A dark chuckle slithers through the void, curling at the edges of my mind like a hand reaching out of a grave.
“Shall we discuss why I summoned you here, Miss Skye?”he asks.“There are quite a few crimes of yours to go over.”
Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit.
I try to swallow. Or, I would if I had a physical throat. Feels like my imaginary one just bobbed anyway. I attempt to move. Speak. Run screaming into the darkness. But nope! Absolutely not happening. I’m locked in place, frozen beneath the sheer weight of his judgment. And he knows it. He knows I’ve got nothing—no excuses, no clever escape routes, no hail mary plea bargains. He knows everything.
Because I’m guilty.
His presence presses down on me, vast, infinite, a gravity well of divine disapproval.
“Your first failure,”he croons, almost amused.“A soul, lost.”
The void flickers, and I see it. A memory. That first soul I couldn’t reap. The one that slipped through my fingers. The one I reached for, scythe ready—only for the men to stop me.
I stare. My brain scrambles for some kind of justification, something to say in my defense. But what is there?
I got tricked back then. Trapped. Bound. Played like a goddamn fool.
But that was only the beginning.
Death hums.
“That should have been your first warning, should it not? A mistake a Grim Reaper should not make. But instead of caution, what did you do, Skye?”
The memory shifts. Twists. My stomach—which I no longer have, yet somehow still manages to plummet—knows what’s coming before he even says it.
“Your second failure,”he continues.“A soul, saved—when it was meant to die.”
Right. That one. The pool lady.
The scene unravels before me like a bad flashback montage. That night. The girl in the water. A life that was supposed to end. I hadn’t stopped it, not directly, but I sure as hell hadn’t done my job either. I just… stood there. Like a very decorative, very useless grim specter while Cassian, Nathaniel, and Talon pulled her out. I had known—I had known—I was screwing up the cosmic order in real time. And yet.
And yet.
The darkness tightens around me.
There’s nowhere I could hide from it.
“And then,”Death muses,“you made a different kind of choice.”
The next memory slams into me like a brick to the face. A different soul. Not mine to keep. Not mine to reap! But did that stop me? No. I participated. Hell, I was a key player.
The Candy Maker.
Silence stretches long enough for my mistakes to sink, deep and gnawing, into whatever remains of my soul.
“You stole what was not yours to take,”he says, and this time, the amusement is gone.“You broke the balance. Again.”
And somehow—somehow—we are still not done.
“And what of the one you condemned?”
Another scene unfurls, dragging my stomach down into the abyss with it. The flickering form of the Grim Reaper who had stood next to me. The one who had waited. Suffered. Obeyed the rules. The woman who had been forced to remain a GrimReaper, shackled to the system, waiting for her one chance at revenge.
The justice she was owed.
And we never let her have it.
