. He waited.

Then curiosity, as well as Wrath, got the better of him. Who the fuck was this he, this bastard she hoped would come to Hell to find her? He'd slice him in half and roast him over an open firepit.

"Who didn't try to find you?" he asked, forcing his voice to be calm and his hands to not swing his fake sword and break boards.

She startled. "Sorry. Did I say something?"

"You said, he didn't even try to find you." Logan couldn't continue, rage was already choking him. An angel? The angel lover she mentioned, the one who supposedly hadn't satisfied her desires? Did she have feelings for him? Would she go back to worthless shit? She would leave him, Logan, for this puny, disgusting, insignificant worm with wings—

Fucking Envy.

"I didn't realize I said it out loud," she said, breathless with emotion. "It's nothing. I can't expect an angel to come to hell, no matter the reason." Her voice broke at the end.

That was it.

He drew his fake sword, caught in the red power of Wrath. "Who is he? His name? I will find him and I will destroy him. His blood will run between my fingers and I will eat his—"

"Stop!" She stared at him in horror. "What is wrong with you? You can't kill my brother, for fuck's sake. Get it together, Logan!"

His own words spit back in his face. He ran his hand through his hair, unsticking locks from his forehead. "You're right. I'm good. Your brother, you say? I didn't know you had a brother."

She shook her head. "You are completely unhinged."

He replaced the sword in the scabbard, brushing the crown of gold and jewels he'd picked up in Greed hanging from his belt.. Not everything in Pride was fake.

His angel was real.

His orders were real.

He had to decide what to do—but no matter what, he had to keep moving her forward, and to do that, he had to keep himself together and resist the call of the temptations.

"I had a brother, a twin," he said. It was probably the first time he ever admitted it out loud to another living being. Being matrix twins was such rarity and an undesirable situation for the lords of hell, that he and his brother quite simply never spoke of it, not even to each other. "Jeraar."

The name felt foreign on his tongue. As if it no longer was a part of his language, no longer belonged to him to say.

"He died?" she asked.

He nodded. He couldn't tell her his twin died on the end of his sword.

"I'm sorry."

"Me, too. And yours? I didn't know angels could have siblings, I thought you were born of star dust."

"Star dust, tears, and songs of summer. Isn't that how it goes?" She snorted unangelically. "No, we are born of females, unlike the demons who are almost all male and therefore can't rely on birth to populate their numbers. Or so I was taught."

"The system of matrices deep under Hell create and cradle us until we are ready to come out fighting," he confirmed. His skin crawled remembering the slime, the stench, the gagging liquid filling his lungs as he clawed his way free, still too young and small to fight battles, but not too young for a blade as his first possession. Jeraar was right behind him the whole time. He opened the way for his brother. He didn't know it the others would take it as a sign of Jeraar's weakness.

There were many things he didn't know about his new home when he emerged coughing and blinking into the hot pits, but he knew that Jeraar was not fit to survive in it without his help. So he helped him.

For as long as he could.

"He failed you," Logan said. "This brother of yours from the same mother?"

"No." She sighed. "Yes. But really no. I couldn't expect Ythaniel to help me, so no. And yet, part of me can't stop feeling as though he did fail me."

"Tell me about him." Distract me from mine and how I failed him.

"He is older than me, by centuries. He sparred with me as a game when I was little and made me want to be a fighter. He's a guardian, one of the angels who watches over humans, helping when he can, gathering the souls of the worthy when he can't. When I first came to Hell, I told myself, surely, if anyone can get in here and help me, it would be him. But he never came. I tried to tell myself that if he tried, he would be killed, but it doesn't matter to my heart that he didn't come."

Something in Logan's chest snapped. He would always be second to another angel in her life, even when no other angels were here. He picked up his pace, lengthening his stride.

Chiara fell silent again while they walked—the stage could seem endless, that was part of the trickiness to this hall. Where the other halls were vast caverns, this one spanned the mind.

He knew she couldn't hear them, but wanted to scream at his audience to shut up.

They hissed at him and booed for hours.

But worse, they repeated the offer the lurkers made him in the tunnel, telling him his orders, whispering his reward if he completed them successfully.

And why shouldn't he?

This was who he was—a demon willing to kill his own brother to earn a place among the best warriors of hell. He killed Jeraar to get the attention of one of the commanders. That commander, Lucius, was now dust and his legions of demons did not have a leader for the upcoming battles for the Fountain and a path into Heaven itself.

Was Logan going to change who he was for an angel he couldn't even keep? An angel who didn't even want him above all others?

*** Backstory - who Chiara and Logan were before being kept prisoner in the dungeon, before needing each other ... Hit the star and have a good one! ***