Chapter 4: Arcane Ravishment
The summons hung in the air long after the chime faded, a hook in my sternum. But I didn’t go to Diavolo. The profound, hollow quiet Belphie had left me with made the thought of the prince’s sunny, calculating presence feel abrasive. I wandered the school’s peripheral halls instead, a ghost in my own skin, the physical reminders of the brothers a faint, sticky ache between my legs.
I ended up at Purgatory Hall. It was neutral ground. Simeon and Luke were away on some celestial errand. The only presence humming through the elegant stones was Solomon’s.
I found him in the library, not surrounded by books, but by a complex, three-dimensional astral chart that shimmered in the air. He traced a line with a finger, his expression one of detached fascination. He looked up as I entered, his keen eyes missing nothing: my disheveled hair, the slow, drained gait, the way my clothes sat on me like an afterthought.
“Nicole.” His voice was calm, a cool river stone. “You look like someone who’s been through a metaphysical wringer. Or several.”
“I needed to talk to someone... Hope I'm not bothering you. Can I use your shower by the way?" My voice was soft and tired.
“My shower is your shower,” he said, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips. He dismissed the astral chart with a flick of his wrist, the shimmering lights dissolving into motes of dust. “Though I suspect you need more than plumbing.”
The hot water did little to scour the feeling of their hands from my skin. I stood under the relentless stream, my forehead against the cool tile, seeing only the dark hunger in Satan’s eyes and feeling the phantom stretch of Asmo’s clever tongue. The physical marks had healed with a demon’s swiftness, but the psychic residue was a greasy film.
I borrowed one of his soft, oversized tunics, the fabric smelling of rosemary and ozone. I found him not in the library, but in his bedroom, sitting at a broad desk covered in delicate alchemical instruments. He watched me enter, his gaze a tangible weight.
“You let them use you,” he stated, no judgment in his tone, only clinical observation. “Trying to fill a Lucifer-shaped void with whatever warm body is offered.”
The accuracy was a slap. “It’s not like that,” I whispered, but the protest was hollow.
“It’s exactly like that.” He stood, closing the distance between us in a few silent strides. “You’re a spell waiting to be cast, Nicole. All that lovely, neglected power. All that raw wanting.” His finger traced my jawline, a spark of static jumping from his skin to mine. “You don’t need their chaos. You need focus.”
His kiss wasn’t like the demons’. It wasn’t claiming or devouring; it was knowing. It was a quiet, thorough mapping of my mouth, his tongue coaxing a response I was too tired to withhold. A low, shivering sound escaped me, part surrender, part relief.
“Tell me what you need,” he murmured against my lips, his hands sliding to my hips.
“I need… to not think.”
“That,” he said, a dark amusement in his eyes, “I can arrange.”
He guided me backwards until my knees hit the edge of his vast bed. With a whispered word, bands of cool, shimmering light erupted from the posts, snaking around my wrists and ankles with gentle, inexorable force. They pulled me taut, spread-eagle against the dark silks. The magic thrummed against my skin, a constant, low-grade vibration that chased the last of the fatigue from my nerves, replacing it with a sharp, buzzing awareness.
“Safe words are for beginners,” Solomon said, his voice calm as he removed his own shirt. “We’re past that. You’ll take what I give you. You’ll thank me for it.”
He started with his mouth, but not on mine. He moved with a sorcerer’s precision, kissing down my throat, between my breasts, over my quivering stomach. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of the borrowed shorts and peeled them down, tossing them aside. The cool air touched my wet skin, and I gasped.
His breath was hot on my inner thigh. “You’re already dripping for me,” he observed, his tone scholarly. “A fascinating physiological response, given your stated emotional distress.” Then he buried his face between my legs, and all scholarly pretense vanished.
His tongue was an instrument of devastating accuracy. He licked a broad, slow stripe through my folds, then zeroed in on my clit with a focused, relentless pressure that made my back arch against the restraints. He sucked, he flicked, he traced maddening circles, reading every twitch and gasp as if it were a line of text. The pleasure was a coil, winding tighter and hotter, a pure physical mandate that burned away the ghosts of the library, of Belphie’s tower, of everything.
Just as the coil was about to snap, he stopped.
I cried out, a raw, frustrated sound. He looked up, his chin glistening, a supremely satisfied look on his face. “Patience,” he chided. He crawled up my body, his hard cock dragging against my stomach. He positioned himself over my face. “Open.”
The command was absolute. I took him into my mouth, the salt-and-skin taste of him overwhelming my senses. He set a slow, deep rhythm, his fingers tangling in my hair not to guide, but to hold. “Good. Take it all. Swallow.”
I obeyed, my throat working around him, tears pricking my eyes from the effort. The subjugation was complete, and in its totality, there was a perverse freedom. I didn’t have to think, to yearn, to be clever. I only had to serve this sensation.
When he pulled himself from my mouth with a wet pop, I was mindless, pliant. He moved between my legs, the head of his cock nudging against my entrance. He didn’t push in. Not yet.
He leaned close, his lips brushing my ear. “Anaphaxia,” he whispered, the ancient word not a request, but a key turned in a lock inside my very nerves.
White-hot electricity, pure and perfect, arced through my core. My body bowed off the bed, a silent scream locked in my throat as pleasure, magnified a hundredfold, detonated in every cell. In the devastating aftershock, he sheathed himself inside me in one smooth, brutal stroke.
“Fuck!” The curse was ripped from me. He was so deep, the fullness borderline unbearable. He didn’t move, letting me feel every inch, letting the residual magical current dance where we were joined.
“Kalos,” he breathed, and another, softer wave of sensation rolled through me, a warm, golden pulse that made my cunt clutch desperately around him.
Then he began to move. His thrusts were not frenzied, but impossibly measured, each one a deliberate conquest. He watched my face, adjusting the angle, the depth, the timing of another whispered incantation to wring another broken sound from my lips. He was conducting an orchestra, and my body was his instrument, played to its absolute limit.
“Come for me, Nicole,” he commanded, his rhythm faltering for the first time, his own control fraying. “Now.”
“Kyrillos!” The final word was a shout, and the magic that slammed into me was not a spark but a bolt. It tore a scream from my lungs as my orgasm exploded, a supernova that erased all thought, all memory, all pain. He drove into me once, twice more, his own release a hot flood and a guttural groan against my neck.
The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by our ragged breaths. The magical restraints dissolved into sparkling mist. I was hollowed out, blissfully blank. Solomon collapsed beside me, pulling me into the curve of his body. He pressed a kiss to my sweaty temple.
“See?” he murmured, his voice thick with satisfaction. “No thinking required.”
And for a long while, in the quiet dark of his room, there wasn’t.
The void he’d carved in me was a peaceful one, filled only with the slowing drum of his heart against my back and the fading ozone scent of his magic. My skin hummed, oversensitive and utterly relaxed, every nerve finally, blessedly quiet.
Then, from the depths of that quiet, it welled up. A cold, sharp thing that no amount of physical satiation could dissolve. A sob hitched in my throat, sudden and humiliating. I clenched my eyes shut, trying to force it back down into the hollow where it belonged.
Solomon felt it. His arm, draped loosely over my waist, tightened just slightly. “The clarity after the storm is often the most brutal part,” he said, his voice a low rumble in the dark. He didn’t ask why I was crying. He already knew.
I held onto him, trembling in the dark room, enjoying the bliss. The comfort I receive from him, Simeon, Diavolo, Barbatos, and the brothers should outweigh the loss of Lucifer, but my mind and heart can't comprehend why he left me. The question, brittle and raw, broke through my teeth. "Solomon... did I do something to him? Is that why he doesn't want me?... Did he find someone else?... Is something wrong with me?"
The words hung there, pathetic and small. I felt him shift, rolling onto his back and pulling me with him so my head rested on his chest. His fingers traced idle, thoughtful patterns on my bare shoulder.
“You’re asking the wrong questions, Nicole,” he said after a moment, his tone devoid of its usual playful malice. It was flat, analytical. “You’re thinking like a human scorned. This isn’t a lover’s spat. Lucifer is the Avatar of Pride. His every action is calculus, not sentiment.”
He paused, choosing his words with a sorcerer’s care. “You didn’t do anything to him. You became something for him. A variable that stopped being predictable. Humans are meant to be fleeting entertainments here, lovely little candles that gutter out. You didn’t gutter. You persisted. You adapted. You made them… feel. That is a catastrophic shift in the order of his world.”
I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. “So I’m a problem he’s shelving.”
“You’re a equation he can’t solve,” Solomon corrected. “And in the presence of an unsolvable equation, a being of pure pride has two options: destroy the variable, or remove himself from the board to reconfigure his entire understanding of the rules.” He let out a short, humorless breath. “He won’t destroy you. The others wouldn’t allow it, for one. For another, I suspect you’re the most fascinating thing that’s happened to him in a millennium. So he withdrew. To calculate.”
His explanation was cold comfort. It made a dreadful, logical sense that felt worse than a simple betrayal. I was a specimen. A disruption.
“He could have told me,” I whispered, the anger finally seeping into the hurt.
“And say what?” Solomon’s hand stilled. “‘My dear, you’ve fundamentally destabilized my ancient, immutable nature. Please wait quietly while I have an existential crisis’? Pride doesn’t beg for understanding. It retreats into silence and expects the world to wait.”
I pushed myself up on one elbow, looking down at him. The dim light from his enchanted instruments glinted in his too-knowing eyes. “How do you know all this?”
A slow, sly smile touched his lips then, the arrogance returning. “I’ve made pacts with seventy-two demons, Nikki. I don’t just command their power. I study their nature. It’s my profession.” He reached up and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear, the gesture almost tender. “Your error is in believing you lost something that was ever truly yours to hold. Lucifer doesn’t belong to anyone. Not even to himself.”
The finality in his words was a door slamming shut. I lay back down, the blissful numbness gone, replaced by a cold, clear ache. Solomon’s logic was a map, but I was still lost in the territory of the feeling.
“Solomon... I think my heart just broke...” My voice was weak and broken as the reality slowly sank in that I fell in love with the Avatar of Pride and would burn the world for him... but I was nothing to him. The air was heavy as my words hung in the air. Solomon froze and slowly came to realize the weight of what he said to me and my understanding.
Solomon froze, the weight of my whispered confession settling over him like a physical law. His clever analysis had dissected a celestial being’s motives but had failed to account for the human heart still beating brokenly against his ribs. The silence stretched, thin and sharp.
Then he moved. He didn’t offer empty words. He rolled over, pinning me beneath him, his frame blocking out the soft light. His eyes, usually gleaming with cryptic knowledge, were dark pools of intent. “Then let it break,” he said, his voice low and stripped bare. “I’ll show you what you can build from the pieces.”
His kiss was a demolition. It was nothing like the calculated seduction from before. This was raw, all tongue and teeth and a desperate kind of anger—not at me, but at the circumstance, at Lucifer’s silence, at the very concept of a heart breaking over something so immutable. I bit back, tasted copper, let the sharp pain anchor me in the storm of my own hurt.
He broke the kiss, breathing harshly. “You want to feel something else? I’ll make you feel it until you forget your own name.” His hand slid between us, his fingers pushing rudely past my folds. I was still slick from our earlier coupling, but he didn’t gentleness. He shoved two fingers inside me, curling them, scissoring them. “This is real. This heat. This wet, filthy ache. This is what you own. Not his fucking pride.”
“Solomon—” I gasped, my hips jerking.
“Say it,” he demanded, crooking his fingers, hitting a spot that made my vision bleach white for a second. “Tell me what this is.”
“It’s—it’s real,” I choked out.
“Damn right it is.” He withdrew his fingers, shiny with my arousal, and smeared it over my mouth before kissing me again, making me taste myself. He shifted down the bed, his hands hooking under my knees and wrenching them apart, spreading me open to the cool air. He didn’t use his tongue this time. He looked, his gaze a clinical, scorching assessment. “Perfectly ruined,” he muttered, almost to himself. Then he leaned in and blew a soft, cool stream of air over my swollen clit.
I cried out, the sensation maddening. He did it again, then followed it with the flat, hot press of his tongue, a brutal contrast. He ate me with a single-minded ferocity that erased thought. His nose ground against my clit as his tongue plunged deep, fucking me with it, the wet, sloppy sounds obscenely loud in the quiet room. He brought me to the edge with terrifying speed, a coil of pure animal tension snapping tight in my gut.
Just as I was about to fall, he stopped.
“Please,” I begged, a word I hadn’t used with him before. My body was trembling, tears of frustration mixing with the earlier tears of grief on my cheeks.
“Please, what?” He crawled back up me, his cock, rock-hard and leaking, slapping against my stomach.
“Fuck me. Please, Solomon, just fuck me.”
He notched the head at my entrance, applying a teasing, impossible pressure. “You don’t want his love right now, Nikki. You want to be fucked. You want to be used until the only thing in your head is the sound of your own screaming. Admit it.”
It was the truth. A ugly, glorious truth. “Yes,” I hissed. “Use me. Make me scream.”
He slammed home.
The air left my lungs in a violent rush. He was bigger, harder, more consuming than before, as if his own emotions had forged him into a weapon. He set a punishing, piston-like rhythm, each drive knocking a gasp or a moan from my throat. The bedframe creaked in protest against the wall.
“This cunt,” he grunted, his composure shattered, sweat dripping from his brow onto my chest. “This perfect, tight, greedy cunt is mine right now. Tell me.”
“Yours!” I cried, my nails digging into his shoulders, breaking skin. The ownership, so blatantly stated, was a relief. It was a fact. A temporary truth to cling to.
“Come on my cock,” he commanded, his pace becoming erratic, brutal. “Come for me, you gorgeous, broken thing. Let it out.”
He didn’t need a spell. The command in his voice, the sheer physical domination, was incantation enough. The orgasm tore through me, a seismic shock that felt less like pleasure and more like annihilation. My body clenched around him, milking him, and with a ragged shout, he followed, pouring into me, his hips stuttering through the final, deep thrusts.
He collapsed, his weight a solid, anchoring warmth. We lay there, slick and spent, the only sound our ragged symphony of breaths slowly returning to normal. The emotional pain was still there, a deep, bruising ache beneath my sternum. But it was quieter now, wrapped in layers of physical exhaustion and a strange, hollow peace.
After a long while, he shifted, pulling out of me with a soft, wet sound. He didn’t leave the bed. He gathered me against him, my back to his chest, and pulled a silken sheet over us. His arm was a heavy band across my waist.
“It doesn’t stop hurting,” I whispered into the darkness, the confession raw. “You just showed me how to put it down for a little while.”
“That’s all any of us can do,” he murmured into my hair, his voice finally soft, the arrogance gone. “We find better distractions. We build new obsessions.”
He was quiet for so long I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he spoke, his words clear and deliberate. “Come to the human world with me. For a weekend. Just us. No demons, no pacts, no ancient history.” He paused. “Just a change of scenery. A different kind of distraction.”
The offer hung in the dark, unexpected and immense. It wasn’t a solution. It was an escape hatch. A chance to breathe air that wasn’t thick with celestial politics and heartbreak.
I laced my fingers with his where they rested on my stomach. The silence between us was no longer brittle, but contemplative. Heavy with a new, uncertain possibility.
“Okay,” I said, the word barely a breath. “Yes.”
He squeezed my hand, a silent pact. Outside, the Devildom’s perpetual twilight began its subtle shift toward a deeper, starless night. The pain was a patient thing. It would be here when I returned. But for now, I had a door to walk through and a hand to hold while I did it.