The first time I ever saw a cello being played, I froze in my tracks and stared. What an ugly instrument. It wasn’t beautiful and elegant like a harp or shiny like a flute. It was huge and ungainly, manipulated with a stick held at an awkward angle. When the cellist began to saw at the strings, I’d expected some harsh sound, like the kind made when you tugged on a taut rubber band.
Instead...music poured out, more beautiful than anything I had ever heard. Bach, read the title of the booklet the player read from. I knew then that I would do whatever it took to master that big, hulking piece of wood. I would make it sing for me.
The one Espi brought me is old. Scratches scar the body of the frame, and the bow is made of cheap fiberglass and plastic rather than the one of Pernambuco wood Vinny gave me. Touching them both, however, is like reconnecting with an old friend. I can’t stop myself from easing it from the case, holding the familiar weight of it balanced between both hands. Before I know it, I’m sitting on the end of the couch, the bow is in my hand, and...
I play. I breathe. I feel. I’m Daniela again, and for as long as I manipulate the strings fear cannot touch me. The room fades. The pain dissipates.
I’m whole again.
The notes come before I can even register the song being played, not that it really matters. I let myself play, and I know deep in my heart that it could be for the last time.
And...
It isn’t enough. For the first time, the motion of my hands and the sweet melody they create doesn’t take me away—something keeps me tethered to this couch and this floor. Someone. I open my eyes and find him watching me, only the devil isn’t impressed by my song. He watches me try to fly, and he yanks me back down by my already broken wings. I’m anchored to him, no matter how hard I try to resist.
My fingers move faster in defiance. My movements are stronger. I can barely hear the song, but I know that I’m playing better than I ever have in my life—and on an inferior instrument than the many Vinny supplied me with—but...it still isn’t enough.
Lucifer keeps me here. He won’t let me go. Tears spill from my eyes, sliding down my cheeks and mingling with the feel of the tuning pegs against my neck, but the devil doesn’t give a damn. He watches me drown. He waits for the very moment that I realize I’m stuck, and then he storms out of the room and slams the door to the apartment in his wake.
“Damn.” The artist’s voice fills the space the final note of music leaves behind, and I glance over to find him crouched down beside me, shaking his head. “Damn, Pyro. You definitely weren’t kidding about being one hell of a musician.”
“I’m nothing,” I insist, gently tilting the cello back in its case. Vinny, for all his cruelty, was correct in his assessment of my talent, at least. I was raw. Rough. Untrained. Untested. It was the same assessment that every judge at every audition I performed would give. You are good now, but with some work, you could be...
The term always varied, but the sentiment was the same. With training, I could be a true cellist, but at the moment I was nothing more than a finger painter compared to a serious musician.
“I dunno,” Espi says, shaking his head. “That sounded damn good to me.”
“Thank you.” I let myself smile while I wrestle the case shut. Only then can I think again. Vinny, Lucifer, his plan...those are the only things that matter now. Music is just one of the many things I’ll have to leave behind.
But the thought hurts less than I would have thought. When I run my fingers along the side of the case...all I can see are piercing blue eyes, daring me to fight him—and I hate him so much that it burns.
“I’ve gotta jet.” Espi rises to his feet again, swiping a hand through his hair. “I’ll try to stop in to see you later. Stay strong, Pyro Girl.”
He heads for the door, but before he can even get it open, Lucifer returns. “We need to talk,” he starts, pushing his way in and a part of me suspects that he never truly left, but waited near the door, listening in.
Espi looks past him. As slender as he is, he has no trouble slipping past the devil and darting down the stairs. “Bye, Danny,” he calls over his shoulder. I hear the door on the lower level slam shut, and I can’t help the question that trickles from my throat before I can reel it back in.
“What happened between you two?”
The devil whirls on his heel to stare me down with hellfire in his eyes. “Wouldn’t you like to fucking know?”
His tone is a lashing whip, but some sick part of me relishes the sting. “I would.” I’m too tired to lie or cower from his rage the way I did around Vinny. He’s poisoned me with the truth, and even now he can’t resist stabbing me with another taste of it, I can see it in his eyes—but this time he holds back. “That’s none of your damn business.”
I settle my hands on my lap and tilt my head to observe him carefully. Drawing this secret out of him will require another one of mine, I suspect. Our little game of tit for tat knows no end.
“Do you want to know when I really hated Vinny? Truly hated him?” The devil remains motionless near the open doorway. He’s curious, but he won’t admit it out loud. “It wasn’t when he killed my family,” I add, though the words hurt to leave my throat. “It wasn’t even when he tortured my first few maids or kept me prisoner. I truly didn’t start to really hate him until nearly a year in, around the first anniversary of their d-deaths...” The memory tugs at my consciousness and it’s harder to speak. I try to. I need to...but it’s only when the devil shifts to face me fully that the words actually leave my lips again. “He signed me up for an audition. For fun, he’d said. Fun.” I shake my head at that.
I can still remember the elegant theater. He had taken me himself that time, and he had sat in the audience, watching from beyond the judges. I still remember his smile. “I played, but when I was accepted into the next round, Vinny said nothing. Then the next, and he was silent. It was only when they offered me a job in the orchestra that he made me...” For a split-second, the room disappears. I see the interior of the theater and the rich backdrop of the ruby curtains that had shielded the stage. I see the face of the director who praised my talent and had offered me a spot.
And I see Vinny, his gaze malicious as he made me turn them down.
“I knew then,” I hear myself say as if Lucifer is there with me, watching four years into the past. “I could see it in his eyes, what he was. What he had become. A monster.”
It feels so strange admitting it all out loud. Vinny could torture me for weeks, and I had still loved him. I had still recited that stupid list in my head: he likes to read, he likes the color green, he loves classical music. Only then had I seen what lurked within the shell of the man I once called my best friend.
“He made me turn...turn them d-down. Every year after that, around the same time, he forced me to audition again—a different theater every time. Sometimes he watched me, sometimes he wouldn’t. This time...” My throat aches. I have to stop talking and gulp at the air just to keep from being swept under again. Pain has a different flavor here than it did with Vinny. It’s a potent, powerful drug, and once it hits...all I feel is rage. I can only see fire, hot and burning, licking at Vincent Stacatto’s skin. In Lucifer’s realm, pain is nothing more than hate, and I won’t survive the reckless high it brings.
“This time I knew the theater. I had only been there once, five years previously...but I knew the general layout of the area. Vinny couldn’t accuse me of lying if I said that I wanted to take a walk home from the subway station. A week before that I had sold one of the pieces of clothing he gave me—a designer shawl. I used the money to pay off some thug I met on a street corner to have men waiting in an alley for a ‘young woman who looks like me,’ that night. They...they could do whatever they wanted to her, just as long as they killed her. Slow. Quick. It didn’t matter. She merely needed to d-die.” My voice cracks. The room starts spinning. The shadows distort and become the two men whose death warrants I signed the moment I just laid there and let them try to get their bit of fun in before killing me. Maybe...I even felt like I deserved it—the pain, the humiliation, the brutality. Maybe I’d needed to feel it all just to erase the harsher ache of flirting with the only future I had ever envisioned for myself and having to walk away.
Maybe...maybe.
It’s only when a hand falls on my shoulder that I realize I’ve said all of that out loud. The fingers clench, gripping me down to the bone, but not because of what I’ve said. I’m choking. Tears spill down, blurring my vision, and I can’t keep up with whatever sound is leaving my mouth now. My ears cringe from it. At some points, it sounds like laughter, at others it sounds like sobs.
The devil waits until I catch my breath and smother the sound, but for some reason, he doesn’t pull away.
When I gather the nerve to look up, I catch the tail-end of a searching look. It’s confusing that I don’t find the things in his eyes that I expect to or should; no hate, no disgust, no pity. I look into his gaze and I see myself staring back, eyes wide, hair a mess.
“I never hated him,” he tells me, his voice so gruff that I could have imagined it—but even my dark fantasies were never so twisted. “I never hated...him. You can’t hate an animal. You pity it. You fear it. You want to put a bullet in its brain to end its fucking misery, but hate? No...” He backs away, shaking his head, and my shoulder burns with the loss of his touch. “You don’t waste an emotion like hate on a creature that can’t even feel.” He flexes his fingers, and I think I understand what he means. A man who makes his living off violence can’t afford to be reckless with the tools of his trade: hate, pain, rage. They fuel him, making it easier for him to envision himself as merely another worthless animal fighting its way out of a cage.
“Espi hates me because...no matter what I fucking did, I could never protect him. It was never enough.” His voice carries a wave of pain that even someone like me—scarred and abused and tormented—can only dream of. It’s the ache I feel whenever I think of Christoph, only magnified by every year and every day that he had to build the shadow of an illusion around the only person he seems to love.
What had it been like for him? Having to enter that house every day to shield Espi from the monstrous “animal” lurking in the basement? What had it been like, waiting to kill his own father the moment he heard footsteps on the stairs at night?
There’s nothing I can say. I can only sit and watch as the devil retreats and storms into the bedroom, slamming the door shut behind him.
I can only breathe and reach down to finger the length of the cello. I can only pray that if I play long enough or hard enough I can escape this hold he has over me.
I won’t let the devil destroy the one thing that Vinny never could.
I play for hours. My fingers ache. My arms are on fire. My mind is still here. I’m still painfully aware when the door to the apartment opens, and a new presence slinks his way inside. He watches me with a scowl, green eyes blazing. Apparently, he isn’t a fan of Bach’s cello suites.
“Can someone shut her the fuck up?” Arno takes a step toward me only to freeze in his tracks. A quick glance over my shoulder reveals why.
Lucifer guards the doorway to the bedroom, his arms crossed like a true beast from Hades. I don’t know how long he’s stood there, but with one look he pins Arno in place. With one look, he steals away every semblance of peace that I have ever found while playing. In defeat, my bow-wielding hand falls, and the song dies on a harsh, broken note.
“Mack’s waiting for you,” Arno says. “Wanted to come get you himself, but I ‘volunteered.’” He’s implying something. Something that makes Lucifer perk up from the top of his head down to the tip of his toes until he prickles with energy, electric.
“He can fucking wait.” His tone leaves no room for challenge and, chuckling to himself, Arno doesn’t even try. There’s a hint of admiration in his gaze. Despite the anger that sometimes burns hot between them, I sense that—though I don’t think by blood—these two really do harbor the bonds of brotherhood between them. There’s respect in the way Lucifer lets him off with only a visual warning when Arno takes another step toward me.
But there’s a challenge between them too. A dare. Maybe even a game. I’m the ball, but Lucifer won’t give me up so easily.
“Anything else?” he wonders, his tone steady and cold—but I don’t miss the way he shifts, bringing his bulk just a fraction of an inch closer.
“Nothing,” Arno concedes, taking a step back. “Just that Mack seems to want to do this shit tonight. Be ready.”
“Am I ever not?”
Arno doesn’t reply when he turns and leaves, closing the door behind him. The tension doesn’t leave Lucifer’s muscles until the door on the lower level slams shut as well, the sound faint through the walls. Even then, he merely shrugs his shoulders.
“Get up.”
I obey, setting my bow aside and propping my cello against the couch.
The devil approaches me with slow, measured strides. My breath hitches and something inside my chest tightens when he enters the shadow of my personal space and reaches out to trap my chin against his palm. With one scorching look, he stares at me, into me, through me.
“About what you said...do you hate him now?”
“Yes.” I don’t even have to think. The rage will always be there festering in the pit of my soul. I hate Vincent Stacatto with every fiber of my being. Maybe that makes me weaker than him, the devil able to reserve his hatred for only those creatures he deems worthy of it.
Lucifer frowns and his fingers tighten. I feel the ridge of every one pressing into my jaw, tilting it so that I’m forced up on tiptoe, and his face is closer. “Do you hate me?”
I flinch away from his touch, but he doesn’t let go.
“Do you?” he asks, but his voice holds a dark confidence as if he already knows my answer. Yes. “I hurt you.” His thumb drifts up to graze my ruined ear, and I can’t silence a whine. “I don’t give a shit about you. I would have let Arno and his men rape you on camera. I’m going to kill you...”
Yes, yes, yes, a part of me murmurs, seconding all of those things. I should hate him. I needed to. God, I even wanted to. Hatred was one of my safe, familiar emotions. Hell, these days it was one of the few things that drove me through each waking moment, apart from fear.
It would have been so damn easy to hate Lucifer, my devil in the flesh.
Fuck him for taking that choice from me.
“You can’t...” I clear my throat and when I meet his gaze again something sparks in the air, dangerous and hot. I see deep into those cold, lifeless eyes—and he lets me in. He lets me boldly prod and pick over the remains of humanity so that I can see for myself. He is truly evil. There is no warmth in him. No compassion. No soul. “You can’t...you can’t hate an animal.”
I don’t know what makes me touch him, bringing a hint of life to those blue eyes as my fingers trail the front of his chest. Anger? Rage? His own twisted bit of hatred for me? He lets me drag my touch all the way down to the hem of his shirt. He lets me slide the tips of my fingers underneath. He lets me feel his hard, warm skin.
My devil has a pulse. He can bleed. He can feel—he likes to feel my fingers along his waistband especially. He liked fucking me. He liked to taste me. My devil didn’t really want to own me...but I suppose that was the twisted irony of hell. Every soul gets shackled to something.
“You can’t hate an animal,” I croak, my voice breaking as that realization sinks in with the same brutality with which my nails dig into the flesh of his stomach.
Lucifer growls, invading my tiny section of carpet and forcing me back against the couch. I retreat until my backside hits the top of it rather than sink down onto the cushions at his mercy. He’s ready for me anyway, forcing himself between my legs and bringing his mouth in close. I hear his teeth click together, hungry for flesh with every bit of instinct of a wolf. Rather than bite, his tongue swipes my ruined ear, raising a wave of pain amid a shockingly wet heat.
“Animal,” he grumbles, tasting the word. “And you...you’re just a little bitch.” His hands brace against the wall on either side of me, trapping me between both surfaces. “I could fuck you,” he tells me in a guttural rasp. “I could make your cunt bleed. You still wouldn’t mean shit to me.”
I nod along with every dark promise as the space between my legs throbs—hell, maybe I even want him to follow through on it.
“You can’t hate an animal,” I repeat, gasping out the words. It’s a curse—some horrible truth that tethers me to this monster that I can’t even bring myself to hate. At least Vinny taught me well enough how to see someone else as an animal. “Animals are meant to be owned,” I tell Lucifer, but my fingers have a will of their own, and they start to hike up his shirt, revealing the chiseled planes of his chest and a dusky covering of fine black hair. “Animals...animals are branded.”
He grunts, rolling his hips against my thigh. He’s hard; I know that fact without even having to look or feel. His lust taints the air, unashamed—he’s merely a beast surrendering to a natural impulse, and for some sick reason, it only grows when I reach into the pocket of my sweatpants and withdraw my knife.
The devil laughs, the sound ripped from a corded neck. He watches me drag my thumb along the dull edge. He waits until I raise it against his skin. He waits until I dig the tip of the knife into him, but not hard enough to draw blood.
Suddenly, the room dissipates. We’re both on fire, drowning in hell. I should throw my knife away. Beg for mercy. Plead. The violence promised in the devil’s blue gaze will swallow me whole.
And it’s about damn time.
I flick my wrist, digging my knife in even deeper, and he grits out a sound between a curse and a groan. His hand finds my wrist, gripping it tightly enough to hurt. Break. Then he applies more pressure, forcing the blade in...
The world shifts. Lucifer is lying on the couch while I straddle him. My free hand paws at his shirt, but he’s the one who tears it off in the end, baring his chest to me, and I can’t help an appreciative groan. Hell didn’t spit out too many monsters like him these days. All chiseled, hard anger and rage, melded against a human form. Fixated, I drag my thumb along his abdomen, enthralled by the vibrant trail of blood that bleeds from a wound no longer than my fingernail.
Animals are meant to be branded. I’m possessed by insanity when I dig my knife in again, lengthening the cut into a longer, straighter line.
“Fuck!” Lucifer bucks underneath me, straining my grip on the blade—but he isn’t in pain. His head lolls, his eyes searing. Do it, they tell me.
So, I cut him again. It’s a careful series of delicate little marks to form the letter D. I won’t maim him the way Vinny did me. I’ll make my brand carefully, cementing my ownership in the devil’s skin. He won’t ever forget what he is: an animal. Untamed. Wild. Mine...
I shiver beneath that thought, but before I can process it fully the devil takes my hand and jabs it against his flesh again, guiding the carving of an A. We take our time, making sure to sharpen the edges. The Y takes the longest; I curve the end of it back to underline the other letters.
Danny. The devil bears my mark much in the same way I bear his. It’s a grim realization that doesn’t empower me the way I thought it would. Ownership of Lucifer is a heavy cross to carry. His pain is mine. His anger is mine. His rage...
Those emotions meld together in the splotches of blood gleaming against the edge of my blade. Vinny never shared anything with me but his obsession. Lucifer holds back nothing. He weighs me down with him, and I struggle beneath the stress of it all. A beast like him isn’t meant to be owned and therein lies the danger...because he owns me too.
I see the possession in his eyes when I finally draw the blade from his skin and glance down at the marks on his chest. Something feral rumbles through his throat as deceptively harmless as a roll of thunder right before the paralyzing flash of lightning.
I’ve never owned many things. Curiosity to know what it feels like draws me to lower my head, bringing my mouth inches over my bloody brand. I inhale, tasting his scent on the air, and I can’t stop myself from dragging a thumb along the angry red letters. Mine.
Lucifer growls in acknowledgment. His. He flinches, jerking his hips when my lips brush the flesh of his stomach. The front of his jeans bulge, and he throbs against my chest, molten and hungry. I don’t feel anything but an answering pulse in my core as I drag my fingers down to the latch of his jeans.
Within an instant, I’m on the floor, lying on my back as Lucifer hovers over me. He fists his hands in my sweatpants, but he doesn’t wrench them down my legs until I arch my back. He waits for me to moan before he slides a hand beneath my sweatshirt and palms my left breast. He waits...for me to thrash, groan, whimper—any reaction that can be construed as permission.
When I’m finally stripped naked, he doesn’t touch me though. His hand flies down to the clasp of his jeans, but he takes his sweet time, watching me grind my thighs together to ease my own ache. My name glows red, etched forever into his skin. The sight of it alone is enough to make my breathing hitch and my vision blur around the edges. Then the devil takes control and nudges my knees apart with one of his own.
“Look at me.”
I do, trailing my gaze up to his. The monster inhales me, and slowly he begins to tug his jeans down his hips, freeing his cock. He springs forward, lethally hard. Beads of white weep from the head of him, and he’s already pulsing for me.
He yanks his pants down to his knees, but when he starts to crouch forward, he rears back. Frowning, he swipes at something jutting from his pocket; it must have stabbed in his thigh when he moved. It’s a chain I see as it dangles helplessly from his fingers. A necklace. I snatch for it before he can toss it aside and observe the pendant with shaking hands.
It says his name. Dante. So simple. So powerful. I glance down and scan the letters of the name etched onto me, but I don’t feel the same thrill. And suddenly I need to. I want to. The devil can’t erase Vinny’s mark...but he can make his own.
“Wait—” Lucifer bites back his protest when I shift out from underneath him and rise shaking to my feet. He won’t beg for me. He watches instead, while I cling to the counter on legs that can barely support my weight. When I reach the stove, I flick on one of the burners with one hand and brandish the necklace in the other.
He must realize what I intend to do because suddenly he’s beside me, wrenching the necklace from my grip. “Fuck.” His eyes are on the newborn flames that match the hue of his eyes. I can’t tell if he’s disgusted or...tempted as his gaze roves over to the chain. After a second, he shakes his head as if trying to clear it. “No—”
“Please.” I don’t recognize the plaintive little voice that tears from my throat. Lynn has returned, this time begging the devil himself to set her free—exorcise her out of my skin with the power of his name alone.
Lucifer frowns again, then he reaches beyond me and tugs at drawers and swipes open cupboards. Somewhere, he manages to find a bottle of vodka. I don’t know what he means to do with it when he wrenches off the cap and wets a rag snatched from the counter with it. “Where?” he grits out, scanning my naked torso. His eyes linger around Vinny’s name, but I shake my head and point to my collarbone.
“Here.”
He says nothing as he swipes at the area with the rag, cleansing it with the alcohol. “Hold it above the flame,” he tells me, jerking his head to the stove. I obey, dangling the necklace by the chain so that the pendant hovers directly above the flames. “Lower,” Lucifer directs. “And don’t bring it up until I say so. This shit will catch fire.”
Alcohol is flammable, I remember as the insanity of what we’re doing rushes to my head. Heat shoots up the slender chain, biting into my fingers, but I don’t let go. Not until the devil finally wrestles the necklace from me himself and raises the heated metal. He scans my chest carefully, searching for any bead of volatile alcohol that might linger. To make sure, he presses me against the counter and exhales once over my skin, making my nipples tighten at the contact. “You...you sure?” He doesn’t make it sound like a question, but a dare.
Are you sure, Daniela?
I nod and press both hands against the counter on either side of me, arching my back to present him with the flattest surface possible. “Yes.”
With only a nod, the devil agrees, and he hefts the chain with his bare hand. Using my knife, he slams the heated metal against my skin and...
Pain. I see black as Vinny’s evil is driven out of me like a nail. Agony and blood and gaping flesh are all that’s left behind, and the devil makes sure to brand his mark over every shuddering inch. I’m not sure how long he holds the hot metal there. When my vision clears, the necklace is smoldering somewhere on the floor, and Lucifer’s eyes are on mine. “You okay?”
“Yes...” My throat aches and my voice is a rasp. The echo that reaches my ears tells me why; I must have screamed. I stare down at the mark he made. I feel it deeper than I’ve ever felt anything in my life, pulsing and volatile. “I’m fine.”
His brand is an angry red against my skin, bleeding in some places. The mark will scar. Once again, another man’s name stains me, but this time I put it there. I don’t know if Lucifer’s surprised when I lunge forward, sealing my mouth against his. If he is, he hides it well by lashing his tongue against my lips to pry them apart.
We kiss in hungry, violent, greedy snatches. Impatient, Lucifer tugs me into the narrow hallway and flattens me against the wall. He’s panting, his cock practically thrumming with the need to be inside me. I reach down and palm it, stroking until he grits out curses with every breath. Guiding him closer, my eyes stare dead into his as he muscles his way between my legs and enters me in one hard thrust. My heels dig into the back of his thighs, my legs holding him tight with every hungry, fierce roll of his hips.
He’s rough. Brutal. I’ll feel him inside me for weeks after. Months. It’s still not enough. My nails bite into his shoulders, goading him on until he’s grunting with each thrust. More. More. Harder. He slams into me, crushing me into the wall, and an icy splash of pain in my core tells me that the devil stayed true to his promise. I could make your cunt bleed. He stiffens when he realizes and tries to pull out, but I sink my teeth into his shoulder before he can. I bite down hard until he stiffens, becoming steel inside me. Mine.
Grunting, he rides me without a shred of mercy, driving himself into me and wrenching himself back out—only to plunge in even deeper. Harder. Faster. I hover on the edge of pain and sanity until, with one last thrust, he breaks me open.
I wail against his skin, memorizing every growl and groan he smothers into the side of my throat. It’s a more potent tune than any I could caress out with my bow or any complex suite. This is a melody I could never play with my cello or any other instrument—only my soul. Only like this, bare flesh against bare flesh with nothing but blood and pain to eke out each brutal, violent note. The devil makes his music in screams, and burning flesh, and rent, ruined skin.
And I’m drunk on it.
“Say it,” I gasp out. My hand shakes as it finds his punishingly gripping my waist, and I urge it up to brush the stinging flesh of his brand. “Say it,” I beg him, my saliva mingling with the blood I managed to draw with my teeth. “Say it...please.”
You are mine. Those words that Vinny loved to boast for my benefit. They’ll make for the crescendo of this twisted melody. I need to hear him say it. I need to. I bite him again when he doesn’t comply quickly enough and the devil howls, twitching inside of me.
“You,” he growls, ramming into me so hard that I see stars. “You...yours.”
Yours. I can only moan in confusion. It isn’t the right thing for him to say.
I’m yours.
Mine. Fire burns white-hot, scalding my spine and reducing my body to ash. I can only cling to him and scream as an orgasm rips me into pieces. Lucifer is careless with the ruined parts of me. He fucks his release into me and then goes limp with the final thrust, pinning me to the wall with his weight alone.
I don’t know how long we stay like that. Minutes? Hours? The only thing I’m aware of when he finally withdraws from me is an agony that cuts me deeper than any pain I’ve ever experienced before and has me sinking down to my knees. It has nothing to do with the throbbing in my bleeding, abused core or the callous way that Lucifer shoves himself off of me and then staggers in search of his pants.
One single realization obliterates what’s left of my heart, leaving scorch marks on my soul: as long as Vinny is alive, none of this fucking matters.
Not one damn bit.