Chapter 10: The argument reaches its peak when Lucifer suddenly grabs Nikki, his lips crashing against hers with centuries of pent-up desire. His hands tear through her ballgown as he lifts her onto the gazebo railing, spreading her thighs wide before thrusting his throbbing cock into her dripping pussy with a guttural growl.
The music from the ballroom was a distant, throbbing heartbeat. A waltz for devils and angels, diplomats and monsters. I could still feel the phantom pressure of Mammon’s hand on the small of my back, his proprietary grip as he’d paraded me before the assembled lords of the Devildom. His newest treasure, polished and presented. Asmo had flitted around us, adjusting the strap of my gown, a confection of shadow and shimmer he’d commissioned at outrageous cost. “Perfection, darling! You’ll ruin everyone’s night because they can’t have you.”
But the wanted thing inside the jeweled casing was cracked. The opulence was suffocating. The eyes on me felt like insects crawling over my skin. I needed air that wasn’t perfumed with ambition and deceit.
I slipped through a servant’s door marked with a subtle, curling vine, found a stone archway, and escaped into the night.
The gardens of Diavolo’s castle were a labyrinth of unnatural beauty. Black roses breathed silvery pollen into the air. Trees with crystal leaves tinkled in a sourceless wind. The path, laid with crushed moonstone, gleamed under the triple moons. I walked until the music was a ghost, until the only sound was the whisper of my silk skirt and the frantic rhythm of my own thoughts.
He hadn’t been there. All night. Lucifer. The one face I’d unconsciously scanned for in the crowd, the one absence that made every compliment taste like ash.
The hidden gazebo appeared as a darker space of tangled iron and night-blooming jasmine. I climbed the few steps and sank onto a pile of cushions, leftover from some prior, secret tryst. I tipped my head back against a cold marble column, staring up at the swirling, witch-light sky. The hurt was a fresh bruise, much worse now. After the temporary fillings of Mammon and Asmo, the emptiness felt cavernous, echoing.
“Running away from your admirers?”
The voice was like shards of ice sliding down my spine. Low, precise, and intimately familiar.
I didn’t move. I kept looking at the sky, afraid if I looked, he’d be a mirage. “There’s nothing to run from. Just more of the same.”
Footsteps on the moonstone path. Slow, deliberate. He entered the gazebo, a taller, broader shadow against the gloom. He was in full formal attire, the lines severe and perfect. He looked like a statue of a king, carved from midnight and arrogance.
“You looked… occupied.” His tone was neutral, offering no entry.
A hot spark of anger finally made me turn my head. He was leaning against the opposite column, arms crossed, observing me with a detached, analytical coldness that made my stomach clench. “I’ve been occupied for weeks, Lucifer. You would know, if you’d been around to notice.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“We’re all busy.” I stood up, the silk whispering accusations. “Busy isn’t a reason. It’s an excuse. What did I do?”
He didn’t flinch. “This isn’t about something you did.”
“Then what is it about?” My voice cracked. “You just… stopped. One day you were there, the next you were a ghost giving me orders through text. Was it Mammon? Asmo? Did my… currency devalue because I let others spend it?”
His eyes, the color of old blood in the low light, finally showed a flicker. Not warmth. Possession. A stark, furious pride. “Do not speak of yourself that way.”
“Why not? It’s how I feel! I feel traded and passed around to keep the peace. Mammon fucks the loneliness out of me, Asmo fucks the anxiety away, but it all just… comes back. Because you put it there. You left a hole, and they’re just… stuffing it full of themselves to plug the leak. Diavolo is the one who tries... bless him and his heart, he's the only one to come close!” The words were ugly, viscous, torn from a place I’d been hiding. “So just tell me. Am I dismissed? Is the human experiment over? Should I just be grateful for the scraps the others throw me? Should I accept Diavolo's proposal to be his? Are you done with me?! Just fucking say it!”
His silence was worse than any answer. It was a vacuum, pulling all the sound from the garden until all I heard was the hammering of my own heart. He pushed off the column, and the air thickened, charged with a static that made the fine hairs on my arms stand up.
“Done?” he finally repeated, the word a soft, dangerous thing. He took a step forward. The oppressive weight of his power, usually so perfectly leashed, rippled outwards, a psychic scent of ozone and ancient stone. “You think this is about being done?”
Another step. I held my ground, my chin lifted, even as every instinct screamed to retreat.
“You let Mammon mark you. You let Asmo parade you. You let the angel taste you, and now Diavolo has offered for you, and you come here, smelling of them all, and ask me if I’m done?” He was before me now, his hand snapping out to grip my jaw, his fingers cold and unyielding. “You misunderstand everything.”
His kiss was not an answer. It was an annihilation. It was nothing like Asmo’s practiced art or Mammon’s hungry consumption. This was a claiming, brutal and final. His tongue invaded my mouth, a conquest. The taste of him—dark wine, iron, and a fury so deep it was cold—wiped away every other flavor. I struggled for a second, a useless push against his chest, and then a broken sound ripped from my throat and I was kissing him back, my hands fisting in the impeccable fabric of his coat, clinging like I was drowning.
He broke the kiss, his breath ragged against my lips. “You are mine.” The words were a guttural command, not a romantic declaration. “You have always been mine. This separation was... a mistake. I could not comprehend the emotions I felt for you. I saw them as a threat to my pride and I... You. You alone are my right. My claim. From your first breath... to our first kiss. You were mine, written in blood. And I, a fool, squandered it.”
His words hung between us, a raw confession that somehow made the void inside me yawn wider. It wasn’t an apology. It was a seismic shift in the bedrock of everything I thought I knew. “A threat to your pride?” I whispered, my voice trembling. “So you punished us both?”
“I orchestrated my own torment,” he countered, his thumb stroking my lower lip, a stark contrast to the bruising grip on my jaw. “Watching from a distance was a unique hell. Seeing Mammon’s dirt on you, smelling Asmo’s perfume in your hair.” His gaze dropped to the swell of my breasts above the neckline of my gown. “Hearing the whispers about you and the angel. About you and our prince. My control is not infinite.”
The admission, dragged from him, was more potent than any gift. But it wasn’t enough. The weeks of silence were a ghost in the gazebo with us. “You think claiming me now erases that? That you can just fuck me back into forgetting how alone you made me feel?”
A dark, dangerous smile touched his lips. It held no warmth, only a predatory certainty. “No. I will fuck you into remembering who you belong to. I will overwrite every other touch, every other taste, until the only memory your body responds to is mine.”
He moved then, a swift blur of demonic speed. My back hit the cold marble column, the impact punching the air from my lungs. His body pinned me there, an immovable prison of muscle and tailored wool. The hard ridge of his erection pressed against my belly through our clothes, a blatant, demanding truth.
“Tell me to stop,” he breathed against my mouth, his hands ripping at the delicate straps of my gown. Silk tore with a sound like a gasp. “Tell me you don’t want this. Tell me you prefer their hollow affection to my possession.”
I couldn’t. The lie wouldn’t form. A broken sob escaped me instead, my head falling back against the stone. He took the submission for what it was. His mouth was on my throat, biting, sucking, marking what the others had only borrowed. He yanked the ruined gown down to my waist, baring me to the humid night air. His hands were rough on my breasts, kneading, his thumbs scraping over my nipples until they were hard, aching points.
“Lucifer,” I choked out.
“Say it again,” he demanded, biting my shoulder. One hand shoved the layers of my skirt up violently, gathering them around my hips. His fingers found my panties and tore them away with a snap of elastic. He didn’t bother with finesse. His fingers plunged into my cunt, finding me soaked. “Disgustingly wet,” he growled, the words hot against my skin. “Your body always knew. It wept for this. For me.”
He withdrew his fingers, slick and glistening, and shoved them into my mouth. I tasted myself, salt and musk, as he watched with burning eyes. “Suck them clean. Taste your own pathetic need for me.”
I did, my tongue circling his fingers, a filthy mimicry that made him groan. He unbuttoned his trousers, freeing his cock. It was thick, long, and brutally erect, the head dark and beading with pre-come. He nudged it against my soaked entrance, not entering, just applying unbearable pressure. “Who does this cunt belong to, Nicole?”
“You,” I whimpered, the last of my resistance crumbling to dust.
“Incomplete.” He pushed forward, just an inch, a searing stretch that made my nails dig into his arms. “Whose ruined, greedy little cunt is this?”
“Yours!” The word was a scream that echoed off the gazebo’s iron ribs.
He slammed the rest of the way home.
The fullness was shocking, a brutal claiming that stole my vision. He was bigger than the others, and he filled me with a single, devastating thrust that felt like it reached my throat. I cried out, a raw, shattered sound. He didn’t let me adjust. He set a relentless, pounding rhythm, each withdrawal a near-total loss followed by a slam that jarred my teeth.
“Look at me.” His command brooked no refusal. I forced my eyes open, meeting his gaze. His perfect composure was gone. His face was a mask of feral hunger, his pupils blown wide. “You will watch me while I take what is mine.”
He fucked me against the column with a wordless, driving intensity. The marble was cold and unforgiving on my bare back. The garnet clips fell from my hair, dark strands sticking to my sweaty skin. Each impact drove a grunt from him, a hungry, possessive sound. I was utterly helpless, a doll being used by a force of nature.
“You clench around me like a vice,” he snarled, his pace increasing. “Trying to milk my cock already? You’ll get it. I’ll pump you so full of my come it’ll leak out of you for days. Let them smell me on you. Let them know.”
His words were obscene, a violent poetry that unraveled me. The coil of pleasure-pain tightened, a searing wire in my gut. I was sobbing now, each cry punctuated by his deep, grinding thrusts. “I’m… I can’t…”
“You can.” He shifted his angle, driving upward, and hit a spot that made my legs buckle. “You will come on my cock. Now.”
It was an order my body obeyed. The orgasm ripped through me with violent, untamed force, a convulsing eruption that made me scream into his shoulder. My cunt clamped around him in rhythmic spasms, fluttering wildly. He fucked me through it, his movements becoming jagged, erratic.
“That’s it,” he gritted out, his own control shattering. “Squeeze me. Milk me dry, you perfect, infuriating slut.”
His rhythm broke. He buried himself to the hilt, his body shuddering against mine. A hot, pulsing flood filled me, jet after jet, marking me deep inside where no one could see. He held himself there, grinding as he emptied himself, his groans muffled against my neck.
We stayed like that for long minutes, pinned together by sweat and spent passion. My legs wouldn’t hold me. He seemed to realize, his arms shifting to support my weight before I slid down the column. He withdrew slowly, a groan escaping us both at the sensation. The evidence of his claim immediately began to trickle down my inner thigh.
Without a word, he lifted me, cradling me against his chest. He carried me the few steps to the pile of silk cushions and laid me down upon them. He followed, his body covering mine again, but the fury was spent. His movements were slower now, deliberate.
He kissed me. It was different. Softer. A silent, desperate conversation. His hands traced the new bruises on my hips, the marks on my throat.
“I will not withdraw again,” he whispered into the space between our mouths. It was a vow.
“Prove it,” I breathed back, my own voice ragged.
A new heat ignited in his eyes. He kissed a path down my sternum, my stomach. He hooked my legs over his shoulders, putting me on blatant display in the moonlight. He looked at the mess he’d made of me, the combined fluids glistening on my swollen flesh. A possessive sound rumbled in his chest.
Then he lowered his head and began to clean me with his tongue.
The intimacy of the act was more shocking than the violence. His tongue, so commanding and cruel minutes before, was now tender, thorough, licking his own spend mixed with mine from my folds. He worshipped the over-sensitized flesh, his movements gentle, inexorable. He lapped at my clit until I was gasping, until a second, softer orgasm trembled through me, making me arch off the cushions.
He rose over me, his cock hard again against my thigh. He was insatiable. He nudged my legs wider, his gaze locked on mine. “Again,” he said, simply.
This time, he entered me with a slow, devastating roll of his hips. It was a different claiming. Deep, possessive, but measured. He set a rhythm that was meant to last, each stroke a punctuation to his earlier words. I will not withdraw.
I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, answering without words. The distant music from the castle had changed. A new song was playing. Our bodies moved in the dark, writing a secret pact in sweat and sighs under the jasmine-scented sky. The emptiness was gone. For now, it was filled with him, and the terrifying, exhilarating promise of what came next.
For now, it was filled with him, and the terrifying, exhilarating promise of what came next. That promise hardened inside me again as he began to move, his hips establishing a slower, deeper cadence. The previous frantic pace was gone, replaced by something more deliberate, more devastating in its certainty.
His eyes never left mine. The crimson gleam was a lighthouse in the dark, pulling me under. “You will not doubt again,” he murmured, each word a soft thrust. “You will not seek consolation in avatars of lesser sins. I am Pride. And you… you are my unparalleled accomplishment. My singular lapse. My greatest indulgence.”
The words wrapped around me, warmer than the silks beneath my back. I could only nod, my breath hitching as he angled himself to stroke a nerve that sparked white behind my eyelids. The soreness from earlier was a distant murmur, drowned by a rising tide of pure, unadulterated sensation. I was unraveling at the seams he’d just ruthlessly stitched back together.
“Talk to me,” he demanded, his voice a low vibration against my lips. “Tell me what you feel.”
“You,” I gasped, my head pressing back into the cushions. “I just feel you. Everywhere.”
“Be specific.” He drove in harder, punctuating the command. “Use your words, Nicole. I want to hear the anatomy of your surrender.”
It was a cruel, exquisite request. “I feel… the stretch. The burn. It’s like you’re splitting me in two and I want you to.” The confession tumbled out, raw and unfiltered. “I feel you so deep I can’t tell where I end. My cunt is gripping you like it’s trying to memorize the shape. I feel… owned. I feel claimed.”
A gratified sound escaped him. He kissed me, swallowing my next gasping breath. His rhythm intensified, the slow, deep rolls transforming into more urgent snaps of his hips. The slap of skin, the wet, slick sounds of our joining, filled the intimate space. The cool night air did nothing to cool the fever on my skin.
I dug my heels into the small of his back, urging him on, pulling him deeper with a desperate need that obliterated all thought. I took every stroke and stretch in every position and wanted more. He was my drug, and I was his. I was beyond drunk on his sin. The world narrowed to the piston of his hips, the crushing weight of his body, the feel of his cock carving a space inside me that felt eternally, irrevocably his.
My body melted with his every movement. My mind was blank, saved for his loving whispers and sweet nothings. “That’s it, my love. Take all of me. Your perfect, greedy cunt was shaped for this. For me.” His voice was both heavenly and sinful, tenderly stroking my soul. It was a paradox—a demon’s tongue weaving a scripture of possession that my human soul drank like gospel.
The pressure built, a coil wound to its breaking point deep in my core. It was different this time. Not a sharp climax, but a deep, impending flood. “Lucifer, I… something’s…” I couldn’t form the warning. My body was seizing, trembling on a precipice I didn’t recognize.
“Let go,” he commanded, his own breath ragged, his movements becoming brutally efficient. “I want everything. Give me everything you are.”
The command broke the last dam. My body lost control, squirting and soaking the sheets and pillows. A hot, sudden gush erupted from me, a release so profound it felt like my very essence was pouring out. It wasn’t just a trickle. I gushed like a fountain, and he demanded more. “Yes,” he snarled, fucking me through the continuous, embarrassing, euphoric torrent. “Drown me in it. Mark this place as ours.”
The slick, soaking heat seemed to drive him mad. His control shattered. With a final, brutal thrust, he buried himself and roared, his release pumping into me in hot, pulsing waves that mixed with the flood I was still producing. He collapsed atop me, his body heavy and shuddering, his face buried in the crook of my neck.
We lay there in the wreckage, the scent of sex and night-blooms and our mingled release thick in the air. The silks beneath us were a soaked, ruined testament. His weight was absolute, but I didn’t want him to move. My limbs were liquid. My thoughts were slow syrup.
After a long while, he shifted, rising onto his elbows to look down at me. He studied my face, then glanced at the soaked cushions. A look of primal satisfaction settled in his eyes. He brushed a damp strand of hair from my forehead.
“The others will be looking for you,” he said, his voice a rough scrape.
“Let them look.”
A faint, genuine smile touched his mouth, there and gone like a ghost. “They will smell me on you from a mile away. Mammon will be insufferable.”
“Good,” I whispered, tracing the line of his jaw.
He caught my hand, brought my fingers to his lips. The tenderness was disorienting. “This changes nothing for them. And everything for us. Do you understand?”
I did. The silence, the distance—it was over. But the dynamics of the house, the brothers’ constant vying, would continue. I was still a prize, but now clearly branded. I nodded.
He stood in one fluid motion, pulling me up with him. My legs wobbled. He held me steady, then, with a flick of his wrist, summoned a cloak of shadows that wrapped around my naked, messy body. He righted his own clothing with efficient, precise movements, the avatar of Pride restored, though his hair was mussed and his lips were swollen.
“Come,” he said, taking my hand. “We have a ball to abandon properly.”
He led me from the gazebo, not back toward the servant’s entrance, but down a wider path that led to the House of Lamentation. Away from the music and the light. Toward the sactuary of the hollowed halls. His grip was firm, an unbreakable tether. The soaked, secret evidence of our reunion cooled against my thighs with every step, a reminder of the pact sealed in the dark. The promise was no longer just terrifying. It was walking beside me, hand in hand, into the glittering storm.