Chapter 3: Study in Corruption
The scent of dream-moth silk and male skin clung to me like a second ghost as I slipped from the castle at dawn. Diavolo had been asleep, one arm thrown possessively over my waist. Barbatos had already vanished, likely to begin the day’s meticulous orchestrations. Their care had been a balm, a sanctuary, but in the clear, cruel light of the Devildom’s twin moons setting, it felt like a transaction. I was now a living piece in a silent power struggle I hadn’t agreed to join.
I needed to move, to think somewhere that wasn’t perfumed with political affection. The RAD library’s public sections were too exposed. My feet, acting on a half-remembered hint from Leviathan, carried me deeper, past wards that shimmered and parted with a grudging familiarity they seemed to grant all exchange students. Into the Forbidden Stacks.
Here, the air was dead. The hum of magic was a sub-audible thrum in the teeth. Light came from sickly-green bioluminescent fungi growing on the shelves, casting long, grasping shadows. The books weren’t titled; they whispered, their leather bindings pulsing softly like dormant hearts. It was a place to get lost. Perfect.
I trailed my fingers along a row of spines that felt like cooled embers, not seeing them. My body still throbbed with a pleasant, used ache. My mind churned.
“Well, look what the Hell-Cat dragged in.”
The voice, smooth as aged venom, came from above. I jerked my head up. Satan lounged on a rolling ladder propped against a high shelf, a massive tome open in his lap. He peered down at me, his green eyes sharp with intellectual curiosity and something darker. “Or should I say, look what finally escaped the gilded cage.”
“I’m not in a cage,” I said, too quickly.
“Aren’t you?” He descended with unnatural grace, the ladder not making a sound. “Diavolo’s personal gardens, his personal pavilion, his personal bed. It’s a very luxurious enclosure, I’m sure. But an enclosure nonetheless.” He snapped the book shut. The sound was like a bone breaking in the silence. “Lucifer is a fool. But replacing his toxic control with Diavolo’s smothering protection isn’t freedom, Nikki. It’s just changing jailers.”
His words hit a nerve he’d expertly located. “What do you want, Satan?”
“Wrath, remember?” He smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “I’m furious on your behalf. It’s energizing. And I’m bored. And you look like you could use someone who isn’t trying to own you, but simply… enjoy you.” He stepped closer. The scent of him was different—old paper, ink, and a sharp, ozone-like spark of pure anger. “Let me distract you. Let’s get into some trouble.”
Before I could answer, another voice coiled through the stacks, sweet as poisoned syrup. “Darling, there you are! I’ve been looking everywhere. Your aura is practically screaming ‘need a spa day and several hours of adoration,’ and who better to provide that than me?”
Asmodeus materialized from behind a bookcase, looking utterly out of place in the gloom. He glowed. He wore a lavender silk shirt that was practically painted on, and his pout was a work of art. “Ugh, this place is dreadful for the complexion. All this… knowledge-dust.” He flicked a mote from his shoulder, then his violet eyes zeroed in on me, widening. “Oh, sweetie. You’ve been consorting. I can smell Diavolo’s pompous sunshine and Barbatos’s creepy-clean precision all over you.” He didn’t sound jealous. He sounded fascinated. “Naughty girl. Playing with the big boys. But did they make you feel precious? Did they worship you properly?”
Satan snorted. “They probably consulted a treatise on optimal pleasuring techniques first.”
“Stop it,” I muttered, heat rising to my cheeks. They were circling me, a predator and a peacock, both with the same hungry glint in their eyes.
“Why?” Asmo purred, closing in on my left. He ran a manicured finger down my arm. “You’re clearly a mess. We’re your lovers. We’re here to help.”
“By cornering me in a forbidden library?”
“The best therapy is often unorthodox,” Satan said from my right. His hand came to rest on my hip, his thumb pressing into the bone. “And we’re not cornering you. We’re… engaging you.”
Asmo’s hand slid around to my lower back, dipping under the waistband of my skirt. “Mm, you’re tense right here. All knotted up with other demons’ dramas.” His other hand came up to cup my breast through my shirt, his thumb brushing my nipple to an immediate, traitorous peak. “Let us give you something that’s just about you. About this.”
His mouth found mine. Asmo’s kisses were an experience—all-consuming, expert, flavored with illusion-berry gloss and vanity. He kissed like he was devouring a delicious secret. I gasped, and Satan used the opportunity to bury his face in my neck, his teeth scraping the tendon. Not a bite, a promise.
“See? No politics here,” Satan murmured against my skin, his breath hot. “Just you. And two demons who are very, very interested in you.”
Asmo’s hand, which had been stroking my back, now slid around front, dipping under my skirt. His fingers, slick with some magic or his own inherent wetness, found my bare cleft. I jolted. “No panties?” he giggled against my mouth. “Already broken in for the day? How convenient.”
Satan’s hand joined his brother’s, pushing my skirt up around my waist. The dead air of the stacks was cold on my exposed skin. “Look at that,” Satan breathed, his voice dropping, turning rough. “All pink and used and still so fucking pretty.”
Asmo peeled my shirt up, pulling it over my head before I could protest, then unhooked my bra with a practiced flick. Still unsure on how the hell he does that. He bent his head, taking a nipple into his mouth, sucking hard while his fingers below began a relentless, circling torture on my clit.
My head fell back against Satan’s shoulder. Logic, consequence, politics—it all dissolved under the dual assault. This was different from Diavolo’s worship. This was raw, hungry, and laced with a rebellious kind of sympathy. They were angry for me, and they were turning that anger into a fuck.
“Hold her,” Asmo commanded, pulling his mouth away with a wet pop.
Satan’s arms became iron bands around my upper body, pinning my arms to my sides. He bent me forward slightly, over a reading stand made of petrified wood. The ancient text on it seemed to leer.
Asmo knelt behind me. I heard the rustle of fabric, the sound of his zipper. Then his hands were on my ass, spreading me open. “Absolutely pristine back here,” he observed, his tone clinical and lustful all at once. “Diavolo didn’t think to claim this? A missed opportunity.”
He leaned in. His tongue, wicked and agile, didn’t go where I expected. It licked a firm, wet stripe from my clit up over my entrance, and then pressed insistently against the tight, forbidden pucker behind.
I cried out, the sound muffled by Satan’s hand clamping over my mouth. “Quiet, little scholar,” he hissed in my ear. “These books absorb sound. They’ll drink your screams and keep them forever.”
Asmo’s tongue worked me open, a persistent, profane intrusion. He spit, the wetness cool, and pushed his tongue in deeper. The sensation was shocking, overwhelming, a bolt of illicit pleasure mixed with sheer vulnerability. I bucked, but Satan held me fast.
“She’s twitching like a little rabbit,” Asmo laughed, standing. I heard the slick sound of him stroking himself. “Ready for me, darling?”
He didn’t wait. He positioned the broad, smooth head of his cock against that spit-slicked entrance and pushed.
The burn was exquisite, a searing stretch that stole my breath. He wasn’t gentle. He filed in with a single, relentless thrust, burying himself to the hilt with a groan of supreme satisfaction. “Oh, fuck. That’s a first. So tight. Clenching around me like a little fist.”
He began to move, pulling out almost all the way before slamming back in. Each thrust jolted me forward against the stand. Satan’s hand left my mouth and wrapped in my hair, pulling my head back to watch Asmo pound into me.
“Look at him,” Satan growled, his own erection a hard line against my back. “Look at the Avatar of Lust taking what he wants. Because he wants you. Not to protect you. Not to own you. Just to fuck you senseless.”
Asmo’s pace was merciless, a celebration of carnality. His hands gripped my hips hard enough to bruise, his perfect composure shattered into breathless grunts. “Take it, you gorgeous thing. Take all of me. Forget his name. Forget all their names. Just feel this.”
The pain melted, transfigured into a deep, blinding fullness. The shame of it, the raw filth of being taken this way in this place, ignited something in me. A reckless anger to match theirs. My inner muscles clenched around him, milking his cock.
Asmo shrieked, a high, beautiful sound. “Yes! That’s it! Come on, make me come inside this perfect little ass!”
His rhythm broke, became frantic. With a final, deep plunge, he froze, pulsing, his release flooding me with shocking heat. He collapsed over my back, kissing my shoulder messily. “Perfect. You were perfect.”
He slipped out, and the sensation of emptiness was immediate. I was dripping, throbbing, utterly debauched.
Satan spun me around before I could sink to the floor. My back hit the shelves; a book whimpered. His eyes were pure, undiluted wrath—for Lucifer, for the world, now channeled into a terrifying need.
“My turn,” he said, his voice guttural. He didn’t bother with preliminaries. He hiked my leg up around his hip, aligned himself with my dripping, well-used front, and slammed home.
I screamed. He was bigger, thicker, and he filled the aching, empty space Asmo had left with a brutal completeness. He fucked with a focused, intellectual fury, each thrust precise and devastating, as if solving a complex problem of anatomy and anguish.
“This is what you needed,” he grunted, his forehead against mine, his glasses askew. “Not tea and sympathy. Not political asylum. To be used. To be reminded you’re alive. To be so thoroughly fucked, you can’t think about him.”
He was right. My mind was white noise, static, filled only with the slap of skin, the smell of sex and old magic, the sight of his enraptured, angry face. The coil in my belly tightened, drawn taut by his ruthless, perfect strokes.
“Come for me, Nikki,” he demanded, his hand snaking between us to rub my swollen clit. “Come on your Avatar of Wrath. Let me feel you shatter.”
The command, the friction, the overwhelming fullness broke me. My orgasm tore through me, violent and silent, my mouth open in a soundless cry. My cunt clamped down on him in rhythmic, vicious pulses.
He followed with a roar, slamming into me one last time, his body arching as he emptied himself deep inside. He stayed there, pressed against me, breathing raggedly, his weight pinning me to the forbidden knowledge.
Slowly, the world seeped back in. The whisper of the books. The green gloom. The sticky, cooling mess between my legs.
Asmo, now impeccably re-dressed, fluffed his hair. “Feeling better, darling? You look thoroughly distracted.”
Satan pulled out, righted his clothes with swift, efficient motions. The anger in his eyes had banked, replaced by a smug, satisfied calm. He plucked his glasses from the floor and perched them back on his nose.
They looked at me, disheveled and leaking their combined spend onto the ancient stone floor. I was a document they had annotated with violence and pleasure.
"Thank you... and fuck you both." I bit out at both of them; there was no trace of anger, only calm. "Hey... have either of you seen Belphie? I've been looking for him since yesterday."
Satan and Asmodeus exchanged a glance over my head, a silent conversation flashing between them in the dim light. The air, already thick with the scent of sex and old paper, seemed to grow heavier.
“Belphie?” Asmo said, his voice losing its post-coital purr and gaining a careful, neutral tone. He busied himself smoothing the non-existent wrinkles from his shirt. “Why would you be looking for him, darling? He’s probably just sleeping somewhere dreadfully inconvenient, as usual.”
Satan’s hand, which had been absently tracing my bare shoulder, stilled. His green eyes narrowed, the satisfied calm evaporating, replaced by sharp suspicion. “He hasn’t been at the House of Lamentation. Not for two days. Lucifer’s been… preoccupied. Not noticing.” He said the last word with dripping contempt. “Why are you looking for him?”
I pushed away from the shelf, my legs trembling, and groped for my clothes. The physical act of dressing felt like assembling a disguise. “He missed our study session. He’s never just missed anything with me. Not since…” I didn’t finish. Not since the incident that had first bound us in secret understanding. I pulled my shirt on, the fabric sticking to Satan’s spend drying on my stomach.
“Since he tried to kill you?” Satan finished, his voice dangerously quiet. “And you’re worried about him.”
“It’s not like that,” I snapped, but it was. It was exactly like that. The memory of Belphie’s hands, capable of such gentle drowsiness and such devastating violence, was a knot in my chest that felt tighter than Lucifer’s withdrawal.
Asmo sighed, a beautifully dramatic sound. “Ugh, drama. Can’t we just have a nice, messy fuck without it leading to a missing person case? It’s terribly inefficient.” He stepped closer, his perfume cutting through the musk. “But since you’re clearly going to obsess, the last place I saw our sleepy little devil was the west wing spire. The one with the broken clockwork astrolabe. He liked the view, he said. For napping.”
I moved to leave, but Satan’s arm shot out, blocking my path. His gaze was no longer angry, but intensely focused. “You’re dripping my brother’s come down your thighs, you smell like a brothel, and you want to go traipsing through the castle looking for another one of us?” A slow, sharp smile cut across his face. “You’re more of a demon than any of us gave you credit for.”
“Get out of my way, Satan.”
“Or what?” he challenged, but he dropped his arm. “Fine. Go play detective. But this…” He gestured at the space between us, at the humid memory of what we’d just done. “…isn’t over. We distracted you from Lucifer. Now you’re just swapping one obsession for another. Come back to me when you want a distraction from everything.”
I didn’t answer. I walked out of the Forbidden Stacks on unsteady legs, the feel of them both still etched into my muscles. The library’s main hall was cavernously empty, the usual demonic scholars absent. The silence was a physical pressure after the raw noise of my body. My mind, clear for a few blessed moments, was now a churn of conflicting alarms: Belphie’s absence, Lucifer’s coldness, Diavolo’s calculated warmth, and the searing, undeniable claim Satan and Asmo had just carved into my skin.
The west wing spire was a forgotten needle of black stone. The stairs were narrow, spiraling, and dark. The only light filtered through grimy, segmented windows showing a bruised Devildom sky. The higher I climbed, the colder it got, the air smelling of dust and static.
I found him at the top, in the circular room beneath the broken astrolabe. Belphie wasn’t sleeping.
He was sitting on the stone floor, knees drawn to his chest, staring at the far wall. A single, fat purple candle guttered in a draft, casting leaping shadows. He looked smaller than I remembered, swallowed by his own oversized sweater. The usual cloud of drowsy apathy was gone, replaced by something still and utterly awake.
“Belphie?”
He didn’t turn. “You smell like them,” he said, his voice flat, devoid of its usual sleepy melody. “Like anger and perfume. It’s loud.”
I stopped a few feet away, unsure. “Are you okay? You vanished.”
“Did I?” He finally looked at me. His violet eyes were wide, clear, and deeply unnerving. “Or did everything else just become too much? The noise. The politics. The way everyone is touching you.” His gaze was a physical weight. “Lucifer’s an idiot. Diavolo’s a strategist. Satan and Asmo… they’re just violent consumers. They take what they want because they’re hurting. It’s boring.”
His blunt dissection left me breathless. “Why are you up here?”
“To think. To be away from the noise.” He uncurled, rising with a languid grace that seemed at odds with the tension in the room. He stepped closer. The candlelight washed over his face, highlighting the dark circles under his eyes. “But you’re here now. Bringing all the noise with you.”
He reached out, not for my hand, but to brush his fingertips against my lower lip. His touch was cool. “You’re worried about me. After everything I did. That’s your problem, Nikki. You keep trying to heal monsters, thinking you’ll find a man underneath.” His hand slid down, over my chin, my throat, coming to rest over the rapid pulse at the base of my neck. “There’s just more monster.”
“Stop it,” I whispered, but I didn’t move away.
“Or what?” he echoed Satan’s challenge, but his tone was emptier. “You’ll run to another brother? You’ve got quite the collection started.” His other hand came up, tracing the line of my collarbone where I knew a bruise was forming from Satan’s teeth. “They marked you up. Made sure everyone would know.”
His cool fingers slipped under the hem of my shirt, skimming over the sensitive skin of my waist. A full-body shiver racked me. It wasn’t like the desperate heat with Satan and Asmo. This was a slow, creeping frost.
“You’re looking for something none of them can give you,” he murmured, his mouth now dangerously close to my ear. “You want the oblivion. The quiet. The place where you don’t have to think about who owns you or who you’re betraying.” His hand moved to the button of my skirt. “I can give you that. It’s what I am.”
The button popped open. The zipper rasped down. My skirt pooled at my feet. The cold air of the spire bit at my exposed skin. I was naked from the waist down, standing in a tower of silence, with a demon who understood the seductive call of nothingness.
He pushed me back gently until my shoulders met the cold stone wall. He didn’t kiss me. He just looked at me, his eyes mapping my body in the gloom. Then he knelt.
His hands hooked behind my knees, lifting my legs over his shoulders. The position was shockingly vulnerable, my hips canted toward his face. He didn’t use his tongue like Asmo, with theatrical flair. He simply leaned in and pressed his open mouth against me, a static, unmoving connection.
A low, hum vibrated from him into my core. It wasn’t pleasure. It was a deep, resonant frequency that seemed to slow the very blood in my veins. My thoughts, a frantic swarm, began to still, to blur at the edges. The anxiety, the longing, the confusion—it all softened, muted under that constant, thrumming vibration.
“That’s it,” he whispered against my flesh, his breath cool. “Just let go. Stop fighting. There’s no victory here. Only quiet.”
His tongue finally moved, a slow, languid stroke that felt less like sex and more like a ritual erasure. He wasn’t driving me toward a peak; he was dissolving the need for one. My hands came down to tangle in his soft, two-tone hair, not to guide him, but to anchor myself as a profound lethargy seeped into my bones.
He withdrew. I whimpered at the loss of contact, the cold rushing back in. He stood, unfastening his own pants. His cock, hard and pale in the dim light, looked almost alien. He wasn’t frantic. There was no anger, no lust, only a quiet, inevitable purpose.
He pressed the head against my entrance, wet from his mouth but not from my excitement. I wasn’t aroused in the frantic way I had been in the library. I was pliant, open, a void waiting to be filled with silence.
He pushed in. The stretch was deep, overwhelming, but devoid of burn. He filled me with a single, seamless motion, burying himself to the hilt. He didn’t thrust. He just stood there, lodged inside me, his forehead resting against the wall above my shoulder. We were a frozen tableau.
“This is all there is,” he breathed into my neck. “No past. No future. No other brothers. Just this weight. This stillness. Can you feel it?”
I could. It was a perfect, numbing emptiness. My mind was blank. My body was just a vessel holding his. Time ceased. The distant, chaotic pull of Devildom, of Diavolo’s schemes and Lucifer’s rejection and Satan’s furious consolation, all of it faded into a soft, grey hum.
He began to move then, finally. Slow, deep, tectonic rolls of his hips. Each stroke felt less like friction and more like a gentle erosion, smoothing away everything I was. There was no build, no frantic race. A low, quiet coiling began deep in my belly, a release not of tension, but of consciousness itself.
I came without a sound, a wave of pure white static that washed through every cell, leaving nothing in its wake. He followed moments after, his body giving a single, subtle shudder, a warmth spreading inside me that felt like a farewell.
He held me there for a long time, both of us quiet. Then he slipped out, and I sagged against the wall, hollowed out and utterly peaceful.
He dressed himself, then picked up my skirt, holding it out to me. His face was once again a mask of sleepy neutrality, but his eyes held a trace of something sad. “The quiet never lasts, Nikki. The noise always comes back.”
I dressed in silence, the fabric feeling strange on my skin. As I fastened the last button, a sound did come back—the distant, resonant chime of the castle’s main clock, a sound that never worked in this spire.
It was a summoning chime. Diavolo’s personal tone.
Belphie heard it too. He gave a faint, knowing smile. “See? The Prince calls. Back to the noise.” He turned to look out the grimy window. “You should go. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
I walked to the door, my body feeling like it belonged to someone else. At the threshold, I looked back. “Belphie… what do you want?”
He didn’t turn from the window. “I want to dream,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “But I can’t. Not anymore. Now, all I can do is help others stop thinking. It’s a poor substitute.”
"Tonight... lets dream together. You, me, and Beel... okay?" I didn't wait for his answer as I left, I knew he would come to my bed tonight as always. The boys have their own way of showing me that they care, just because Lucifer doesn't want me doesn't mean I'm not wanted... but the pain of him not being there still hurts even if it's faint.