Page 127 of The Devil's Canvas

I take her like I’m staking a claim—every thrust hard enough to remind her who she belongs to. I grab her wrists and pin them above her head, hips slamming into hers again and again, skin on skin, sweat and moans and breathless curses.

“You’re mine,” I snarl into her mouth.

“Yours,” she cries. “Only yours.”

Her walls clench around me and I lose it. My rhythm shatters. My mouth finds hers in a final, desperate kiss as we fall apart together—louder, rougher, more broken than anything I’ve ever known.

I carry her to the couch. Her body melts into the cushions, one leg draped over mine, her head resting against my chest. The fire crackles beside us, casting low light across her skin. Her mark pulses steady now—bright and sure, like it never left.

She looks up at me. “I think I’m supposed to take my place at the Loom.”

I nod slowly, brushing a hand down her hair. “It always belonged to you. Even before you knew.”

Her fingers find the center of my palm, tracing slow circles like she’s still grounding herself. “And you?”

“I go back to work,” I say, voice low. “The Council can’t hide me forever. I have debts to settle. Power to reclaim.”

“You’ll be different now,” she murmurs, watching me carefully.

“I already am.” I meet her eyes. “But I’ll be stronger for it. And so will you.”

She leans forward, mouth brushing my jaw. “We’ll do it together?”

“Always you,” I promise, my voice breaking just a little. “Always us. No more giving pieces of ourselves away.”

We dress in silence—not heavy or awkward, but reverent. Like something sacred has been rewritten between us. Her movements are smooth now, deliberate. Gone is the fragility that once lived in her frame. Her eyes, when they meet mine, are bright with clarity and strength. Not the kind she had before—but something new. Something earned.

When I reach for her hand, she takes it without hesitation. No words pass between us as we leave. None are needed.

The Council doesn’t summon us. They don’t need to. The moment our bond reformed, the Loom stirred awake, sending a pulse through the old veins of Hell that only the ancient would understand. And they felt it. They knew.

We walk together through the deepest corridors of the underworld—past the Vaults, beyond the Throne Hall, through the roots of Hell where even shadows are afraid to linger. At the very end, the doors wait.

Obsidian. Towering. Carved with old runes too deep for translation. They do not open for me.

But for her they part like breath, slow and thunderous.

The room beyond is nothing but darkness to my eyes. I see walls carved in black stone. An altar of sorts. And in the center, what I know must be the Loom. I can't see it—not truly. Not without her eyes, without her power. Without what she was always meant to become.

But I feel it. Ophelia steps inside alone.

She doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t flinch. She walks with the kind of certainty you don’t learn—you remember. Like her feet already knew the way. I stay at the threshold, because this isn’t my place. This part belongs to her.

She moves toward what I cannot see, guided by a pull older than memory. When she kneels, it is not submission—it is arrival. And I let her go, into the dark, into the silence, into what was always hers.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ophelia

Theroomhumswithpower, alive in a way that presses against my skin. Light ripples across the obsidian walls, not from torches or fire, but from floating, endless screens. They shimmer with motion—fragments of lives unfolding like ghost stories. A child’s first laugh. A mother’s scream. A betrayal whispered under breath. Thousands of moments suspended in time, flickering across the surface of the dark like candlelight on water.

Blue fire coils in the center, rising without smoke, bending toward me as I step forward in recognition.

And there, suspended like a question in the dark, is the Loom.

It isn’t made of anything I can name. Not string. Not metal. Not wood. It’s built of something closer to nerve and light—threaded with strands that shimmer in impossible colors. Some glint like starlight on oil. Others twitch, barely tethered. Some are frayed so finely they could disappear if I blinked.

I lower to my knees. Not out of reverence, but inevitability.

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