He leaned forward, all dangerous elegance: skin the color of burnished earth catching firelight, hair swept back to reveal a face too perfect for mortality, eyes molten amber that seemed to peel me apart. The scent of him rolled over me—cardamom, sandalwood, something faintly carnal.
“Now, where were we?” Damien poured coffee into his delicate porcelain cup, the stream of dark liquid smooth and controlled. “I believe you two were processing your shock over how I knew you were hunting a man named Edward Fitzgerald,si?”
I felt Violet’s hand tighten in mine, heard her breathing change—faster, shallower. Her heart hammering in her chest sounded like it was trying to break free.
She wanted Edward dead. Needed it the way I’d once needed warmth in the tundra, needed it with a desperation that eclipsed reason and self-preservation. Vengeance was her north star, the fixed point around which everything else orbited.
If Damien was offering her a path to Edward’s throat—
Fuck.
She’d take it. Of course, she would. She’d make a deal with this demon wearing human skin, would bind herself to him with obligations and boons, and walk straight into whatever trap he’d carefully constructed.
Because revenge mattered more than safety.
Because some scales needed balancing, even if it cost everything.
I’d spent fifty years learning when to run, when to fight, when to make deals with devils. And every instinct I possessed was screaming that this was the kind of bargain you didn’t walk away from. The kind that followed you like a shadow, collected its due with interest, left you wondering when the other shoe would finally drop.
But Violet?
Violet was already leaning forward, her voice steady despite the chaos I could hear in her pulse. “You can deliver him to me?”
And there it was.
The moment she stopped askingifwe should deal with this demon and started negotiatingterms.
I watched Damien’s smile widen, watched those golden eyes gleam with satisfaction as he sipped his coffee. “But of course I can,mi gatita. And I am confident that I already know the answer to this next question, but Idowant to hear it directly from your lips.” He paused and sipped his coffee. “Whydoes someone gifted by the God of Time want to find Edward Fitzgerald?”
God of Time?
Things were still hazy—my mind struggling to catch up with being resurrected, with the golden door I saw, with Death herself releasing me, with Jules’s sudden murder—and Violet answered before I could, her voice steady where my own was not.
“Vengeance,” was all she said.
The word thrummed through the room like a loosed arrow. It struck me in the chest as well—an echo, a kinship I couldn’t unfeel. Her heartbeat spiked. I heard it clearly, hammering against her ribs.
Damien clicked his tongue, amused. The sound was sharper than it should have been, almost metallic. “Mi gatita. . . how primitive.” His smile was too perfect for how dangerous he truly was. “You seek vengeance upon a man for pain he rendered upon you in a different life?”
He knows too much. How does he know about Violet’s rebirth?
I tensed, bare skin prickling with cold despite the heat from the fireplace. My eyes moved to Violet, and I saw her hand clench—knuckles white, tendons standing out like bowstrings. The fracture showed behind her resolve, hairline cracks in stone about to break. She glanced at me quickly, searching for something, then turned back to him.
“Both lives are me,” she said, voice taut as wire. “The joy I’ve experienced in this life does not erase the pain he caused me in my previous life.”
My heart hammered against my sternum. “Violet, we can surely find another way to get to Edward.” The words were fire on my tongue, ash in my throat. “HekilledJules.”
Her breath hitched—I heard it catch, heard the wet sound of tears she was holding back. “I know he did.” She turned to me, and her eyes held a haunted shadow I recognized. This was a side of her I had barely glimpsed, seen glimmers of beyond the youth she portrayed. She looked like someone who had seen death countless times. Someone, I realized, like me. “But I have to hear him out, Rowan. If he can get me closer to Edward—”
“At what cost?” I asked.
“Atanycost. Part of me feels as if,” she paused and struggled for the right words, “as if killing him is the reason I am here. The reason I was given this second chance.”
I squeezed her hand. “Violet, you do not know that.”
“And neither do you,” she snapped. “How could you? You know so much about this supernatural shit we’re in,” she said as she waved her hand around the room. “But you don’t know how or why I was reborn. It had to be for a reason. Just. . . forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”
Damien chuckled, the sound resonating in his chest in strange harmonics. His two hearts beat out of sync with each other, creating a rhythm that hurt my head if I focused on it too long. “I imagine he would understand better than most. He is, afterall, grappling with his own form of reincarnation.”
