Novels by Divine Lucifer

The dissolution inquiry's preliminary findings were due to be presented to the council panel on a Friday, which was not the final ruling, the full ruling would come in three more months, but the preliminary findings were the substance of the thing, the historical determination of what had happened to Ashpen and who was responsible and what weight that responsibility should carry, and they'd been waiting for it since the review panel began six weeks earlier.Aldric called on Thursday evening.She picked up and he said he wanted to talk before the presentation because once the findings were public there would be less freedom in what either of them could say about it, a quality that formal processes had where everything said around them became part of how they were interpreted, and he'd rather have a conversation that wasn't already situated inside the interpretation.She said she understood and asked what he wanted to say.He said he'd been talking to the three remaining Collective pack

Kira stood on her own for the first time on a Tuesday morning in the week after Aldric's visit, which was not a Tuesday that had anything else notable about it, no council filings due, no intelligence reports flagged, just a regular Tuesday in the compound, and the fact that it happened on a regular Tuesday was something Jasmina found herself thinking about afterward.She'd been in the central working space with Sable and Kira, the morning session, and Kira had been moving around the perimeter of the space the way she'd been doing for two weeks, pulling herself up against the low shelf and the padded bench Sable had added, making circuits of the room in her standing-with-support mode with the focused determination she brought to everything she'd decided to practice. Sable had been writing something from the previous session, working through her notes, and Jasmina had been sitting on the floor with her back against the wall half-thinking about a question from Elara's morning message ab

Sable had written four pages during the hour that Aldric was with Kira, which was more than any single session had produced in months, and when Jasmina sat across from her in the central working space Sable spent two minutes finishing her current line of thought before she looked up, which Jasmina had learned to treat as a sign that the thought was important and not as a sign that Sable was being difficult.She said start with the blue.Sable said the blue was the thing she'd least anticipated and the thing she was going to say least about confidently, which was an unusual combination, and that she wanted to be careful about the temptation to assign meaning to a new color based on the context in which it appeared because that was the kind of reasoning that looked like insight and was often confirmation bias wearing insight's clothes.Jasmina said she understood that and asked her to say what she actually thought anyway.Sable said what she actually thought was that the color register

He arrived in the late morning in a single vehicle with one person driving, which she'd asked for and which he'd honored exactly, and she met him at the main gate because that was where she'd decided to meet him, not in an office, not in the main hall with its formal quality, but at the entrance itself, where the meeting started on neither her interior ground nor his but at the threshold between them.He was smaller than she'd imagined. She'd built some version of him that matched the weight his presence had accumulated in months of intelligence reports and phone calls and Sable's analysis and Damoew's thinking and the Hollow Vale story and the Ashpen dissolution and the Eastern Collective's forty-two pages and the fourteen pages after it, and the man who got out of the vehicle was old and thin and moved with the care of someone whose body had opinions about being seventy-three. He had very steady eyes. She noticed those first.He shook her hand and said he appreciated the invitation.

She made the decision about Aldric three weeks after the Greywood ruling, which was not quite as long as she'd told Damoew she'd wait but close enough that she'd genuinely sat with it rather than arrived at it immediately, and the thing that settled it was not a single event but an accumulation of small readinesses that added up to something she trusted more than any single argument had.She told Damoew first, the night before she was going to call Aldric, and she told him specifically what had moved in her thinking since their conversation about consent and the ethical structure of what she was considering. She said she still didn't have a clean answer to the consent question and she wasn't going to pretend she did. What she'd been sitting with was a distinction Sable had made in the most recent check-in, which was that Kira's directional projection had been pointed northeast for six weeks without Jasmina doing anything to produce or direct it, and that in Sable's assessment the proj

The Eastern Collective's response to the Greywood ruling came through their council filing four days later and it was not what she'd expected, which she was beginning to think was a recurring experience with Aldric.She'd expected either a formal challenge to the ruling, some procedural argument about the review's scope or the panel's composition, or a public statement claiming the ruling as a victory for the sovereignty argument, which it could be framed as, the council admitting its own historical inadequacy was the kind of thing that could be used to argue the council wasn't trustworthy to adjudicate anything. Either of those would have been the move that served the Collective's stated position.What Aldric filed instead was a formal request for the Collective to be represented in the dissolution complaint inquiry as an interested party, specifically as a body with documented historical connection to the events of Ashpen's dissolution, which was an assertion of standing through the

Elliott’s POVThe sunlight falls softly across the terrace, warm and forgiving. I sip my coffee, the taste bitter but grounding, as I watch Luca in the garden. His hands are covered in paint, a smear on his cheek, and he looks up, catching my gaze with that same spark I thought I’d lost forever.Months have passed since we found each other again. The scars of the past—the lies, the silence, the months apart—still linger, but they no longer weigh us down. Instead, they remind me of how fragile love can be and how fiercely worth fighting for.I set my cup down and step toward him. He doesn’t look surprised; he never does when I appear out of nowhere. That’s our rhythm now, unspoken but understood. I reach for his hand, feeling the warmth spread through me, anchoring me to this moment.“You’ve been busy,” I tease gently, nodding at the splashes of color across his shirt.He laughs, a sound I never want to forget. “Someone has to bring beauty into the world. Even if it’s just one brushstr

Elliott’s POVThe studio smells of paint and wood, the faint tang of turpentine lingering in the air.I step inside, heart hammering. He’s there, just as I imagined him in the countless nights I spent wondering, pacing, and questioning every choice I made.He stands by the large canvas, sleeves rolled up, hands smudged with colors that tell a story only he can read.“I thought you’d disappeared again,” I say, my voice rough, uneven.He turns slowly, eyes scanning mine, calm but sharp, the fire I’ve missed for months flickering in them.“I never disappeared,” he says quietly, “you just stopped looking.”I swallow hard. Words fail me. Months of anger, regret, guilt, and longing are tangled into one impossible knot. I take a step closer.“I was ready to give up,” I confess. “Ready to let you go. To walk away.”His lips twitch in the hint of a smile, small but warming. “And yet here you are.”I glance around the studio, feeling the weight of all the months—the lies, the silence, the dista

Luca’s POVI saw him before I realized I was holding my breath. Elliott. Standing there, distant yet painfully familiar. My chest tightened, a mix of anger, longing, and disbelief twisting together. After months of running, of hiding, of convincing myself I was done, here he was.He didn’t approach. Not yet. Just standing, watching, waiting. That old, stubborn pride of his, the one I used to curse, was still there. And I hated it. And I loved it. Every part of him still held me captive, even after all this time.I remembered the lies, the jail, the silence, the betrayal I had believed for so long. And yet, seeing him now, I felt the old ache resurface. It was the same one that had haunted me in my quiet nights, the one that refused to be buried by success or distance.He took a step closer, cautious, measured. His eyes locked on mine, and for a moment, the world stopped. Every doubt, every plan, every carefully constructed wall crumbled. I realized then that no matter how much I trie

Elliott’s POVI saw him before he noticed me, standing among the crowd at the gallery. Luca. Alive, real, untouchable. My chest tightened, and for a moment, I forgot to breathe. Months of searching, of silence, of regret—all converged in that single instant.He hadn’t seen me yet. He laughed with someone, but the lines of his face, the tilt of his head, everything screamed that he was the same man who had haunted my dreams. I felt both joy and fear, hope and dread, all at once.I wanted to run to him, to close the distance, to tell him everything. But my legs felt rooted, my body betraying my intentions. Pride, fear, and love tangled in a knot too tight to undo. What if he hated me? What if the past couldn’t be undone?The memories came unbidden—the jail cell, the lies, the betrayal, the letters, the nights I had spent imagining this exact moment. Pain. Regret. And beneath it all, a deep, undeniable longing that refused to be silenced.I moved slightly, just enough to let him catch si

Luca’s POVI watched him from across the gallery, my pulse quickening without permission. Elliott. Alive, real, standing there, and yet somehow distant. So many months had passed, yet seeing him now brought back everything I had tried to bury. Anger, longing, regret—all tangled in a knot too tight to undo.He didn’t move at first, just observed me like he was measuring how much of me remained. I stiffened, unsure if I should approach or retreat. My pride, my scars, my carefully built walls, they all threatened to push him away before he could even speak.The room felt smaller, tighter, as though the space between us existed only to torture me. Every laugh he had once drawn from me, every word we’d shared, now seemed like an echo in the walls. And yet, the ache in my chest told me he hadn’t been gone at all.I could feel his gaze linger, heavy and searching. I hated that it still affected me, hated that a single look could unravel the composure I had fought to maintain. Yet here he wa

Elliott’s POVThe city felt different tonight, quieter somehow, yet my mind screamed in chaos. I walked the streets without direction, letting the cold wind hit my face, hoping it would clear the fog clouding my thoughts. Luca. His name haunted me, more alive than ever. Every memory, every stolen moment, replayed relentlessly in my mind.I had spent months trying to forget him, convincing myself that distance, silence, and duty would heal the ache inside me. But the truth was unavoidable. I loved him. Always had. Always would. And the thought of him existing somewhere, living and thriving without me, burned more than any betrayal could.Work had become unbearable. My hands shook when I signed papers, and my mind wandered during meetings. Cecilia was distant, preoccupied, and so was I. Nothing mattered—no business deal, no press event, no obligations—except finding him, understanding him, maybe even convincing him I was worth another chance.Every café I passed, every street corner, e