Page 68 of Bargain with the Demon King
I take another step. This one costs more—I have to pause, hand pressed to my ribs where the grinding gets worse. Black spots dance in my vision, but I breathe through it. Another step. Building momentum, though each movement sends fresh warmth running down my arms from the chain wounds.
Toward him.
"What are you doing?" Sithara's voice pitches high with disbelief. "The door is that way."
"I know where the door is." Copper runs down my chin, but I keep walking toward the beast that killed for me. Another step. My vision tunnels, but I can still see him—massive, terrible, magnificent. "I also know where I choose to be."
"You're free," Kaine insists, ice cracking under the weight of his disbelief. "You have no obligation—"
"Exactly." I stop just out of Azzaron's reach, swaying but standing, meeting those impossible gold-black eyes. "I have noobligation. Which means I'm not here because I have to be. I'm not here because of chains or contracts or soul-stones."
I reach up with a hand that shakes, touch the twilight necklace he bought me just because I smiled at it. "I'm here because I choose him. Because somewhere between dinner conversations and demon markets and him crushing my soul to set me free, I chose this. Chose him."
The words hang in the frozen air, rewriting everything.
"Adraya." His voice cuts through—not the beast's layered harmonics but him, raw and disbelieving. "You don't have to—"
"I know. That's the point." I take another step, close enough to feel the heat radiating from his transformed body. "I don't have to do anything. For the first time in my life, I'm choosing with complete freedom. And I choose you."
"You're insane," Vex breathes, all shadows converging into one terrified mass.
"Probably. Chad did always say I was too much. Too emotional. Too devoted. Too everything." I take the final step, close enough to touch Azzaron's beast form. "Turns out he was right. I am too much. Too much for him to handle. Too much for you to understand. Too much for this world to contain."
My fingers find Azzaron's arm—shadow and scale and barely contained violence. He shudders at the contact, the beast recognizing what even demons cannot: I'm choosing him while bleeding, while broken, while free to run.
"But I'm exactly enough for him."
The arrow comes from behind Vex—Lady Morinth, who wasn't supposed to be here, bow still raised. The shaft punches through my stomach with a wet sound, the barbed head emerging just below my ribs. I look down at it, confused. The pain hasn't hit yet, just cold pressure and the strange sight of wood and fletching protruding from my body.
"Oh." The word escapes small, surprised. "That's not good."
Then the pain arrives—burning cold spreading from the wound, and with it, wet heat flowing. The pool beneath me spreads. My hands come away slick when I touch the shaft, and my knees buckle.
I reach for Azzaron as I fall, his name on my lips, but before I hit stone, everything explodes into violence.
Azzaron's beast doesn't just kill them—he unmakes them. Shadows turned solid tear demons apart joint by joint. Fire that burns souls themselves, leaving bodies intact but empty. Kaine's ice turns against him, freezing him from inside out until he shatters like crystal. Sithara's horns become weapons turned inward, piercing her own skull with wet sounds that echo. Vex's shadows rebel, pulling him in four different directions until he exists in pieces that can't agree on dying.
Lady Morinth tries to run, bow clattering away. Azzaron's claw catches her at the door, drags her back screaming. He makes her watch as he pulls the arrow from my stomach—slowly, letting her see exactly what she's done. Then he pushes it through her eye, into her brain, letting her die looking at what killed her.
The unnamed demon with purple marks burns from his soul outward, screaming in frequencies only demons can hear, his marks igniting like fuses leading to his core.
I watch it all through vision going dark at the edges. Exquisite violence. The Demon King unleashed, painting his throne room with the insides of those who dared touch what he couldn't admit was his.
Then silence. Just my labored breathing and crimson pooling beneath me, spreading in patterns that mirror the soul-stones above. The arrow wound pulses with each heartbeat, and I can feel my life leaving with each pulse.
He drops beside me, beast form splattered with every shade of demon ichor. His claw—too large, too sharp—touches my face with impossible gentleness.
"I was always yours." The words bubble through copper. "You just didn't know I chose it."
His form ripples, beast receding enough to speak clearly. "There's one way. But it will bind you to me forever. Tighter than any soul-bond. You'll feel what I feel. Live only as long as I live."
I laugh, more red on my lips, the metallic taste overwhelming. "I was already bound. Just not how you thought."
"This is different. Blood-bond. Demon bond. You'll carry me in your veins forever."
"Sounds romantic." My vision fractures into prisms. "Do it."
He tears his own wrist open with his teeth—black essence that glows gold at the edges, life that smells of power and possession and home. The taste, when he presses it to my mouth, is iron and lightning and dark promises. It burns going down, not heat but transformation, rewriting me from the inside cell by cell.
