Archive of Our Own

Her first thought was of Trixie.

That was a lie. Her first thought was simply run and then she ran until she had no thoughts at all. Paramedics caught up with her outside, probably called when someone heard the gunshots along with the first of what would be many waves of cops, and she considered resisting, but let them set her down, look her over. A hospital, they recommended, to make sure there was nothing but a bruise. At least that was away from here.

It was then, on the far too long drive over, that she finally thought of Trixie. Sweet, kind Trixie who adored Lucifer almost as much as—almost as much. Was that all it took to go to hell? She didn’t believe in hell, except that now she did. Did it make a difference that she hadn’t known?

She should have known.

She hardly noticed arriving at the hospital, was so tired that she wanted nothing but to drift off to sleep, but the fear coiling its way through her chest wouldn’t allow it. She wasn’t safe here, where he could so easily find her. Maybe she wasn’t safe anywhere. Maybe she would never sleep again.

Luckily, there were questions to answer from a string of cops, some she knew, some clearly pulled from other departments to sort out this mess. She told them most of the truth and let the rest melt into confusion and uncertainty.

Finally, Dan appeared at her side and she almost asked him why he looked so horribly sad before she remembered. He didn’t know the truth, all he knew—

“Are you okay?” He asked. “What the hell happened?”

What could she say? How could she even begin to make him understand?

“Lucifer killed Pierce,” she managed. It wasn’t funny but it came out with a laugh regardless.

It was the wrong thing to say. The wrong thing to even begin to convince him. Marcus had killed Charlotte and for that Dan would never feel anything except relief at his death. Hell—it might make him like Lucifer more.

“Chloe,” he said, voice soft, in that way he only got when he was overcorrecting away from feeling. “I know you two were over, but that’s still… I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care about Pierce,” she said. “I—Lucifer isn’t who I thought he was.”

It was the exact sort of truth Lucifer would tell, one that missed the point entirely.

“He did know the whole time who Pierce really was. If he’d told us sooner—”

Maybe that was the point. Sow chaos and bloodshed and death around him and always keep his hands clean.

Except for now. Except for Pierce. An exception or merely a drop in the façade? The man who’d once looked so surprised when she kissed him on the beach was an illusion and the creature that wore that skin… was it a trick or a novelty for him? Had he already stolen her soul?

Dan was still talking. How long had he been talking?

“When can I leave?” She asked.

He looked worried, but she let him worry. Worry was better than sorrow, better than anger or grief or fear.

“Soon,” he said. “I sent someone to grab your cruiser and bring it to the precinct. I’ll bring you home.”

The fear spiked against her heart. Her apartment, the one Lucifer walked into any time he damn well pleased. The one Maze—oh, god, she wasn’t ready to think about Maze—still had a key to. It was the first place he would look for her.

“Can—?” She swallowed. “Can Trixie and I stay with you tonight? I—I don’t want to go home.”

“Chloe,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said. “No, Dan, I don’t think I am.”

That was all he needed to hear. For all his flaws, Dan would never turn her away when she needed help. True, when they were married, he had gone about being helpful all the wrong ways—working more to provide instead of being there—but he was different now.

And more importantly, she was almost certain Lucifer had no idea where he lived.

“I’ll swing by and get Trixie from school,” he said. “I—I’m going to need to figure out what to tell her.”

She almost questioned him, before she remembered Charlotte. She hated how easily that grief had fallen to the side, replaced by nothing but fear, but she couldn’t conjure anything except a nod.

He was gone for an eternity that the clock on the wall claimed was less than an hour. He got her checked out with any trouble, Trixie moving from his side to cling tightly to Chloe. Her shoulder ached, but she didn’t let it stop her from leaning down to hold her daughter tight against her.

The car ride back to Dan’s was silent, except for the whistling from the back window that hadn’t quite closed all the way since before they’d even separated. It had driven her crazy at the time, but now she was just grateful for a distraction, even an annoying one. Typically her annoying distractions tended more towards—

She wouldn’t let herself think about him. Not here and now.

It was still the middle of the day, but Chloe had barely slept half an hour in the last seventy-two and she was ready to collapse. Dan settled Trixie in her room, his voice low as he read her a story. It hadn’t been strictly necessary to pick her up from school early, but Dan had been up two nights in a row too and slept even less than her in that time. She knew she should be worried about him, the grief he wasn’t letting himself feel, or thankful for all that he was doing, but all she could feel was the fear as she settled on the edge of the couch.

He was quiet when he emerged, setting a spare pillow and blanket down beside her.

“Take the bed,” Dan said, voice low and sad.

“I’m not kicking you out of your own bed, Dan,” she said, reaching a hand towards him but not making contact.

He shrugged. “I’m not going to sleep much anyway.”

She knew there was no point in arguing, so she just nodded, a silent thank you instead of all the words she should say. In another life, another mood, another day, she would have said so much more, would have teased him that she was fairly certain the sheets on his bed were from the early days of their marriage, but today she was so tired and so afraid, she just pulled on the spare sweatpants he’d left out for her and collapsed in a heap of blankets.

She didn’t want to sleep, didn’t want to dare leave herself so defenseless, but there was nothing else she could do. Tomorrow, she would take Trixie and run even further. Tonight, she needed to rest. She closed her eyes and prayed—she’d never prayed before—that she would wake back up in a world that made sense.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

Chloe woke all at once, eyes open and sitting up within an instant of gaining consciousness. She looked around, confused to find herself in her own bed, phone on the side table still lit up with the text that must have woken her.

Ella: Still waiting on another sweep of the scene but I managed to pull Charlotte’s files for you. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

It buzzed again in her hand.

Ella: It’s kinda eerie in here. Even Pierce is really quiet.

Pierce. Marcus. Cain?

She blinked and looked down at herself, still in her clothes from the night before. She hadn’t—it had been a dream. Marcus being the Sinnerman and Lucifer actually being the devil. Just a crazy dream.

For a moment, she dared to pretend that Charlotte’s death was part of the dream too, but she knew that wasn’t true.

She glanced at the time, finally shucking off yesterday’s clothes. She’d been asleep less than half an hour based on her last text, a message to Ella that read: Running home to change, let me know if you hear anything.

It felt like she’d been asleep much longer, but she shrugged it off, got dressed as quickly as she could, shot a text to the babysitter thanking her for getting Trixie on the bus, and rushed back to the precinct.

The drive seemed to take eighty years and yet no time at all, but she chalked it up to sleep deprivation. Her accidental catnap had been the only sleep she’d gotten last night, after none the night before.

Thankfully, Lucifer—her human partner, Lucifer, and not a scary red-faced monster—had coffee waiting.

“Hey,” she said, moving into his space even though the crazy tired part of her brain was still telling her he was something to be frightened of. “How are you doing?”

He managed a sad smile and held the coffee cup out. “Just how you like it, Detective.”

Later, she promised herself, she would make him answer that question, but for now, she knew the answer. She knew how important Charlotte had been to him, knew that despite whatever weird and dark family tension sat there, that he’d genuinely cared for her. Dan was the one who would shatter in front of them, Lucifer would be careful to hide any shards of his own.

She settled a hand on his. “Thanks. I managed twenty minutes of deeply unrestful sleep but I could use the caffeine.” For a moment, she just stayed there, but then she took the coffee, swallowed a few tasteless sips—not because Lucifer ever got her order wrong, but because the whole day seemed rather tasteless—and moved to pick up the files stacked on her desk. “Let’s bring these into the conference room. I think we’re going to need the space.”

They mostly worked in silence, digging through Charlotte’s cases, except for a brief interlude when Ella appeared with more coffee. It was breakroom coffee, admittedly, but she needed the caffeine too much to care. She forced herself to focus on the case, on Charlotte, on whoever had really killed her, but that dream was still haunting her.

It was just a dream.

She had almost convinced herself the memory was fading, that she hardly even remembered it, when Dan burst in, looking frantic, his words a blur.

“Now, it's gonna sound completely crazy, but I need you to hear me out, okay?”

She tried not to stare blankly at him. “Of course. What is it?”

“If anyone realizes what we know, our lives are in danger.”

“Okay,” she said, and it felt like déjà vu, like going insane, like she was still in a dream. “Okay. What's up, Dan?”

He was going to say something different this time. He wasn’t going to—

“I figured out who killed Charlotte.”

“What?” There was more breath escaping her than there was sound.

“It was Pierce.”

Her brain went on autopilot after that. She felt herself speaking, saying the things she knew she should say, the things she would say because she hadn’t know what Pierce was. She couldn’t have known. She didn’t—

“Daniel’s right,” Lucifer said and the world fell out from under her.

It wasn’t possible. It was a dream. It was just a dream and her exhaustion had nothing to do with it, just with her lack of sleep.

Sleep deprived. She was tired.

She almost believed it, grateful for Ella’s sudden appearance, but her stomach sank watching Pierce.

Even in her wildest dreams, she wouldn’t have expected to see him tear up. To dream that and then to see it—

She breathed. “He did it, didn’t he?”

And if he did it—she wouldn’t let herself think about it. She just had to solve this case, just had to bring him to justice. Then she could worry about it all.

She let herself be pulled along by the current of the day. They went to see their suspect—that was the wrong word, they didn’t suspect him of anything—and though she knew there would be a gun in the desk, she waited for him to suggest it. If she did everything right, maybe today would end differently. The dream didn’t have to come true.

But it did. They got the phone from the driver—she’d known it was him before they even stepped foot in the house—and set their plan to entrap Pierce. She knew what the rage would look like on Ella’s face before she ever got a chance to see it. Ella, who she’d never seen so angry in her life, had a frown that was burned into her mind.

But, when Dan asked for a moment alone with Barrow, when she stepped away, this time she was terrified to go join Lucifer and Ella on the balcony.

“Detective,” Lucifer said. “Everything alright?”

“Nothing’s alright,” she said.

“Tell me about it,” Ella said. “Today has just been—today’s been hell.”

Lucifer huffed a little laugh. “Thankfully, only metaphorically, Miss Lopez.”

This was new, she realized. The last time around, they’d hardly spoken but this time he’d asked how she was.

She tried not to stare at him, that face she knew so well. There couldn’t really be a monster under there, could there?

There couldn’t be, she decided as he smiled softly at her. This was her partner, her—this was Lucifer. She knew him.

It was convincing enough that she made the same choice, to take Lucifer to find Barrow’s sister, even if part of her was thinking about that dream, about the trap that maybe awaited them. But the balcony had changed. This could change too.

She believed it up until the moment she looked Marcus in the eye, but even then, she still wanted to believe it. She still stepped in between him and Lucifer, even though she knew—she didn’t know what she knew.

She still pulled the trigger.

Maybe this was the dream, she thought, as the bullets sounded. Maybe none of this was real.

She wasn’t fully sure how she ended up on a roof, but one minute Lucifer was there with her and then he was gone and her phone was ringing and—

She should have known. She should have known the first time around and she absolutely should have known this time. This wasn’t a dream. This wasn’t an illusion.

She had to know.

She ran for the stairs, ran down them as fast as she could. She knew she’d done this in her dream, but she hardly remembered, hardly remembered anything except—

Lucifer was bent over Pierce’s body—Marcus. In some ways, he was still Marcus to her. But he rose. He turned.

It was true. It was true.

She had been a fool. Maybe if she’d done something differently this time, maybe—

She couldn’t do anything different.

She ran.

The rest of it was a blur, paramedics then nurses then cops then Dan. Dan who was full of grief instead of fear. Dan who took her home with him and read Trixie a story even though it was one in the afternoon.

She was nothing but raw nerves and shaking terror.

“Take the bed,” Dan said.

She reached out a hand, hesitating. This time, she just said, “Thank you.”

She didn’t dare to pray again.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She reached for her phone immediately upon waking up.

Ella: Still waiting on another sweep of the scene but I managed to pull Charlotte’s files for you. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

No. No, no, no—

Ella: It’s kinda eerie in here. Even Pierce is really quiet.

The devil.

Lucifer was actually, for real, the devil. There was no getting around that, no escaping it.

That first instinct, deep in her gut was still there.

Run.

She got dressed quickly and tossed some clothes in a bag. Her toothbrush, Trixie’s. Nothing else mattered.

She barely remembered driving to Trixie’s school, managing to fix her hair and paint a less insane expression on her face as she stepped into the front office.

“Ms. Decker,” the secretary—Carol or Cheryl or something like that—said. “How can I help you?”

She hadn’t prepared at all what to say, but with her life, this sort of thing was routine. She was the sort of mom that the school secretary knew on sight. “We had a family emergency come up. I’m going to need to pick up Trixie.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I hope everything’s alright.” When Chloe didn’t answer, she added, “I just need you to sign her out here.”

It was a long few minutes to wait, but eventually Trixie wandered into the front office, brow raised.

“Is something wrong, Mommy?” She said, as Chloe led her out to the car. “I thought Daddy was picking me up. Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” she said quickly, even as she debated if it were true. She hadn’t even thought to call him, to stop him from heading to the precinct, but he was probably there by now, or he would be soon, and she didn’t want to chance—“He’s just real busy, monkey.”

She got in the car, frowning. “So why are you picking me up now?”

“I thought we could take a trip,” she said.

“In the middle of the school day?”

“I could take you back to class if you want.”

She giggled. “You’re weird, Mommy.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I probably am.”

They drove for what Trixie deemed an eternity before she dared to stop for the first time about an hour outside of the city—which, with LA traffic being what it was, was closer to three hours of driving. She needed gas and a plan. She dealt with the former, letting her mind wander as she pumped gas.

She didn’t realize Trixie was on the phone—her phone, that she hadn’t looked at since Ella’s texts that morning—until she opened the car door.

“Oh, she’s done,” Trixie said, and held it out. “It’s Daddy.”

“Thanks, babe,” she said, silently cursing. “Stay there.” She closed the door again and took a few steps away from the car before she put the phone to her ear. “Dan.”

“Chloe.” He breathed. He sounded a little insane, but, then again, she probably did too. “Where are you? Why is Trixie not in school?”

“I need her to be safe,” she said. It was pointless to try to explain the truth, but this he would understand. “I—Dan, I don’t want to talk about this over the phone, but what you found out at Charlotte’s? I know. Follow Ella’s lead. The driver will be able to tell you more.”

“What?” He asked. “Chloe, what lead? What driver? And how do you know about Pier—?”

“Don’t,” she said. “Trust Ella. Don’t trust anyone else.”

“You know what he did? Who he is?”

“I didn’t before today,” she said. It was mostly true. “I have faith in you, Dan.”

“Chloe—”

She hung up, put her phone on silent, and shoved it deep into her pocket.

“Daddy’s calling me now,” Trixie said, holding up her phone as Chloe got in the car.

“We can talk to him later,” she said. “We should get back on the road.”

She raised a brow. “Why don’t you want me to answer?”

Chloe didn’t know how to explain this to Trixie, who didn’t even know Charlotte was dead, much less that her almost-step-father was a crime lord and possibly the world’s first murderer and that her—Lucifer was the actual devil.

“He’s not happy I took you out of school,” she said. “But we’ll talk about that later, okay?”

She considered seriously. “I want chocolate.”

Chloe sighed but followed her inside the convenience store to buy a chocolate bar. There were not really that many choices, but Trixie considered them all seriously, weighing caramel against peanut butter against crunchy.

It was why Chloe was so surprised when Trixie looked up suddenly with glee.

“Lucifer!”

Chloe put out a hand to stop her from moving before she dared to look out the shop window, Lucifer moving for the door. How had he gotten here? He had no car, no—

He was the devil.

“Stay here,” Chloe ordered, and moved for the door. She would be a line of defense even if it killed her.

“Detective,” Lucifer said, when she closed the door behind her, all too aware of how visible Trixie was through the glass. “You’re alright.”

“Why are you here?” She asked.

He raised a brow. “I could ask you the same.”

Her hands were shaking and it took all her effort to shove them in her pockets. “How did you find me?”

He frowned as if it were obvious. “Daniel tracked your phone. He and Miss Lopez are following a lead, but—I needed to know you were safe.”

“I got off the phone two minutes ago,” she said. “How did you—?”

“I flew,” he said. “Angel wings, remember? Now, are you going to tell me what you and your spawn are doing all the way out here? Because if you’re running from Cain, Detective, or Pierce, rather, I can—”

“I don’t trust you,” she said, and it was the wrong thing to say. She should have played along, but she couldn’t bear a second more staring at the creature that looked like the man she’d—the man who had never existed.

“Detective,” he said, like it was a whole sentence. His eyes were full of that kind of sorrow he was so good at but rarely bothered with. It meant she wasn’t at all expecting the next question out of his mouth. “Are you in danger?”

“No,” she said. It felt like a lie.

He nodded. “Then I’ll take my leave. I can hardly trust Daniel to deal with Pierce after all. You best get back to your offspring before she robs the store.”

Chloe glanced over her shoulder, back at Trixie, pure instinct, and by the time she looked back again, Lucifer was gone.

She wanted to sit down on the curb and sob, but Trixie was still inside, so she went back in, bought the two chocolates Trixie had settled on, and drove until the sun vanished from the sky. It wasn’t enough, would never be enough. Hours of driving and it took him two minutes to find her.

They found a motel for the night and, despite her high energy, Trixie fell asleep almost instantly. Chloe didn’t fall so easily.

Eventually though, curled up and muffling tears into a stale smelling pillow, the world faded to black.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

This time, she was efficient. Clothes, toothbrushes, into the car and to the school.

“Ms. Decker,” Carol at the front desk said. “How can I help you?”

“Family emergency,” she said. “I need to grab Trixie.”

This time, she powered off her phone and set it down casually out of Carol’s view. She couldn’t risk Dan tracking her again.

“Mommy!” Trixie said.

“Hey, monkey,” she said. “We’ve got a bit of a drive. You wanna go run to the bathroom first?”

Trixie raised a brow. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, honey, everything’s fine. I’ll hold your bag.”

She handed it over without hesitation and ran off. Chloe tried to appear casual as she unzipped the front pocket, powering off Trixie’s phone and then dropping it to the ground and kicking it under a chair. She zipped the bag back up.

“Is something wrong, Mommy?” Trixie asked as they walked out to the car. “I thought Daddy was picking me up. Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” she said. “He’s just at work.”

She frowned. “So why are you picking me up now?”

She almost laughed at that, at the horror of how predictable her kid’s words were, how predictable everything was. “I can always take you back to class.”

This time, driving in a fully different direction so Lucifer couldn’t find her in the same spot again, her eyes kept going to the clock, to the minute she knew Dan would get worried and call, but it passed without incident. For the next two minutes, she drove and held her breath.

Eventually, she did have to stop for gas and she did buy Trixie chocolate, but no one appeared to confront her, and they kept driving.

A different motel this time, a different stale pillow, but just the same, Chloe Decker cried herself to sleep.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She put the pillow over her head and went back to sleep.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She didn’t get out of bed, letting her phone ring and ring.

Eventually, her eyes fluttered shut again.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She smashed her phone with a hammer and sat under the hot spray of her shower until it went cool. She changed her sheets, as if it would do anything, and went back to bed.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

It was the sheets that got her, the same as before she’d changed them, but she did get out of bed, get dressed for the first time in—days wasn’t correct, but it was the best way she could put it.

Text me when you get a lead, she wrote to Ella and then, heart in her throat, texted Lucifer, Meet me at the penthouse.

He responded almost instantly, with a nonsense string of emojis, including both a devil and a detective. She swallowed her fear and drove to Lux.

Somehow, she beat him there, though she didn’t dare ponder at the ridiculousness of a creature with angel wings bothering to drive. She went up to the penthouse, not daring to sit or touch anything. Her gun was at her side, and despite all of her training, she wanted to be holding it.

She heard the elevator ding and it was only terror that kept her rooted to the spot. She stared at the opening doors, not daring to look away.

“Detective,” Lucifer said, concern in his eyes as he set a coffee—her coffee—down on the bar.

She didn’t even realizing she was drawing her gun until he cocked his head.

“Detective,” he said again. “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” She asked, voice breaking immediately. “And more importantly, why? Why are you doing this to me? Wasn’t living through today once bad enough?”

His confusion and concern looked real, but she had always thought so. Her instincts meant nothing anymore, not when it came to him.

“The devil,” she said. “You’re actually, really the devil. Of course, you decide to torture me.”

“Never,” he said. “I—I am the devil, Detective. I’ve never claimed to be anything else. But I retired. I gave it up. And I would never do anything to harm you.”

She shot him in the leg. She’d shot him there before, when she’d almost believed.

“Don’t lie to me,” she said.

He winced as he spoke, but didn’t lean down to staunch the blood of the graze. “I have never lied to you, Detective.”

She raised the gun.

“Two hours ago, you didn’t believe,” he said. “What changed?”

“I saw your face,” she said.

His eyebrows scrunched in confusion—why did he fake confusion so well? “That’s not possible.”

“You show it off, all the time, don’t you? All those people you’ve driven insane.” She hadn’t thought about this yet, about—“Jimmy Barnes.”

“Yes,” he said, “but not in ages. I don’t have my devil face anymore, Detective. I told you, it was taken from me. Or, I lost it.”

She hesitated. It should have been the only opening he needed. She’d seen how fast he could move, how unafraid he was of being hurt. He could have surged forward and pulled the gun from her hand and there was nothing she could have done to stop him.

But he didn’t. At first, he didn’t move, but then he went to the bar, slowly and deliberately pouring himself a drink, then glancing at her and pouring a second. He retreated to the couch, circling around her without approaching and gesturing to the bar as if to choose if she wanted the coffee or the liquor.

She took the liquor, swallowing a gulp. It was a stupid choice but she was all out of good ones. She stayed by the bar, not daring to approach.

If he wanted to physically harm her, he could have done it by now. Could have crushed her the moment she drew a gun, or the moment she shot him, or—hell, any one of the many times she’d been alone with him in a sketchy place in the past several years.

She holstered her gun and took another gulp before settling in the chair across from him, trying not to shake.

Blood was dripping down his leg, but he didn’t even glance at the wound. “I would never harm you, Detective.”

He said it with such truth in his voice. It was a tone she knew, the one he used when he wanted to be taken seriously. She knew it and yet she knew nothing about him. She should have—

“Then, why are you doing this to me?” The first tears escaped her. “What is this?”

That confusion was going to drive her mad. “Detective, I don’t know what you’re referring to. I was waiting for you at the precinct when I got your text to come here. Unless—I didn’t kill Charlotte, if that’s what you mean.”

“I know that was Pierce,” she said, waving it away. “I was talking—”

“What?” Lucifer asked, all semblance of control fading. “Why would Pierce kill Charlotte?”

She stared blankly at him. “You haven’t talked to Dan since the crime scene?”

“Haven’t seen him,” he said. “Detective, I don’t understand—”

“Dan found out Charlotte was investigating Pierce, that he was the Sinnerman. In about twenty minutes, he’s going to storm into the precinct to tell us that. Because we’re not there, in about an hour, he’s going to call me.”

He stared at her. “How—I never told you Pierce was the Sinnerman.”

“No, Dan did, about twenty minutes from now.”

“I don’t understand.”

She stared at him. She’d been so frightened—was so frightened—of him that she hadn’t even for a moment considered that her repeating day wasn’t his doing. But if he really didn’t know—

“Are you lying?”

She saw frustration bubbling up in him, but it didn’t come out in his voice, cool and even. “I have never, once, in the time we’ve known each other, intentionally told you anything untrue. I have, on occasion, not told you the full truth, but everything I have ever said is true. I don’t know what’s wrong, Detective, or what’s happened, and I am not trying to torture or harm you.”

If that was true—if that was true—

“I need to go,” she said, standing abruptly. “Don’t follow me.”

“Whatever you need, Detective,” he said. “I’m going to find Pierce and—”

“You’re going to kill him,” she said, pausing to turn back by the elevator.

“Angels aren’t allowed to kill humans,” he said, face softening. “One of the few of my father’s rules that I actually agree with.”

She stepped into the elevator, heart pounding. “When have you ever followed the rules?”

She didn’t know where she was going except away, which seemed to define her day—days?—but away she went. She found herself parking again in a blur, wandering out on the beach.

Their beach, she had long considered it, the place she had seen for sure how much he cared for her, the place she had kissed him.

She sat down in the sand and stared at the waves for hours and hours. Her phone rang and rang for the first hour or so, but then she chucked it into the surf and enjoyed the quiet.

After a few more hours—she didn’t bother worrying how Dan would deal with Barrow without her—her jumbled thoughts began to settle into facts and fears, known truths and potential problems.

Fact: This day was on a loop.

Fear: This day would be on a loop forever.

Fact: She had to find a way to stop this.

Fear: She had no idea how to stop this.

Fact: Lucifer was the devil.

Fear: She still wanted—

She stood abruptly, shaking sand off every inch of her skin, out of her hair and clothes. She picked the first hotel she saw and booked a suite—none of the money was actually going to stay spent—and took a long bath in a very expensive tub. Tomorrow, she needed to get back to work, to finding the truth and setting things right. There was a way to end this.

Fact: She was still a detective. This was just another crime to solve.

She tried not to think about how usually, she had a partner, how usually, she had someone to tell everything to.

Fear: She was probably going to hell.

Fact: She was absolutely going to hell.

She spent a few hours at the hotel bar, then returned to her room, watching the sun set from the balcony. Tomorrow, she was going to fix this.

But that night, she finally slept well.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She was half dressed before Ella’s second text came in and even remembered to text the babysitter a thank you on her way out the door.

The drive was even more monotonous now as she predicted the slow spots and the bad drivers with near-perfect precision. It felt like an eternity to get to the precinct. She’d had too much time left alone with her thoughts lately.

It would be fine. She would solve this. There had to be an explanation, even if it was one that she wouldn’t have believed yesterday.

Despite all her logic and facts, the moment she came face-to-face with Lucifer, she had to fight the urge to turn and run.

“Detective?” He asked, handing her a coffee.

She knew how today would go, she reminded herself. He didn’t do anything to her today. She could run tomorrow, if she ever saw it.

She—

All it took was him moving vaguely towards her and she jumped and threw the coffee in his face, cup and all, blinking in surprise as the paper cup clattered against the floor.

Lucifer raised a brow and shook out his hands, dripping. “While I’m sure I did something to deserve that, Detective, my Armani certainly didn’t.”

“You’re not mad?” Her voice was too small.

He scoffed lightly. “Well, I’m not exactly thrilled. What was that about?” His eyes were soft. “Are you alright?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I am.” She gave herself five seconds to breathe, then said, “Would you bring Charlotte’s files into the conference room? I’m going to go check on Ella.”

“As you wish, Detective.” He looked at her with concern, but did as she asked.

She turned on a heel and moved to the lab before she could second-guess herself, shutting the door firmly behind her.

“Hey,” she said, though Ella took a moment too long to turn around, eyes red with tears.

“Hey,” Ella said. “Nothing to report yet.”

“I figured,” Chloe said. “You doing okay?”

“I just keep thinking about Dan,” she said. “And—oh, god, Charlotte had kids, didn’t she? I—” She took a breath. “But we’ve got to focus up. No stupid mistakes.”

She had been ignoring the grief for days, hadn’t thought about Charlotte at all, but now it came roiling back. Ella could do that to people.

She could feel herself losing her nerve. Everything she had to say sounded so stupid in the face of the death of a—was Charlotte a friend? Not exactly, but… she was--Lucifer’s step-mother. How in the world was she the step-mother of the actual devil? What did that even mean? That had to have been a lie.

“Chloe,” Ella said, in a tone that implied it hadn’t been the first time. “What’s going on?”’

“I need to ask you an insane question,” she said. “You know a lot of sci-fi, right?”

“Sure,” she said, relieved for a deceptively light-seeming topic. “Hard question on the crossword?”

“I was wondering what you know about weird, time shenanigan things.”

“What do I know about time travel?”

“More like time loops?”

Ella laughed, though it was more of an attempt at good cheer than actual joy. “Oh, being in a time loop would make me go totally loca. If you had to pick any day to repeat over and over, what would it be?”

She let out a long breath. “Not today.”

“Yeah, I’m with you there, but—”

“How do you get out of a time loop?”

Ella raised a brow. “I mean, it depends on the movie. Sometimes there’s a lesson to be learned or a thing you haven’t done that you need to do. Sometimes it helps to convince other people you’re in one.”

“How do you do that?”

“Well, if you’re lucky, they’ll have a time loop code.”

“What’s a time loop code?”

“You pick a secret code word and never ever tell it to anyone, unless they tell you they’re in a time loop. Then, if someone comes to you and says that they are and they know your code word, you have proof and don’t need to spend ages getting convinced every day.”

She swallowed, hard. “What’s your code?”

“Decker, you’re not getting the point. If I tell you the code, it no longer works as proof of anything.”

“Ella,” she said, voice shaky. “I need you to tell me your code word.”

She laughed in that sort of confused and shaky way. “Are you okay, Chloe?”

“I am actually, for real, caught in a time loop,” she said, surprising herself. “I’m not joking, and I need your help.”

She fully stopped what she was doing to look Chloe in the eye. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” Proof. Chloe would demand proof on the other side of this. “In about an hour, Dan is going to rush into the precinct frantically and tell me and Lucifer that he knows who killed Charlotte. An hour or so after that, you’re going to find evidence from the third sweep of the scene—”

“Decker,” Ella said. “I believe you.”

“You do?”

“I have faith,” she said. “And, also, you are the last person on earth to try this as a prank, especially today of all days. Now, if you were Lucifer—”

Chloe flinched.

“Did something happen?” Ella asked, still looking at her too closely. “Or, is something going to happen?”

That, she decided, was firmly too much information at once. “It’s a long story.”

She nodded. “How many times have you done today? You sound kinda frantic.”

“It’s the… eighth or ninth time,” she said. “And the first one alone was a long and terrible day.”

“It took you nine tries to come talk to me?” Ella asked. “No wonder you’re still stuck. We’re getting you out of this loop.”

“How do we do that?”

“What have you tried so far?”

It was a fair question and one that was hard to answer without getting into the unending terror that came from knowing—

“Detective,” Lucifer said. “There you are.”

“Whoa, what happened to you?” Ella asked, managing to crack a smile at the sight of his stained shirt.

“An incident with a coffee,” he said. “I have our dear detective to thank. De—Detective, are you alright?”

She hadn’t realized how tightly she was clutching the counter, how pale her face must have been.

“Are you still nauseous, Decker?” Ella asked, though she hadn’t said anything of the sort. “Go get her a ginger ale or something, Lucifer.”

“A good idea, Miss Lopez,” he said, moving back off into the precinct.

“Okay, what on earth is going on with you and him?” Ella raised a brow. “That wasn’t awkward or uncomfortable, that was—Chloe, what’s going on?”

The person she most wanted to tell everything—he didn’t really exist. Dan would usually be her next choice but he was in the throes of grief and thinking he was going crazy. Anyone else—there was no one else.

“We need to talk somewhere private,” Chloe said. “I—Ella, I need you to promise me something.”

“Anything.” She meant it too. Chloe wasn’t sure when they had become so close, when they had so sure and steady, but when they got out of this, she owed Ella… something.

“What I’m going to tell you is going to sound like I’m going certifiably insane. Even if you can’t actually believe me, I need you to act like you do.”

“Here you are, Detective,” Lucifer said, bursting back in with a stupid grin and a ginger ale.

“Can you do me a huge favor?” Chloe asked, trying to maintain her composure for just thirty seconds. “Dan just left me a really weird voicemail, could you go check in on him? I can get started on Charlotte’s files.”

“But won’t you need my help?”

She smiled even though she was feeling a bit nauseous for real. “Papers are hardly your area of expertise. I’m sure you’ll be back before I’m done with them.”

“Detective.”

“I’ll call you if I find anything, I’m just—I’m really worried about Dan.”

He nodded. “Very well. I’ll find Daniel. I’ll be back before you can miss me.”

Ella waited until he was halfway up the precinct stairs to say, “You’re a scary liar.”

“Does Lucifer know where you live?”

She frowned. “He’s never… been there. I guess not.”

“Can we go to your apartment?”

“Like you have to ask.”

Chloe Decker had never been good at faith, not in god or the universe and certainly not in people. People, more than anything, were good at leaving, at failing, at giving up. Her mother, for all she loved her, was a child who had been terrible at being there. Dan had helped to destroy her reputation and make her think she was going insane after Palmetto. Lucifer—why did Lucifer belong in her top three disappointments?

Chloe Decker had never been good at faith, but after a short drive filled with cheery pop music, she had a pint of ice cream shoved into her hands and she thought she might just have faith in Ella. Maybe that was a dangerous or stupid thing to do, but—

“Faith can always survive challenges,” Ella said, as if reading her mind. “And I have faith in you.”

She wasn’t really eating the ice cream, but the cold against her hands was grounding. “Do you believe in the devil?”

She considered her. “Is this about Lucifer?”

“Ella, he’s not a method actor.”

She shrugged. “So, he’s a weirdo. That much is obvious.”

“Ella,” she said. “I have never been a believer. I don’t know much about religion or god or any of it. I need you to understand how much it would take to get me to say this.” She swallowed. “Lucifer is the devil.”

Ella hesitated. “You mean that literally?”

“I do.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s—that’s a lot. But I believe in god and… I’m believing in time loops. I can—I don’t know if I believe, Decker, but I can at least proceed as if I do.”

Chloe let out a breath that quickly turned into tears. “I thought I was going crazy the first few times through today. I thought—I was sure it couldn’t be true. And when I realized it was—I ran. I took Trixie and I fled the city and I just kept waking up back at home. And then—yesterday, or as close to it as I can get—I confronted him. He insisted he had no idea what I was talking about, that he didn’t know why the day was repeating.”

“Okay,” Ella said. “Why don’t you start at the beginning? What happened the first time around?”

She sat back with a calmer breath. “I went home to change after the crime scene this morning—”

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She hardly remembered falling asleep on Ella’s couch, ice cream melting on the side table, but she woke back in her bed.

She reached for her phone, hesitating as the second text came in. Faith. She could have faith. She dialed.

“Hey Decker,” Ella said. “On your way back?”

“I’m about to say something insane. Are you alone?”

“Uh, yeah. What’s up?”

“I’m in a time loop, for real. Your code word is enterprise. I need a favor.”

“Seriously?”

“Would I make a joke about this, today of all days?”

“What do you need?”

“I need you to find me some files and bring them to my apartment. And I need you to do it without Lucifer or Pierce knowing what you’re doing.”

“Charlotte’s files? I pulled those already.”

“No. I need every case I’ve ever worked with Lucifer.”

“That’s a lot of files, Chloe.”

“I know and I’m sorry. But right now, you’re the only person I can trust.”

“Ride or die, girl. I’ll get them for you.”

She stood and got dressed and, hesitating with the time she suddenly had, made herself breakfast. She wasn’t sure she’d eaten anything except coffee and vending machine snacks since this loop had begun and even though she clearly wasn’t starving to death, it felt good to eat a proper meal. She waited a little over an hour, long enough for Dan to be heading to the precinct, to call him.

“Chloe,” he answered immediately, distress in his voice. “I need to talk to you. I’m almost—”

“I’m at my apartment. I will explain more once this is over. I found out what you just did, about Marcus. I need you to cover for me at work. Work the case from the front, get Lucifer to help you. I’m going to work the other end.”

“You know?”

“Do you trust me, Dan?”

“You know I do.”

“Work the case. Cover for me. Don’t kill Lucifer. We’ll talk more later.”

“Wait, Chloe—”

She hung up and tried not to pace as she waited twenty more minutes for Ella to appear with several boxes of files.

“Sorry that took forever,” she said. “I had to get one of the techs to distract Lucifer for me.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I owe you, big time. Now, get back to the precinct. You need to be there to help Dan.”

Ella blinked. “Decker, you’re in a time loop and you’re worried about that?”

“I need to be sure everything is okay,” she said. “I don’t want to start testing what happens if someone dies or something while I’m stuck. Go, please.”

“I got you,” she said. “Anything you need, yeah?”

“Ride or die,” Chloe said. “Thank you.”

She would have thanked god that the files were in chronological order, but instead she mentally thanked Ella once more and started at the beginning.

Delilah. She would never forget that case

“Lucifer Morningstar,” she had asked, the very first thing she had ever said to him, “Is that a stage name or something?”

“God-given, I’m afraid.”

He wasn’t a liar. From the very beginning, he had been telling her the truth and smiling. It was funny to him that no one believed him.

Jimmy Barnes had shot him. She had been so sure of it in the haze, but later waved it off as impossible.

She pulled out a single sheet of lined paper, determined not to take too many notes given that she was probably going to have to memorize them, and merely wrote: Invincible(?)

Robbie Russell Jr. She flicked through the file, but quickly moved on. Ali Thornton—she’d forgotten some of the details of that case, but she paused on that report. Lucifer had thrown the agent through a glass wall with one hand. She—she might still have that video file on her computer. She’d watched it probably a hundred times.

She abandoned the paperwork for her laptop and found the video, only watching it thrice.

Super strength, she wrote.

Lindsay Jolson. She’d forgotten the name entirely, but her report had mortification rushing back in. That awful case at the Player’s event where she’d been stupid and—

Invincible(?) sometimes(?), she amended.

Those scars on his back. She’d seen them that same night for the first time. She didn’t often think of them, but when she had, she’d managed to conjure all sorts of ways he could have gotten them. But he’d told her, hadn’t he?

Maze cut off his wings.

Used to have wings, cut off.

Paola Cortez. Their first official case together. Or, semi-official. Her report said he hadn’t been officially made a consultant until afterwards. Their first department-authorized case, then. It might have been the one—it certainly wasn’t in her report—that he’d started a fight with a cop in her defense. She tried not to think of it fondly. It was definitely the one where Maze had defeated a dozen gang members without breaking a sweat.

She ignored the fondness and wrote, Demons = skilled fighters.

Erwin Scovell. A stolen container with a case of Russian dolls. She’d added later details about Lucifer’s stolen wings and her meeting with the feds about them to the file and she hesitated re-reading that note. Wings. Real wings.

She flicked through a few more, hesitating when she got to the sloppiest paperwork she’d probably ever filled out. She almost wondered why, but then she glanced at the date. Javier Aries. The paperwork she’d been working on when Dan dumped her by text. When she—

Oh, god, she’d almost had sex with Lucifer that night. She did not add that to her list, but she did sit with it for a little too long.

Rose Davis from the Satanist cult, immediately followed by Jacob Williams, the street preacher. Someone else had finished the paperwork there for her, because it had gotten complicated. Lucifer nearly getting arrested for murder, then Dan actually getting arrested for stealing evidence.

There wasn’t paperwork here about what happened after, but she didn’t need it. She’d had nightmares for a year about Trixie being kidnapped. Lucifer had been shot, bled all over the floor, and then been absolutely fine. She’d almost tested his blood, even then, she—she should have known.

A few more cases, a few more notes.

Has a mother somehow (ask Ella about lore)

CR- stepmother?

Car-crash, thought his dad was trying to kill me

Unfortunately, keeping her mind on track seemed impossible. She only had case files to read, but every one only reminded her of the moments in between and after and around.

Tried to get himself killed???

He does really love Lux

Why did he ask me to dinner and not show up?

Hundreds of people have slept with the devil and they’re not all dead

Check if any of those people are dead

He saved my life when I got poisoned then immediately married a stripper

How did he save my life? Formula

He doesn’t like kids but he loves likes puts up with Trixie

Can he love?

She didn’t realize she’d snapped the pen in her hand until the ink started to drip onto the page.

She gave up there. Perhaps there were more memories her case files could spark, but suddenly none of that felt so important.

She turned her siren on while she drove. It seemed like the sort of thing that mattered less now. It still felt irresponsible.

Her heart was pounding by the time she knocked on Linda’s door, in her throat by the time it swung open.

“Chloe.” She smiled. “How can I help you? I’ve got a few minutes until my next client.”

Now that she was here, she had no idea what to say, just mutely clung to the doorframe.

“Chloe?” Linda asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Lucifer,” she managed. “I learned some things about him that—I shouldn’t be here. This was a bad idea.”

“Wait,” she said, “what did you learn?”

This day was going to reset anyway. She could deal with sounding crazy for a moment.

“That he’s the devil.”

Linda’s eyes went wide and she moved to her computer in a hurry.

“What are you doing?”

“Canceling my next client,” she said. “We need to talk.”

“Because I need to be institutionalized?” Chloe asked.

“Chloe,” Linda said. “Have you seen his face?”

Chloe closed the door, finally moving to sit on the couch. “You know?”

“I’ve known for a while,” she said. “It was—it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh,” she said. “So you must know—what can you tell me?”

She sighed. “Technically, of course, doctor patient confidentiality means I shouldn’t tell you anything about Lucifer. But this is hardly the circumstance I think was imagined for that, so… I’ll tell you whatever I can. Honestly, though, Lucifer spends more time in our sessions talking about you and your work than anything.”

She hesitated. “He does?”

Linda sat across from her. “Do you want to tell me what happened? You seem to be taking this… comparatively well.”

“What did you do when you found out?”

“Hid for weeks,” she said. “Installed like three extra locks on my office door. Maze coaxed me out eventually but—I don’t think I spoke to another person for at least three days afterwards.”

She still wasn’t ready to think about Maze, so she said, “Is he—what does it mean, that he’s the devil? Is he stealing our souls or trying to send us to hell? I don’t—Linda, I’m terrified.”

“I know,” she said. “Trust me when I say, I understand what you’re going through. The single most reassuring thing I’ve been able to realize about Lucifer is something you already know, deep down.”

She sat forward.

“He doesn’t lie,” Linda said. “I used to think that meant he was speaking his truth, speaking in metaphors, but he really doesn’t lie. So, anything he’s said to you, that’s still true. And the thing he says the most about being the devil, something I’m sure he’s told you, is this: he’s not evil, he’s a punisher of evil.”

“Like Cain,” she said.

Linda’s eyes narrowed. “What did he do?”

“It’s what he’s going to do. I—”

The door burst open and Maze staggered in, bloody and exhausted and feral.

“Are they here?” She asked, hardly seeming to notice Chloe even as she surged up to help. “Did someone try to kill you?”

“What the hell happened?” Linda asked.

Chloe took a step back. Maze looked like… well, she looked like hell. Was this what she had been doing for a dozen loops?

“Are you okay?” Maze asked. Maze, who was a demon. Maze, who looked so concerned.

“Yes! I’m fine.”

“Maze,” Chloe said. Maze, who loved Trixie even if she’d hurt her feelings. “What happened?”

“Pierce,” she managed before she collapsed. “Don’t trust him, Decker.”

Pierce. Cain. Marcus.

“Oh, god,” Linda said. “She looks… what is going on?”

“I’m going to find out,” Chloe said. “When she wakes up, find out where she was and text me.”

“Where are you going?” Linda asked.

Maze didn’t look so frightening when she was asleep.

“Is she really a demon?” She asked.

“Yeah,” Linda said. “And my friend. Even if—even if she doesn’t always act like it.”

“A demon or a friend?”

“She has her moments of both.”

“Text me,” Chloe said, sparing one more glance and then rushing back out to her car.

The precinct felt far more frightening this time—Lucifer and Dan were out, probably looking for evidence of the frame job. Ella wasn’t in the lab, though.

“Decker,” Pierce said, approaching casually. “Espinoza borrowed Lopez. He was under the impression you were about to keel over sick.”

“Yeah, I lied to him,” she said. “Can we talk in private?”

“Okay.” He moved to his office, unaffected. He was good at that, at giving nothing away, but she knew him better than he gave her credit for.

For once, knowing that the day was going to reset was calming. Unless—

Unless Pierce was the one doing this to her. She didn’t know what sort of powers he had. She needed to be careful.

“I know,” she said, the moment she’d closed the door behind her.

He raised a brow. “Enlighten me, Decker. What do you know and why is it more important than the case you should be working?”

“I saw Lucifer’s face,” she said. “His real face. Marcus—he’s really the devil, I… I didn’t want to believe it.”

“He showed you his face?” His face was stone but she saw the suspicion in it.

“I don’t think he meant to,” she said, and the honesty of her words struck her. She had been an actress once, the best acts came from a place of truth. “I ran. I—is he going to steal my soul or something?”

He was hiding something like joy, mixed with caution. He put a hand on her shoulder, led her to a chair. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Chloe. He’s—he’s incredibly dangerous, but I have a plan to send him back to hell.”

Her instinct was to push him for details, even now, but he would expect that if she was lying, she would be trying to get information from him, so she just said, “Okay. I—I know I ended things and I don’t—I still trust you, Marcus. I can’t think about anything else right now.”

“Everything is going to be fine,” he said.

“Are you really Cain from the Bible?” She asked. “I—you’re human, right?”

“I’m human,” he said. “You don’t have anything to worry about. Where is Lucifer now?”

“I—I don’t know. I—it was real, right? You and me? Everything about my life feels like a lie right now.”

“Of course it was,” he said, a tiny bit of hurt bleeding into his expression.

A lie, then. At least partially a lie. Maybe a lie? He was so hard to read.

She stood. “Thank you. I—I need to go home and—I need time. I don’t know what to think about any of this.”

“This will all be over soon,” he said. “I promise.”

“It feels like today will never end,” she said.

“Go home,” he said. “Get some rest.”

She managed to breathe normally until she’d made it back to her car. She drove home, a thousand thoughts swirling around her head. Marcus killed Charlotte and he had only maybe loved her. Lucifer was going to kill Marcus and he had—

Her phone buzzed with a text from Linda and she fully pulled the car over to read it. An address.

Linda quickly followed it up with a second text: Maze says Pierce wanted her to kill Amenadiel and things got ugly when she refused. Please, whatever you’re doing, be careful.

What in the world did Amenadiel—an angel. Amenadiel was Lucifer’s brother and therefore an actual angel. And Pierce had wanted to kill him for some reason.

She set her GPS and didn’t bother asking follow-up questions. Maybe if she got to Maze earlier in the day, she could question her before she got the shit beaten out of her. How many people must it have taken to—?

She got her answer at the address, the bodies inside a clear indication of Maze’s presence. It was all she needed for right now.

She went home, barely glancing through the dozens of missed calls and unanswered texts. From Dan, and Ella, and more than anyone, from Lucifer.

It was stupid, but she’d filled her day with so much and now, in the dark, home with a bottle of wine she’d already finished before, she called him.

“Detective,” he answered immediately. “Are you alright?”

It wasn’t why she’d called, but she didn’t have anything else to say, so she asked, “Why would Pierce want to kill Amenadiel?”

Lucifer was silent a moment. “I… haven’t the foggiest. But—Amenadiel was with Charlotte when she died. He took her to heaven.”

“So, he killed Charlotte by accident,” she said. “Where’s Amenadiel now?”

“Well, I’m glad to see you have been checking your phone, Detective. Daniel’s been worried that you haven’t been answering him. Or—or myself or Miss Lopez.”

“Answer the question.”

He scoffed lightly. “I assume he’s in the Silver City. We won’t be seeing him again.”

“The Silver City?”

“Heaven,” he said. “Not that you believe me.”

“What’s it like? Heaven.”

“Boring,” he said immediately, but after a long enough silence, he added, “To be honest, Detective, it’s been millennia since I was last there and… it’s changed since then. There were no human souls in heaven when I went to hell.”

“Are you evil?”

He was silent even longer, unnaturally long. “I punish evil, Detective.”

She considered a moment, almost hung up, then asked, “Is it real? You and me, our partnership. Is it real to you?”

She expected—she wasn’t sure what she expected, but all he said, voice more serious than she had ever heard him, was, “Yes.”

She hung up before he could speak again or, worse, before she could. She tossed her phone out the window and crawled into bed.

Tomorrow—it was time to think about Maze. She needed answers and Maze—Maze had always been frightening. Right now, she preferred that over—it was time for some answers.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She texted Dan on her way out the door and sped to the warehouse. She went in slowly, quietly, and quickly realized that Maze had yet to take out Pierce’s men.

In a normal world, she would have called for backup, but she had left sense and reason behind several loops ago, so she drew her gun and slipped through the building. There were half of dozen of them congregated out in the front, a few more doing rounds, and—Maze, cuffed to pipes, unconscious, with two men hovering around her.

She must have breathed too loud or moved too quickly, because they spun to face her. She didn’t hesitate to fire, perfect shots, central mass, and both of them went down with a shout.

“Maze!” She didn’t have time to be afraid, to hesitate, so she holstered her gun and shook her awake, earning herself a growl.

“Decker,” Maze finally managed. “Linda’s in danger.”

“Linda’s safe,” she promised. “We need to get you out of here now.”

Maze pulled her arm hard, tearing the pipe from the wall and grabbing it. She freed her other hand just as easily and it was only the sound of others approaching that kept Chloe from freezing in fear.

Super strength. Okay. She could deal with super strength.

Maze smiled, a feral grin, unsteady on her feet. “You planning to just watch, Decker?”

She drew her gun and let her lead the way.

Violence, she could handle. Fighting alongside Maze was not exactly comfortable, but it was familiar. She’d always fought like hell had been unleashed and all that was different now was that Chloe knew why.

The last of Pierce’s men went down with a pipe to the head.

“I need to see Linda,” Maze said, panting. “You’ve got a car?”

“You need a hospital,” Chloe said, more on instinct than anything. “Oh, fine, never mind. We need to talk.”

Maze threw an arm around her, a desperate need for physical support disguised as camaraderie. “You came to save my ass just because you wanted to lecture me about something?”

She dug out her car keys as they made their way outside. “I saw Lucifer’s face.”

She coughed out a laugh. “And that made you come save a demon? Damn, Decker, you do have stones.”

Chloe got Maze in the passenger seat, drawing in a deep breath as she made her way around the car. It didn’t help.

She got in, shut the door, but didn’t start the car. “Why does Pierce want to kill Amenadiel?”

Maze went still for a moment. “Did he try again?”

“I don’t know about again,” Chloe said. “He shot and killed Charlotte Richards. Lucifer thinks they were together when she died, so maybe Pierce was trying to kill him and missed.”

“He’s alive?” She asked.

“No one’s seen him,” she admitted, “but Lucifer thinks he took Charlotte to heaven.”

Maze tilted her head in an almost catlike curiosity. “You’re talking about heaven like you believe in it.”

“I told you, I saw Lucifer’s face.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And you’re not running?”

“It’s a long story,” Chloe said. “But I need an answer. Why does Pierce want Amenadiel dead?”

“He doesn’t,” Maze said. “He wants to kill him.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I’ll talk if you drive.”

Chloe started the car.

“How much do you know?”

“Uh, not much, I don’t think. Pierce is Cain. Cain like killed his brother or something, right? And Amenadiel is an angel. Lucifer is the devil. You’re a demon.”

“The basics, then.” She kicked her feet up on the dash. “Cain didn’t just murder his brother, he was the first murderer. No human had ever died before and it was a real violent way to go. Abel went off to hell and Cain—God cursed Cain, gave him a mark so he would always remember his sin. The Mark of Cain?”

Chloe shrugged. “I’m not really religious. We only even had Trixie baptized because Dan’s—”

“God marked him,” Maze said, “and made him immortal, so he had to live with his sin forever. He’s been trying to find a way to die ever since. But then, you came around, and now he’s all mortal. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to die anymore. And now, he figures that killing God’s favorite son will earn him his mark back.”

There was far too much to unpack there. She stared at the road in front of her and wondered if she’d still repeat the day if she accidentally drove into oncoming traffic.

It was morbid enough of a thought to shock her back to reality.

“What do I have to do with him being mortal?” She managed to ask after a long silence.

“Honestly, it’s some celestial bullshit and no one really knows.” She scoffed. “Lucifer and Amenadiel will try to tell you otherwise, that it’s part of God’s plan or whatever, but they’re just as clueless as anyone.”

“Then, how do you know it has to do with me at all?”

“Well, Pierce thinks it’s because you fell in love with him.”

Had she been in love with him? The whole affair had been such a whirlwind, she’d hardly had a moment to even consider—even now, she was thinking about Lucifer so quickly that she nearly swerved off the road.

“Chloe,” Maze said. “You should talk to him.”

“Pierce?”

She scoffed. “Lucifer. You came to question me when you could have asked him. How did you even find me? That couldn’t have been easier.”

“Why did Lucifer come to LA? Why did you?”

“Look, he’s the devil, but he’s exactly the guy you already know—childish, self-absorbed, absolutely oblivious to everyone else all the time. He came to LA because he was pissed at daddy and he was bored of torturing. And now he won’t even take me back home because he won’t leave you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah,” Maze said, “Neither do I.”

It seemed to be all she was going to get, because Maze nearly leapt out of the car the moment they pulled up to Linda’s office. She considered going after her, but decided against it and pulled out her phone before she could change her mind.

Meet me at the penthouse.

She beat him there, poured herself a drink and moved out onto the balcony. It was a stunning view, and one she had stopped appreciating.

“Detective,” he said, out of breath. “Where have you been? Daniel said you were ill.”

She moved in off the balcony, not getting close, not daring. “You’re the devil.”

He hesitated. “I’ve always said so.”

“Show me your face.”

He frowned. “I don’t have my devil face, Detective. I—you believe me?”

“What can you show me?” She asked. “Your wings, right?”

“Detective,” he said. “I don’t understand what changed.”

“Show me.”

White filled her field of vision, feathery wings that—he’d shielded her with them, hadn’t he? And flown her to the roof. He’d—he was the devil and he’d saved her life.

She sat in one of the chairs, staring across to him, slowly perching on the couch, prepared to run. She needed to know. She needed to know something.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” She asked and he flinched like she’d slapped him.

“Don’t ask me that, Detective.” The wings vanished, eyes wide.

“Why?”

“Because I’ll tell you the truth.” His expression was unguarded and open and pained. “And then you’ll run.”

The one nice thing about an endless time loop was that you didn’t have to worry about keeping your promises. “I won’t.”

“Detective—”

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“I killed my brother,” he said. “Uriel. Stabbed him with Azrael’s blade and obliterated his soul. No heaven or hell, just… gone, just a body for me to bury.”

She studied his face, but he hardly seemed to notice. There was shame there, shame that she was seeing this part of him, but it was overwhelmed by guilt and grief and sorrow. It took her a long time to be able to speak, to be able to swallow that. “Was this… was this during your rebellion?”

He scoffed lightly, without any real annoyance behind it. “Last year.”

That was harder to fit into her ever-shifting image of him. Not angel-winged or devil-faced Lucifer, but nightclub-owning, police-consulting, ever-frustrating Lucifer. He had killed someone and she hadn’t known.

She was afraid to ask, so they sat in silence for a while before she finally managed, “Why?”

The worst thing he’d ever done and it had been since she’d known him.

His eyes were wide but he met her gaze. “Last year, you were in a car accident.”

The worst thing he’d ever done—no, no she didn’t—

“It wasn’t an accident,” he said.

Probably there were other things she should be thinking—an angel had maybe tried to kill her—but he looked so afraid and sad and tired, all she could think—

The worst thing he’d ever done and it had been for her.

He was the devil. He was supposed to be evil. Was it possible to be evil and still look so sad?

She meant to say something else, but instead she just burst into tears, sobbing into her hands. He hovered awkwardly, clearly wanting to comfort her, but not daring. It was so like him that she wanted to laugh.

She stood and threw herself into his arms, still sobbing.

He’d held her like this last night, at the crime scene, filled with grief. It felt a million years away now, the last night before time stopped mattering.

There were answers she didn’t have, too many things she didn’t know, but she had accepted long ago that she would never know everything about Lucifer. That night with Malcolm, his blood in a vial she’d never had tested. She would never know everything.

She just wanted her partner back. She should have known from the start that, bound for hell or not, she needed him.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She only vaguely remembered passing out on Lucifer’s couch, but she was getting used to time being a blur. Her next step should have been to fill Lucifer in, to get his help in getting out of this hell, but she barely managed to drag herself out of bed, get some things together.

She found herself at Trixie’s school, smiled at Carol at the front desk.

“Ms. Decker,” she said. “How can I help you?”

“Hi Carol,” she said. “Good to see you. I needed to grab Trixie early today.”

“Oh, I hope everything’s all right?”

She wanted to laugh. “Not exactly, but it will be.”

She was in no rush this time as she waited for Trixie, taking in the quiet hum of the front office. What must it be like to live like this?

“Mommy!” Trixie said.

“Hey, monkey.” She smiled. “Let’s go.”

“Is something wrong, Mommy?” She asked as they walked. “I thought Daddy was picking me up. Is he okay?”

“He’s fine, honey. I just thought you and I could use a girls’ day at the beach.”

“Really?” Trixie raised a brow.

“Really.”

“Is this a bribe?”

She chuckled. “That’s your dad’s domain, I think. I just thought we could have some fun.”

“That’s suspicious.” She grinned. “I love it.”

Chloe laughed and ruffled her hair.

It was a beautiful day, the beach was busy but not crowded, and Trixie ran into the waves with a glee that made Chloe feel a thousand years old. But she set up their towels on the sand and decided, for once, that she didn’t care about sunscreen.

Was this what it was like to be immortal? Just a complete confidence that everything would be fine no matter how many bad decisions one made? She—

She actually kind of understood Lucifer and, for once, it was almost a comforting feeling. Of course, he was terrible at prioritizing things she found important and, of course, he would never—he would never care about her the way she had once wanted him to. How could he? How easy was it for her to ignore Dan on the worst day of his life when she knew that none of it really mattered in the end?

And even if she did get out of this time loop, that was still true, wasn’t it? One day, she would die, and go to hell and stay there for the rest of eternity. Probably she should be trying to change—go to church and stop spending time with the devil—but if this life was all she got, if today was all she got—

Her daughter laughed and that mattered more than an eternity of anything.

Maybe that was why he stayed here in LA. Well, Lucifer with his daddy issues the size of the universe—literally, though she wasn’t ready to think about god being real—would probably hate a paternalistic metaphor, but human beings must be so small and clueless and funny to watch. Smaller than children really, more like watching ants. Is that why he flitted between them so easily, a hundred beautiful women in his bed?

Why was she different?

No, that was a flawed question, based on a flawed premise.

Was she different? What did he get from being her partner? Why was it enough to kill his brother? He hated his father, maybe that extended to his whole family, maybe killing his brother wasn’t nearly as big a deal for him as—

“Mommy!” Trixie ran up. “Aren’t you coming in the water?” She paused, tilted her head. “What’s wrong?”

Chloe stood, futilely brushed the sand off herself. “Nothing, babe. I’m just… overthinking.”

“About what?”

What the hell, none of this was going to stick anyway.

“Lucifer,” she said.

Trixie grinned, that smile that Lucifer always elicited from her. “You like him.”

“Yeah,” she admitted. Even now, it was still true. “But, I don’t think he likes me the same way.”

“How come?” She flopped down onto her towel, crisscrossing her legs very seriously.

“I thought you wanted to go in the water, honey.”

“We’re having girl time,” she said, like it was obvious.

Chloe laughed and sat back down. “When did you get so grown up?”

“Stay on topic,” she ordered.

“I don’t know, Trix,” she said, “we’re very different people.”

“But he obviously likes you,” she said. “Maze thinks so too.”

Chloe raised a brow. “Oh, really. And what did Maze have to say about that?”

“She said Lucifer’s different when he’s with you. That he thinks more about the consequences of his actions and it makes him really boring.”

Chloe considered it. “For Maze, that’s surprisingly insightful.”

“She also said you need to bone,” Trixie announced cheerfully.

Chloe managed not to sputter. “And… did she tell you what that meant?”

“She said to ask you. Which I know means it’s gross grown-up stuff.” Something dark crossed her face. “Does she really hate me?”

Chloe’s heart dropped. She knew Trixie had been upset and she knew Maze hadn’t been around much lately, but it had been weeks since the incident. She had mostly forgotten about it and she’d assumed Trixie had too. She should have known, should have seen.

“No,” she said firmly, surprising herself with how true the word felt. Yes, Maze was a demon, but she’d seen the way she’d run across the city to make sure Linda was alright. Her adoration for Trixie, maybe it wasn’t the same as a human would have, but it was real. “Maze is—she’s going through a hard time, monkey. And sometimes, when we’re upset, we lash out at the people around us, even if we don’t mean it.”

“That’s what Daddy said.” She frowned. “But she hasn’t even said she was sorry.”

“Yeah,” Chloe said, “she isn’t good at that, is she?”

Trixie almost smiled. “I don’t want to be mad at her anymore.”

She let out a breath, let go of whatever her mind was trying to grapple with. “You don’t have to be.”

“Come on!” She jumped to her feet. “We have to go in the water.”

It was a beautiful day with her perfect daughter. Sometimes, that had to be enough.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She allowed herself ten whole, luxurious minutes to decide what she was doing with the day, then shot texts to Dan and Lucifer. She hesitated before hitting send on the latter, then immediately dialed before she could think better of it.

“Chloe,” Linda said warmly. “How are you?”

She let out a long breath. “I saw Lucifer’s devil face.”

“Oh,” she said, followed by a long silence. “I’m going to clear my schedule for today.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

She tried not to overthink it on the drive over, but all that went out the window the moment she heard Lucifer’s voice through Linda’s open door.

“That’s not possible, Doctor,” he said. “I don’t have my devil face. I—this must be Pierce.”

“It’s not about Pierce,” she said, closing the door behind her.

“Detective,” Lucifer said, like he was surprised to see her, like she wasn’t the one who’d asked him to come here.

“I believe you,” Chloe said, holding his gaze. “I believe.”

He furrowed his brow in that confused way he did when someone did something too selfless. “Detective, are you feeling quite alright?”

“Lucifer,” she said. It was the only thing she could say.

He tilted his head, took a small step back. “You really believe that I’m the devil?”

She almost laughed. “I’m about to tell you something even crazier, so I think I owe you that much.”

“Why don’t we all sit down?” Linda asked. “And, uh, how exactly can it get crazier?”

“I’m caught in a time loop.”

“Like Groundhog Day?”

“Never actually seen it.”

“That’s not possible,” Lucifer said.

“I don’t have time to watch a million movies,” she said.

“What?” He stared at her. “A time loop? Detective, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t have time to prove it to you,” she said. “In an hour, Dan’s going to call because we’re not at the precinct and he’s freaking out that Pierce is the Sinnerman and killed Charlotte. In a few more, Maze is going to burst in here covered in blood because she thinks Linda’s in danger. Is that enough to go on faith?”

“It’s enough for me,” Linda said. “I—Charlotte’s dead?”

Chloe let out a regretful breath. “Sorry, I’ve been through today a dozen times so it’s—yeah.”

“Pierce killed her?” Lucifer asked.

“Yes,” she said. “We’re going to stop him. We already have several times. Right now, I need to focus on the time loop.”

“Time,” he said, as if that were revelatory. He jumped to his feet, halfway to the door. “That bastard.”

“Lucifer, sit,” Chloe said, before he could make it out the door.

He turned back, something strange on his face. “I need to find Amenadiel. Now. Whatever he’s doing—”

“Now, I’m not the expert in celestial… anything,” Linda said, “but Amenadiel’s power, even if he got it back, just slows time, doesn’t it?”

He hesitated. “Well, yes, but… if it’s not him, then I have no bloody idea what to do.”

“In fact,” Linda said, “from what you’ve described, this sounds a lot more like a hell loop.”

“It is not!” He growled, anger quickly melting into shame. “I—Doctor, the Detective cannot be in a hell loop, because for that, she would need to be in hell, and you and I can plainly see she’s alive.”

“What’s a hell loop?” Chloe asked.

They both turned to her in surprise. Lucifer fiddled anxiously with his cufflinks. “Detective—”

She turned to Linda. “What’s a hell loop?”

Linda glanced to Lucifer, hesitating.

“Chloe,” Lucifer said, returning to his seat beside her. Her name was raw and foreign in his mouth. “You’re not in a hell loop.”

“Tell me,” she said.

He was quiet a moment. “In hell, guilty souls are forced to relive their guilt on repeat. But you’re alive and when you do die, you’re going to heaven, Detective. It’s not relevant.”

She drew in a long breath. “How do you get out of a hell loop?”

“You don’t,” Lucifer said. “No one ever has.”

“You did,” Linda said.

He scoffed. “No human being ever has. And I only got out because Mum—” He hung his head. “Regardless, Detective, you don’t need to worry about it.”

“How do I know that?”

He looked at her, worry in his eyes. “I promise.”

“Lucifer,” she said. “I understand that you can know that, if you’re real. But if you were part of my guilty conscience, wouldn’t you tell me that anyway? How do I know this is real?”

He let out a shaky breathe. “I suppose—I suppose you don’t.”

All the sudden surety she’d been finding, all her thoughts about life and love and what it meant that the devil—all of that vanished.

She wasn’t going to hell.

She was in hell.

“Chloe,” Linda said. “Take a deep breath. Let’s not jump to any conclusions yet.”

“Detective,” Lucifer said. “I would never allow you to go to hell.”

“You control who goes to hell?”

He didn’t answer, which meant he knew she wouldn’t like the answer. If this was real, that was. Wow, she was really losing it.

“Detective,” he said, “you really are in a time loop?”

“Or a hell loop.”

“It’s a time loop,” he said, “and it’s surely my father’s doing, but—” He stood, moving for the door. “Are you coming?”

“Where are you going?” Linda asked.

“To prove to the Detective that this isn’t hell.”

Chloe stood. “But if you’re just—”

He held out a hand to her. “Have a little faith.”

Faith. Right. She had managed it in Ella and… she could manage it now. For today. For this moment.

“Thank you,” she said to Linda and, shoving aside all hesitation, she took his hand.

Faith took her to a rooftop restaurant with no prices on the menu and a gorgeous view of the city. The hostess tried to tell them there were no tables available but then the owner appeared to greet Lucifer and thirty seconds later, they were seated with mimosas in hand.

Lucifer took a sip, poured a good helping of liquor in from his flask, and smiled at her. “Does this look like hell to you, Detective?”

“How should I know what hell looks like?” She sipped at her drink. “Do you have a supernatural alcohol tolerance? Because that would explain a lot.”

He laughed. “If I want to get properly drunk, it takes half my bar.”

He didn’t lie, but he was known to exaggerate and she chose to believe this was an overstatement rather than think about the sheer amount of money he must spend on liquor.

Her phone buzzed and, on instinct she reached for it.

“What is it?” Lucifer asked.

She didn’t bother to check the caller ID. “It’s Dan. I—I’ve ignored this call so many times, but for a second there, I felt normal enough that I forgot none of this is real.”

“Detective,” Lucifer said. “Do you want to answer it?”

She knew he meant it. Even though he had surely planned a whole string of things to prove that this wasn’t hell, he would forget it all in a moment for her.

The phone stopped ringing.

“Will you show him your wings?” She asked.

“You think Daniel can handle being a celestial insider?”

“I need him to believe me,” she said, not realizing how true it was until she said it. “I need—please.”

“As you wish,” he said, standing and brushing himself off.

Meet me at the penthouse, Chloe wrote, yet again.

“Lux,” she managed to say aloud as she stood.

He nodded seriously. “Let’s go.”

This was not the plan. She had meant to find the source of this loop, meant to figure out if this was really hell, but—

Maybe none of it really mattered in the end, but she was tired of ignoring Dan on the worst day of his life. If this was hell, maybe it would relieve some of her guilt and if it was real-life in a time loop, then—well, then she’d get nothing from it and it would all reset but she still had to do it.

Lucifer was quiet as he drove, unusually contemplative, though still ignoring both the speed limit and good sense. She didn’t know whether to question him or to thank him or to cry, so she settled for silence.

Dan was already in the penthouse when they arrived, pacing the length of the bar.

“Chloe.” He breathed, frantic eyes open wide. “We need to talk.”

“I know about Pierce,” she said, trying to remember what the grief and the shock were supposed to feel like. “He’s the Sinnerman. He killed Charlotte. He needs to go down. We’ll get back to that.”

“Back to it?” Dan raised a brow. “Where the hell have you been? How do you even know—?”

“Dan,” she said, before Lucifer could finish opening his mouth to say something stupid. “I have a lot of absolutely insane things I need to tell you. Things that should earn me a psych eval. But first, I need to prove that I’m not crazy.”

“Chloe,” he said. “You don’t need to prove yourself to me.”

Lucifer moved to pour a drink. “Well, in that case—”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.” She glanced to Lucifer, then back to Dan. “Lucifer is the devil.”

Dan looked at her. “What?”

“Show him,” she said, turning back to Lucifer again, who had already finished his drink.

He’d agreed so easily before, but now he was hesitant, fiddling with his cufflinks. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was nervous. “Perhaps you should sit down, Daniel.”

“I don’t need to sit,” Dan said. “I need your help. Chloe, what is going on?”

“Show him,” she said again, then, though she felt bad about it, added, “You promised.”

Lucifer took a step away from the bar and his wings, great and white and still impossible enough to take her breath away, filled the air around him.

Dan sat down.

Silence filled the room for ten very long seconds, until Lucifer folded his wings back away. One day, she would ask him where they went.

“You’re—” Dan finally said.

“The devil,” Lucifer said, as Dan finished, “an angel.”

Lucifer made a face at that and poured another drink. “I was. A very long time ago. Come on, Daniel, you were raised Catholic, yes? You understand what it means to fall.”

He stared, blinked. “Oh, god.”

“Now you’re getting it.” Lucifer handed him the drink he’d poured. “Is this what you wanted, Detective? I’m starting to worry he’s going comatose.”

“He’s fine,” she said. “Dan.”

“The devil,” he said. “And you knew?”

“I just found out,” she said. “And that isn’t even what I need to tell you. That was just so you believe what comes out of my mouth next.”

He laughed, head in his hands. “I’m going insane. I can’t—Chloe, I—”

“I know,” she said, sitting across from him. “Dan, I’m not entirely sure I’m not in hell or going insane or—I need you to believe me.”

“I always believe you,” he said. “Just, sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

She took a deep breath, looked to Lucifer, who was too busy pouring himself a drink to notice, and said, “I’m caught in a time loop. I’ve been through today over a dozen times. We stopped Pierce the first time, Lucifer killed him—”

“Excuse me?” Lucifer said.

She ignored him. “We stopped him, he was dead, I saw Lucifer’s devil face—”

“Hold on,” Lucifer said, “I haven’t got my—”

“What is a devil face?” Dan asked.

“Scary and red,” she said. “I saw it, I ran off, and then I woke up the next morning and none of it had happened, so I did it all over again. And again. And again. I don’t—Dan, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to start. I just wanted to tell you that I wasn’t avoiding the case because I don’t care about you, or about Charlotte, but—I know what to do. I know how to catch him. I just don’t know how to stop this all from happening again and again and—”

He took a breath. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I—I mean, it’s not okay, but—I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say.”

Lucifer sat beside Chloe, placing a drink in her hand. “Detective, I…”

She turned to look at him, surprised by the hurt on his face. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to kill Pierce?” He asked.

“No one would blame you for it,” Dan said.

“My father would,” he said. “Angels aren’t allowed to—I’ve never killed anyone. I’m not sure I like the idea of Cain being my exception.”

“Cain?” Dan asked, even as Chloe frowned.

“World’s first murderer,” Lucifer said. “Goes by Pierce these days.”

“That’s not true,” Chloe said.

Lucifer looked at her in confusion. “You believe I’m the devil, but not that Pierce is Cain?”

She blinked. “No, I mean—you said you’ve never killed anyone. That’s not true. I thought you didn’t lie.”

His face darkened in pain. “I suppose I misspoke. I’ve never killed a human being. And Pierce, or Cain, however dastardly, still falls into that category. I—what did I tell you?”

She knew, immediately, that no matter how she had tried to brush it away, killing his brother had hurt him more deeply than anything she’d ever seen. And he’d done it for her.

She wasn’t an ant.

She’d wanted so badly to be there for Dan, even if it wasn’t going to stick, even if it wouldn’t matter tomorrow. It mattered today. Here and now, it mattered.

One day, she was going to die anyway, but Lucifer had killed his brother to delay it a handful of decades. Here and now.

She wasn’t in hell. She knew it, suddenly and certainly. She didn’t know how hell worked or what tricks it contained, but she knew, for sure, that if she was in hell, she wouldn’t be feeling so certain that he really did love her. Maybe not in the way she wanted, maybe not in a human way, but—

“Detective?” Lucifer asked.

“I’m not in hell,” she said. “This is real?”

“It’s too crazy to be anything else,” Dan said.

She drew in a breath. She was so tired of crying, but despite it, she was tempted. Instead, she took a long gulp of the drink in her hand.

“Detective,” Lucifer said. “One day, a very long time from now, you will die, and you will go to heaven.”

“How can you know that?”

“I know that,” Dan said. “Well, I guess now that I have to start believing in heaven again, I know that.”

Another breath. “I’m—I need some air.” She moved to the balcony.

She looked out over the skyline, that beautiful view that she had considered everything from a taste of heaven to a needless extravagance.

After a few minutes, Lucifer joined her, quietly settling against the railing. “I don’t know how to save you.”

“I don’t need you to save me,” she said. “You—how many times have you saved my life?”

He met her gaze, eyes wide. “And you, mine, Detective.”

“I…” She looked out at the city. “It all looks so small from up here, doesn’t it?”

He put a hand on hers.

“Is this what you see when you look at us?” She asked, needing to hear him say it even if she thought she knew. “Something tiny and far away?”

He smiled a little sadly. “In the beginning, when humanity was new and my father, he was obsessed with you. My mother, she thought so. Humans were tiny and fragile and a waste to care about. But I—from the start, Detective, I found myself rather jealous of you lot.”

“Jealous?” She asked, tilting her head. “Of what?”

“Dad doesn’t like when anyone questions him,” he said. “For my trouble, he threw me into hell. But human beings, from the beginning, you always asked so many questions, even when it meant challenging him. Even after the garden, it never cowed you.”

“The garden,” she repeated. “Like, Adam and Eve?”

He scoffed. “Well, Adam was a bit of a tosser, but Eve… Eve was a delight. Pity neither of her sons took after her in the slightest.”

“Wait, is Pierce—Cain and Abel were her sons, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “But that was a long time ago.”

They were quiet a moment, peaceful.

“Why did you never tell me the truth?” She asked, then corrected, “You told me you were the devil, but you never tried to prove it. Why?”

He looked a little wounded, but said, “At first, there was no reason to. And then, I was afraid that—I was afraid you would run. Everyone says they want to know the truth, Detective. Hardly anyone means it.” His gaze fixed on the horizon. “I did try to show you, that night I called you, after the pier? But then, I got kidnapped and my wings came back and—” He swallowed. “And then, you were with Pierce and everything I did just seemed to drive you further away.”

“Maze said that I made Pierce mortal,” she said, the conversation vague in her mind. “That he was trying to die and I was—is that why he was with me? Because he was using me to get himself killed? And why me?”

Lucifer drew in a breath. “Detective, this is—do you really want the truth? Even if you won’t like it?”

“I need it,” she said. “Lucifer, nothing scares me about Pierce.”

“This isn’t about Pierce,” he said. “This is about you.”

Her blood went cold at his words, his face, his tone, full of fear. He was so afraid, even now.

She kept fear from her face, put a hand on his arm. “I want to know.”

“Early in our partnership,” he said, “you shot me.”

Her hand went to her throat, to the necklace she wasn’t wearing anymore.

“Before that night, I was entirely invulnerable.”

“Jimmy Barnes,” she said. “He did shoot you.”

“He did, several times. Bullets meant nothing to me then. That night, you shooting me, it was the first time I had ever been injured by a human. Angels and demons have weapons that can hurt me, Maze’s knives, but human weapons aren’t capable of damaging the divine. Until you.”

“How is that possible?”

“I’m getting to that. Pierce had been keeping tabs on me, knew when I was back on earth, and when he realized I’d become vulnerable, that you were the reason, he came running to Los Angeles. That case at the charlatan reform farm—”

“He saved my life,” Chloe said.

“He was the one who called ahead and told the murderer you were on the way. He was hoping that if you were there, and he threw himself in front of you, he would get to die. It didn’t work. We worked together for a time, tried a hundred other ways to kill him, but then he got it in his head that the reason I was vulnerable around you was—was because you cared for me. So, he made sure that you cared for him. At least, that’s what it was at the beginning. I do believe it became real for him. That it wasn’t when your feelings changed that he became vulnerable. It was—it was when his did.”

She heard the admission in those words. The night she’d shot him—he wasn’t even an official consultant yet. They’d known each other, what? Weeks, a couple months?

“Why were you so afraid to tell me this?”

“Because there’s more.” His face was unreadable. “I—if you were going to run, I wanted to make sure you’d gotten to hear everything first.”

“I’m tired of running.”

“You’re a miracle.”

She stared at him a moment, slowly understanding that this was not a compliment, but not parsing at all what it meant. “Okay. What does that mean?”

He couldn’t seem to look at her. “Thirty-five years ago, my father sent Amenadiel down to earth to bless a couple who was struggling to conceive a child. Your parents, Detective. You were born because of a divine blessing, a miracle.”

“That—” She swallowed. “That doesn’t make Amenadiel my father, right?”

“Oh, Dad, no!” He wrinkled his nose. “No, your father is still your father, Detective. Just blessed.”

“Okay. Does your dad do that a lot, bless people?”

“Never before or since,” he said. “Almost as if—as if he intended us to meet.”

“Okay.” She stayed still, kept her eyes on his face even as he refused to meet her gaze. “I—I wish you had told me this, along with everything else, but I don’t understand why that would make me run.”

“Free will, Detective,” he said. “It’s the greatest thing about humanity and I would never forgive myself if I let my father take it from you. It’s why…”

“Why what?”

“It’s why I married Candy,” he said, “in part, at least. To make sure you weren’t forced to choose…”

“You think I don’t have free will?”

He gestured widely. “Maybe that’s why you’re trapped in this loop. Maybe if you make a choice he doesn’t approve of, he’ll just do this to you until you concede! Because the bloody bastard—!”

She grabbed his arm, spun him easily to face her. It sounded no less ridiculous to think of blaming his father for every bad thing in the world even now that she knew the truth. “So, what, human beings are worthy of your jealousy, except me, who just needs pity, needs to be saved? Do you think so little of me?”

The anger vanished from his face. “Never. I’m sorry, I—I think the world of you, Detective.”

“Me being a miracle, is that why your mojo doesn’t affect me?”

“I believe so.”

“Ask me anyway.”

“What?”

“Ask me.”

They were standing so close now and it was only the ever-pressing reminder that today was going to wash away like writing on the sand under the beating of the waves that kept her from being mortified that Dan was still inside, almost certainly eavesdropping.

“Tell me,” he said, uncertain and afraid, “Detective, what is it you desire?”

“I want you to believe that I can make my own choices. I want you—I want you to have faith in me.”

“The devil is not very good at faith.”

“Neither am I,” she said. “Maybe we can figure it out together.”

He nodded. “I want to try.”

She surged upwards, but he took a step back, eyes never leaving her face.

“I—” she said, “I thought—”

“I want nothing more, Detective,” he said. “But I want to remember it.”

“Tomorrow, then,” she said.

“Tomorrow,” he said, and it sounded like a promise.

Dan was, luckily, a little too shell-shocked still to demand proper answers from her and didn’t even question her desire to lie down for a few minutes.

Even with all the thoughts spinning through her head, she fell asleep near immediately.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

This time, she stopped for coffee on the way to Linda’s and sat down on the couch with a great sigh.

“Okay,” Linda said. “You—how are you doing, Chloe?”

“I’m fine about Lucifer,” she said. “That’s actually the secondary thing. The main one is that I’m caught in a time loop.”

She blinked. “That’s a thing? Like Groundhog Day?”

“Apparently. Anyway, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve redone today, but yesterday, when we talked—”

“Yesterday?” She asked. “Oh, your yesterday. Continue.”

“You suggested that I might be in a hell loop,” Chloe said. “And then Lucifer had a freak out about trying to prove that I wasn’t dead so we didn’t get much further than that. He—he said no one had ever gotten out of one.”

“It’s about guilt,” Linda said. “If you can stop feeling guilty, you can leave. The problem is, being constantly confronted with the thing you feel guilty about doesn’t help anyone to feel less guilty. It doesn’t seem exactly like a fair system, but then that gets into questioning God, who is real, so I just try not to think about it.”

Chloe decided to also not think about that. “But I don’t—I don’t feel guilty. At least, I don’t think I do.”

“I don’t think you’re in hell, Chloe,” she said, frowning. “Unless we’re both in hell. Can people share hell loops?”

“Linda.”

“Right, sorry.” She shook her head. “You were saying?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I did panic initially and think it must be hell, but I’ve had days in this loop where I’ve just gone back to bed or taken Trixie to the beach. It doesn’t feel like hell. Not all of the time, anyway. Not—”

Linda waited a moment, then lightly nudged, “Not what?”

She looked to the window, hands clenched. Linda wouldn’t remember a word she said, but still, once she said the words, she wouldn’t be able to un-say them.

“Chloe.”

“When I’m with him,” she said, “it’s hard to feel afraid. How crazy is that? In the first version of today, I was terrified and running away from him, and now, so quickly I’m right back to needing him.”

Linda reached out a hand, put it on hers. “I know what you mean. Lucifer is—he’s a lot of things.  But it’s only his face that’s frightening. He—once, before I knew the truth about him, during a particularly difficult session, Lucifer punched a hole in my wall. Now, I’ve had patients before who’ve done things like that, including ones where I genuinely feared for my safety. But, as a man, he never frightened me.”

“And as the devil?”

“As the devil,” she said, “I’ve realized that behind his carefree façade, he puts a lot of effort at all times into holding back. His anger, that celestial strength. It’s—when I was a kid, I used to be afraid of dogs. Especially because my neighbors they had this giant Rottweiler. I was petrified of it. My neighbors would leave it tied up in their backyard and I was too afraid to even go outside. But one day, I was out in the yard, and the dog got loose. I don’t think it even meant to, but the lead had worn down over time. I just froze in place and tried not to scream—I think I had it in my head that dogs were like bears and wouldn’t approach if I stayed still. But it came over to me and didn’t look as scary, so I tried to be brave and pet it.”

As a mother, Chloe winced at this.

“Not my smartest move,” Linda admitted. “But all I did was raise my hand and the dog went running off into the neighborhood. Not sure they ever found it.”

“What does this have to do with Lucifer?”

She smiled. “Afterward, I told my mother what had happened. And she said, no matter how frightened you were, I think that dog was more afraid of you than you will ever be of him.”

“I’m assuming Lucifer is the dog in this scenario?”

“He is a scary frightening thing,” she said. “And he could actually harm you if he wanted. But he never would. He is so afraid of anything and anyone that can make his walls come down. More than anything, he’s afraid of you. Afraid of being rejected.”

“Like I rejected him,” she said. “I ran, when I saw his face. I ran and ran and didn’t stop running for days. Maybe that’s what I feel guilty about.”

“I thought you didn’t think you were in hell.”

“I don’t, I think,” she said. “But I don’t have any better ideas. Maybe time loops and hell loops work the same way.”

“Okay,” Linda said, “let’s operate for the moment under that assumption. You feel guilty now about rejecting Lucifer when you saw his true face. Did you feel guilty the first time around?”

She frowned. “I was too afraid to really be thinking about his feelings.”

“So, that might explain why you’re still in the loop, but if it is guilt-based, that wouldn’t explain how the loop started. The first time around, what did you feel guilty about?”

She considered that for a long moment. “I don’t know. The day was such a—I went into it sleep deprived and then it ended with Lucifer killing my boss-slash-ex-fiancé-slash-world’s-first-murderer so I didn’t do a lot of self-reflection.”

“Lucifer killed Pierce?” She asked.

“He’s going to,” she said. “Pierce killed Charlotte.”

“Charlotte’s going to die?”

She let out a long breath. “Charlotte is dead. She died last night.”

“Oh,” Linda said.

“It doesn’t really make it better,” Chloe said, “but Lucifer thinks that Amenadiel took her to heaven.”

“Good,” she said, nodding seriously. “I—putting that aside for a moment. Trying to put that aside, anyway, you are in a unique position to examine your guilt. If today really is repeating endlessly, maybe the best thing to do is to repeat what you did the first time, and see if you can find guilt. Or—honestly, any strong emotions. We don’t know how this works.”

“That’s—” Chloe frowned. “That’s actually a pretty good idea. I guess that’s my plan for tomorrow. And then I get to come back and explain all of this to you, again.”

“That sounds exhausting,” Linda said. “Screw therapy, I think you need a drink.”

“We should stay,” she said. “Maze is going to burst in looking for you in an hour or so and I don’t really want to find out what she does to LA if she doesn’t find you.”

“Uh, Maze is—I mean—demons.” She sighed. “How about we go get a few bottles of wine at least?”

Chloe let out a breath. “Sounds like a plan. Maybe some first aid stuff too.”

Concern crossed her face. “Is Maze okay?”

“She’s going to be.”

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

The nice thing was, she woke up without a hangover.  She tried to get back in her original mindset, a mix of annoyance that she’d fallen asleep, exhaustion, grief, and the smallest hint of still thinking about Lucifer, about the previous night.

That night felt a million years away, but she thought she managed it, remembered to text the babysitter, drove the same way to work and managed to dredge up just a little remaining annoyance at the traffic.

Lucifer was waiting with her coffee and she tried to forget that she knew it would taste like dirt.

“Hey,” she said, moving close to him but not collapsing in his arms sobbing like she wanted. “How are you doing?” She tried to say it, not like a script, but like a genuine concern, like nothing had changed since the first time she asked it.

He did that same sad smile and held the coffee cup out. “Just how you like it, Detective.”

It was hard to do both things at once, to try and maintain the correct chain of events while also digging deep into how she felt. God, she hated therapy.

But she kept it together. They looked at Charlotte’s files, Ella brought them more breakroom coffee, Dan stormed into the conference room.

It was there that she had to work harder. It was strange, to act shocked and hurt and angry by things she’d known for ages and ages, but she managed it, managed to remember what it felt like to find out for the first time. Pierce was the Sinnerman, Lucifer had known—she should’ve known. More than guilt or grief or anger, it was that one thought that had come to her at the beginning and not gone away. She should’ve known—who Pierce was, that he was untrustworthy, that Lucifer was once again breaking her trust and hiding behind metaphors.

But the anger was there too. She held onto it a bit like finding a cellphone from the nineties, something useless if a bit nostalgic for a simpler time. Once, she had still had a proper capacity for anger and not just the urge to cry. Chloe Decker may have been utterly deconstructed by today, but she still didn’t cry at work. There were some lines you didn’t cross.

The evidence, the suspect’s house, face to face with Dan’s ever-present fresh grief for something that felt ancient. The phone, the distraction—acting like she didn’t know Lucifer was going to go rogue—bringing Pierce’s goon back to the penthouse. She could still feel the fear, the frustration, the determination.

It was a mistake to stray from the script and she wasn’t sure what made her do it, but she left Dan alone with Barrow and hesitated. She was supposed to go out onto the balcony, to stand there in the quiet and stare at the skyline and plot Pierce’s downfall, but she stepped out of Lucifer’s bedroom and pressed herself flush against the outer wall. It wouldn’t change anything to know what he had said. He was so full of grief, maybe—maybe she could find a way to help him when all of this was over.

“A corrupt cop,” Dan said, and she wasn’t sure if he had trusted her to walk away or if he no longer cared if he admitted it. Even now, her heart protested, but she knew he wasn’t wrong.

“What?” Barrow asked.

“A corrupt cop,” he repeated, with a quiet chuckle that made her blood go cold. “That's what Pierce called me... when we first met. And it pissed me off when he said it. Well, you know what? He was right.”

She froze. The unmistakable sound of a gun being loaded. The only thing keeping her in place was the knowledge that he wouldn’t fire it.

“I have stolen evidence.” He cocked the gun and she had to remind herself that the whole point was to behave the same—“I've had someone killed. And I never regretted it for a split second.”

No. Not Dan. Everyone else could have secrets, could have lied to her, but after Palmetto, she had thought Dan—he was supposed to be the one she could trust to tell her the truth. Who had he killed? When? What could be so worthy of death that she believed the lack of regret in his voice?

“What do you think the answer is?” She heard him ask.

Maybe she should have known this too. Dan had lied to her after Palmetto. Nothing had changed, she had just decided to pretend he would be honest now that they weren’t married.

Even then—Dan wasn’t a killer. He—there was too much grief in his voice for it to have been a lie.

They made their plans to go save this girl that didn’t exist, but she allowed herself one more divergence before they ran out the door. Her feelings quest had already been thrown off-kilter anyway.

“Dan,” she said, tilting her head to the balcony. “A word?”

“What’s up?”

She had to know. She was so tired of not knowing.

“When did you have someone killed?”

His face darkened into something foreign, still guiltless. “You heard that?”

“Tell me,” she said. “Please, no games, Dan.”

“Can we talk about this later?”

“There is no later. Only now.” She held his gaze.

He looked away, out at the skyline that she was getting sick of. He hesitated a moment, two—“Perry Smith.”

She forgot how to breathe, forgot how to speak, forgot how to do anything but stare.

“Maze had some Russian friends, made a call,” he said. “I wasn’t letting him walk away.”

For her. Another person killed for her that no one had bothered to tell her about. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say to that.

She wasn’t sure why she laughed, but once she started, she couldn’t stop.

“Chloe,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“For all you hate each other,” she said, “you and Lucifer are so alike.”

Before he could say anything, she turned away. They still had a trap to walk into. She still a bullet to take, had to be flown to a rooftop, had to—

“You’re safe,” Lucifer said, holding her in his arms. “That’s all that matters.”

She had believed him the first time, but now she felt it all the more, felt the shock when he vanished from behind her, the trembling realization as Dan called.

“Dan?” She breathed, just as breathless as the first time.

His relief sounded more pointed. “Hey, Chloe, uh, it's a trap.”

“Dan, I-I know. I know. We had to find out the hard way.” This was the script, the things she had said, fear and shock and everything working their way up her chest. “Pierce, he tried to kill us.”

“What? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I am.” It had been a lie the first time and it was a lie now. “I-I don't know how, but I am.”

“Or maybe I do know.” She should have. It shouldn’t have taken this. “Maybe I've been avoiding the biggest truth this whole—”

The gunshots. That was her cue, wasn’t it? The actress in her had to follow her cues.

But sometimes, instinct was stronger than the script. Seeing that face again, that horrifying face with her partner’s voice—the script wasn’t what sent her running. More than anything, that fear was still real, even if it was just a child running from a dog. She hated that the fear wasn’t as gone as she’d thought. She hated that she couldn’t control the emotions boiling inside her.

Paramedics, nurses, cops, Dan.

Even now, she was glad to see him, glad to have him take her home with him.

“Take the bed,” Dan said.

“Stay,” she said. “I— just… I need someone to hold me. Please.”

For a moment, he looked properly grief-stricken, but he moved to her, wrapped her in his arms without hesitation. They hadn’t shared a bed in a very long time, but neither of them had forgotten how to do it. There was nothing remotely romantic about it, but even with all he’d done, even after his lies, after the blood on his hands, sometimes Dan was the only solid ground in the sea. He was family, and that meant they could hold each other and cry until they fell asleep.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

“Like Groundhog Day?” Linda asked.

“Anyway, you told me to go through the day like I did the first time to see if I could identify strong emotions—we’re operating on the basis of time loops being somewhat similar to hell loops. But I ended up getting a bit sidetracked because I found out that Dan and Maze had someone killed last year.”

“They did what?” She sat forward. “Maze—well, honestly, Maze doesn’t surprise me, but, Chloe, that’s—”

“Perry Smith,” she said. “The man that killed my father. He got to walk free and then almost immediately got killed and I refused to be happy about it. I wanted him in jail. I—I would never ask Dan to do anything like this. Why would he? Why do people think they need to kill for me but not that they need to tell me the truth?”

“People,” Linda said, face giving nothing away. “What do you mean by that?”

“Lucifer told me about Uriel,” she said. “And I’ve been trying not to think too much about it. It’s different if it’s an angel, if there’s no proof it ever happened. But Dan—and Pierce.”

“Pierce?” She asked.

“Lucifer is going to kill Pierce,” she said. “And the worst thing—I don’t care. I haven’t bothered to spare him even a second of grief. I was going to marry him, Linda! What’s wrong with me that I don’t care?”

“He’s not dead yet,” she said. “And on some level, I don’t think you’ll be able to grieve, in whatever way you end up grieving, as long as you’re still trapped in a back and forth where you can go talk to him alive.”

“He killed Charlotte,” she said. “And every loop that passes, that grief seems to fade a little more. I know we weren’t the best of friends, but—I did like her. And she’s gone. Actually, really gone, before this stupid loop even started. She—you know, she was the one who represented my father’s killer. She tried to get me to betray Lucifer. And on some level, I think I forgave her.”

“She didn’t,” Linda said, voice quiet. “I mean, I don’t know for sure, but it wasn’t—what do you know about Lucifer’s mother?”

“Nothing,” she said, hating to admit it. “Somehow, there’s still a million things I know nothing about.”

“The supreme goddess, or whatever,” she said. “God tossed her into hell, but last year she broke out and—I’m going to get details wrong, but somehow she possessed Charlotte. Safe rule of thumb is that, if Charlotte was acting obsessed with Lucifer, you were actually talking to a goddess. She was—she almost killed me. Not a fun woman.”

Chloe blinked. “Wow, okay, that’s—the pier. After the pier, Charlotte was different.”

“She went to hell,” Linda said. “She—I was seeing her, actually. She was—she never wanted to go back there. And now—”

“She’s in heaven,” Chloe said. “Amenadiel took her himself.”

“Good.”

They were quiet a moment, Linda considering it all.

“Have you talked to Lucifer about his hell loop?” She finally asked. “He knows better than anyone what it feels like to be inside one.”

She frowned. “You said he was the only person to ever get out of his hell loop. Isn’t he the king of hell? Why would he be trapped there?”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m—I’m going to answer for you, but I am the wrong person for all the detailed celestial stuff. Okay, um… he is the king of hell, but when he went back to hell after dying—”

“He what?”

She let out a long breath. “Okay, this might take a couple tries to get to the point. Last year, you were poisoned and Lucifer somehow retrieved the antidote formula only known by a dead man?”

She sighed. “He didn’t.”

“He did. He had—well technically, he stopped his own heart and had me and Maze standing by to bring him back. But, he wouldn’t come back. His mother—the goddess went to hell after him and got him out. And I’m not sure if it’s because he suddenly had enough guilt for hell or if it was because he died instead of flying down under his own power—he didn’t have his wings at the time—but if she hadn’t gone in after him…”

“What was his loop?”

She frowned. “He is still my patient, Chloe. I—I don’t know.”

“Please,” she said. “It’s different with him. I—I need to know.”

“Uriel,” she said. “He killed him over and over and over. He’s never—I don’t think he’ll ever forgive himself for what he did.”

She tried to digest that. He had said it was the worst thing he’d ever done, but—somehow, it was more real, here, talking to another human being. Maybe that wasn’t fair, but maybe it took this, it took until now for her to actually, truly internalize something.

“Lucifer really never lies,” she said.

“Never,” she said.

“Why—why would he do all of that for me?” The tears came unbidden, but mercifully silent.

“That case, your father’s killer,” Linda said. “He and I—his mother wanted to prove to him that you wouldn’t sacrifice for him even a fraction of what he had for you. She was wrong.”

“Linda,” she said. “How long have you known, about all of this?”

“It’s sort of a blur,” she said. “A year, maybe? Less, probably. It was—I know for certain that it was Uriel that made him tell me the truth. He—he told me how he’d killed his brother and I knew—the man I knew wasn’t a murderer, so that meant it was another metaphor and I gave up. I told him to tell me the truth. So he showed me.”

“I’m sorry you had to do that alone,” Chloe said. “I think I’d be going crazy without you.”

“I had Maze,” she said. “And Amenadiel. And Lucifer—well, Lucifer is not great at support, but I do think he tries. And I think that might be the point.”

“Maybe it is,” Chloe said. “I—can I ask you something personal, as someone who’s had time to think about this?”

“Ask away.”

“Do you think you’ll go to heaven, someday?”

She looked to the window just for a moment, face that unreadable, professional blank that she was so good at. “No.”

“No? Why not?”

She smiled. “Chloe, you are in a unique position to learn as much as possible about everyone around you. All their secrets, their lies, the deepest darkest pieces of them. But people aren’t keeping secrets at you. Sometimes—most of the time—people are just complicated. Even Dan. Even Lucifer. If Lucifer had shown you his face on a random Tuesday instead of during a terrible, horrible day, what would you have said?”

“Yesterday, I was still afraid,” she said. “I thought I was over being scared, but seeing his face again—I don’t think there’s anything he could have said to not—I don’t think it would have changed anything. I think I always would have needed some time. Is that terrible?”

“I installed three extra locks on my office door,” Linda said. “You don’t owe him a perfect reaction.”

“But I should have known.”

She looked at her strangely. “Why do you say that?”

Because it was obvious, wasn’t it? He had never lied, had never tried to stop her from testing his divine blood, because he was sure she could figure it out. Because he had saved her life so many times in so many impossible ways and because she loved—

She didn’t realize she’d stood until she was halfway out the door.

“Chloe,” Linda said. “Where are you going?”

She didn’t know, but she went. She went because she couldn’t answer that question and still keep herself together, because she was terrified of the answer, because in a world that had taken all her choices away, at least she could still run.

She was so tired of running.

“Decker?” Ella’s voice asked against her ear, a phone call she hadn’t realized she was making. “You okay? I think Lucifer was about to send out the search parties.”

“Have you ever found out something—something that changes the way you see everything, the way you see yourself?”

“Chloe,” she said. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

“I have to do it again,” she said, tired of explaining herself. “I have to know—there has to be a way out. It can’t be—I won’t let it be this.”

“Slow down. What are you talking about?”

“Ella,” she said, “you don’t have any deep dark secrets, do you?”

“Um,” she said, “the ghost thing?”

That felt almost refreshingly mundane, though someday she would ask Lucifer if ghosts were, in fact, real.

“Thank you,” Chloe said, and hung up. She should have—she went home, poured herself a glass of wine, drew a hot bath, tried to let all the tension drain from her shoulders.

It didn’t really work, but for a moment, she let herself pretend that everything was going to be okay when this was all finally over.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She made her day less of a script and more of a checklist, one thing after another after another, mentally noting down the emotions she remembered having.

Texted the babysitter. Exhaustion and stress.

Drove to work. Annoyance.

Drank the terrible coffee. Grief.

Went through Charlotte’s files. More grief, a little spark of helplessness.

Coffee break. Grateful to Ella, to Lucifer.

Back to the files. A dryer sort of determination.

Dan’s arrival, Lucifer’s confession. Shock, confusion, anger.

Pierce’s speech. Rage and fear and more rage.

Ella’s new evidence, the plan brewing. Anger, determination.

The suspect’s house. Worry for Dan, anger at Lucifer, fear of Pierce’s reach.

Waiting for Dan to loop Ella in. More worry, more fear, more anger.

Waiting for Barrow to show up at Dan’s. Rage, burning rage, tempered with a need to stop him.

The penthouse, doing it right this time and going to the balcony and not making any faces that would make Lucifer break their silence. Concern, mixed with a fierce need to win, to bring Pierce to justice.

Walking towards the trap. Frustration and anger with Lucifer, for all the things he’d kept from her.

Guns raised, stepping in front of him. Fear and rage and—

She felt the bullet strike, again, always again.

Love. That was the third thing. The thing she was so afraid to admit, even to herself.

The blur of feathers. The roof. Shock and awe and confusion, tempered with just a bit of fear.

And then, the call and the gunshots and she was running for the stairs. Running with a refrain in her head— should’ve known should’ve known, should’ve known.

And then, she was looking at him. Fear and shock and—

She should have known.

Guilt. Not from running, but from the moments before. Not from hurting him, but from being too much of a fool to—

She ran. She had to run.

Paramedics. Fear.

Nurses. Fear.

Cops. Fear.

Dan. Fear.

Holding Trixie in her arms. Peace, if just for a moment.

The drive to Dan’s, the sound of the back window. Fear.

But the fear wasn’t real anymore, just the perfect playact of a former actress. Her head was still playing that refrain.

“Take the bed,” Dan said, knocking the thought loose from her head.

She wasn’t afraid, and she was tired of being angry.

“Dan,” she said, a hand on his arm. “I know— I know. But, anything you need, I… we’re still family. It’s different now, but I still love you. And I’m here for you.”

Maybe that was the answer. That she could do.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She sent three texts on her way out the door, awkwardly hovering by her car as she finished them.

The first, to the babysitter: Thanks so much for staying overnight and getting Trixie on the bus! It’s huge help.

To Trixie: Hey monkey, I hope you’re having a great day at school! Can you give me a call when you get home? I just want to say hi since I didn’t see you yesterday.

To Linda: Hey, I’ve been trying to hunt down Maze and haven’t been able to find her. Can you let me know if you see her? I’m worried about her.

She got in the car, then hesitated as her phone buzzed with an immediate text back from Linda.

I’ll let you know, but honestly, I’m a bit on the outs with Maze at the moment. Everything okay?

She dialed and drove, the traffic annoyingly familiar.

“Chloe,” Linda said. “What’s wrong?”

Guilt. Maybe this counted as guilt too, but this was better at least.

“I just wanted to—you haven’t talked to Lucifer today, have you?”

“Not today,” she said. “Is he okay?”

She let out a long breath. It was better to tell her. It was better to know. “Charlotte was shot and killed last night.”

Linda was quiet a moment. “Oh, I—Chloe, I’m so sorry.”

“Lucifer is—well, you can probably guess how he is. I’ll have him give you a call later.”

“How are you, Chloe?”

She almost laughed. “I’ve been better. But, thanks, Linda, for everything.”

Lucifer was waiting at the precinct with coffee and she moved to him and, though she already knew what answer she would receive, she still had to ask her question, still had to let him know she cared: “Hey,” she said, “How are you doing?”

He managed a sad smile and held the coffee cup out. “Just how you like it, Detective.”

She put a hand on his arm for a moment, a soft touch that he looked far too grateful for, then took the coffee, hating the taste but drinking it anyway.

“Would you bring Charlotte’s files into the conference room?” She asked. “I’m going to go check in with Ella.”

“As you wish, Detective.” He gave her that look of concern.

She reached out and grabbed his hand as he turned to move towards her desk. “Lucifer, I—”

He frowned. “Detective.”

She didn’t know what to say. She hated not knowing.

“I want there to be magic words,” she said, “to make this all better. I know there aren’t, but—I want you to know I trust you. Even when you don’t tell me things and I wish you would. Even when I’m not sure if you trust me. I—I should talk to Ella.”

“Detective,” he said, stopping her in her tracks. “I trust you. And I—when this is over, there’s—I want you to know the truth.”

She nodded. “I want to know everything. I know your life is complicated, but—we can talk about this tomorrow, okay? This will all be over tomorrow.”

He raised a brow at her optimistic assessment but nodded. “Very well. Tomorrow.”

This time, she moved away before either of them could say anything else. She managed to keep her pace casual as she moved towards the lab, as jittery as she’d been the first time they’d kissed. It—god, was she really thinking about doing this again? Did she really—

“Decker,” Ella said, eyes red with tears. “Are you—well, I guess not. What’s up?”

She wasn’t entirely sure what she had to fix here. Everyone else—Lucifer, Dan, Trixie, Maze, even Linda—she saw a way for her to do better, to treat them better and fix the things she felt bad about. But Ella—she hoped there was nothing to fix there.

Eventually, she settled on, “Do you want a hug?”

In the blink of an eye, she was in Ella’s tight embrace and she stayed there longer than she really wanted to, holding her friend.

“Hey,” Chloe said. “I want you to know, I—I’m not good at faith, but I always have faith in you.”

“That’s so nice, Decker,” she said. “I have faith in you too.”

She pulled away. “I’m gonna go look at those files. Let me know if you hear anything.”

“Of course.”

She started towards the conference room then hesitated and moved to Pierce’s office.

“Decker,” he said, detached and emotionless as always. “Any news?”

“Nothing yet,” she said. “I just—I just needed a minute. I—sorry.”

He raised a brow. “You needed a minute, so you came to my office?”

“Well, when you say it like that it sounds stupid.” She didn’t feel bad about how this was going to end, but she did feel something. Maybe she needed something. “I—I needed a step away from all the big emotions. I know I won’t be able to feel anything about any of this until this is all over.”

He nodded. “That’s the job, Decker. You have to get it done.”

She nodded. “You’re right. I should get back to it.” She moved for the door, adding, before she could hesitate. “I’ll fill you in on what we find later. Goodbye, Marcus.”

She moved to the conference room before it could become a strange moment, but the word—goodbye—echoed in her chest like an almost-grief, like something she would have to feel.

Tomorrow. She could feel it tomorrow.

She had Charlotte’s files near-memorized at this point, so she let her mind wander as she paged through them. What else did she feel guilty about? What else could she fix?

She managed to smile when Ella brought them coffee, managed to be a semblance of a person who cared. She did care. She did still want to care.

She had to steel herself for Dan’s appearance, consider her choices carefully.

“Now, it's gonna sound completely crazy,” he said, “but I need you to hear me out, okay?”

She tried to look at him comfortingly, believingly. “Of course. What is it?”

“If anyone realizes what we know, our lives are in danger.”

“Okay,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“I figured out who killed Charlotte.”

“You did?”

“It was Pierce.”

This time, she considered him, drew in a deep breath. “Then, we really are in danger.”

“You—” Dan stopped. “You believe me?”

“I assume you have some reason for thinking this?”

“Charlotte was investigating him,” he said, voice low. “He’s the Sinnerman.”

“Daniel’s right,” Lucifer said. “About the Sinnerman part, at least. I don’t know if he killed Charlotte, but—”

“He’s capable of it,” Chloe said.

But Dan was turning to Lucifer, that grief and rage burning so brightly. “You knew?”

“Yes,” Lucifer said. “He told me ages ago.”

Chloe stepped between them before Dan could do anything. “We have bigger things to worry about right now.”

“Yes,” Lucifer said, vaguely suspicious. “You seem remarkably willing to accept that Pierce is a cold-blooded killer, Detective. The first killer, specifically.”

“I’ve known he was cold-blooded,” she said. “The killer part is the only thing that’s new and if Charlotte was investigating him—I wish it was harder for me to believe. Let’s just focus on taking him down. Any argument with that?”

“None,” Lucifer said.

“Then let’s get to work.”

It didn’t change very much. Ella found the cigarette which led them to the suspect and the gun in the desk which led them to the driver and the phone. Part of her thought that being kinder, softer, believing people at their word without judgment, that would all be enough, but even as the small guilts of everyday life fell away, she was still left with the big one, pounding in her chest like a second heart (should’ve known, should’ve known, should’ve known).

Trixie called while they were waiting for Dan to fill Ella in on the situation and despite everything, Chloe still smiled when she answered.

“Hey monkey,” she said, “one second, okay?” She pressed the phone against her and looked to Lucifer, sitting in the passenger seat beside her. “I told Linda you would call her when we had a moment. Go do that now.”

“I’m not really in the mood for therapy, Detective.”

“Yeah, I get it,” she said, fairly certain she’d timed this all correctly. “But I promised, and I want a moment alone to talk to Trixie.”

He sighed, but moved to get out of the car. “Very well.”

“Hey,” Chloe said again, phone back to her ear. “How was school?”

“Good!” Trixie said. “I kicked butt at dodgeball.”

“And you had fun with the babysitter?”

“She’s fine,” she said, joy fading a little.

“Trixie,” Chloe said, “I’m sorry that Maze isn’t good at saying she’s sorry, but—I know she feels that way. The mean things she said, I know she didn’t mean them.”

“I know,” she said. “How come knowing doesn’t make it hurt my feelings less?”

“I don’t know, honey,” she said, then, honestly, “I wish I did. But, if you don’t want to be, you don’t have to keep being mad out of principle.”

“I know,” she said. “I don’t want to be mad anymore.”

“Good,” she said, realizing Lucifer was looking concerned, phone tight to his ear. “I have to go, honey. But I love you.”

“Love you, Mommy.”

She got out of the car, moved around to Lucifer. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Maze, Doctor,” he said, hardly acknowledging Chloe. “She will be fine. She—she’s always fine.”

She grabbed the phone from him, earning an exasperated scoff. “Linda? What’s going on?”

“Chloe,” Linda said. “It’s Maze, she—I think she’s okay, but she rushed in here looking like she fought an army, convinced someone was trying to kill me, then passed out.”

She looked to Lucifer, trying to appear as if she were just thinking of this for the first time. “When she wakes up, if it has anything to do with Pierce, call me right away.”

“Is everything okay?”

“No,” she said. “It’s not. But focus on Maze. Me and Lucifer can take care of each other.”

Lucifer’s eyes softened, that way that they did when he was a little touched by a small gesture. She—there was so much she didn’t know, but she did know that face.

She hung up and handed him back the phone, her phone buzzing with a text from Dan. She didn’t bother to read it. “I’ll see you at the penthouse. Please be careful.”

She considered telling him not to let Pierce know they were onto him, but there was no point. She didn’t want the day becoming unpredictable on her, not now.

It went the same, Lucifer’s distraction, her and Dan setting a trap. Linda called back right after they’d gotten Barrow to the penthouse.

“Linda,” she said, stepping aside to answer it.

“You’re on speaker,” she said.

“Decker,” Maze said. “Pierce, he was trying to kill Amenadiel. He’s dangerous and there’s no way he’ll go down without a fight.”

“Okay,” Chloe said. “Are you okay, Maze?”

“I’m fine.”

“I don’t think you are,” she said. “Look, I know things have been—I know. The whole—whatever your weird ulterior motive was at the bachelorette party. But Trixie misses you being around. I miss you. The tribe, remember?”

“Don’t get soft on me, Decker,” she said, but her voice was strange.

“I have to go,” she said. “But—I don’t think Trixie’s upset anymore, if you want to give her a call. I think it would mean the world to her to hear your voice.”

Maze hung up.

She turned her attention back to the task at hand, interrogate Barrow, let Dan have his moment alone, take the bait, fall into the trap, find herself on the roof, Dan calling, and—

No matter how many times she’d done this, she always felt a panic running for the stairs, that refrain in her head.

“Detective,” Lucifer said. That face she didn’t know, had run from so many times. And yet, a voice she did, laced with something like confusion.

He didn’t know. He really didn’t even realize his face had changed. It was—

All at once, she knew her attempt had failed. Because she had taken care of so many things, so much guilt, but even now, moving towards him and his terrifying face, she saw his eyes, soft and kind despite the face they were set in. What lay there eclipsed anything she had ever felt in her life.

Maybe this whole thing wasn’t about her and her guilt at all. It was his. He’d almost trapped himself in hell over his guilt about his brother and to kill someone else, a human being, against his father—his father had rules about angels killing humans. Maybe—maybe she had to stop him.

Her shoulder ached. Faster. She needed to move faster. She—

He realized as he reached out, eyes wide at the red hand he beheld. He took a step back.

She took a step towards him. “I should’ve known. I—Lucifer.”

The devil faded away, replaced once more by her handsome partner, concern in his eyes. “Detective—Chloe. I would never harm you.”

“This morning, I told you I trust you,” she said, moving towards him and pressing herself into his arms—well, more against his chest than anything, since he made no move to hold her there. “That hasn’t changed.”

Slowly, so slowly, he tucked his arms around her, letting in a shaky breath. “I don’t understand.”

She knew this wouldn’t last, so she just let him hold her. “I don’t care who you used to be. You’re my partner.”

“I can hardly blame it all on my past,” he said, voice choked. “Look at what I’ve done.”

She pulled away just enough to put a hand to his cheek. “You saved my life.”

There were tears in his eyes, more guilt there than she could stomach.

Part of her wanted to stay here forever, but her shoulder was aching and she knew, soon, the scene would be swarming with cops, so she forced a wince, put a hand to her shoulder. “I think, maybe we can talk about all of this later. For now, a hospital sounds like a good idea.”

“You’re wounded?” His eyes went wide, guilt gone.

“Probably just a bruise,” she said, “I did have my vest on, but I’d rather a doctor tells me that.”

He all but clung to her on the way out of the building, in the ambulance, in the hospital. She didn’t bother waiting for the string of nurses to change to a string of cops, just let her eyes flutter shut and the day vanish.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

This time, she walked into Pierce’s setup with her gun drawn. “It could be a trap.”

Lucifer nodded and tried to move in front of her, but she pressed forward with a glare. “I’m the one with the gun.”

She didn’t manage to find Pierce before there was a gun pointed back at her, but she carefully noted where he’d popped out of.

“You don't have to do this, Pierce,” she said.

“Yes, I do. And normally, I would just skip town and reinvent myself. But this time, I can't. Not before I kill Lucifer.”

The actress in her knew she had more lines before the big sequence, but she was so sick and tired of acting. So what if they shot her?

She pulled the trigger, but he moved too fast, caught in the shoulder.

Bullets, wings, Pierce dead by Lucifer’s hand, all again.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

“You don’t have to do this Pierce,” she said.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “And normally, I would just skip town and reinvent myself. But this time—”

She pulled the trigger.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

“Yes, I do. And normally, I would just skip town and—”

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

“Yes, I do. And normally—”

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

“Yes, I—”

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

“Like Groundhog Day?”

Chloe was fully sprawled across Linda’s couch, throw pillow shoved in her own face like it would block out the world. “Yes,” she said, muffled. “Except I can’t seem to kill my ex-fiancé who is also the world’s first murderer.”

“That doesn’t sound much like Groundhog Day.”

“I’ve never seen it,” she said. “Is it any good?”

Linda considered that. “Honestly, I don’t remember. Either way, not the point. What can I do?”

“We’ve been operating off the basis that time loops function like hell loops, based off my guilt. But, I was thinking, Lucifer is the one who’s going to kill someone—“

“I know you’ve probably explained this many times,” Linda said, “but what?”

“Pierce killed Charlotte while trying to kill Amenadiel,” she said. “And he’s going to try to kill Lucifer so he can run off and get himself a new identity. Lucifer’s going to stop him. Anyway, Lucifer seemed way more guilty-feeling than I am, so I was thinking maybe this is somehow tied to me being a miracle. Maybe, I’m supposed to stop him from killing a human being, keep him following his father’s rules? But every time I try to beat Pierce to the punch, kill him before Lucifer can, I fail. And I thought about killing him before he tries to kill us, but then if it does work, I’ll go down for murder instead of—what?”

Linda had stopped nodding along and raised a brow. “I may not know how time loops work, but I do know what you’re doing, Chloe.”

“And what’s that?”

“You do feel guilty about something. And whether or not that actually has anything to do with the time loop, you’re afraid of admitting it, so instead, you’re hoping that someone else’s emotional struggles are to blame. If God wanted to stop the devil from killing Cain, do you really think trapping you in a time loop is the most efficient way to do it?”

“I don’t know how God works.” She sat up, hands curling into fists around the cushions.

“Neither do I,” she said. “I’m asking, do you think that’s what happening, or do you want that to be what’s happening?”

Chloe was silent for a long time. “It’s—I’m not even sure guilt is the right word for what I feel. It’s—I have this refrain in my head, over and over and over again, the same thing. And it’s—if this is what guilt is, I understand why no one ever gets out of hell. Because, how do you shake a thought like that?”

“What’s the thought?”

“I should have known.”

Linda considered this for a moment, then, voice soft, asked, “What should you have known?”

She felt the tears forcing their way out, but tried to ignore them. “That Lucifer is the devil. That Marcus is a murderer. Dan still lies to me. Trixie is struggling and she doesn’t tell me. I—I’m supposed to know! It’s my job to find the truth and yet every piece of my life, everywhere I turn, there are so many things I didn’t see! I almost married Cain from the Bible and I thought he was a nice, normal guy. I should have known better!”

Another pause. “Chloe, you’ve been through a lot lately. But think about it for a minute, the devil. Lucifer is the devil. Why on earth would you believe the devil exists? That’s insane. I certainly didn’t believe it without proof.”

“But I had proof. Glimpses of his face, of the way people are terrified of him or charmed by him, the way people admit their deepest truths to him. The way nothing about his life makes any sense.”

“I’m no detective, but isn’t that what you would call circumstantial evidence?”

She drew in a breath, wiping away tears. “I—I guess.”

“So, tell me, why should you have ignored all the real, concrete evidence you had, everything that said Lucifer was charming, rich, and attractive, a human man and nothing more, in favor of things you half-saw? Why should you have known what he didn’t tell you?”

“I had his blood, once,” she said. “After everything with Malcolm, when he was shot, I almost tested his blood. Maybe, I would have seen then, but—I wanted to prove I trusted him, that I didn’t need to find all his secrets.”

“Exactly,” Linda said. “It is not a crime, or a sin, to trust the people in your life, to not be constantly trying to discover all of their hidden flaws. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting proof, real proof, when someone says something you can’t believe. But I think you know that. I think on some level, you know that your guilt is not a rational thing.”

Her voice cracked, face wet with tears she’d given up on staunching. “Then why do I feel this way?”

“Because you are human and the things you feel as a human being are not rational. Maze—Maze hates human emotions. She’s always saying they’re gross and they don’t make any sense, and she’s right. None of this makes any sense! But—” Linda took a breath. “I would rather this life, the one with my friends, even when Maze is angry at me and even when I pushed Amenadiel away, over going back to a world that makes sense.”

None of it made sense. Not the way she felt or the things she was doing or the people she—the people she—

“I think I might be in love with Lucifer,” she said.

Linda smiled. “It’s not my business to tell you what he feels, Chloe, but you should tell him.”

“What’s the point? This is all just going to keep restarting, repeating, again and again.”

“You called it a refrain,” Linda said. “That thought in your head. Repeating over and over again.”

“So?”

“So, maybe, you need to stop thinking it. Stop believing it.”

She couldn’t look at Linda, but she resisted the urge to run.

“Chloe,” she said. “You are never going to know everything. And you did the best you could with what you did know.”

Her hands shook. “What if it’s not enough?”

“What if it is?”

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She knew now. Maybe that would be enough. She had tried to do everything perfectly, but her best—maybe she couldn’t do it alone. Maybe she knew better now.

It wasn’t entirely convincing, but it was enough to get her out of bed when all she wanted to do was sleep. Going through the motions was so familiar as to almost become comforting.

Almost.

But she texted the babysitter on her way to the car, not wanting to risk forgetting if she did succeed, and she drove through traffic with perfect ease. Lucifer gave her coffee and it tasted like dirt and she drank it anyway.

She slipped into the lab and offered Ella a hug.

“Thanks, Chloe,” she said, with a sniffle.

“Of course,” Chloe said, managing a kind smile. “When Dan gets back, come join us in the conference room, would you?”

“I thought Dan went home?”

“I give it an hour before he sneaks back in,” she said, as if she couldn’t count to the minute. “You’re doing great, Ella.”

In the conference room, Lucifer had started in on Charlotte’s files, but he looked up with that same look he always gave her.

She moved to stand beside his chair, put a hand on his shoulder, not because she had anything to say, but because she didn’t want to forget how much she cared.

They worked for a while and Ella brought them coffee and they worked some more, files that Chloe knew as well as the day by now. But there was almost a comfort in it, in the work of someone’s last days being known so well, in this piece of Charlotte she still managed to hold onto.

Almost.

She slipped out a moment before Dan would arrive, back to the lab like she had something to say. “Oh, Dan’s here. Can I steal you for a minute?”

“Of course,” Ella said, following without question. That was a real comfort, without an almost.

Dan shut up as they stepped in, anxiously waiting for the chance to speak.

Chloe shut the door and let out a breath, but didn’t give him a moment to cut in. “Okay, I’m about to say something insane, but I need all of you to believe me.”

“Is this about Pierce?” Dan asked.

“No,” she said. “We’ll get to that.” She turned to Ella first, always the easiest to convince. “I’m caught in a time loop. Your code word is enterprise.”

Her jaw dropped. “Wait, seriously?”

“Detective,” Lucifer said. “I don’t know—”

She turned to him. “You told me how you buried Uriel. And why.”

His face went dark.

“Uh, what?” Ella’s glee faded. “That’s ominous.”

“Chloe,” Dan said. “What the hell are you talking about? Look, I need to tell you, Pierce—”

“I know how to stop Pierce,” she said. “I’ve done it dozens of times by now.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I never need to convince you, Dan. I know you’ll help me even if I really am going crazy.”

“Detective,” Lucifer said. “If I told you about Uriel—”

“I’ve seen your face,” she said.

“That’s not possible.” He took a step back.

“Do you trust me?” She asked, looking to him, to Dan, to Ella.

“Of course,” Ella said as Dan managed a nod.

Lucifer drew in a shaky breath. “If you’ve seen— if you’ve seen my face, Detective, you should be running far away.”

“I did,” she said. “I ran. I’m not proud of it. But I’ve had time to come to terms with it. We can deal with this later. Right now, I need my partner.” Her voice went quiet, vulnerable. “I need you.”

His eyes looked as fragile as glass, his hands ready to shatter if he dared to pry them from their grip on the chair.

“Uh,” Ella said, “sorry to interrupt, but what do you mean by stop Pierce?”

“Pierce is the Sinnerman,” Dan said, “and I think he killed Charlotte.”

“He did,” Chloe said. “And he’s going to try to kill Dan, and then me and Lucifer. I know that’s a lot on faith, Ella, but I need you.”

She drew in a breath. “You’ve got me, girl. Sisters, right?”

“Right.” She turned to Dan. “I know you think I’m a little crazy—”

“Everything about today is insane,” he said. “I thought I was going crazy. I—I’ll take what I can get.

“So,” Ella said. “What do we do?”

“Most of it, we just need to behave the way we would if we didn’t know any of what’s going to come—”

“Uh, we don’t,” Dan said. “So, that should be easy.”

She turned to Lucifer. “There’s just one thing I haven’t be able to fix yet, it’s the only thing I—Linda and I had this theory that maybe time loops functioned somewhat similarly to hell loops.” She held up a hand to stop his protest. “I know I’m not in hell. But if the answer is chasing guilt, there’s one thing I keep coming back to. And I wondered, maybe it was your guilt causing this, but—I think it’s mine. For letting you—I’m not letting you do it this time.”

“Detective,” he said. “What on earth do you mean?”

“You can’t kill Pierce,” she said. “Not this time.”

“Oh,” Ella said.

Lucifer looked away. “Is that what started all of this? My father and his games, because I broke his rule?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s the last thing I haven’t tried. You have to let me kill him.”

“You can’t exactly just walk in and shoot a police lieutenant,” Dan said. “Arrest him.”

“We have no evidence,” she said. “And the only way to get the evidence is to walk into the trap where he’s going to try and kill us. He’s not surviving today. I just—I can’t let you do it, Lucifer.”

“I hardly think killing Pierce is worthy of a guilty conscience,” Lucifer said, but not like he really believed it.

“I know what everything with Uriel did to you,” she said. “I can stop it now. I know better now.”

“Uriel was my brother,” he said, lip curling into a snarl. “Pierce is nothing.”

“Did he just admit to murder?” Dan asked.

“No,” Chloe said, before Lucifer could speak. “Look, Ella, you need to get back to work, follow the evidence, let us know what you find. We just have to follow the trail.”

“If you know what to do already, why wait?” Dan asked. “We can stop him now.”

“Because,” she said, “when this works, I want the evidence in hand already to prove that he was a murderer. We’re still beholden to the courts whenever this is finally over. Now, come on, he has a whole speech we have to hear.”

They survived the speech, survived the waiting, Ella managed to treat the cigarette like it mattered—of course, she didn’t know it’d been planted, she only knew that they’d been waiting for it. They were out the door immediately, piling into her car.

“A time loop,” Lucifer said, as she drove. “Detective, how many times have you been through today?”

“I lost track a long time ago,” she said. “Dozens. And then, every time, I wake back up in my bed, right after—I left the crime scene this morning, but it feels like weeks ago.”

“So, no chance to save her,” Dan said, voice quiet.

“No,” Chloe said. “What I would give for that chance.”

The routine was easy, almost—almost. She was almost there. The gun, the party, the driver, the phone. Looping Ella back in would be easier for Dan this time and she reminded Lucifer to keep his mouth shut about the time loop to Pierce, but didn’t bother to warn him off the rest of it. She and Dan hardly spoke as they prepared for Barrow, brought him to the penthouse.

“We don’t actually need information from him,” she said when Lucifer rejoined them. “We just need Pierce to think we do.”

“What’s he going to tell us?” Ella asked.

“He’ll tell us anything we want on Pierce so long as we can protect his sister from him. Except, then me and Lucifer get to find out he doesn’t have a sister the hard way. It must be some code word or something from Pierce, but we need him to think he’s setting the trap.”

“Your plan, based on dozens of tries, Detective, is to intentionally walk into a trap he’s set?”

“Got a problem with that?”

Lucifer poured himself a drink.

She called Pierce and felt nothing as she recited the same words she’d said so many times. She was worried about him, she still cared, none of it was real. Not anymore.

“He knows I can get to his sister,” Pierce said, and that was all she needed. The rest of it was just the echoing voice of a man long-dead.

She could kill him. She just needed a little help.

She followed Lucifer out to the balcony. “Hey.”

He managed that sad smile. “I’m sorry.”

“None of this is your fault.”

“My father, what he’s put you through—”

“I ran,” she said. “The first time we did this, I saw your face and I ran. And I haven’t had a chance to really apologize for that.”

“You never need to apologize to me,” he said, “especially not for that. Detective, my face has driven lesser people mad. I—I’m honestly just glad you forgave me for it.”

“There was nothing to forgive.” She put a hand on his arm and they were standing so close, almost—“This fight with Pierce, I’m gonna get hit, but I’ll be okay. You fly me to the roof so I’m out of range of your vulnerability thing and take out his men, and you’ll have an opportunity to kill Pierce, but I need you to keep him busy for another minute instead. Can you promise me that?”

He sighed. “I—I promise, Detective.”

She squeezed his arm. “Then, let’s get today over with. Tomorrow—I need to see tomorrow.”

“You will,” he promised.

She almost believed him.

Almost.

Being caught in Pierce’s trap meant nothing anymore, just the start of a cycle she’d grown too used to. She let him have his whole speech, took her failed shot, took a bullet to the vest. This time, on the roof, Lucifer met her gaze, let her see his wings, before he flew off to finish the confrontation. This time, she realized a second after the call should come that Dan and Ella hadn’t figured out the trap on their own—because they knew there was no point looking into Barrow, so of course they hadn’t bothered. She listened for the gunshots, went running for the stairs.

That refrain—she almost silenced it.

Pierce was on the ground when she entered, Lucifer above him, and she ran to them, took aim—

“Chloe,” he said.

—and fired, two shots to the chest, then a third when she needed to be sure.

“Detective,” Lucifer said, dropping the knife in his hand and moving towards her.

“Hospital,” she said, holstering her gun. “They’re gonna have a lot of questions.”

This routine she knew, Lucifer hovering the whole time: paramedics, nurses, cops, Dan. Dan whose brand of worry was different, but still worry.

“I’m okay,” she assured him, taking his hand. “Can you—I’m so sorry to ask this, can you take Trixie tonight?”

“I want to,” he said. “Chloe, I think I need to have someone to take care of after today.”

“Go get her from school early,” she said. “Get some ice cream and watch some movies.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes,” she said.

Lucifer waited until Dan had gone to go back to fussing himself.

“I don’t want to go home tonight,” she said, cutting off whatever he wanted to say. “Can I come with you?”

He just nodded.

They were quiet on the ride back to the penthouse, on the elevator up, but she caught him looking at her, over and over again, worry and want, desire and fear. All the things she felt when she looked at him too.

She collapsed back onto his bed with a sigh, holding a hand out to him, drawing him onto the bed.

“Detective,” he said.

“Lie down,” she said, laughing when he finally did. “I’m so scared.”

He wrapped an arm around her, steady. It was almost enough to comfort her.

Almost.

“I’ve been through this so many times,” she said. “And for most of them, I felt so alone. And I thought I could get rid of this refrain in my head, this thought that—what if it’s not enough?”

“What thought?”

“I keep thinking,” she said, “that I should have known better. Should have known you better, should have known everything.”

“Detective,” he said, and then, voice so unbelievably soft, “Chloe. I think you know me better than anyone in the universe ever has. And that—I was frightened, that you would see this other side of me and reject it, but I was the fool. You—whether or not you knew I was the devil, you knew exactly who and what I was yesterday. Maybe—maybe even better than I did.”

“You’re going to say I know you better than Maze?”

He considered it seriously. “Yes. Maze—Mazikeen knows every bit of my history in perfect detail, not that she’d admit she cares enough to remember it all. But who I am now, who I am here, with you? You are the only one who has ever seen him.”

She didn’t remember the last time she’d been surprised.

He reached out a hand, wiping away tears she hadn’t realized she’d been crying. His hand was soft against her cheek, eyes kind.

“Lucifer,” she said, “I need to tell you something. Even if—even if this doesn’t work, I think I need to say it—”

“Whatever you need.”

She was almost sure. Almost.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“Detective,” he said, leaning in to press a soft kiss to her temple. “Even after everything you know about me, you’re still here, and after every time you’ve redone today, you still wanted to do it the right way. Maybe knowing—it feels like it should change everything, to know the truth, but maybe it doesn’t change anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what you’re going to say to me tomorrow,” he said, “and it does matter to me, but—I’m not quite sure it changes anything. It certainly—nothing you say can change the way I feel about you.”

“And how do you feel about me?”

He smiled and that was all she needed. “Tomorrow, yes? We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

She pressed herself into his arms and drifted off easily like that.

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

She woke to the buzz of her phone, but for a moment she dared to hope anyway. She still had a phone, even if it was—

Her phone buzzed again.

Her heart fell.

Maybe—everything she knew and none of it had changed a thing. But she—she didn’t know the answer. Maybe she would never know the answer.

She got out of bed, texted the babysitter on the way out the door. It’s what she would have done if she didn’t know and—none of it changed a thing. It should have felt like a hopeless position, but she thought about Lucifer’s words, his certainty in her.

Dozens of days like today and in the end, she had made the same choices as before she knew anything. There was no more almost, no more refrain, no more fear.

“Hey,” she said, because she wanted to say it and for no other reason. “How are you doing?”

Lucifer managed a sad smile and held a coffee cup out. “Just how you like it, Detective.”

She took the coffee and, now that she wasn’t thinking about the dozens of other coffees, she found it actually tasted quite good. Maybe it always had, but that didn’t change anything.

They worked through Charlotte’s files and she looked at them with fresh eyes, not a collage of someone’s last days, but just paperwork that showed one piece of a woman’s life, just her work. There was more to Charlotte than this, more than she could ever memorize.

Ella brought them coffee and it felt like a surprise, like a kindness rather than a requirement. She didn’t know if it had felt this way the first time and it did matter, but it didn’t change that now, in this moment, in this life she was living, she was grateful for the caffeine when she hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes in forty-eight hours. She felt properly tired, let herself feel it.

And when Dan burst in, she listened, didn’t fight him, but didn’t spill the truth either. She just listened, in a way she wasn’t sure she ever had, Lucifer confirming his words and soothing that anger.

She let herself feel the wave, the fear. She had almost married a man with a criminal enterprise and Lucifer—knowing didn’t change anything. She hadn’t known who Pierce was when she broke things off with him. It mattered, but it didn’t change anything.

She listened to Pierce’s speech, listened properly and knew, deep in her gut, it was the one and only time she would ever see him cry.

It didn’t matter what she knew, what mattered was stopping a killer. Everything else—this crisis she was having—it could wait until tomorrow.

They had a plan to make, and then fake evidence to follow. It felt less and less like a script or a guarantee and more and more like—like a very bad day. They tipped Pierce off about the phone and the rage she felt at the idea that he would try to kill Dan—Dan who she loved more in the midst of their divorce than she had Pierce on the day he’d proposed. It was different, of course, but it was always different.

She stood on the balcony in the penthouse, the fatigue fighting to catch up. She wouldn’t sleep again tonight, that much was clear even without magical foreknowledge. But tomorrow—

The sun was up as they went to look for Barrow’s sister, bright and warm in a way she rarely ever appreciated. She didn’t draw her gun, not right away.

She took her shot.

She heard Lucifer shout for her, saw a flurry of white that she knew—she knew what that was—before it all seemed to disappear in a blink, replaced by a blue sky and her partner’s worried face.

She loved him. That much, she was sure of.

And this time, when she went running, down those stairs that she never wanted to see again, that was the only thought in her head.

She didn’t wait for him to turn around before she ran to him, throwing herself into his arms before he could even realize what face he was wearing. It did matter, it still mattered, but it didn’t change anything, not for her, not for them.

“Detective,” he said, fear in his voice as he saw his hands.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“You’re not afraid?” He asked.

“I’ve spent so long feeling like I should have known,” she said, “but the truth is, I wasn’t ready to know.” She put a hand on his cheek, red skin rough, but those eyes that met hers still the same, full of fear and guilt and hope. “I’m ready now.”

♡⋅•⋅ ༺∘☽⋅☼⋅☾∘༻ ⋅•⋅♡

Her first thought was that the sheets were too soft. The sort of sheets that she couldn’t possibly justify purchasing, that surely weren’t any better than the normal cotton ones.

Her eyes snapped open, sunlight streaming into Lucifer’s bedroom.

“Ah,” she heard him say before she managed to find him, sitting in a chair, phone in hand, in a way that made her sure he’d been watching her sleep. “Awake at last, Detective.”

“How long was I asleep?” She asked.

“Eighteen hours,” he said, amusement in his eyes. “Honestly, rather impressive. How are you feeling?”

“It’s tomorrow,” she said, almost disbelieving, and his brow wrinkled in confusion and worry. Then, “Better than I have in a long time.”

“Detective,” he said, then stood all at once. “Why don’t you rest a while more and I’ll make you some breakfast?”

“I’m starving,” she said, but stood, moving to put a hand on his arm.

He didn’t pull away, but he did stiffen at the touch, so confused. “You really aren’t frightened of me?”

“You’re my partner,” she said. “You saved my life.”

“Even though you know I’m the devil?”

“I know,” she said. “And Lucifer, I want to know everything.”

“Very well,” he said, “then, I suppose—I suppose we have a lot to talk about.”

She grinned a wild grin, bright and cheerful and unafraid, and only just managed to resist the raucous, overpowering laugh that was working its way through her chest. She moved her hand from his arm to his cheek, leaning up slowly but without an ounce of hesitation as she pressed her lips against his.

He was stiff against her for only a moment before he kissed her back, still so confused but clearly wanting her as badly as she wanted him.

She didn’t know what was going to happen next, but maybe that was okay.

“Lucifer,” she said, pulling away, smile bright, and heart pounding with excitement, “you don’t know the half of it.”