Chapter 4: The Butler's Secret Hunger
The silence of the palace corridors was a living thing, breathing against her skin as she walked. The sheet she’d wrapped around herself felt absurdly flimsy, a pathetic shield against the predatory energy still humming in her veins from Diavolo’s chambers. Her body was a map of their claim: muscles aching from strain, tender flesh throbbing with a phantom fullness, the scent of them clinging to her. Yet, beneath the soreness, the bond vibrated—a plucked string that refused to go quiet.
It was this vibration that led her. Not memory, not guesswork. A subtle, discordant pull, a frequency that felt like a suppressed sigh amidst the roaring chorus of Diavolo and Lucifer. It tugged at her navel, a gossamer thread leading down, away from the royal suites, into the functional heart of the palace.
The air grew warmer, carrying the rich, yeasty scent of baking bread and the sharp, mineral tang of magic. The humming in the walls grew louder here, a deep, resonant bass note to the bond’s higher pitch. She paused at the arched entrance to the kitchen.
It was a cathedral of culinary alchemy. Obsidian counters gleamed under permanent witch-light orbs suspended in the vaulted ceiling. A hearth large enough to roast a behemoth glowed with banked coals. And there, at a vast central slab of marble, stood Barbatos.
He was a study in contained motion. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, revealing forearms corded with lean muscle. His hands, sheathed in thin, pristine white gloves, worked a mound of dough with a rhythmic, hypnotic precision. Push, fold, turn. A gentle, relentless strength. The air around him shimmered slightly, a testament to the temporal magic he wielded so casually. Flour dusted the marble like first snow.
He didn’t look up. “You should be resting, Miss Celeste.”
His voice was the same cool, polished river stone. It washed over her, and the bond inside her gave a sudden, painful twist—not of hunger, but of recognition laced with a profound, self-inflicted ache.
She stepped into the room, the flagstones cool beneath her bare feet. “I couldn’t.”
“No,” he agreed, still not ceasing his rhythm. “I expect not. The bond is… insistent in its formative phase.” He finally glanced up, and his green eyes, usually so placid, held a storm of unspoken things. They tracked from her disheveled white hair, down the line of her throat—lingering on a bruise she could feel but not see—to the thin sheet clutched at her breasts, and lower, to her bare legs. His nostrils flared, almost imperceptibly. “You are injured.”
“I’m sore,” she corrected, her own voice husky.
“A distinction without a difference, given the cause.” He returned his focus to the dough, kneading with renewed vigor. The silence stretched, filled only by the soft thump of his fists and the crackle of the hearth.
She leaned against a counter, watching him. The powerful flex of his shoulders, the absolute control in every movement. It was mesmerizing. And it called to the part of her that was still raw, open, and singing with need. The soreness between her legs was fading into a fresh, low thrum. The sight of his hands working, the muscles of his back shifting under his tailored waistcoat… it stoked the embers Diavolo and Lucifer had left blazing.
A warm, betraying dampness gathered at her core. She shifted, pressing her thighs together. The soft sound of the sheet rustling was obscenely loud.
Barbatos’s hands stilled. He didn’t turn. “You are leaking arousal onto my clean floor, little witch.”
The words, so blunt, so clinical, sent a shock of pure fire through her. Her face flushed, but a defiant heat pooled in her belly. “Maybe your floor isn’t as clean as you think.”
Now he turned. He plucked a towel from his shoulder and slowly, methodically, began to wipe the flour from his gloved fingers. His gaze was a physical weight. “You came here for clarity. Not for this.”
“Did I?” she breathed. The bond was a frantic hum now, a bee trapped in her ribcage. It reached for him, this silent, disciplined man, and she felt it slam against a wall of absolute will.His denial. It wasn’t rejection.It was a fortress. “I can feel you, Barbatos. I felt you in the library. You’re there. In the… resonance. You’re hurting. Why are you hurting?”
A flicker—a true crack in his impeccable facade—crossed his face. Pain, yes, but also a searing, naked want so deep it stole her breath. It was gone in an instant, buried under layers of ice. “My wellbeing is irrelevant. My duty is to the Prince’s stability. Your bond with him and Lucifer is paramount. My… echoes… are a procedural complication to be managed.”
“Managed.” She pushed off the counter, letting the sheet slip a little. “Like you managed me in the library? With your fingers inside me?”
He went perfectly still. The air in the kitchen thickened, grew heavy. The scent of baking bread became cloying, mixed with the salt of her sweat and the fertile, unmistakable scent of her own desire. “That was a necessity. A release of tension to facilitate rational thought.”
“Bullshit.” The curse hung in the air. She took a step closer. “You felt it.You feel it now. It’s burning you up from the inside. I can taste your denial, Barbatos. It’s bitter. And it’s pulling at me.” She was before him now, close enough to see the rapid pulse at the base of his throat. “Don’t I get a say in who manages my complications?”
His control was a sublime, terrifying thing. She watched it fracture in slow motion. His eyes darkened, the green depths swallowing the light. His gloved hands clenched at his sides. The bond between them didn’t sing—it screamed, a silent, piercing siren of mutual need.
“You have no idea what you’re asking for,” he said, his voice a low rasp.
“Then show me.”
He moved. It wasn’t the predatory hunger of Diavolo or the cruel precision of Lucifer. It was an inevitability. One gloved hand shot out, encircling her wrist, pulling her roughly against him. The other went to the knot of the sheet at her chest. A single, sharp tug. The fabric pooled at her feet, leaving her utterly bare before him, dusted in the faint flour that hung in the air.He looked his fill. His gaze was a brand, scorching over every bruise, every bite mark, the slick evidence of her earlier takings still glistening on her inner thighs. A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Marked,” he breathed, and the word was a curse.
“They’re not the only ones who can leave marks,” she whispered, her bravado a thin shield.
With a sound that was almost a growl, he spun her around, bending her forward over the cold, flour-dusted marble of his work table. The shock of the stone against her breasts and belly made her gasp. Her hands scrambled for purchase, sending a bowl of proofing dough clattering to the floor with a wet thud.
He ignored it. His body pressed against her from behind, the fine wool of his trousers rough against her sore skin. He leaned over her, his mouth at her ear. “You come here, smelling of them, dripping with them, and you provoke me.” One gloved hand smoothed over the curve of her ass, possessive, rough. “You seek clarity? This is the only clarity I can offer you.”
His fingers trailed through the mess between her legs, collecting her wetness, mixing it with the traces of Diavolo and Lucifer he found there. He brought his gloved fingers to his mouth, his eyes locked on hers in the reflective surface of a copper pot. He tasted them. A flicker of pure, unadulterated fury crossed his features before his expression shuttered again.
“Filthy,” he murmured, but it was layered with a dark, hungry awe.
The gloved hand returned to her cunt. Not one finger, but two. He plunged them into her without ceremony, a deep, claiming thrust that made her cry out and arch her back. The leather of the gloves was a shocking texture, smooth and unyielding, catching on her sensitive inner walls as he began to piston them in and out. The sound was obscene—wet, squelching, rhythmic.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” His voice was steady, even as his breath hitched. His other hand pressed between her shoulder blades, holding her down. “To feel another demon claim what’s already been claimed? To prove the bond is a greedy, indiscriminate thing?”
He scissored his fingers inside her, stretching her, and the combined friction of the leather and the lingering soreness tipped into a sharp, bright pain that bordered on pleasure. “Fuck,” she panted, her cheek against the cold stone.
“Such language from a witch,” he chided, but his rhythm was breaking, becoming erratic. He was feeling it too, the feedback loop she’d experienced with the others. His calm was a veneer, cracking under the force of his own need. He added a third finger, the stretch intense, filling her in a different, more specific way. He curled them, searching, and found a spot that made her legs tremble.
“There,” he hissed, triumphant. He rubbed that spot relentlessly, his gloves now soaked, the leather squeaking with the motion. “You see? Your body doesn’t discriminate. It just wants. It is a vessel for need.”
She was so close, teetering on the edge, shame and desire fused into a single white-hot wire.But she needed more. “Is that all?” she gasped, pushing back against his hand. “Just your fingers? Your master’s loyal hound, only brave enough to use his hand?”
The pressure on her back vanished. For a terrifying second, she thought she’d gone too far. Then she heard the rustle of fabric, the unmistakable sound of a zipper, the snap of latex. He’d sheathed himself. Of course he had. Even in this, he was managing, controlling.
He spat into his palm—a crude, utterly un-Barbatos gesture—and slicked himself. The blunt, hot head of his cock pressed against her entrance, nudging aside his own fingers. He withdrew his hand.
He didn’t tease. He didn’t ask. He simply pushed.
He was thick, different from Diavolo’s sheer girth or Lucifer’s brutal length. He filled her with a slow, inexorable pressure that stole the air from her lungs. The glove-softened stretch was overwhelming. She was so full, so sensitized, every nerve ending screaming.
He sank to the hilt with a choked-off groan, his hips flush against her ass. He froze, buried deep inside her, both of them trembling. The bond, which had been a frantic scream, dissolved into a deep, resonant hum of… rightness. A missing piece sliding home.
“Damn you,” he whispered into her hair, his voice shattered. “Damn you for this.”
Then he moved.
His thrusts were not rhythmic. They were desperate. A brutal, pounding pace that shook the table, sending utensils rattling. Each drive buried him to the root, the slap of his skin against hers a sharp counterpoint to their ragged breathing. One hand fisted in her white hair, pulling her head back. The other gripped her hip so hard she knew it would bruise.
“You feel that?” he grunted, pistoning into her. “That is not duty. That is not management. That is me. Fucking you. Because I have wanted to since the moment you walked into this damned palace with your witchlight eyes and your defiant stare.”
The confession, torn from him in the heat of possession, undid her. Her orgasm ripped through her with a silent, seismic violence, her internal muscles clamping down on him in wave after wave of blinding release. She screamed into the marble, her body convulsing.
It broke the last of his control. With a raw, guttural shout that held centuries of suppressed longing, he slammed into her one final time and came, his hips jerking against hers as he emptied himself in deep, pulsing jets.
For long moments, the only sounds were their heaving breaths and the distant crackle of the hearth. He stayed buried within her, his forehead resting between her shoulder blades, his body shuddering with aftershocks.
Slowly, carefully, he withdrew. The loss was acute. He disposed of the condom with efficient, robotic movements. He righted his clothing, his back to her. When he finally turned, his face was a mask again, but it was a damaged mask, hairline fractures visible in the stillness of his eyes.
He picked up the fallen sheet and handed it to her, not meeting her gaze. “Your clarity, Miss Celeste,” he said, his voice hollow, stripped of all its polished edges. “I am part of your resonance. And I am… unfit. My desire is a flaw in my service. This,” he gestured at the flour-strewn table, at her naked, used body, “cannot happen again.”
He walked to the sink and began washing his gloved hands with surgical thoroughness, scrubbing away the evidence. The bond between them thrummed with a new, agonizing chord: a connection violently acknowledged, then brutally severed. He had shown her the truth, and in doing so, had built a higher, colder wall.
She wrapped the sheet around her shaking body, the scent of him, of sex, and of fresh bread clinging to her skin. The confusion was gone, replaced by a colder, more desolate understanding. The bond had three points. And one of them had just chosen to live in permanent, excruciating silence.
The cold marble imprint stayed on her skin long after she stumbled from the kitchen. The sheet, now grimy with flour and the sticky evidence of their encounter, hung around her like a shroud. She didn’t look back at Barbatos, still methodically scrubbing his gloves at the sink. His silence was louder than any thunder. It echoed in the new, raw hollow inside her chest, a cavity carved not by absence, but by deliberate severance.
The grand halls of the castle blurred into a smear of obsidian and gold. Her bare feet were numb against the stone. The bond, that frantic, living thing inside her, was no longer screaming. It was… weeping. A low, discordant keen that vibrated in her teeth. It reached weakly for the two blazing suns of Diavolo and Lucifer somewhere above her, and recoiled, singed by their earlier fury. It reached for the newly-discovered, steady pulse of Barbatos and slammed against that polished, impermeable wall.
She couldn’t go back to them. Not to Diavolo’s desperate warmth or Lucifer’s calculated fire. Not when she felt so fundamentally ruined.
The path to the House of Lamentation was instinctual, a retreat to the closest thing she had to a neutral den. Students milled in the common areas, their chatter slicing at her senses. A sharp, citrusy laugh from Asmodeus. The gruff bark of Mammon arguing about Grimm. She flinched, pulling the filthy sheet tighter, and became a ghost drifting up the staircase.
Her room door clicked shut with a finality that felt like the only truth left. She locked it. The mundane snick of the bolt was a sanctuary. Only then did she let the sheet fall, a soiled puddle on the floor. She didn’t shower. The smells—sex, sweat, flour, him, them—were a testament to the madness. To wash it off felt like denying it happened.
She crawled into the bed, the cold linens a shock, and pulled the heavy blankets and duvet over her head. The world reduced to the dark, stuffy cavern of her own breathing. The bond’s keen softened here, muffled by down and wool, but it didn’t stop. It was a toothache in her soul, a persistent, twisting throb.
Her phone, left on the nightstand, lit up. A soft buzz against the wood. Then another. A cascade of vibrations. Diavolo’s name flashed, followed by Lucifer’s. Then Diavolo again. The screen pulsed like a frantic heartbeat in the dark room. She watched the light bleed through the fabric of her makeshift cave, each buzz a tug on the leash she was now, with every fiber, refusing to heed.
The void in her heart wasn’t empty. It was full of ache. The bond bent under the strain, a bridge stretched between three pillars where one had deliberately withdrawn its support. She felt their distant concern, a hot prickle against the edges of her awareness. She felt Barbatos’s resignation, a cold, still pool miles deep.
But within her, under the blankets and the weight of it all, there was only a vast, silent numbness. The calls went unanswered. The vibrations ceased. In the sudden quiet, the only thing left was the raw, scraping pain of a connection that could find no peace, and her own will, fragile but fierce, to not be consumed by it.
The quiet was a lie. It throbbed.
Beyond the muffling blankets, the world had not stopped. The bond, that three-pointed knot of fire and ice in her chest, pulsed with wounded urgency. It gnawed at the edges of her numbness, a rat trying to chew through a wall. She squeezed her eyes shut, ordering her heart to be stone, her nerves to be dead. It almost worked.
Then the lock clicked.
Not the rattle of a key, but the clean, soft sound of a mechanism yielding to a higher authority. The door swung open, bathing the room in a slice of hallway light. Two silhouettes filled the frame, their auras pressing against her shielded senses like heat from a forge.
“This is pathetic.” Lucifer’s voice cut through the dark, precise and cold. He stepped inside, Diavolo a broader, more hesitant shadow behind him. “Hiding in a nest of linens. Did you think it would silence the connection?”
Diavolo closed the door softly. The room plunged back into near-darkness, but their presence was a physical pressure. “We felt your distress, Cici. A sharp, cutting pain. Then… nothing. A void. That is not how this works.”
She didn’t move from under the covers. “Get out.”
“You went to him,” Lucifer stated, his voice moving closer. She could smell the faint trace of infernal amber and cold night air on him. “The floor was flour-dusted from the kitchens to here. You reek of him. Of spent lust and his particular misery.”
The blankets were ripped away. She flinched, curling into herself on the bed, naked and exposed in the low light. They stood over her, Diavolo’s expression pained, Lucifer’s analytical. Their eyes cataloged the fresh marks on her hips—the stark, gloved fingerprints from Barbatos’s grip—amidst the older bruises.
“He confirmed it,” Diavolo said, his voice thick. “The resonance.”
“And then he renounced it,” she spat, finally looking up. Her green eyes were dry and hard. “He fucked me over a flour-dusted table and called it a flaw. So congratulations. Your bond has a crippled limb.”
Lucifer’s hand shot out, not to strike, but to grasp her chin, forcing her head up. “His denial is a poison. It will seep back into the network, into us, into you. Creating fault lines.” His thumb stroked her jaw, a chilling parody of tenderness. “We cannot allow it.”
“Allow?” She wrenched her face free. “You don’t allow anything. You just take. He’s the only one who’s honest about it being a curse.”
Diavolo sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. The warmth radiating from him was a tangible pull, a siren song to her chilled skin. The bond whimpered, reaching for him. “It is not a curse, Cici. It is a responsibility. A shared one. His refusal to bear his part makes the burden heavier for us all. For you.”
He reached out, his fingers brushing a strand of white hair from her cheek. The touch was electric, a jolt that traveled straight to her core. A low gasp escaped her. Her body, traitorous and hungry, immediately softened, a slick heat blooming between her legs in direct contradiction to her will.
“See?” Lucifer murmured, a dark satisfaction in his tone. “Your flesh knows its masters. It calls to us even as your mind rebels.”
He moved then, with a fluid grace that belied his intent. Kneeling on the bed behind her, he pulled her back against his chest. His arms wrapped around her, one hand splaying over her belly, the other cupping her breast. His clothed erection pressed against the small of her back. Diavolo watched, his golden eyes glowing in the dimness, before leaning in to capture her mouth.
This kiss was different. It wasn’t passionate or furious. It was deep, consuming, and full of a terrible, possessive sadness. He tasted of regret and power. As his tongue slid against hers, Lucifer’s hands began to move. He pinched her nipple, rolling it to a stiff peak, while his other hand slid down, through the damp curls, and found her clit.
She moaned into Diavolo’s mouth, her body arching back against Lucifer. The resistance was crumbling, not under force, but under a devastating, shared loneliness. The bond drank her surrender, swelling with a dark, radiant warmth.
“We will fill the void he left,” Diavolo whispered against her lips, breaking the kiss. His hand joined Lucifer’s between her legs, his thick fingers pushing alongside his, stretching her, working her open. “We will burn his poison out with us.”
They maneuvered her with a silent, practiced efficiency that spoke of their deep understanding. Lucifer lay back against the pillows, pulling her to straddle him. His cock, freed from his trousers, stood hard and demanding. She guided him into her cunt, sinking down with a choked cry at the familiar, filling stretch. He filled her completely, his hands gripping her hips.
Before she could adjust, Diavolo moved behind her. She felt the broad, slick head of his cock nudge against her other entrance. Lucifer held her steady, his gaze locked on hers.
“For us,” Lucifer commanded, his voice a rough vibration beneath her. “All of it.”
Diavolo pushed. The intrusion was immense, a breathtaking fullness that made her see stars. She was split open, impaled in both holes, a living conduit between them. The bond screamed in triadic resonance, a feedback loop of sheer sensation that short-circuited all thought.
“Fuck, she’s tight,” Diavolo groaned, his hands on her waist, holding her still as he seated himself to the hilt.
Lucifer’s composure shattered. He thrust upward, a sharp, punishing drive. “Move.”
They set a brutal, counter-rhythmic pace. Diavolo pulled out of her ass almost completely before slamming back in, the force driving her down onto Lucifer’s cock. Lucifer met each downward slide with a driving upward thrust, spearing her from below. She was a puppet between them, a vessel of their shared desperation. The slap of skin, the wet, obscene sounds of their joining, their guttural grunts filled the dark room.
“This is what you are,” Lucifer hissed, his fingers digging into her hips. “Ours. Every part.”
Diavolo leaned over her back, biting her shoulder, a claiming mark over the ghost of Barbatos’s touch. “Come for us, Cici. Let us feel it together.”
The pressure was atomic, building in her core. It wasn’t pleasure; it was annihilation. Her orgasm detonated, a silent, white-hot shockwave that ripped through the bond and into them. Lucifer came first with a sharp cry, his release flooding her cunt in hot pulses. The clenching of her internal muscles around him triggered Diavolo’s climax, a roaring release that filled her ass as he ground deep, shuddering.
They collapsed in a tangle of limbs and spent breath, still joined. The bond hummed, a saturated, heavy thing. The void Barbatos had left was momentarily gone, stuffed full of them.
Lucifer’s hand, surprisingly gentle, stroked her sweaty back. “It will require constant reinforcement,” he said, his voice drained. “Especially now.”
Diavolo nuzzled her hair. “We will not let you fracture.”
But as the physical urgency ebbed, the truth seeped back in. The hollow wasn’t filled. It was just plastered over with their bodies. She could still feel the precise shape of Barbatos’s silence, a cold, perfect geometry amidst their heat. And she knew, with a chilling certainty, that plaster would crack. The hunger wasn’t just for flesh. It was for wholeness. And their triad was missing a piece.