The Devil's Favourite Obsession

”I have been trying to find them myself,” he said in a low and grudging . It was the voice of a man admitting something that cost him pride. ”The one who can beat you at your own game. But I couldn’t. Every group that had a hand in it was already dead.”

Cassian’s eyes narrowed further. The sword stayed at his throat. ”And why would you care who was behind it?”

”Isn’t it obvious?” Rafael met his gaze without flinching. ”To shake their hand.”

The honesty was so brazen it was almost admirable.

”Give me the empire,” Rafael went on, ”and I’ll stay out of your life.”

Cassian looked down at him. He was kneeling, bleeding, and bargaining. A demon on his knees, offering terms to the Devil, as though the Devil had ever once accepted terms from anyone.

”Cixi and the empire,” Cassian said, ”are both mine.”

And without warning, he lifted the sword and brought it down.

The blade moved in one clean arc, fast enough to split the air, fast enough that the sound of it arrived after the act was already done. Rafael’s head left his neck in a single silent motion, fell to the obsidian, rolled once, twice, and stopped. For a full second, the body stayed upright on its knees. Then it pitched forward and struck the ground.

And the crimson sky began to change.

The red drained out of it slowly, pulling back from the edges, lifting like a curtain drawn upward and behind it came blue, clean and pale, the blue of an ordinary sky on an ordinary day. The lava cooled. The molten rivers darkened and crusted over, blinding orange to dull grey to solid black. The heat withdrew, the ash settled, and the volcanic plain flattened and dried and cracked until it was what it had been before the King’s world bled through it.

Desert. Dry, flat, silent, cracked earth running out to every horizon under a clear sky.

They were back on earth.

Cassian’s sword dissolved, the blade scattering to smoke on the dry wind, and his fingers closed on nothing. At his feet, Rafael’s body lay still, the severed head resting two feet from the neck, amber eyes open and fixed on the empty blue above.

Then the head moved.

Not from the wind. Not from gravity either.

It rolled on its own, slow, back toward the body. At the severed edge, the skin began to knit; threads of dark, ashen tissue reached out from head and neck alike, stretching toward one another like roots finding soil. They met. They fused. They drew tight. The head settled back onto the shoulders, the wound sealed, the vertebrae realigning with a soft run of clicks like a man cracking his knuckles.

Rafael opened his eyes.

He sat up. Rolled his neck to the left, then the right. Pressed a hand to the line where the cut had been and found nothing but smooth, unbroken skin. Then he got to his feet and looked at Cassian.

”You shouldn’t have done that.”

”And you shouldn’t have listened to her voice.”

”You are talking about Cixi again.” Rafael stretched his neck a final time. His eyes had gone back to their human brown, his horns were gone, and his face had softened into the handsome, careless thing that walked the Palace halls and charmed everyone who didn’t know what lived behind it. ”I do wonder, though. Whoever lifted that spell — what else have they heard? And how safe is your Cixi from them, really?”

Cassian’s jaw tightened. ”Maybe I should have killed you properly.”

”Maybe.” Replied Rafael.

But Rafael wasn’t wrong, and that was the trouble. Cassian stood in the desert with the wind dragging at his hair and the wide blue sky pressing down, and he knew it.

If someone had broken the spell on his floor, then someone inside the Palace had done it. To unravel it, a person had to be in the building. Inside the walls. Close enough to put a hand to the enchantment and pick it apart thread by thread.

And that person knew exactly who he was. He wasn’t thinking about being a businessman. But the actual demon.

He pulled the last days back through his memory like beads on a string.

The spell didn’t only swallow sound; it misdirected. Anyone approaching his floor uninvited felt a gentle, irresistible pull the wrong way. Their feet carried them past the right door. Their minds assured them they’d already checked that corridor. They circled without ever knowing they circled, until they gave up and left, certain they had simply got lost in a large house. Sound and direction — two layers that had held for decades without a single breach.

Now three people had reached his door in the span of days.

He should have known the moment Cixi’s mother walked in. Olga Romanov, a mortal woman with no gift of any kind, had come straight to his floor and knocked as though she’d been handed a map. No wandering. No hesitation. She had simply arrived.

Then Emily, storming in with her accusations about Rafael and her grievances about the family, found the room without one wrong turn — walking through a ward built to confuse immortals as though it weren’t there at all.

Then Rafael. A demon two ranks beneath him, strolling in like a man through a garden gate. No resistance. No confusion. Nothing pushing him away.

Three breaches. Three people who should never have come within sight of his door, all inside a handful of days.

The spell wasn’t weakened. It was gone. Someone had taken it apart completely, quietly, without letting him feel a single thread come loose.

And they were still inside the Palace.

Cassian’s true form began to fold away. The horns drew back into his skull; the shadow wings furled inward and vanished beneath his skin. His eyes shifted from black voids to dark human irises, his height settling from seven feet down to six, his skin lightening, his face softening — the Devil receding until only Cassian Crown, the man, stood in the desert. A few feet off, Rafael had shed his own shape as well, hands in his pockets, blood drying on his collar.

Cassian looked at the cracked earth running out around them. He looked at Rafael. He looked at the sky.

Then he was gone in one breath, absent in the next.

The desert held the shape of his absence for a moment, and then the wind smoothed his footprints out of the dust until it was as though neither of them had ever stood there at all.

He had a spell to rebuild. A Palace to search. A King to avoid.

And a grey-eyed woman who was still owed a night — one he fully intended to deliver.