Chapter 5 #2
My stomach churned as I experienced Jasper's emotions firsthand.
The fear, the confusion, the betrayal—it all coursed through me as if it were my own.
The most heart-wrenching moment came when Jasper looked out at the crowd moments before his execution.
The faces of his brothers were a mixture of shock and raw pain.
I felt Jasper's resolve and selfless desire to protect his brothers even in the face of his own demise. The love he held for them was a stark contrast to the betrayal he'd suffered at Asrael's hands.
As the executioner raised his blade, I experienced Jasper's final thoughts—a mixture of regret, acceptance, and a fierce, protective love for those he was leaving behind. The blade fell, and I screamed, the phantom pain of his death tearing through me.
I gasped, my vision blurring as the scene shifted. Suddenly, I was no longer in my own body but experiencing everything through Jasper's ghostly form moments after his death.
The courtyard, which had been a cacophony of noise just seconds ago, was now eerily silent.
I felt a chill run through me as I gazed upon the crowd, their faces frozen in horror.
These were the same people who, moments before the blade fell, had been screaming for mercy, begging for a pardon.
Now, they stood stock-still as if time itself had stopped.
My eyes darted to where Jasper's brothers stood.
I saw Talon and Felix, their faces contorted in anguish.
Misha's huge hand was resting on Ashland's shuddering shoulders, grounding him to reality. Rhodes was frozen, completely frozen, I wasn’t even sure he’d breathed.
Just moments ago, they had been fighting against the guards with every ounce of strength they possessed, desperately trying to reach Jasper before it was too late.
Now, they were motionless, the fight drained from their bodies as the reality of what had just transpired settled over them like a suffocating blanket.
The silence was deafening. It pressed in on me from all sides, making it hard to breathe. Did I even need to breathe in this form? I felt a surge of emotions that weren't my own: confusion, fear, and an overwhelming sense of loss.
As I looked down, I saw Jasper's body lying on the execution platform, blood pooling around him. It was surreal watching the scene unfold from this perspective. I could feel Jasper's shock and disbelief as he realized he was no longer tethered to his physical form.
At that moment, I caught sight of Asrael.
He stood at the edge of the crowd, his face a mask of false grief.
But as I watched, I saw a flicker of something else in his eyes—satisfaction, particularly as they landed on Rhodes, who was clutching the spot where his heart was, as though ripping it out himself would be less painful than what had just happened.
The world seemed to ripple around me as Jasper's consciousness began to fade. I felt a pull as if something was trying to draw him away from this plane of existence. But there was resistance too, a strong tether holding him back, keeping him bound to the mortal world.
As everything started to blur, I heard a whisper in my mind—Jasper's final thoughts as a newly formed ghost. "I made a vow and I will protect them," he thought, his love for his brothers and Rhodes burning bright even in death. "I can't leave them alone with Asrael."
And then, just as quickly as it had begun, the vision faded away.
I blinked, tears streaming down my face as I returned to the present moment, still connected intimately with Jasper. I looked into his green eyes, seeing centuries of pain and longing reflected back at me. Slowly, they refocused, bringing him back to the moment.
"Palmer," he whispered, his voice raw with emotion. "I... I had forgotten. How could I have forgotten?"
I stroked his face gently, feeling the dampness of tears I hadn't even realized I'd shed. "It's okay," I murmured, though I wasn't sure if anything would ever be okay again.
Jasper's grip on my hips loosened, his body relaxing as the intensity of our connection began to ebb.
He rolled to the side, pulling me with him so we remained joined, face to face on the bed.
I tried to move; this experience was so emotionally overwhelming, having his cock in me felt like too much.
I couldn’t move. “What the hell?”
He placed his hands on my thigh, holding me still. “We’re going to be stuck like this for a while.”
“What?” I shifted and found that stuck was exactly what we were.
“It’s a demon thing,” he whispered, his voice a mix of amazement and deep sadness. I didn’t understand. This hadn’t happened with the others. “Just… lay here with me. Please?”
He looked so broken and rattled that my questions seemed unimportant right then. I wrapped my arms around him and nodded. “Okay. Do you… want to talk about it?”
"As time wore on after my death," he began, "the memories... they seemed to fade away. It was like sand slipping through my fingers. I no longer knew why I needed to watch over them. Just that I had an unwavering sense of duty."
I nodded, encouraging him to continue. My heart ached for him, for all the time he'd spent as a shadow of himself, driven by a purpose he couldn't fully remember.
"I hadn't even remembered my relationship with Rhodes," he confessed, his eyes clouding with pain. "Or the... the abuse with Asrael. It was all just... gone."
“What was the moment you realized you didn’t share the same vision as Asrael? When did you actually start working against him?” I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that Asrael was a demon. The layers of his deception were starting to show, and it was so hard to accept.
Jasper was quiet for a moment, his brow pinched as he mentally worked through my question.
I had to know as much as possible because even though I’d seen more than enough to know he wasn’t the man I’d thought he was, my heart was naively hopeful that just maybe he wasn’t as bad as my head was telling me.
“Well, he started bringing young demons, both females and males, to the castle. Claiming they’d been orphaned. The whole operation made him look like a hero, taking in these kids who had nobody else, giving them a better life than they’d had with their parents.”
My mouth went completely dry.
“One night, I went with him to retrieve this girl who was probably ten. We arrived at her village, and she’d been living with a neighbor and their son, who was around the same age.
These kids, they were gifted. Two girls were outside playing when we walked up, and Asrael had chuckled when they turned to face us, and they had the exact same features.
The boy was able to shapeshift already. At his age?
That was unprecedented.” He took a deep breath, and I just knew that this story was going to change everything.
“The girl was a sleepwalker who didn’t know her capabilities.
She’d been able to plant ideas and actually warp the reality of the dreamer, even once they’d awakened.
Asrael had been so excited when he learned she'd unknowingly caused the village elder to believe he was being hunted by shadow creatures.
The poor man had gone days without sleep, terrified to close his eyes.
When he finally did, he woke up swinging a blade at invisible enemies.
He ended up killing his own wife, convinced she was one of the shadow creatures coming for him. "
The room spun. My fingers dug into the sheets beneath me as bile rose in my throat.
"We took the girl that night," Jasper continued, his voice hollow. "She went willingly. She was excited. Asrael had promised her a place where she could learn to control her abilities. A place where she'd be understood."
"And the boy?" The question scraped past my lips, already knowing where this was going.
"We left him with his parents. The girl cried for him when we left, but Asrael promised her she’d see him again."
I couldn't breathe. The parallel was too clear, too painful.
"Two weeks later," Jasper said, his eyes met mine with an intensity that froze the blood in my veins, "we returned to that village. The boy's home had burned to the ground three days prior. Both parents dead. Convenient timing, wouldn't you say?"
A strangled sound escaped me. My parents.
Jasper hesitated, and I could see it on his face. He didn’t want to tell me anything else. It was only going to get worse. The realization I was slowly coming to, he had already reached and accepted.
“I have to know,” I begged, eyes wild. “Please, tell me. What happened next?”
He took a shuddering breath and studied my face, looking for what? I had no idea, I just needed to fucking know. Resignation settled across his features, and he nodded once before beginning.
“I think all of this started when Ashland began showing all of his strength, and Asrael was jealous of Khol getting to train him as his own. Khol and Ace had this connection between them, even though they weren’t blood, they were bonded."
Ashland had been raised by Khol the Cold?
"Anyways, the boy was distraught, catatonic with grief.
Asrael played the savior again, swooping in to rescue this newly orphaned child with extraordinary abilities.
" Jasper's jaw clenched. "That was the moment I knew something wasn't right.
I started watching him more closely after that.
Counting dates. Tracking patterns. It became clear these weren't coincidences.”
My chest heaved as memories flashed through my mind. Asrael finding me, bringing me to Montague Industries. His gentle hands as he guided my training, his proud smile as I mastered each new skill. All built on a foundation of blood. My parents' blood.
"He killed them." The words fell from my lips like stones. "He killed my parents."
"Palmer—"