Damned By His Touch

4. Chapter

Lucifer

I had left her in that damned hole for three days.

For three days I tried to convince myself she was just another sinner playing games with my patience. Another human soul that would eventually scream, curse, beg, and finally break like all the others.

But the silence from the prison wing grew louder and louder in my mind.

There were no more shouts.

No more insults.

No more furious pounding on the door.

When I finally went down there, the anger had long since burned away. What remained was something darker.

A suffocating curiosity.

I expected to find her clinging to the bars, screaming at me. Or at least glaring from the corner with that blazing hatred in her storm-blue eyes.

But what I found made my stomach tighten instinctively.

The torchlight fell across the wall.

And in the corner… there was only a small heap.

A trembling, fragile heap.

“What happened to that big mouth of yours, little girl?” I asked, forcing mockery into my voice.

Even to my own ears it sounded hollow.

No answer.

Her body shook in a relentless rhythm. The blanket was wrapped around her so tightly it looked as if her life depended on it. When I stepped closer, I heard the sharp clatter of her teeth.

The sound echoed in the cell like cracking ice.

“Look at me,” I ordered.

My voice bounced off the stone.

Slowly—painfully slowly—she lifted her head.

Those stormy blue eyes that had once thrown lightning at me were now glassy with panic. She wasn’t looking at me. Her gaze darted around the corners of the cell, toward the dark crevices in the walls, as if death might crawl out of them at any moment.

Her face had sunk inward.

Her porcelain skin had turned a frightening shade of pale blue.

“Please…” she whispered.

The word was barely breath.

“Just… don’t leave me here… in the dark…”

I stood there, strangely frozen.

This cell wasn’t cold.

I am the ruler of Hell. In my presence the stones themselves glow with heat. The air is always heavy and burning.

And yet this girl looked like someone abandoned in the Arctic to freeze.

I stepped closer.

The runes on my arm began pulsing red in response.

When I entered her space, she did not pull away.

The opposite.

She looked at me with something dangerously close to longing. As if I were salvation itself.

I crouched and placed my hand on her shoulder.

I immediately stiffened.

Her clothes were dry.

But her body…

Ice.

Not merely cold—frozen.

It felt like touching a statue pulled from the depths of a winter well.

The moment my burning palm met her skin she let out a weak cry.

Not pain.

Relief.

The sound cut deeper into me than any angelic blade ever had.

Without thinking she leaned toward me, resting her head against my thigh, trying to press herself closer to the heat radiating from my body.

“What the hell are you?” I muttered.

There was no anger left in my voice.

I lifted her from the ground.

She weighed almost nothing, but the trembling of her body transferred into mine. When I held her against my chest, the cold from her skin bit into me, trying to drain the fire from my blood.

My runes flared wildly.

They fought the unfamiliar frost leaking from her fragile body.

“I’m taking you upstairs,” I said.

Mostly to myself.

I carried her through the corridors.

The guards stared in disbelief as the King of Hell walked past them carrying a shaking woman wrapped in rags toward his private chambers.

I did not care.

All I felt were her fingers clutching the front of my shirt with bloody knuckles while she buried her face into my chest, desperate to stay near the heat.

I brought her into my bath chamber.

The massive black marble pool there was always filled with steaming hot water.

I did not summon servants.

I did not want anyone to see this.

I set her on the edge of the bath and opened the golden taps. Steam immediately filled the room.

“Undress,” I said shortly.

But her hands were shaking so violently she couldn’t even loosen the blanket around herself.

Every instinct in me resisted what I did next.

But there was no other choice.

I dropped to one knee in front of her.

I—the being before whom princes bow to the ground.

My movements were rough, conflicted. Something strange pulsed inside me: irritation, anger… and something far more dangerous.

One by one I removed the filthy, damp rags from her body.

My gaze moved across her without permission.

She was beautiful.

Lush curves. Full breasts. Wide hips—shapes that had driven men to war since the beginning of time.

But right now all I saw was suffering.

And the scars.

Deep, jagged marks carved across her back.

As if something brutal had once been ripped out of her.

There was no time to examine them.

I lifted her and lowered her into the steaming water.

The bath almost hissed as her body sank beneath the surface.

I expected her to scream from the heat.

Instead she closed her eyes and released a long, trembling breath.

Color slowly began returning to her face through the rising steam.

“Better?” I asked.

My voice sounded strange.

Rough.

She opened her eyes.

The panic was gone now, though the defiance had not returned yet either. She simply looked at me while floating in the water.

Slowly she lifted a hand.

Her fingertips brushed against one of the glowing runes on my arm.

“You…” she whispered.

“You burn.”

For the first time there was no hatred in her voice.

“But it’s the only thing worth living for.”

I pulled my arm away as if she had burned me.

My heart beat with a rhythm I had not felt in millennia.

And suddenly I understood something.

The girl wasn’t freezing because the cell was cold.

Hell itself was freezing her soul.

She did not belong here.

Not even remotely.

She was more foreign to this realm than any human I had ever seen.

“Don’t get used to it, little girl,” I muttered, standing up so I wouldn’t have to meet her gaze.

“I only saved you because I’m not finished with you yet.”

But it was a lie.

And I knew she knew it.