Sinners' Kingdom #1: The Book of Lust (Complete)

74

MAMMON

There was a time when I tolerated Asmodeus. There was a time when we all tolerated him. Never too eager to please, yet never too aloof that he reeked haughtiness, either, unlike Lucifer who I'd always despised despite my respect for his strength. Asmodeus was much easier. By far the youngest of us, he never resented his lacking seniority among the Seven as he grew into his power. He even humbly learned from us all, never stirring up contentions like most of us would do out of sheer boredom, and instead growing his appeal, treating us as elder brothers, trusted mentors. In those days, before we came to know he exercised his influence over us while hiding his incubus nature, he was even almost a friend.

But all along, he had always possessed secrets and hidden sides, deceitful and treacherous. We all of us had shadows and skeletons we kept from one another, not out of shame but simply because it was no one's business but our own. But Asmodeus was the only one to deliberately deceive and mislead purely out of enjoyment, not necessity, not indifference. It was a game to him, like everything else, his subtle seductions and charms as he grew into the fold and insinuated himself in our Covenant. All along, it had been a performance meant to make idiots out of us.

But for the first time, I saw the true Asmodeus. On an island that reeked of unnatural interference and powers, in the middle of nowhere while trapped at the mercy of his missing Shard and a dormant witch who made my blood run hotter than lava, Asmodeus became transparent as glass, every one of his pretenses and insidious charms melting away. Drive. Desperation. Fury so madly intense it became as clear as still water. I saw right through him, deeper than bone.

He had been mastered.

The contract I already knew about. He had already taunted me about it, declaring his bond with her just to get a rise out of me. But I had ignored the signs and told myself it was the witch who was in danger of crumbling just like all his prey, doomed to become a hollow puppet whose sole purpose was to present her cunt for his pleasure upon command like a good pet.

False. Completely, stupidly wrong. I'd blinded myself from the start and ignored what lay in front of me.

Mastered.

Whatever contract they had, whatever scheme Asmodeus had originally hatched to outfox the witch, it had all come to nothing. He was sold now, like a common imp shackled into a slave contract and rendered powerless by some hack magician. The so-called Prince of Lust who had struck fear into the heart of every realm he walked for generations, for centuries, for millennia — now an unleashed dog rendered mad in the absence of his master.

Without the witch, he was empty, hollow like a clay vessel left out to dry in desert sun. The only thing that echoed inside him was the need to restore his master and have her by his side once again.

The desire was poison, insanity turned venom. It flowed thickly through his veins and into the very center of him, radiating and calling to the Shard buried inside my flesh. The poison seeped. The poison spread. The poison...

Was paradise.

The witch should be mine. If I hadn't chased Asmodeus' falling Shard into that trap in the mountains, I would have caught the scent first. It should have been me. I should have been the one to brand her with my mark and sink into her essence, threading it with mine and claiming her for eternity. Because Asmodeus had practically confessed it: she was the one. The heir of Lilith. The lost seed of the ruins of the First Houses. And in every incarnation... hunted and eradicated to legitimize the claims of pretenders to the Triple Throne.

It had been three thousand years since the last. Since then, not one had arisen. Three millennia with no incarnation walking the realms had been enough to kill the legends and reduce the Heir to only ancient myth, wisps of stories so old no one knew even a single one of them from start to end anymore.