Chapter 3: The Shared Fantasy
The invitation arrived on crisp, scented paper. Lady Rias, your company for tea tomorrow afternoon would be a welcome solace. - Grayfia.
It was a masterstroke of simplicity. Not from the Phenex estate, but from the Lucifuge manor—a place Rias knew as Sirzechs’s cold, administrative seat. It felt safe, neutral. A gesture from a fellow high-born woman navigating the treacherous waters of devil politics. Rias, feeling increasingly isolated under the weight of her family’s expectations and her brother’s distracted indifference, accepted.
Their tea was a performance of exquisite subtlety. They met in a sun-dappled Lucifuge conservatory, not the ballroom of course. Grayfia was the picture of elegant, melancholic composure. She spoke of duty, of the stifling nature of legacy, of the loneliness that came with being a piece on the board. She never mentioned Riser directly. She didn’t need to. His presence was in the careful silence that followed any mention of “new arrangements,” in the faint, almost imperceptible tremor in her hand when she lifted her cup.
“It’s a different kind of service,” Grayfia said, her voice low, her gaze on a rare, frost-tipped orchid. “One that requires the complete setting aside of one’s own… previous allegiances.”
Rias, who had spent a lifetime watching her brother treat Grayfia as a beautiful, functional statue, found herself leaning forward. “Is it terribly difficult?”
A smile, sad and knowing, touched Grayfia’s lips. “The difficulty is in the unraveling. After that…” She let the sentence hang, a breath of implication in the fragrant air. “Would you care for a walk in the gardens? The evening air is quite refreshing.”
The walk led naturally, inevitably, back to the manor’s residential wing. “I have a bottle of surface-world wine,” Grayfia said casually as they passed a somber portrait of a long-dead Lucifuge. “A petty rebellion. Would you indulge me? I find the silence of these rooms oppressive tonight.”
Rias’s curiosity was a live wire. “I’d be glad to.”
Grayfia’s personal chambers were not what Rias expected. They were sleek, modern, but warm. Books were stacked neatly, a soft throw was draped over a chair. But on the bedside table, next to a simple lamp, sat a heavy iron collar. Rias’s eyes locked onto it the moment she entered.
Grayfia noticed the look. She didn’t hide it. She moved to a small sidebar and poured two glasses of deep red wine, her back to Rias for a moment. When she turned, she handed Rias a glass and took a deliberate, fortifying sip from her own.
“It’s not what you think,” Grayfia said, her eyes following Rias’s gaze to the collar. “It’s not a shackle.”
“Then what is it?” Rias asked, her voice barely above a whisper. She was standing too close. The room felt too intimate.
Grayfia set her glass down. She walked to the bedside, picked up the collar. The metal looked heavy, cold. She held it in her palms, offering it to Rias’s view. “It’s a reminder. A definition. In a world where everything is a transaction, this marks the one thing that isn’t. It’s… belonging.”
Her voice broke on the last word. It was a flawless crack in her armor. A single, perfect tear traced a path down her cheek. She wasn’t the unshakeable Grayfia Lucifuge anymore. She was a young woman, overwhelmed.
“Grayfia…” Rias breathed, stepping closer.
“He terrifies me,” Grayfia confessed, the words tumbling out in a rushed, shameful whisper. “And I have never felt more alive. The things he does… the way he sees me. Not a tool. Not a political alliance. A woman. Flesh and need and fire.”
Rias was captivated. Her own wine forgotten. “What things?”
Grayfia’s eyes glazed over, looking at a memory. “After the ceremony… Sirzechs was there. Reading the documents.” She let out a soft, incredulous laugh. “And Riser… he bent me over the altar. The obsidian was so cold it burned. He took my ass, Rias. My virgin ass. While my former husband recited legalities and… and pleasured himself watching.”
Rias’s mouth went dry. A bolt of pure, undiluted shock shot through her, but it was tangled with something hot and thick. She couldn’t look away.
“He was so rough,” Grayfia continued, her voice dropping to a sensual, husky register. “It hurt. God, it hurt so much I screamed the place down. I thought he’d split me in two.” Her fingers tightened on the collar. “And then… the pain just… changed. It melted. It became this incredible, filthy pressure. I could feel every inch of him, stretching me, owning me. I came so hard I saw stars. I came on his cock while he was buried in my ass. I’ve never… nothing has ever come close.”
She lifted the collar. “This was on me the whole time. He put it on me before it started. I could feel it, cool against my throat, while he was burning me up from the inside. A anchor. His anchor.”
Without thinking, Rias reached out. Her fingertips brushed the etched metal of the collar. It was cool. Smooth. She traced the Phenex phoenix, its wings spread in triumph.
Grayfia’s free hand shot up, capturing Rias’s wandering fingers. She didn’t push her away. She pressed Rias’s palm flat against the cool metal, then slowly, deliberately, moved their joined hands. She placed Rias’s hand on her own chest, just above the swell of her breast. Rias could feel the frantic, galloping rhythm of Grayfia’s heart through the soft fabric of her blouse.
“He has a way,” Grayfia murmured, her lips close to Rias’s ear, her breath warm and scented with wine, “of knowing what a woman craves, even before she knows it herself. He finds the secret, hungry part of you and he… feeds it. Until you’re so full of him there’s no room for doubt, or duty, or anyone else’s expectations.”
Rias’s own heart was hammering against her ribs. Her skin felt too sensitive. The image was scorched into her mind: Grayfia, bent and screaming, taken so brutally, so publicly, finding ecstasy in it. The idea was monstrous. It was intoxicating. She could feel a low, aching throb beginning between her own legs, a traitorous pulse answering the graphic confession.
“You’re so strong, Rias,” Grayfia whispered, her other hand coming up to gently stroke a strand of Rias’s crimson hair. “You carry so much for your family. Who carries you? Who sees the girl who wants to rage, not just reign?”
Rias swallowed hard. Her mind was a riot of conflicting thoughts—disgust, fascination, a yawning, terrifying curiosity. Grayfia’s touch was electric. The scent of her, lavender and something darker, was everywhere.
“I… I shouldn’t…” Rias stammered, but she didn’t pull her hand away from Grayfia’s chest.
“Of course you shouldn’t,” Grayfia agreed softly, a knowing smile on her lips. She finally released Rias’s hand, letting it fall. The loss of contact was a shock. “It’s the ‘shouldn’t’ that makes it taste so sweet. Think about it. That’s all. You’re a Gremory. You’re entitled to your… curiosities.”
She turned back to the sidebar, refilling her wine glass as if the last five minutes hadn’t occurred. The collar was placed back on the table, a silent, potent monument.
“The summit is in two days,” Grayfia said, her tone shifting back to something approaching normalcy, though her eyes still shimmered. “You’ll see him then. Watch him. Not as the arrogant brat you expected, but as the man who can make a woman like me forget my own name. See if your body doesn’t… respond to the truth of him.”
Rias stumbled back, her legs unsteady. She mumbled something about the hour, about thank you, about the wine being lovely. Grayfia merely nodded, sipping her drink, a portrait of conflicted elegance once more.
The walk back to her own rooms in the Gremory estate was a blur. The night air did nothing to cool the fire in her blood. She locked her door and leaned against it, sliding down to the floor.
Her mind replayed it all. The tear. The description of the altar. The cold feel of the collar. The pounding heart under her hand. Her own body was alight, humming with a restless, unfamiliar energy. She was wet. She was shamefully, achingly wet.
She brought her fingers to her nose, inhaling. She could still smell the faint, metallic scent of the iron collar, and underneath it, Grayfia’s perfume.
“Oh, god,” Rias whispered into the empty room.
She pushed herself up, storming to her desk. The half-empty bottle of whiskey was there. She poured a finger, knocked it back, the burn doing nothing to sear away the images. She looked at her bed, at the neatly folded covers. The order of it felt like an insult.
Her hand drifted down, under the waistband of her skirt. Her fingers found the slick, swollen flesh she’d been ignoring. A sharp gasp escaped her as she touched herself. It wasn’t gentle. It was frantic, searching, a crude mimicry of the violence Grayfia had described.
She imagined it was not her own hand. She imagined cold obsidian under her palms. She imagined the searing stretch, the helpless scream, the paradox of pain twisting into overwhelming pleasure. She imagined the cool weight of iron around her neck, and a pair of cruel, crimson eyes watching her fall apart.
She came violently, biting her own fist to stifle the cry, her body convulsing against the edge of the desk. As the waves subsided, leaving her shaking and soaked in shame, one clear, terrible thought solidified in the haze.
She would watch him at the summit. And a part of her, a part she could no longer deny, desperately hoped he would watch her back.
The summit was a cage of whispered silk and sharp smiles. Rias wore hers like armor, the high collar of her Gremory crimson dress feeling tighter with every passing minute. She watched him. Across the gleaming negotiation table, Riser Phenex was a study in disarming calm. He listened to the older devils debate territory and tribute, his fingers steepled. He spoke only when necessary, his proposals succinct, intelligent, and stripped of the legendary arrogance she’d been warned about. It was infuriating. It was fascinating.
Her skin remembered the phantom feel of Grayfia’s collar. Her eyes kept drifting to the hollow of Riser’s throat, imagining the pulse there. When a servant leaned over to fill his water glass, Riser moved his hand slightly, his knuckles brushing the servant’s wrist. A simple accident. Rias felt the touch on her own skin, a jolt of static that made her thighs tense. She saw Grayfia, standing perfectly attired behind Sirzechs’s chair at the head of the table. Their eyes met for a fractured second. Grayfia’s gaze dropped, slowly, to Riser’s hands, then back to Rias. A barely-there smile. A secret passed in silence.
The formal session adjourned for a recess. A murmur of conversation rose as devils drifted into clusters. Rias saw Riser rise and walk alone onto a terrace overlooking the sprawling, shadowed gardens. Her heart was a trapped bird. She didn’t decide to follow. Her body carried her through the parted glass doors, the cool night air hitting her flushed face like a slap.
He didn’t turn. He leaned on the balustrade, the city’s distant lights painting his profile in gold and shadow. “Lady Gremory. Is the discourse too stifling?”
His voice was deeper than she remembered. It vibrated in the pit of her stomach. “It’s predictable,” she said, surprised at the steadiness of her own tone. She joined him at the railing, leaving a careful foot of space between them. “You’re not.”
Now he looked at her. His crimson eyes were not fiery. They were absorbing, like dark wine, drinking in the nervous flutter at her neck, the white-knuckled grip on the stone. “Predictability is a luxury for those who can afford to lose. I can’t.”
“You seem to be winning quite a lot lately.” The words were out before she could stop them, loaded with a meaning that went beyond politics.
A slow smile touched his lips. It wasn’t kind. It was knowing. “Some victories are more satisfying than others. They require a more personal… touch.”
The image of that touch, on Grayfia’s hips, on Grayfia’s throat, smashed into Rias’s mind with the force of a physical blow. The throbbing between her legs returned, urgent and wet. The cool, intellectual curiosity she’d felt in Grayfia’s room was gone, burned away by a raw, hungry need that shortened her breath.
“She told me,” Rias whispered, the confession torn from her. “What you did. In the ballroom.”
He didn’t feign ignorance. “And?” He turned fully to face her, crowding her space without moving a muscle. His scent, sandalwood and something hotter, like embers, washed over her. “Did it frighten you? The thought of being so thoroughly known? So completely used?”
“Yes.” Her voice broke.
“Good.” He reached out then. Not for her face, or her hand. His fingers brushed the high, stiff collar of her dress. A mockery of propriety. “Fear is honest. It’s a better starting point than pretty lies about duty and lineage. You’re drowning in pretty lies, Rias. I can see it.”
His use of her name, stripped of title, felt more intimate than a kiss. The last thread of her resistance snapped.
“Please.” The word was a ragged, shameful sound.
“Please what?”
She looked up at him, her pride ash, her body a single, screaming nerve. “You know. Please, I… I can’t think. I haven’t been able to think since she… I feel like I’m going to burn alive. Please, just…” She swallowed, the filthiest word she knew feeling like the only truth left. “Fuck me. Just fuck me so I can stop feeling this.”
He studied her face, the tear tracks she hadn’t felt forming, the utter defeat and yearning in her eyes. He nodded, once. “Not here.”
He took her hand. His grip was firm, final. He led her not back into the main hall, but through a servant’s door hidden in the terrace wall, down a narrow, dimly lit corridor smelling of stone and damp. She followed, a docile shadow, her mind blank of everything but the heat of his hand and the promise of relief.
The room was small, a neglected antechamber with a worn couch and a single lamp. He locked the door. The click of the bolt was the loudest sound she’d ever heard.
“Take off the dress,” he said, leaning against the door, watching. “I want to see what a Gremory heiress looks when she begs.”
Her fingers fumbled with the intricate fastenings. The fine fabric, worth a fortune, pooled at her feet like discarded skin. She stood in only her lace panties and heels, the air cool on her nakedness. She was trembling.
“Those too.” He nodded at the last shred of lace.
She hooked her thumbs in the waistband and pushed them down, stepping out. She was exposed, utterly. Her nipples were tight, aching peaks. The neat crimson curls between her thighs were already glistening.
“Look at you,” he murmured, pushing off from the door. He didn’t touch her yet. He circled her, a predator. “All that power, that legendary pride. Melting into a puddle of need because you heard a dirty story.” He stopped behind her. His breath warmed her shoulder. “You’ve been fucking yourself thinking about it, haven’t you? Imagining it was my cock stretching that pretty cunt of yours.”
“Yes,” she sobbed, the humiliation complete, yet fueling the fire.
“Good girl.” His hands closed on her hips, sudden and hard. He walked her forward until her knees hit the edge of the worn couch. “Bend over. Hold the back.”
She obeyed, her body folding forward, presenting herself to him in the same obscene offering Grayfia had described. The position made her feel vulnerable, owned. She heard the rustle of his clothes, the clink of his belt.
He didn’t prepare her. He didn’t tease. The broad, swollen head of his cock nudged against her soaked entrance, and he drove into her with one relentless, deep thrust.
Rias screamed. It was a sound of sheer, shocking fullness. He was bigger than her fingers, hotter, infinitely more real. He filled her with a brutal, perfect pressure that shoved every coherent thought from her mind. He didn’t wait for her to adjust.
He fucked her. Hard. Each snap of his hips slammed her into the couch’s back, the rough fabric scraping her knees. The sounds were animalistic: the wet, rhythmic slap of his flesh pounding hers, his low grunts, her own choked, sobbing cries.
“Is this what you wanted?” he growled, his hand fisting in her crimson hair, pulling her head back. “To be used like a common whore in a storage room?”
“Yes! God, yes!” she wailed, the pain and the pleasure blurring into a white-hot cascade. Her orgasm was already building, a terrifying wave rising from her core with shocking speed. She couldn’t control it. It wasn’t hers anymore. It was his, triggered by his brutality.
It crashed over her, violent and convulsing. Her internal muscles clamped around his driving cock in frantic, fluttering pulses. She screamed again, her vision spotting. He didn’t slow. He fucked her right through it, the overstimulation a new kind of agony that bordered on ecstasy.
“Again,” he commanded, his pace never faltering, his cock pistoning into her sensitive, clutching flesh.
“I can’t!” she wept.
“You will.” He shifted his angle, hitting a spot so deep and electric her legs nearly gave out. “Come on my cock, Rias. Now.”
She did. A second, sharper orgasm ripped through her, wringing a broken shriek from her throat. Her submission was chemical, total. Her body was no longer her own; it was an instrument he played with devastating expertise. A third peak began to build almost immediately, a rising tide of helpless, addictive sensation.
He was relentless. He fucked her through the third, and then a fourth, a fifth. She lost count. She was a shuddering, sobbing mess, held up only by his grip on her hip and her hair. Pleasure became a continuous, screaming current in her veins. Each climax melted into the next, breaking down her will, her identity, everything that was Rias Gremory.
When he finally spilled into her, his hot release flooding her depths, it triggered a final, cataclysmic wave that made her vision go white. She slumped forward, boneless, onto the couch, his weight heavy on her back as he rode out his own pleasure with a few last, grinding thrusts.
Silence, broken only by their ragged breathing. The room smelled of sex and sweat and her own shattered dignity. He pulled out of her slowly. The feeling of emptiness was profound.
He stood, rearranging his clothes. She couldn’t move. She felt ravaged, ruined. And she had never, in her entire life, felt so alive. The pleasure had been so good, so utterly obliterating, that the idea of living without the promise of its return was a void more terrifying than any loss of status.
She pushed herself up, turning to look at him. Her body was covered in a fine sheen of sweat, marked where he’d gripped her. Her eyes were wide, awed, and utterly broken open.
“That…” she breathed, her voice raw. “I need that. I’ll do anything. Please.”
He watched her, his expression unreadable. “Anything is a dangerous word.”
“I mean it.” She crawled off the couch, onto her knees before him. She didn’t think about it. The movement was natural, inevitable. She looked up at him, the heir of the Gremory clan, naked and kneeling at his feet. “I don’t care about the politics. I don’t care about being a heiress. Just… let me be this. Let me be yours. For this. Just for the sex.”
She reached for his hand, pressing her lips to his knuckles, a vow sealed in sweat and submission. “I’ll be your slave.”