But one month was better than burning today.
She straightened her shoulders and met Edmund's gaze without flinching.
"One month it is."
His smile suggested he knew exactly what she was thinking and found it amusing. "Wise choice. Though I should mention: escape attempts will result in immediate execution. No second chances."
The urge to roll her eyes was almost overwhelming. "Got it."
His eyebrow rose.
"Take her to the cells," he told the guard captain. "Maximum security. No visitors, no exceptions. We can't risk losing such a valuable tribute."
As the guards hauled her toward the door, Edmund's voice followed her out.
"You're the Death Lords’ problem now."
His tone suggested he thought that would be the end of the problem. That she'd walk into death's realm and disappear like every other tribute before her.
He had no idea who he was dealing with.
III.
DANTE
The Throne of the Forsaken rose from the dais like a monument to death itself. Massive ribs arched overhead like cathedral vaults, curving inward to form a canopy of bone that seemed to breathe in the flickering light. A towering spine formed the back, each vertebra the size of a man's head, while armrests were hewn from femurs so large they could only have belonged to giants or things that had never been human at all. The entire structure gleamed in the twilight, fifteen feet of polished bone that commanded the hall.
But it was the base that drew the eye. Thousands of smaller bones woven together in patterns suggesting supplication. Hands stretching upward, frozen mid-grasp, as if the dead had clawed their way toward the throne and been trapped reaching.
The throne room stretched beyond the reach of torchlight, bone beams arching overhead and disappearing into shadows that moved with their own purpose. The walls were lined with skulls—hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, arranged in neat rows from floor to ceiling. Cold blue flames burned in their eye sockets, casting the hall in ghostly light that made the shadows dance. Some of the skulls had too many eye sockets. Some had jaws that hung slightly open, as if frozen mid-scream.
Columns of black marble rose between the skull-lined walls, carved with names of the forsaken dead in scripts that predated human memory. The floor was a mosaic of teeth. Yellowed ivory and bone-white fitted together in spiraling patterns that pulled the eye toward the distant throne. They crunched softly underfoot, no matter how lightly one walked.
Dante sat within this monument to death, black-gloved hands resting on bone armrests while his shadows pooled around the throne's base. Dark extensions of his will that seemed to merge with the reaching hands carved below.
No one approached closer than twelve feet. His courtiers, bound souls in court dress that had long since ceased to follow mortal fashions, formed their usual semicircle. Translucent but solid, they served without hesitation and never, ever tried to get closer to their lord.
They'd learned. Eventually, they all learned.
"The soul of Isabel Graves seeks judgment," his chamberlain announced from the great doors.
A young woman stepped forward, her dress once fine but now stained with soot and blood. She knelt exactly at the boundary, but her shoulders didn't shake like most. When she lifted her head, her eyes held the hollow darkness he recognized: the look of someone who had stared into the abyss until it stared back.
"Speak."
Silence fell across the hall. Every soul present held whatever breath they still possessed, and frost began forming on the nearest torches.
"My lord, I thought I was clever." Her voice didn’t shake. "My family owed debts we couldn't pay. The moneylender said he'd forgive everything if I spent one night in the old Moore manor. Just one night. Prove it wasn't haunted."
The shadows around Dante's throne writhed.
"I lasted six hours." Her voice cracked. "The things that lived there... they didn't kill me quickly. They fed on me first. Made me watch them take pieces of my soul while I screamed for help that never came. I died begging for it to end."
Terror. Despair. Cursed death. She belonged here.
Dante had seen it a thousand times. The cruelty that turned ordinary deaths into forsaken ones. Someone always profited from manufacturing despair.
"The moneylender knew," she whispered. "He'd sent eight others before me. The manor needed feeding, and desperate people cost nothing."
