We’re ghosts. Myths. The kind of thing people tell stories about but don’t actually believe in.
Which is exactly how we’ve survived this long.
I close the laptop, scrub my hands over my face. My skin feels gritty, unwashed. I haven’t showered since yesterday morning. I haven’t slept more than a few hours. My body is running on caffeine and adrenaline and the sheer stubborn refusal to break down before I’ve figured out what the hell I’m supposed to do.
Think, Raven. Think.
Gramms served two years. That means she had direct experience with at least two of the Houses. If only I had her notes, her journals, her records. I blink, remembering the two years where it had been impossible to reach her. She called but never invited me over, never asked about my clients. She went quiet, and I thought maybe she’d decided to stop sin eating and settle into her cottage.
But then she was gone, and she left nothing behind except a cottage full of furniture I sold to pay for the funeral, and a debt I’m now obligated to fulfill.
No notes. No warnings. No instruction manual for How To Survive Seven Years of Supernatural Servitude Without Losing Your Mind.
Just seven letters and three days.
I look at them again, spread across the table like playing cards in a game I don’t know the rules to.
“What are you willing to sacrifice to stay free?”
Gramms’ voice in my head, cold and sharp as January wind. One of her lessons, delivered over tea in her kitchen while I was still learning what it meant to be a sin eater. I was eighteen, maybe nineteen. Had just broken my first contract and was still shaking from it.
“Freedom isn’t free,”she’d said, watching me with those pale gray eyes that missed nothing.“Everything costs something. The question you have to ask yourself, Raven, is: what are you willing to sacrifice to stay free?”
“Nothing,”I’d said. Young and stupid and convinced I could do this work without paying the price.“I won’t sacrifice anything.”
She’d smiled then. Thin and bitter and sad.“Then you’ve already lost.”
I didn’t understand what she meant. Not then.
I’m starting to now.
Freedom isn’t on the table anymore. The only question is what I’m willing to sacrifice to keep Luna safe. To keep her in her dorm room studying for biology exams and texting me about cute boys and living the normal life I’ve never had.
The answer, I realize with a clarity which feels like breaking glass, is simple: everything.
I’ll sacrifice seven years. I’ll sacrifice my autonomy, my safety, my sanity if that’s what it takes. I’ll walk into the House of Gold and serve the angel of greed if it means Luna stays in the light.
Because that’s what love is, isn’t it? The willingness to walk into darkness so someone else doesn’t have to.
Gramms taught me that, too, though she never said it out loud. She just lived it.
I just wish I knew why she bound herself to the angels to begin with. She’d warned me against it again and again.
But maybe, maybe, she did it for the same reason I’m about to.
To protect someone she loved.
The thought sits heavy in my chest, uncomfortable and unwelcome. I’ve spent the last six months being angry at Gramms. Angry that she died and left me alone. Angry that she raised me to be a sin eater and then disappeared before teaching me how to survive it.
But what if shewasprotecting me? What if the debt was never meant to pass to me? What if she thought she’d live long enough to serve all seven years herself?
Inherited debts are ironclad. Blood calls to blood. The granddaughter inherits the grandmother’s obligations.
It’s one of the oldest laws in the supernatural world, etched so deep into the fabric of how things work that even angels and demons respect it. If someone wanted to force my hand, wanted to compel me into service, killing Gramms and invoking the inherited debt would do it.
The question is: why?
Why me specifically? I’m good at what I do, yeah. Eighteen years of breaking contracts, forty-three, well, forty-four now, successful purges. But I’m not the best. There are older sin eaters. More experienced ones. More powerful bloodlines.
