Chapter 3: The Mayor's Wrath
The high-backed chair of crimson velvet did nothing to soothe the fury thrumming through Michael’s veins. He sat in his opulent office, royalty pissed off, his diamond-like eyes fixed on nothing, seeing only the image burned behind them: Raziel’s blue-black hand resting on that half-breed’s scarred back in their wretched, honey-lit cottage. The scrying orb on his desk had gone dark, but the aftertaste of their domestic bliss lingered like a foul smell.
The heavy oak door clicked open.
His assistant, a slight man with perpetually rounded shoulders, entered with his head bowed and eyes glued to the polished marble floor. He moved as if the air itself might bite him.
“Mayor Michael… it… it’s done,” the assistant nervously said, his voice shaking with every breath.
Michael simply grunted. He didn’t look up. Beneath the broad expanse of his mahogany desk, a slight shifting occurred. A muffled, rhythmic sound ceased. With a contemptuous flick of his boot, Michael kicked the elf hiding under his desk, the one currently sucking his dick. The creature—emaciated, with eyes wide with terror—scurried out from its hiding place on all fours, bumping into the assistant’s legs before scrambling for the door. Michael’s cum spilled from the corners of its mouth, a silvery trail dripping onto the immaculate floor.
The assistant didn’t look. Didn’t speak. He had learned long ago to avert his eyes in Michael’s presence. You see nothing. You know nothing. You are nothing. The saying rang like a funeral bell in his assistant’s ears.
Michael finally got up, adjusting the front of his immaculately tailored trousers, and walked to the front of his desk. He leaned back against it, the picture of celestial authority amidst the squalor of his own actions. “The demon has been informed?” he said, barely looking up as he examined his perfect, clean fingernails.
“Yes, Mayor Michael.”
“Good.” The word was a drop of ice water. He straightened, his golden hair catching the cold light from the windows overlooking his city. “I want that pathetic cottage monitored. Every breath, every whispered word. I want to know if he so much as trims a rose bush. Use the watchers from the lower wards. They’re less… squeamish.”
“It will be done.”
“Also,” Michael continued, his voice dropping into a conversational tone that was infinitely more terrifying than any shout, “fire that elf. And send me someone better.” He finally met his assistant’s downturned gaze, a cruel smile touching his lips. “Perhaps someone who can actually suck dick.”
The assistant’s throat worked. “Yes, Mayor Michael.”
A wave of his hand, and the man was gone, leaving Michael alone with the echo of his own malice. He walked to the window, clasping his hands behind his back. The city spread below him, a testament to order and light. His light. And in a distant, wooded curl of the land, a blot of darkness festered.
Seraphina. Her name was a shard of glass in his heart, forever twisting. His beautiful, radiant sister. Not just dead. Defiled. Reduced to ash and memory by the hands of the beast she’d foolishly wed. The official histories called it a tragedy, a demon’s inherent nature revealing itself. Michael knew the truth—the betrayal Raziel had discovered, the violent, shameful end—but it didn’t matter. The demon had taken her. That was the only fact that endured.
And now the beast had the gall to try again. To pollute the world with another hybrid creature, to play house with a wounded, wingless thing as broken as he was. It was an insult. A living, breathing insult to Seraphina’s memory.
His scrying orb shimmered to life at his unspoken command. The image resolved, not inside the cottage—his spells couldn’t yet pierce the wards Raziel had woven from old, deep demonic magic—but on the garden path outside. He saw the demon emerge, his ice-blue eyes scanning the treeline, his massive body coiled with a tension that was both predatory and protective. Behind him, a flash of grey-lavender skin in the doorway. Elara.
Michael’s lips curled. He saw the way Raziel positioned himself, a shield between her and the unseen forest. He saw the demon’s tail, a lash of agitated muscle, curl possessively around her calf for a fleeting second before returning to its hunt.
Love. They called it love. It was a biological glitch. A shared pathology of two damaged things clinging to each other in the dark. He would illuminate that darkness. He would show them the cost of their happiness.
The orb’s view shifted, following Raziel as he moved to the edge of the property, his nostrils flaring as he caught the scent left behind by the message. Angelic magic. Michael’s magic, carefully scented of a generic, lower-choir agent. Let the demon wonder. Let him suspect every flicker of white in the periphery.
“You can smell it, can’t you, beast?” Michael whispered to the empty room. “The past isn’t dead. It’s just been waiting for an invitation.”
He watched as Raziel knelt, pressing a clawed hand into the soft earth where the messenger had stood. The demon’s head lifted, and for a heart-stopping second, Michael could have sworn those piercing blue eyes looked directly through the orb, through the miles, and into his own.
It was impossible, of course.
But Michael felt a thrill, sharp and cold, lance through him. The game was truly afoot. The opening move—the blood on the sheets, the note—had been delivered. A declaration of war written in gore and fear.
Now, he would begin the siege. Not with armies, but with whispers. With revoked permits for the rare herbs Elara needed for her potions. With unexpected inspections of their property. With town citizens suddenly too afraid to sell them goods, their minds gently brushed by angelic suggestion. He would isolate them. Corral them. Make their sanctuary a cage.
And then, when they were raw and looking at each other with the first seeds of doubt—when the demon’s gentle heart began to harden again under the pressure, when the half-breed’s scars began to ache with remembered persecution—then Michael would strike at the bond itself.
He deactivated the orb. The office was silent, save for the distant hum of the city.
He had waited centuries. He could wait a little longer. Watching, after all, could be its own exquisite form of torture. And the sight of Raziel’ world crumbling, piece by carefully orchestrated piece, would be the only balm that could ever soothe the never-healing wound of his sister’s loss.
Michael smiled, a true, bright smile that never reached his diamond eyes. Outside, the sun shone brilliantly over his perfect, golden spires.