Chapter 26 He Wanted
(The Devil)
She went limp in his arms the moment his teeth left her skin. The sudden absence of tension felt wrong, as if someone had cut the string on a bow he’d drawn too tight, leaving the echo of strain vibrating through his muscles with nowhere to go.
One breath, she was fire—thrashing, clawing, fighting him with every scrap of strength—and the next—Gone. Her weight shifted all at once, no longer resisting but slumping, and the Beast inside him snapped its jaws on empty air, furious at losing the fight in the very instant it became interesting.
Her blood—fresh, hot, streaking across his tongue—still dripped from the corner of his mouth. He felt the throb of her pulse under his lips as he pulled back, ragged breath shaking through him. Each faint flutter against his mouth felt like a question: alive? alive? alive?—and every answer came back yes, to his own bafflement.
The world around them seemed to flinch with her collapse. The trees stilled, the wind stopped its howling, even the Beast inside him paused—as if all of Hell waited to see what he would do next. The forest’s usual chorus—the distant creak of boughs, the rustle of small things in the undergrowth, the whisper of mist through ferns—folded in on itself, a circle of silence tightening around the two of them.
He should let go. He should step away. He should remember who he is and what the hell he’s doing— But instead, he lowered his head. And he licked the blood from her skin. A slow drag of his tongue across the crimson running down her neck. The copper-salt taste burst across his tongue, heavy and bright, and for a heartbeat, he felt ancient sigils flare in the back of his mind—echoes of old rites that had once crowned queens and cursed tyrants with a single mouthful of enchanted blood.
Heat rolled through him like a shockwave, each taste striking against his palate with the force of a spell detonating. Her scent—earth, smoke, and something bright as starlight—flooded his senses until the forest around them blurred into irrelevance. The edges of the world softened, trees becoming smudges, the ground a vague dark beneath his feet; only the warm line of her throat and the ghost of her last scream remained sharp.
He didn’t intend to do it. It wasn’t instinct. It wasn’t a ritual. It wasn’t hunger.
It was compulsion. A demand in his bones. A summoning from some buried, forgotten part of him that remembered a time before the Pact, when his choices were his own and not written in blood on stone.
The taste hit him like lightning. His muscles locked. Heat detonated up his spine. His vision blurred at the edges. Even the shadows recoiled from him, peeling back across the ground as if scorched by whatever surged through his veins. The night itself seemed to recoil and then bow, as if some deeper hierarchy had just been rearranged and every lesser darkness knew it.
Her blood was wrong. Not human. Not entirely. It burned across his tongue like molten honey—sweet, metallic, laced with something ancient, something he hadn’t tasted in centuries.
Power. Pure, uncut power. Raw. Wild. Untamed. Not witch blood. Not demon blood. Not any mortal line. Something rarer. Something he’d thought died out long before her village existed. Old stories rose unbidden—of star-touched lineages culled at the dawn of the Pact, of bloodlines hidden in remote corners of the mortal world so the gods could sleep without challenge. He had dismissed those tales as superstition. Until now.
His breath hitched—an involuntary, primal sound he hadn’t made since the old wars, when magic still moved like storms across the earth. He remembered standing on burning plains, tasting sorcery in the rain, feeling the sky itself crackle with power; this was that same taste, condensed into a single mortal body.
He dragged another slow, involuntary lick up the curve of her neck. A tremor tore through his hands. His mark flared violently along his arm, lines of black ink twisting under his skin like they were trying to crawl free. The burn of it tore a hiss from his throat. The sigils shifted, rearranging into shapes he hadn’t seen since the Pact was first branded—patterns meant only for equals, not offerings.
Her blood answered. The bite-mark pulsed against her skin like a heartbeat that wasn’t hers, glowing faintly beneath the smear of his touch. A halo of dull, simmering red circled the crescent of his teeth, threads of light veining outward beneath her skin as if seeking pathways into the rest of her.
For the first time in centuries, he felt the old language humming inside the mark—a whispering chorus of the Pact’s original power, ancient and hungry. The words were not spoken, yet he heard them all the same—vowels and consonants shaped from fire and shadow, promising consequence if he pushed this bond any further.
His vision went white for a split second. Madness. Hunger. Need. Possession. Recognition.
He felt all of it at once— a storm ripped loose inside him, tearing through the Beast and the male and the thousand-year-old king alike. For one vertiginous moment, he didn’t know which part of him stood holding her, or whether all three had reached for her at once.
He wanted more. He wanted all of it. He wanted—
“No,” he snarled aloud, jerking himself back from her neck. The word cracked the charged air like a whip, and the forest flinched as if he’d lashed it.
He forced himself to breathe. Slow. Sharpened. Dangerous. Each inhale tasted of pine and iron and her, each exhale edged with smoke as the excess magic tried to claw its way out of him.
The taste lingered on his tongue, branding him from the inside out. He could have lost himself. He nearly did. The line between taking and devouring had never felt so thin, so inviting.
He wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing the blood across his lips, down his jaw. The smell hit him again— bright, intoxicating, wrong— and his knees nearly buckled. His body, traitorous and ancient, wanted to kneel—not in surrender, but in recognition of power that matched his instead of cowering beneath it.
The realm’s pressure thickened, Hell itself seeming to lean toward her blood still wet on his skin, as though starved for something he alone had been allowed to touch. The distance between worlds thinned for a heartbeat, the veil humming in tune with his racing pulse, hungry spirits pressing close like wolves scenting a kill they weren’t invited to.
He stared at her limp body. Her head slumped against his shoulder. Her breath shallow. Her pulse fluttering. Each fragile flutter was a countdown and a promise—proof that the bond had not yet cost her life, only rewritten it.
And he realised, with a darkness that sank like a stone in his chest: He had bitten her. He had licked her blood. He had tasted something that should not exist. And now he would never forget it. Not for a thousand years. Not for eternity. Her flavour had etched itself into the same part of him that remembered the first soul he ever claimed, the first throne he ever took, the first oath he ever broke.