Chapter 145 Even Gods Get Jealous
(Caelum Ashborne)
Why am I alive?
The thought skated in circles, scraping the same groove deeper.
He knew what the Devil did to betrayers. He had watched it. Facilitated it. Marked out the places the bodies would hang.
He wasn’t naïve enough to think long service bought mercy. Loyalty in Hell was a currency with one use: it bought permission to be more useful before you were broken.
So why this?
Why not kill him and give her to some other demon whose magic didn’t lurch every time she breathed?
Caelum stopped at a junction and braced one hand against the wall, palm flat to warm stone, feeling the hum of wards through his bones. The palace’s pulse travelled up his arm: slow, steady, indifferent. It did not care that his thoughts were fraying. It did not care that his ember hurt. The realm would move on just as smoothly without him. That knowledge had always comforted him—he was a cog, replaceable, clean. Tonight, it made him feel more precarious, not less.
He knew one answer. It sat in his chest like a stone. The Devil didn’t trust him anymore. He had seen it in Apollo’s eyes—an almost imperceptible crack in that easy, ruthless certainty. My trust in you is frayed. Not a threat. A fact. A small, quiet admission in a realm that thrived on loud ones.
So he had done what kings did with weapons they feared and still needed.
He’d kept him close.
Put him at the edge of the flame he was starting to suspect could undo more than just their enemies.
Guard her. Watch her. Don’t touch.
Punishment disguised as duty. Or duty disguised as punishment. Or a test so layered even Caelum’s pattern-trained mind couldn’t see all the way through.
You will not touch her. Not as I do. Not with curiosity.
Caelum’s lips twitched into something that might have been a humourless smile if there were any humour left in him.
To touch her as he does. Even gods grew jealous.
His gut twisted. He’d seen more of how Apollo touched her than any demon had a right to. His mind tried not to replay it. It did anyway.
Her voice cracked around her gasps. The way her legs had trembled, straining to hold herself up. The sound she’d made when she’d finally let go—a sound he doubted she’d ever made for anyone else. A sound made for altars, not kings.
And Apollo—horns risen, wings shuddering, hands clamped around her hips like he’d tear the realm in half before he released her. Those images sat just under his eyelids, ready to flare any time he blinked too long. Each replay came with that same, treacherous answering heat in his own body, as if his flesh hadn’t gotten the message his mind kept repeating: she is not for you.
Later, in the hidden passage, when the magic had ebbed, Caelum had dragged his ember back into its cage and told himself a story.
This was proximity. This was a fluke of power lines. This was his Ember reacting to a Queen’s descendant the way an old hound might twitch at the sound of a forgotten whistle. It was biology. Blood. Fate. Anything but what it felt like. Want.
Want was dangerous. Want got you killed.
He had buried his once, young and foolish, when the Queen’s flame died and his people’s hope went with it. He had sworn then that his fire would be a tool, nothing more. A knife, not a hearth. A weapon, not a warmth. He had turned devotion into discipline and called it survival.
Now here he was, summoned before the throne like a sinner, with that same ember singing under his ribs because of a mortal girl hanging from the Devil’s chain and shaking on the Devil’s bench.
You should have burned, he told himself. He should have reached into your chest and torn the ember out in front of the court and let them watch it go dark.
Instead: Guard her.
The hand on the wall curled into a fist.
“She will be the end of something,” he murmured, unheard. “I just don’t know if it’s him or me.”
Or the world.
The thought didn’t scare him as much as it should have. If anything, it settled over him with a strange, grim calm. Things ended. Queens. Empires. Bloodlines. Maybe he’d always been walking toward a fault line; Adelaide just made it visible.
His feet found the last stair without him looking. The corridor levelled, the air shifting in that subtle way that told him he’d returned to the upper residential wing. The screaming from below dulled, replaced by the quieter sounds of a palace in its version of sleep: distant clatter, muted footfalls, the occasional hiss of magic being spent on something small.
He felt her before he saw her door.
Her ember was a low, steady thrum now. Tired. Folded in on itself. But still there. Still stubborn. It called to something in him, the way a note plucked on one string will make a hidden twin vibrate across the room. The resonance crawled under his sternum, making his ribs feel too narrow, his skin too tight. Every beat of her flame tapped out a rhythm his own ember remembered, even if the rest of him wanted to forget.
Caelum exhaled once, slowly, and let his shadow spill ahead of him, testing the wards along her threshold.
They recognised him now.
Fresh from the throne, Apollo’s command still glowed like brand marks across his magic. The wards around her room tasted that mark, shuddered, then allowed his shadow to seep through the crack at the bottom of the door.
It slid under first, soundless and flat. He followed a heartbeat later, stepping through the stone as easily as a man might step through a curtain.
The room was dim. Hell’s false moonlight painted pale bars across the bed. The scent of bath salts and smoke clung to the air, softened under the faint, very human smell of warm skin and recent sleep.
Underneath it lay another thread of scent—fresh, unmistakable. Sex. The humid whisper of slick heat and salt, the faint musk of Devil and mortal tangled together. His nostrils flared before he could stop himself, instincts cataloguing what his mind did not want to touch. No sharp iron of spilled blood. No sour edge of fear-sweat. No bitter tang of torn flesh or fresh bruising. Just the echo of pleasure and the warmth of bodies that had come apart and then… rested. The absence of violence in the scent wrong-footed him more than if the room had reeked of it. The Devil had taken her again—and not broken her to do it. Something cold slid under the heat in his veins at that realisation. Apollo changing his pattern was more terrifying than any number of screams. Monsters, he understood. Whatever this was, he did not.