It is petty. It is infuriating. It is everything he wants.
Bastion collapses onto the couch with a grunt, stretching out like he owns the room. I follow, rubbing my face, trying to scrub away that restless hunger. The house shifts then, subtle as a fracture spreading underfoot. My hand finds Bastion’s arm and I go still. He turns toward me and understands without words.
Something is wrong.
The windows explode inward like a throat being torn open. Crystal rains down, glittering and deadly. Three figures land in the front hall with the precision of hunters. Their clothes are black as fresh ink, armored with obsidian plates that drink the light. Sigils crawl over those plates like living scars. Their eyes are pits of tar. The air sours around them.
Zepharion’s guard. Guards of a Warden of Hell.
One of them steps forward, taller than the others, and measures us with a glance meant to count our teeth. His voice is flat and polite enough to be terrifying. “We are here for the girl,” he says. “Hand her over and we will leave without harming you.”
Bastion laughs a low, dangerous laugh that makes the lead flinch. The sound is a small victory. Most demons know who we are. Together we are something the lesser kind pray not to meet. Power does not only sit in crowns. It walks in muscle and bone and in the quiet certainty of men who have been forged in worse fires than this.
But a fight with a Warden is not a thing to welcome. I cross my arms and keep my face neutral because I still believe there is profit in restraint. “There’s no need for violence,” I say. “You can take her and leave. This need not become a war.”
The silence that follows feels like judgment. Behind me a breath sharpens into a presence I can feel more than hear.
Lillien.
Her scent changes. Hurt and betrayal and disbelief curl into the air. She looks at me in a way that makes the world go thin. I had betrayed her. Heaven and its rules had told me I would. I had done it anyway because I had thought it necessary, because I wanted to keep us safe, because the math of survival is ugly.
Before words can gather into anything useful, Deimos steps forward. He is in sweatpants and looks like a man who has slept through the apocalypse and remains unconcerned. Lillien trails behind him in his oversized shirt, barefoot, still smelling of last night. Deimos’s lips tilt into a smirk and his violet eyes shine with a cruel, easy amusement that sets the air on edge.
“What was that?” he asks, voice low and mocking.
The lead stammers, confidence unthreading where Deimos stands. “Zepharion ordered us to retrieve the girl,” he says atlast, regaining a sliver of composure. “He does not wish to start a war, but you do not want to anger him.”
At the name Lillien flinches. I feel something new in her then, a tremor I have never seen. She is not afraid of us. Sheisafraid ofhim.
Bastion rises from the couch like a creature waking, eager and sharp. “I think Idowant to anger him,” he mutters.
Violence detonates. The lead lunges for Lillien and Deimos moves like a blade. He slams into the attacker and sends him flying through the dining room. Wood explodes, blood arcs, a wet gurgle punctuates the air. Bastion meets the second demon with a thunderous clash, fists slamming into flesh and bone. The third charges me and I do not waste breath.
I sidestep his blade. Amateur. My sword materializes in my hand with a hum of holy heat. I drive it into his ribs, hard and true, and the world makes a sound like skin being peeled from bone. The soul slips from the body with the awful clarity of a thing unstitched. He gurgles, eyes wide, and falls with a dull, final thud.
Bastion is a wrecking thing. He grabs the second attacker and tears the throat out in a single, savage motion. Vertebrae catch the light like ivory. Blood paints him and he inhales it like fuel. The sound is wet and terrible and for a moment there is no room in the world for anything but the business of killing.
It is over in minutes. Deimos stands astride the last fallen demon, blade at his throat, the house a ruin of glass and splintered wood and gore. He yanks the demon’s hair and leans close, voice ice. “Tell Zepharion,” he says, and his tone carries the promise of worse things, “that if he wants her, he should come and claim her himself.”
He scores the skin shallowly to draw blood; the demon screams and sobs and then, like any animal with a scent of death on him, he stumbles away into the night.
Silence falls, heavy and stunned. Bastion wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and flexes his fingers as if the violence fed him. “Well,” he says simply, “that was fun.”
Deimos straightens. He shakes his hand through his hair, blood on his palms and blood under his nails. “Fucking fantastic,” he says, and the words are a grin and a razor.
I look at Lillien. She does not tremble. She does not cry. She watches, taking the scene into herself with a cold, almost clinical curiosity.
When her eyes find mine they are flat. “You would have given me to him,” she says softly.
I do not answer. There is nothing my voice can say that would unmake what she has seen. She already knows the calculus that led me to speak the words I did. She will not forget. I can feel the memory like a brand sinking into her. We have not healed anything tonight. We have only revealed the lines each of us is willing to cross.
TWENTY-NINE
The betrayal cuts like a blade. It isn’t a single thing; it’s a slow unspooling that reveals itself in the way Cassiel said those words, casual as handing over a trinket.
I know I don’t belong in their world yet. I know I’m intruding, entering a house that’s already mapped itself around other people’s lives. Cassiel has always been the closed one of them—quiet, distant—and still, I never thought he would trade me away so easily. His tone made me feel small, like something to be moved between hands without thought, like I am not one of theirs.
A hot, sharp sting coils through my chest. I swallow down the sting because there is no time to linger in the wound. None of us have time. My whole life tilts in the slow, uncertain arc of a question I can hardly force into voice.
