Heat pools low and heavy in my stomach until everything hums. I lean forward, tasting the moment, and then the dream fractures.
The flames gutter and die. The room cools. Cold squeezes my lungs and the air goes thick as old honey. The scene shivers, then shifts out of the corner of my eye. Not Cassiel. Not the tender desecration I was building. Something else settles into the space, like a new prayer whispered over a grave.
A voice, low and amused, slides through the dark. It is a voice I have been hearing for weeks and months, a fossilized echo in the back of my skull that should not carry such familiarity. My chest rips open on a sharp inhalation as I spin.
There he is: tall and impossible, terrifying as sculpture come to life. Golden eyes burn slow and terrible, cutting me like a blade. His scent hits first, a corrupt perfume of burnt myrrh and rotting roses, decay braided with an ancient, wrong divinity. I take a step back because every instinct that is not hunger says run. No, the other side says, stay. Something in the marrow of me wants him, even as my throat tightens.
I call for Deimos because he was here. I felt him like gravity. He was in the edges of my vision a moment ago. He is gone. Panic flutters up, brittle and bright, and for a second the dreamfeels like drowning. “Where is—” I manage before the intruder answers.
“I found you.” His voice hums like a promise and a threat. “I needed you alone.”
The words are soft as silk and heavy as iron. My mouth tastes of copper. “Who are you?” I force out, trying to keep the tremor from my voice.
His smirk spreads, indulgent and patient. “I am Zepharion,” he says. The name slides into the dream and the dream shudders. “And you, petal, belong to me.”
I laugh, brittle, because what else is there to do with terror? I mask the fear with scoff and arrogance. But my thighs press together anyway. His presence is a vise of heat and command. I want to be consumed by it and I want to be spared from it all at once.
“I belong to no one,” I say, daring the lie.
The air around us changes; reality bends in on itself. Fire does not simply burn. The flames turn black as old blood. The floor beneath my feet melts and becomes a sheet of molten glass that frames my reflection like a cracked mirror. In it my face looks sharpened and strange. My teeth are longer, my eyes are too bright, my skin shivers with something not wholly mine. I do not recognize the creature staring back, and that recognition blooms like ice.
Something dark flexes in his gaze. He reaches toward me with fingers that seem capable of rearranging continents. Then he feels it. Deimos. The bond. His grin tightens, and the air tastes suddenly of copper and promise.
“He marked you,” Zepharion says, amusement laced with a deeper hunger. “You were promised to me long before you were born.”
The words land like a stone in my chest. My blood runs cold. “My parents promised me?” I whisper, the sentence scraping raw across my teeth.
“Yes,” he murmurs, each word folded with the weight of old contracts and cruelties that predate us both. “You were meant to be my bride, the mother of my children.” His fingers trail slow and possessive along my jaw. His touch leaves an after-image of flame against my skin. “And now that I have found you, I am never letting you go.”
A pressure like a hand clamping around my sternum crushes the air out of me. I lift my chin because spite is a habit, because anger can be armor. “You cannot force me.” The defiance tastes hollow even as it leaves my lips.
He chuckles, a sound that vibrates in the bones. “Oh, little succubus, I can.” Those words land like a verdict. The dream snaps like a thread.
I wake gasping, lungs burning, and find myself submerged in water that is warm and oddly calming. Candlelight licks against the tiled walls, painting them with slow, trembling gold. I cough and spit until the room rights itself, heart staccato still. The bathtub holds me like a cradle and the world is blurry at the edges, like ink bleeding through paper.
Then I feel him. Watching.
I turn my head. Deimos kneels beside the tub, a damp cloth in his hands, his violet eyes heavy and unreadable. He is cleaning me with an almost ceremonial care, wiping away the residue of last night until my skin is bare and unmarked. For a long, taut moment we simply look at each other. His face is beautiful in that distant, unreachable way. Like a door with no key. The cloth moves slow and efficient between his fingers. That motion steadies me in a way words cannot.
“You were dreaming,” he says at last, voice low and grave, the kind that carries both accusation and offering at once.
I breathe out, a small ragged sound. Zepharion has found me in sleep. He is real and he is coming. Those two facts sit in my gut. I watch Deimos. His fingers twitch against the cloth as if the fabric jars something inside him. His jaw is set, his grip on my leg deliberate, unyielding. His presence is a cliff I could fall from and also the only thing I want to hold onto.
A realization, sudden and cold as a blade, slices through me. Deimos was in my dream. He was there. He saw something. He saw the man who calls himself Zepharion. He felt the way that man looked at me, the way the dream bent around him. What meaning does that have? What edges of plans and claims now rub against one another like knife blades?
Before I can find the words to ask, a crash comes from below us. Glass explodes. Something heavy hits the floor. Footsteps, quick and hard, pound up the stairs. Deimos’ head snaps up and his entire body tightens like a drawn wire. The small softness that had softened his features flattens into something else. Something hungry and precise and close.
A grin spreads across his face, slow and dangerous. It is a promise of violence and a bell that calls me to the center of whatever is coming. He rises, shoulders rolling as if he were shrugging into armor.
“Well,” he murmurs, the grin carving his face into a map of cold amusement, “let’s go find out what trouble you brought to my doorstep, Lustling.”
The bathwater cools around my legs. The candles gutter. Outside, the house whispers and waits. I stand because there is no longer anywhere to hide. We move toward the noise, together and terrible, and the air tastes of iron and rain.
Zepharion has announced himself and the promise of him hangs in the rooms like a stain. I want to run, but I want something else too, a thing too dangerous to name. I follow Deimos down the stairs, ankles wet and pulse loud, becausethere is nowhere I belong more than here in the wake of his all-consuming attention.
TWENTY-EIGHT
We come back hours later and the house greets us with a silence. I let out a long breath. Mercy, at last. Not having to listen to them fuck the place down is a small grace. It made me too hard, left a raw ache in me I could not soothe. Deimos does this on purpose, winding us up and keeping his prize to himself.
