Page 10

“Trying to find someone who doesn’t know she’s being hunted,” I correct him, my voice tight.

I place my hands on the rim of the basin. It requires a focal point, a piece of the soul one wishes to find. Without a physical token of Cassia’s, I must use the next best thing: the most potent memory I have of her, the moment our essences felt the pull.

I close my eyes, forcing my mind back to the Infernal Palace, to the moments after they signed the accords a few days ago. I see the torch-lit courtyard, the oppressive air of Hell. And high above, on a balcony carved like a gaping maw, is her. Her gaze had found mine across the vast expanse, and I remember the jolt, the silent unity that spoke of longing and loss. I focus on the phantom ache that bloomed in my chest as she had turned away, the wound I couldn’t name for a love I couldn’t remember. I pour that memory—the pain, the recognition, the inexplicable pull of her soul against mine—into the basin.

The moonstone shimmers, the surface clouding. It swirls with the ghost of her silent nod and the shadow of the empty balcony she had left behind. Then clears and opens a void.

My hands tremble, but I turn my focus to a more practical desperation now. Sera. I can still find Sera. I send a pulse through the network, a coded query to the watchers in the city and the contacts still loyal to me in the mortal realm.

The silence that answers is more terrifying than Cassia’s absence.

“Asset Seraphine Vex is not at her residence,” a new watcher assigned to Savannah says. “Not at her place of work. She has vanished, sir.”

Jareth stands beside me, his face grim. “Vanished? Like…went-for-a-latte vanished or dragged-screaming-into-another-dimension vanished?”

“I hope it is not the second one,” I say, my voice raw.

We stand in that sterile, humming room, the forged edict still glowing before us.

They have set the board. The pieces are moving through shadows we cannot see. And I, Heaven’s loyal guardian, am catastrophically behind. The game has already begun.

It’s not a fall but a quiet surrender that leads to Hell. The air thins, growing cold and heavy with the weight of unspoken history. I move through the veil, a silent tear in reality, while driven by a dread so profound it has become its own fuel.

Michael’s forged edict burns in my mind, a brand of betrayal. I can no longer trust the orders of Heaven, not when its highest commander moves his own daughters like pawns.

I have to know what Lucifer knows. He was there at Cassia’s trial, his vote the final nail in her coffin. Some foreign instinct is telling me he holds the answers.

So, here I am.

The Crimson Keep greets me with its familiar, oppressive grandeur. Obsidian walls, carved with the tormented histories of damnation, rise into a gloom that swallows the light of the hellfire sconces. The air is thick with the faint sulfurous tang of power and the scent of something colder. As I navigate the labyrinthine corridors, a strange, unnatural stillness leads me toward the palace’s ancient heart. I round a final basalt pillar and freeze.

Before me stands the monolithic doors of the keeper’s archive. Some pull in my chest made me walk all the way to the far end of this wing. I did not know this was where the archive is. But it is not the doors that hold me captive. It is the figures slumped against them. Tribunal enforcers, at least a dozen of them. Their celestial armor has dimmed, their bodies entombed in an unnatural slumber. Their celestial light—the very essence of their beings—is slowly being siphoned from them. Faint golden threads drawn from their bodies and feeding into the ancient stones.

“A beautiful, terrible symmetry, wouldn’t you agree?” a velvet rasp asks.

I turn, my hand instinctively reaching for the hilt of my blade.

Lucifer stands there, a pillar of shadows and regal amusement. Black and bloodred robes cloak him while a ring of lightless gold encircles one horned brow. His fiery eyes glint. “They came for her, of course.” He gestures toward the sleeping angels with an elegant, almost lazy hand. “Heaven’s hounds sent to drag her away. But they were too late. And now…they serve a different purpose.”

“Which is?” I demand, my voice tight.

“Feeding,” he says, a cruel smile playing on his lips. “The archive locks its doors when a soul unburdens itself, and it demands absolute privacy. No one enters. No one leaves. Anything that presses against its wards becomes tribute.”

Cassia. She is there. Trapped. The realization is a cold stone in my gut. I take a step forward. “I’m going in.”

His laugh is low and dark. “You misunderstand, Guardian. The archive is a middle space, a law unto itself. When it seals for a visitor, no one can get in until the confession is complete. I do not know who is within, but they are quite occupied.”

Before I can answer, the stone floor beneath my feet trembles, and a violent phantom agony rips through my chest. It is not a physical pain but more profound, a psychic scream that echoes in the very marrow of my bones. I stagger, a hand flying to my sternum, and a choked gasp tears from my throat. The pain is sharp and intimate, a ghost of a sensation.

Lucifer’s smile vanishes. His fiery eyes narrow, his amusement replaced by a calculating intensity. He watches me with the keen interest of a scholar observing a rare reaction. “You feel that, Guardian?” he murmurs, his voice a silken blade. “That is the sound of a key turning in a lock you forgot you possessed.”

I stare at him, my breaths coming in ragged pulls. The phantom pain still echoes through me. I straighten, pushing the unsettling feeling aside. “This is your fault,” I growl, my gaze accusatory. “You condemned her at the trial. I was there. Your vote was the one that condemned her. Why?”

He tilts his head, and his smirk returns, colder now. He takes a step closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “For this exact reason,” he says, his gaze flicking to my chest, to the place where my soul is still screaming her name. “For what you are currently feeling.”

The cryptic words hang in the air, a truth I am not yet ready to understand. The angelic essence in my veins burns, not with holy fire but with frustration and a terrible confusion. Enraged, confused, and unnerved by a feeling I have no name for, I turn and storm away, his low chuckle following me down the hall.

I stride through the keep’s oppressive grandeur, Lucifer’s mocking chuckle echoing behind me. The phantom pain in my chest has subsided, leaving a hollow ache and questions. What lock? What key? His riddles twist around the cold certainty of Michael’s betrayal, tangling into a knot I cannot unravel.