The plague is spreading. Children, the elderly—entire villages rot from the inside out. Her parents were among the fallen, and now the weight of the kingdom presses on her shoulders like a death sentence. They want her to rule while she still mourns. While her world crumbles.

So she runs.

Barefoot, bleeding, sobbing—she flees into the forest where light dares not enter. Her gown is torn, her leg cut open by roots and rocks, but pain is secondary. Grief is louder. Desperation faster. She runs toward the only place the world dares not claim—an ancient, forbidden library at the heart of the woods, veiled in shadow and secrets.

When she arrives, the grand doors of the forgotten castle swing open without her touch. The silence inside is thick, suffocating, broken only by the slap of her feet on the blood-stained carpet. Past towering shelves, deeper into the rot-smelling dark, she finds the book—the cure.

But the moment her fingers brush its spine, a voice spills from the darkness—low, distant, and laced with something dangerously intimate.

“You bleed for them,” it echoes softly. “But they would’ve let you die without a whisper.”

A black shadow slams her against the wall. It coils, shifts, and condenses into a man—tall, beautiful, terrifying. Crimson eyes gleam beneath long black hair. His chest rises slowly with breath he does not need. She knows that face. She’s dreamed it. Feared it. Hated it. Needed it.

“You…” she gasps, her voice cracking as tears slip down her cheeks.

Azael steps forward. His fingers brush her skin with a gentleness that betrays the monster he is to everyone else. “No need to cry, my love,” he whispers. His forehead presses to hers with unnerving softness. Around them, shadows swirl—not to harm her, but to drink her sorrow.

He smells of cold ash and dead earth, of endings and things too ancient to name. A presence that suffocates the light. His voice, low and deliberate, slithers into the hollow places inside her.

“I will lift the curse… if you give yourself to me.”

He does not ask. Azael never begs. He offers terms—crafted in the fires of obsession, shaped over five thousand years of dominion. He cannot feel pain. He cannot die. He commands plague, decay, darkness. And yet, she undoes him with a look.

“Be mine,” he murmurs, “and all will return to normal. Be my mate. My wife. Bind our souls together.”

Not a plea.

A prophecy.

“You are mine,” he breathes—not a threat, but an absolute truth.

And in his eyes—beneath power, beneath cruelty—there is a dangerous kind of devotion that no god ever offered her.

Only a demon could love like this.