CHAPTER 10: THE DEVIL’S BARGAIN

POV: Daemon | Night, Day 3

The royal chambers were soundproofed in theory only.

Daemon understood this as he stood in his private study with Elara, both of them aware that the palace walls were porous to determined ears, that servants gossiped, that information moved through the corridors like blood through veins. Which meant that whatever happened in the next hour would be known to every person in the palace by morning.

Which was precisely the point.

“You understand what I’m asking?” Daemon said, pouring wine with movements that suggested absolute control. But his hands trembled slightly—a tell Cassian would have recognized immediately. “I’m asking you to perform with me. To make the palace believe that I’ve chosen duty over desire.”

Elara took the wine without hesitation.

“I understand,” she said. “And I’m willing. But we need parameters.”

“What parameters?”

“Nothing penetrative,” Elara said with the kind of clinical directness of someone who understood her body was a tool, a negotiating point, a weapon. “My body belongs to Seraphina. But I can give you everything else—hands, mouth, proximity, the sounds that will convince observers. The performance without the violation.”

Daemon nodded. He understood what she was really saying: I understand what this will cost him. I’m agreeing anyway because the kingdom requires it.

“And afterward,” Elara continued, “you have to maintain the performance. Public touches. Glances. The specific intimacy of people who’ve recently been lovers. It won’t be constant, but it will be consistent enough to be convincing.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Elara moved closer, and her gray eyes were absolutely without mercy. “Because what I’m actually asking is whether you understand what this will do to Cassian. Whether you understand that even though he’ll intellectually know this is performance, his body will react to it. He’ll have to watch you touch me the way you touch him. He’ll have to see you kiss me with intimacy. And it will destroy something in him.”

Daemon felt the words land like accusations.

“He’ll survive it,” Daemon said coldly, and heard the lie in his own voice. “Because the alternative is that Marcus wins. Because the alternative is that Cassian hangs for treason anyway. So yes, this will hurt him. Yes, this will damage him. But he’ll survive because he understands what’s at stake.”

“Will he?” Elara moved toward the connecting door that led to the bedchamber. “Or will he decide that your willingness to stage intimacy with someone else proves that Marcus was right? That you never actually loved him? That everything was circumstantial?”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

“Is it? Or are you just willing to sacrifice his sanity for political necessity?”

The words hung between them like a blade suspended above a neck.

Daemon understood what she was doing. She was forcing him to be honest about the cost of his choices. She was making him acknowledge that every strategic move came with casualties. That every game of thrones was built on the corpses of people who couldn’t survive the psychological weight of being sacrificed.

“Yes,” Daemon said finally. “I’m willing. Because the alternative is worse.”

Elara nodded, as though he’d just passed some kind of test.

“Then let’s begin,” she said.

The sounds started within minutes.

Elara’s first moan was almost too restrained. Daemon caught her eye and shook his head slightly. Louder. More raw. More convincing.

She adjusted, and the next sound was different—wilder, more desperate. The sound of a woman being taken with passion rather than care, the sound of someone surrendering to desire rather than performing it.

Daemon positioned himself between her thighs, and they began the choreography.

There was no penetration—they’d established that boundary and would honor it—but there was friction. There was the specific grinding of bodies in simulated intimacy. There was contact of skin against skin, the movement of hips, the physical performance of desire.

And there was sound.

Daemon began to move with deliberate force, his hips thrusting with the kind of intensity that suggested raw need. Elara responded with moans that escalated in pitch and desperation, her hands gripping his shoulders, her legs wrapping around his waist.

“Yes,” she gasped, her voice carrying clearly through the chambers. “Yes, Your Majesty, just like that.”

The formality was a nice touch. It suggested that even in passion, hierarchy remained. That she was the subject surrendering to his power.

Daemon heard footsteps in the corridor stop. Heard whispers. Heard the specific quality of servants recognizing that something significant was happening.

“Harder,” Elara said, her voice reaching the kind of pitch that would carry through stone. “Take me harder.”

Daemon increased the intensity of his movements, his breath coming faster, his control carefully maintained despite the performance of losing control. Elara matched his rhythm, her moans becoming almost frantic, her nails—carefully positioned to avoid leaving marks—scraping against his back.

The sounds of the performance were becoming hypnotic. The rhythmic slapping of bodies. The desperate gasps. The increasingly incoherent pleas. It was pornographic in its rawness, in its apparent desperation, in the specific way it communicated that the king and his betrothed were locked in passionate consummation.

It was entirely false.

“I’m close,” Elara gasped. “Your Majesty, I’m so close—”

“Come for me,” Daemon said, his voice dropping into the register that suggested absolute dominance. “Come for your king.”

Elara’s final moan was theatrical in its release—a sound that built from her throat and seemed to vibrate through the entire chamber. She arched her back, her entire body seeming to convulse with the performance of orgasm, her hands gripping the bedding.

Daemon followed seconds later, his own climax sounding more controlled, more regal.

For a moment afterward, both of them lay still, their breathing deliberately audible.

Then Daemon moved away from her and walked back into his study, closing the door behind him.

The rumors spread through the palace like wildfire.

By morning, every servant knew. By afternoon, every council member had heard. By evening, the story had reached Marcus in his holding cell: the king had consummated his engagement. The marriage was moving forward. The future of the kingdom was being secured through duty, not desire.

Daemon maintained the performance flawlessly. Public touches with Elara. Glances that suggested intimate knowledge. The specific body language of a man who’d made his choice and was content with it.

But when he finally went to see Cassian in his holding cell, everything fractured.

His lover was sitting on the narrow cot with his face turned toward the wall. When Cassian heard Daemon’s footsteps, he didn’t turn around.

“I can smell her on you,” Cassian said quietly, his voice carrying the specific tone of someone whose entire world had just fundamentally shifted. “I can smell her perfume. I can hear her voice in my mind from the sounds that carried through the corridors.”

“Cassian—”

“Don’t,” Cassian interrupted, finally turning to face him. His amber eyes were red-rimmed, his expression carved from ash and rage and devastation. “Don’t tell me it was strategy. Don’t tell me it was performance. Don’t tell me you had to do it to maintain your position. I don’t care about the reasons. I only care about the fact that you did it.”

Daemon moved closer, but Cassian flinched away.

“The kingdom is watching,” Daemon said quietly. “Every move I make is being dissected. If I show weakness, if I show that I’m choosing love over duty, it validates everything Marcus said about moral corruption destroying my judgment.”

“Then I guess you made the right choice,” Cassian said, his voice breaking on the final word. “You chose the kingdom. You chose the crown. You chose everything except me.”

“That’s not true—”

“Isn’t it?” Cassian stood, his body vibrating with barely controlled rage. “Because from where I’m sitting, in this cell, listening to you fuck someone else, it feels very much like it’s true. It feels like you chose the crown. And I have to sit here and wonder if you ever actually loved me, or if I was just a convenient secret. A man to hide with until someone better came along.”

Daemon felt something in his chest shatter into irreparable pieces.

He understood, in that moment, that he’d broken something in Cassian that couldn’t be fixed through explanation or apology or strategic revelation. He’d made his lover believe, with absolute certainty, that the love was conditional. That it was dependent on circumstances. That it could be abandoned when the political winds shifted.

“I love you,” Daemon said, and the words felt grotesquely inadequate.

“You have a strange way of showing it,” Cassian replied, turning away again. “Now get out. You’ve made your point. You’ve demonstrated your commitment to the kingdom. You’ve humiliated me in front of the entire palace. You’ve won.”

Daemon left.

And in leaving, he understood that he’d just performed the most dangerous act of all: he’d made the man he loved believe that the love was false.

Even though the marriage was to save him, even though every choice was made to keep him alive, even though the performance was designed to protect him..

Cassian would spend every moment of the next week believing that he’d been replaced.

And there was nothing Daemon could do to convince him otherwise until the performance was over.

By then, something fundamental would have shifted.

By then, trust would have fractured in ways that couldn’t be fully repaired.