Chapter 27 Law Of The Pact
(The Devil)
He stared down at her face, slack with unconsciousness, lashes damp from the tears that pain had forced out of her. He hadn’t meant to bite her. Not like that. Not now. Not while wearing human skin. Human mouths were for speaking, for lying, for pretending at civility—not for sealing ancient bindings that even the gods had agreed to fear. Yet here he was, teeth still aching with the imprint of her.
His human teeth had no business marking her. His human mouth had no right claiming what only the Beast should touch—yet he’d done it anyway. A transgression that felt more intimate than ritual, more binding than blood-oaths. The Beast claimed by law of the Pact. This—this was claimed by choice, by impulse, by something dangerously close to desire.
His grip tightened around her waist before he realised he was doing it. His fingers splayed, as if testing the reality of her, needing to feel the solid weight of flesh and bone to assure himself she hadn’t been some illusion conjured by his own starvation for novelty.
Her body sagged against him, her head lolling against his bare shoulder exactly at the place where she had driven the spear into him hours earlier.
His wound throbbed—the same rhythm as the bite now pulsing red along her neck. Two wounds. One shared.
A mirrored ache. A tether he felt coil deeper with every passing heartbeat. The pain was no longer clean; it braided with something else, an insistent pull that made his every movement feel slightly off-centre unless she was close.
He cursed under his breath. Everything felt wrong. Everything inside him was wrong. He wasn’t supposed to feel this much in this form. The Beast always dulled emotion, dampened it beneath instinct and hunger and ancient power.
But right now, emotion roared through him like wildfire. Hunger. Rage. Possession. Confusion so thick he felt strangled by it. And something else— something he refused to name. It prowled at the edge of his awareness, this unnamed thing, pressing its face to the bars of his ribs like a captive creature begging to be acknowledged.
He stared at the mark on her neck. The crescent of his bite. The blood that still trickled from it, warm against his skin.
He had sunk his teeth into her the moment he saw her. Not because of hunger. Not because of the Pact. Not even because she was his chosen one. But because something inside him snapped the moment he saw her hiding under that fallen tree— mud-streaked, shivering, defiant even in exhaustion.
His mark had flared so violently he could barely breathe. It had felt less like recognition and more like remembrance, as though some old promise he had never consciously made had just been called due.
He should have left her. Waited for dawn. Let the Pact complete its cycle naturally. Another had already died by his hand. The Pact was complete. He could have just returned to his realm.
Instead, he had taken. Not fully. Not fatally. But enough. Enough to ruin every rule. Enough that the neat, cruel arithmetic of one life for ten years had been replaced by an equation with a variable he could no longer ignore.
He dragged his thumb across the smear of blood at the corner of her mouth. Her lips parted slightly at the touch. His jaw clenched.
“Fool,” he muttered, though he wasn’t sure if the word was for her or for himself.
“Little Flame… you’ve ruined everything.” The accusation burned bitter on his tongue, but beneath it, a quieter truth whispered: or remade it. He silenced that thought ruthlessly.
He dipped his face into her hair—unable to stop himself—breathing in the scent of her: rain-soaked earth, wild pine, and something warm and bright that didn’t belong in a mortal at all. Something that curled its fingers around his ribs and squeezed. Images he did not want flickered at the edge of his mind—her walking through his obsidian halls unafraid, her hand outstretched toward shadows that usually fled from touch. He tore his thoughts away as if burned.
He shouldn’t have been in this form. Not in this world.
That bite was meant to be done as the Beast— fanged and furious, ritualistic and ancient.
The Beast’s bite marked the soul, not just the flesh.
But this— this human-mouthed bite— was different. It burned brighter. Sank deeper. It was personal in a way it shouldn't have been. It tied her not only to his power, but to his choices, to the flawed, temperamental creature he became when he wore a human face and let himself feel.
He looked down at her slumped form, feeling the tremble of her shallow breaths.
“You should not have made me feel,” he whispered, aloud or in his own mind—he wasn’t sure.
The words carried a rawness that startled even him—an admission torn from a place he thought had calcified centuries ago. Emotion had been a luxury once, something he’d burned out of himself to survive the first centuries of Hell; now it flowed back in through the puncture wounds she’d left in his certainty.
The bite still simmered along his teeth, a lingering sting that crackled like lightning in his jaw. He could taste her blood—hot, metallic, threaded with the strange, impossible spark he had sensed on the first night she defied him.
That spark had always been faint—like a whisper at the edge of thought. But now, it blazed. It pulsed along his tongue. Sang through his veins. Rattled the Pact mark that snaked down his arm. Every beat of his heart sent another flare along the ink, like a drum signalling to some distant army that had been waiting, patient and silent, for this exact call.
He staggered a step, dizzy for the first time in centuries. Her bite mark glowed faintly, a dull red in the half-light. His own tattoo flared in response, ink shifting under his skin like living smoke. He hissed through his teeth, tightening his hold on her as the mark burned hotter.
The two responded to each other— mark to mark, like magnets caught in each other’s pull. Invisible lines of force tugged at them, insisting on closeness, promising backlash if he tried to separate too far, too fast.
Magic arced between them—thin gold threads snapping into existence then dissolving, like a spell attempting to cast itself but lacking the final word. Every time the threads sparked, he caught flashes at the edges of his sight—her standing in fire and not burning, her hand pressed flat to the barrier between realms, his own shadow bending toward her instead of away.
He didn’t understand it. He didn’t like it. But every instinct howled the same truth: He could not leave her here.
If another creature stumbled upon her unconscious form— if dawn rose while she lay defenceless— if anything touched her.
The thought made something feral snarl inside him. Jealousy—sharp and unfamiliar—raked its claws down his spine at the idea of any other set of eyes, mortal or monstrous, seeing her like this: undone, marked, bound by something they would not understand.