Chapter 99 What The Devil Does
(Caelum Ashborne)
Caelum had known, in abstract, what the Devil was capable of. He had seen the aftermath of Apollo’s punishments. He’d walked past the pits, past the torture wheels, past the cages that never opened. He’d watched demons dragged out in pieces.
This was worse.
Because she was not a demon. Because she was not supposed to be here. Because he needed her alive.
Because something about the angle of her head, the mess of her hair, the marks on her skin made his chest hurt in a way he didn’t have a mission word for. Not pity. Not love. Something more dangerous: responsibility that didn’t feel like a command.
Her wrists were raw where the bindings bit in, fingers lax. Shoulders strained. Bruises painted her shoulders, ribs, and hips in violent shades of violet and black. The bite on her breast—he didn’t let himself look at it long—was an ugly, darkening mark, red ringed with purple, skin broken in crescents where sharp teeth had sunk in.
He catalogued it the way he’d been trained: location, severity, pattern. And the way he was trained did nothing to stop his stomach from turning.
Another bruise marred her throat over the Devil’s bite mark, like Apollo’s hand had pinned her there more than once. Her thighs—he stopped himself again, jaw tightening.
Blood.
From this angle, not much. Perhaps just a smear dried along the inside of one thigh. A darker patch near the junction of her legs.
Something cold and furious slid through his chest. Apollo left proof like a signature. Caelum erased proof like a survival instinct. He hated himself for recognising the artistry in the cruelty.
Caelum shut his eyes briefly, jaw clenching so hard it hurt, and leaned his forehead against the stone. The rock burned his skin. He welcomed it.
Prophecy didn’t say anything about this part, he thought bitterly. Just ‘Queen’s fire will rise in chains. Devil’s flame will answer.’ Nothing about crosses and torture and—
There was a story Emberborn parents told their children, whispered over low fires in hidden caverns: if the Devil cannot break your mind, he will break your body. If he cannot own your will, he will own your flesh.
Caelum had assumed it was a metaphor.
Apparently not.
He pulled back from the slit, breathing hard. Sparks prickled under his skin in response to his rising temper, desperate to flare. He pressed the back of his head against the cooler stone of the passage and counted slowly until the urge to burn something blunted.
If he lost control now, the wards would feel it. The Devil would feel it.
And she’d die for it.
He forced himself to look again.
He didn’t need details. He needed facts. She was breathing. Was she conscious? …No. Probably not. She was bound. She was… used.
Her head hung forward, chin against her chest, hair a dark tangle obscuring most of her face. Even from this distance, he could see the slackness of her limbs, the micro-tremors that shuddered through overstressed muscles.
Alive, he thought. But barely.
He could taste the faint flicker of her ember in the air—dampened, exhausted, but still there. Still defiantly alight. It didn’t blaze. It persisted. Like a coal refusing to admit the night had won.
Relief hit him so hard his knees almost buckled.
He should leave. Rationally, he knew that. The Devil would return sooner rather than later; power like the wave that had just shaken the palace didn’t simply… pass without consequences.
But the idea of walking away while she hung there—empty, used, alone—curdled in his gut.
Two nights ago, she had stood in the far corner of this room wearing a makeshift dress of silk and stubbornness, fire in her eyes even when fear tightened her throat.
She hadn’t sounded like someone who broke easily.
Now…
Now she looked like every warning the Emberborn had ever whispered about what would happen if they failed.
Caelum hissed out a breath between his teeth. “Damn you, Devil,” he muttered under his breath in his own tongue. “You always overreach.”
Apollo overreached with force. Caelum’s people overreached with hope. Somewhere between those two mistakes, a girl was paying the price.
He laid his palm flat against the slit, let his ember seep into the wards just enough to feel for cracks. They scraped against his senses like old bone—Devil-made, full of teeth, but still imperfect. Apollo had built them quickly, in rage and fear. Rage and fear rarely left room for finesse.
He found a seam and slipped through.
The magic bristled at his presence—recognising something not of its making, something that smelled of old enemies. He narrowed his focus, easing the Emberborn flame down, down, until it flickered like a single candle.
Not a threat. Just a shadow. Just a whisper slipping between other people’s words. And still, the wards reacted as if his restraint offended them.
The wall’s surface softened.
He stepped into the chamber.
Heat wrapped around him instantly, clinging to his skin like a damp cloth. Thick. Hot. Heavy with the residual scent of spent magic, sex, blood, and smoke. It clung to his throat, his nostrils, his skin. The air tasted like a storm that had struck indoors. Like lightning trapped in a room with nowhere to ground.
The braziers’ low light threw long shadows across the floor, pooling darkness at the edges of the room.
For a heartbeat, he just stood there, senses straining for any hint that the Devil still lurked nearby.
Nothing.
The bond’s echo was faint, like Apollo had retreated somewhere deeper in the palace to lick his wounds—or to deny that he still had any. Caelum recognised the tactic. Leave the ruin behind. Let it hang. Let it learn to fear quiet.
Caelum moved.
He crossed the space between the wall and the cross quickly but not carelessly, each step measured to avoid loose stones and betraying sounds. His gaze flicked once toward the door—mangled, then restored, runes etched into the frame still glowing with fresh, territorial magic. The runes looked freshly fed, too bright at the edges. A king’s handwriting.
No one was at it. No shadows beneath it. No heat signature behind it.
He let himself look at her properly.
Up close, the damage was worse.
Her face was pale under the flush of exertion, cheeks streaked with dried tears, lashes stuck together. Her lips were swollen and reddened, as if she’d bitten them bloody to smother her own sounds. Sweat slicked her hair to her temples and throat.
The ropes of smoke around her wrists had tightened with every minute she’d hung there. Angry red rings marred her skin where ember met flesh, the faint glow of magic still pulsing in time with her sluggish heartbeat. Her fingers were curled into rigid claws, knuckles scraped raw where she’d strained against restraints that would never yield.
Bruises layered over bruises darkened her shoulders, her hips, the sides of her thighs. Not just from the bindings. From hands. From impact.
The bite on her breast had clotted, but the surrounding flesh still looked tender and inflamed. Her nipples were still perked and swollen from being abused.
Heat crawled under his skin again as he surveyed the markings. A quick flash of desire hit him. He swallowed down. Not here. Not like this.
Instead, he let the fury in. Bright and clean and useless. Useless, because fury was loud. And loud got her killed.
His gaze moved lower. To the place between her legs—
He didn’t let himself linger there. He saw enough in one flicked glance: drying blood; the slight swell of abused flesh; the dried remains of the Devil, of his lust; the way her inner thighs trembled even in unconsciousness.
He swallowed a curse so violent it tasted like acid.
You knew what he was, he told himself. You knew what he’d do.
Knowing theory and seeing evidence were very different things.