The first time Dain saw her, he was not looking for anything at all.
The Abyss stretched before him, endless and gray, a wasteland of ash and silence. His father had sent him to walk the borderlands, a punishment disguised as duty. The Devil's heir did not question. He walked. He watched. He waited for something that never came.
The rift opened at his feet.
He almost ignored it. Rifts were common in the wastes, thin places where the veil between realms wore down to nothing. Most showed only darkness, or the flicker of some other dead dimension. This one showed green.
He stopped.
The green was startling. He had not seen green in centuries. The demon realm offered only dark germs, gray ash, the dull red of dying embers. But this rift, this tear in the fabric, opened onto a world of impossible color. Grass. Trees. A sky the color of milk and honey.
He crouched, bringing his eye to the crack. The image was small, distorted, but he could make out shapes. A garden. Flowers he had no names for. A stone wall covered in moss. And in the center of it all, a girl.
She was young. Fifteen, perhaps sixteen. Her hair fell past her shoulders, brown threaded with gold. Her face was tilted toward the sun, her eyes closed, her lips parted in a smile that reached nothing. She wore a white dress that clung to her thighs, her feet bare in the grass. In her hands, she held a bundle of lavender, pressed against her chest as if it were precious.
Dain forgot to breathe.
He stood there, in the ash and the cold, watching a mortal girl through a crack in the world. She was nothing. A speck. A creature of flesh and bone who would live eighty years and rot. He had killed thousands like her, had fed on their terror and their blood. He had never once stopped to look.
But he could not look away from this one.
She opened her eyes. Hazel, he saw. Wide and clear and innocent. She laughed at something, a bird, a bee, some small joy he could not see and the sound reached him through the rift, thin as a whisper, and it buried itself in his chest like a blade.
The rift closed. He did not know how long he had been kneeling there. Minutes. Hours. The ash had settled on his shoulders, turning his black coat to gray. He remained motionless, staring at the empty space where the green had been.
Something had shifted inside him. He did not understand it. He did not want to.
He stood, turned his back on the place where the rift had been, and walked deeper into the wastes. He did not look back.
But he could not forget her.
Days passed. Weeks. He returned to his father's fortress, took his place at the court, performed his duties with the cold efficiency expected of him. He sat through councils, executed traitors, took women to his bed and fucked them until they wept. None of it touched him. The girl with the hazel eyes lingered at the edge of his thoughts, a splinter he could not remove.
He began to walk the borderlands again. Not because his father commanded it , because he needed to find that place again. The thin place where the veil had opened and shown him green.
It took him three weeks to find it.
He searched the wastes methodically, mapping the thin places, tracking the currents of power that shifted beneath the ash. The demon realm was vast, but he had walked it for centuries. He knew its rhythms. He knew where the veil wore thin.
He found the spot at dusk. The rift was smaller this time, no wider than his hand, but it was there. He knelt in the ash and pressed his eye to the crack.
She was there.
Older now. Sixteen, perhaps. Her hair was longer, her face less round. She knelt in the same garden, her fingers buried in the soil, her brow furrowed in concentration. She wore the same white dress, or one like it. She was alone.
He watched her for an hour. Two. The rift began to close, the edges fraying, the green fading to gray. He reached out with his power and forced it to hold. The effort cost him blood dripped from his nose, his vision blurred but he did not let go until the sun had set in that other world and the girl had vanished into a cottage of white stone.
Then the rift sealed, and Dain was alone in the dark.
He did not move for a long time. The ashes settled on his shoulders. The wind carved ice against his skin. He sat there, feeling the echo of her in his chest, and something that had been dead for centuries began to stir.
He returned the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that.
He learned the patterns of the rift when they opened, how long they held, where the veil was thinnest. He built himself a shelter, a place where he could watch without being seen. He told himself it was practical. He told himself he was simply studying the borderlands.
He told himself many lies in those days.
He learned her name from the grandmother's lips: Jasmine. He learned her routines. She rose before dawn, ate breakfast at a wooden table, washed dishes in cold water. She spent her mornings in the garden, her hands in the soil, her hair falling across her face. She walked the perimeter of her property every afternoon, her fingers trailing along the wall, her eyes scanning the treeline as if she sensed something watching her.
Sometimes she paused at the eastern wall, where the woods grew thickest. She would stand there for long minutes, her head tilted, her brow furrowed. Once, she reached out as if to touch something he could not see.
He held his breath. But her hand fell, and she turned away, and the moment passed.
He began to leave things for her.
It was madness. He knew it was madness. He was heir to the throne of Asphodel, son of the Devil, a creature of cruelty and conquest. He did not leave gifts. He took.
But he could not stop himself.
A feather from a bird she had never seen, left on her windowsill while she slept. A stone that glowed faintly in the dark, placed among her flowers. A single white rose, its stem wrapped in silver thread, laid on her doorstep at dawn.
He watched her find them. Watched her turn them over in her hands, her brow furrowed, her lips parted in wonder. Watched her bring them to her grandmother, watched the old woman's face go pale with fear.
Dain smiled in the dark.
The years passed.
He watched Jasmine turn from sixteen to seventeen. He watched her body change, softening into womanhood. He watched her touch herself in the dark, her breath quickening, her thighs pressing together. He watched her face in the aftermath, confused and ashamed, and he wanted her so badly his hands shook.
He began to take other women to his bed. Mortals and demons alike , mostly, purchased or stolen. He closed his eyes and pretended they were her. None of them screamed like he imagined she would. None of them looked at him with those hazel eyes, wide with terror and something else. Something he craved.
He stopped taking them after a while. They only made the hunger worse.
His father noticed the change in him. There were questions, demands, threats. Dain ignored them all. He spent his days at the thin places, waiting for rifts, watching his girl. He had begun to speak to her through the thread he had spun between them not the full bond of claiming, but a whisper, a promise. She could not hear him, not yet. But he liked to imagine she could.
Soon, he told her. Soon, you will be mine.
He watched her turn eighteen. He watched her grandmother grow frailer, the old woman's cough deepening, her steps slowing. He watched Jasmine begin to wander to the edge of her property more often, her eyes fixed on the woods, as if she sensed something waiting for her.
She did. He was certain of it. Some part of her knew he was there, watching, waiting. He saw it in the way she shivered at the wall, the way her eyes lingered on the shadows. She felt him. And that knowledge made his blood run hot.
Her grandmother died on a Tuesday.
Dain felt it through the thread he had spun between them a sudden emptiness, a grief that was not his own. He opened a rift and saw Jasmine kneeling beside the old woman's bed, her face wet, her hands clutching the cold fingers.
She was alone now. Truly alone.
He should go to her. He knew he should go to her. The waiting was over. She was of age, unattached, unprotected. There was nothing stopping him from stepping through the rift and taking what had been his since the moment he first saw her.
But he did not move.
He watched her grieve. Watched her bury her grandmother in the garden, beneath the roses. Watched her sit alone in the cottage, her hands empty, her face blank. Watched her return to her routines as if the old woman might come back.
He waited three days. Then a week. Then two.
He told himself he was giving her time. He told himself he wanted her grief to settle, to harden, so that when he came for her, she would have nothing left but him. He told himself many things.
But the truth was simpler: he was afraid.
He had wanted nothing in his long existence. He had taken what pleased him and discarded what did not. He had never waited for anything, never longed for anything, never needed anything the way he needed her. And that need terrified him.
What if she broke too quickly? What if she never stopped fighting? What if she looked at him with those hazel eyes and saw only a monster?
He laughed at himself for the thought. He was a monster. He had always been a monster. He did not want her love. He wanted her submission, her fear, her body beneath his. He wanted to hear her scream his name until her voice gave out.
But the waiting continued.
On the twenty-third night, he stepped through the rift.
He told himself it was time. He told himself he had been patient long enough. He told himself she had healed enough, grieved enough, been alone enough.
The cottage was dark, the moon hidden behind clouds. He stood in her garden, surrounded by the flowers she had tended for years, and breathed the scent of her. Lavender and soil, rain and something else something that made his chest ache.
He moved through the house without sound. Past the kitchen where she had eaten breakfast every morning. Past the hearth where she had read by firelight. Past the photograph of a woman who he supposed was her mother.
Her bedroom door was open.
She lay in her narrow bed, her face turned toward the window, her hair spread across the pillow. Her cheeks were still wet. Her hands were folded over her chest, as if she were already in a grave.
She was so beautiful it made his teeth ache.
He stood in her doorway for a long time, watching her breathe. The rise and fall of her chest beneath the thin quilt. The flutter of her eyelids as she dreamed. The soft sound of her breath, steady and warm.
He had imagined this moment a thousand times. He had imagined taking her in her sleep, her terror fresh, her resistance fierce. He had imagined breaking her slowly, night after night, until she knew only his name.
But standing there, watching her breathe, he found himself frozen.
She is mine, he told himself. She has always been mine.
He stepped forward. The floor creaked beneath his weight.
Her eyes opened.