Deimos stops pacing. He turns and the room feels colder for it. His eyes are red fire under dark lashes. There is murder folded into the look he gives us.
“We cannot just talk about getting in,” he says. “We need to figure out how to get the fucking necklace off her.”
The sentence lands hard. Silence snaps into place.
“She is fading,” he continues, voice lower and more dangerous now. “That thing around her throat is cutting her off from us. From herself. If we cannot sever it, if killing him does not break it…”
He does not finish. He does not need to. We all hear the same impossible if.
Cassiel leans on the table, jaw clenched until the muscles stand out. “Then that is our priority. Find the source of the enchantment. The caster. Someone in his court knows how it is woven.”
“Enough,” I cut in. “We need to get into the kingdom first.”
Deimos slams his fist into the map and the papers skate. “I know that?—”
The air changes. Not a breeze, not a shift, but a pressure, like the world holding its breath. Something ancient arrives without knocking. One heartbeat it is empty. The next, he is there.
Lucifer does not enter. He appears as if the floor itself opened to him. Tall, immaculate, smirking in that way that says he has always been owed the performance. His boots do not touch the stone. Smoke clings to his shoulders like a cloak.
No greeting. No preamble needed.
“I brought a gift,” he says, voice velvet over broken glass. He snaps his fingers and a scroll slides across the war table with a hiss. The wax seal burns violet. Wrong in a way that sets the teeth on edge.
We do not move.
Lucifer sighs, theatrical and bored. “Really, you three are no fun. I expected a little more fight. Or at least a clever insult.”
Deimos growls. Cassiel’s fingers twitch as if his blade wants to be real in his hand. I stare him down. He grins wider. “Youhave until sundown,” he says, pointing at the scroll. “After that, Zepharion will complete what he intends. Marriage and binding and all the infernal niceties. Once she is his, you will have very few options left.”
I taste iron. Deimos looks like he might split the room open with his hands. But Lucifer pauses at the threshold, eyes old and bright. “I cannot wait to see how the fight plays out,” he says, then he is gone. No smoke trail, no flourish. Just the echo of brimstone and amusement.
Left to the scroll and the seal, we stare. The wax thrums like a heart.
Cassiel is the first to speak after the silence stretches. “We strike during the wedding,” he says, voice low, final.
Deimos nods once, sharp. I push off the table, the animal in me cracking impatient. “If we accept an invitation, it is a trap,” I point out. “It puts us where he wants us. Surrounded. On display.”
“Of course it is a trap,” Cassiel says. His calm is a blade. “That is the point. But it is the only opening Lucifer’s interference gives us. The scroll bypasses outer wards. It grants us access without sounding the entire court.”
Deimos does not take his eyes off the glowing seal. “It does not change the plan. It gives a window. One moment. That is all.”
I pace, energy coiled. “He will show her. Flaunt her. Make the moment obscene. And then what? Bury us under a hundred witnesses? Use our presence to seal the rite?”
Cassiel’s jaw tightens. “He could try to use the ritual to bind more than her body. He could twist our connections into leashes. Turn what ties us to her into anchors for his control.”
The thought tastes of rot.
“We must break the ritual before it binds,” Deimos says simply. “If the vow is spoken and the mark set, we get one shot. If he marks her…”
He does not finish. None of us need him to.
I rub my thumb over the ring she half-asleep kissed one night, the memory a small, hot thing against my skin. Fury feeds me. Strategy sharpens it.
“I say we let him think he has won,” I say. “Let the ceremony start. Let him make his show. The moment he reaches for her, when he lifts his blade or pronounces the vow, we take her back.”
Cassiel's face is an unlit forge. “We will need to shatter the wards at exactly the right second. Any mistake and the bindings close.”
“We get one shot,” Deimos says, voice a promise and a threat. “One opening. If he marks her, there may be no undoing it.”
