My voice came out steadier than I expected. The clinical woman, the one who cataloged and assessed and kept her hands from shaking by turning everything into data, had taken the wheel.
His mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "It's more accurate to say Hell is a bad translation of where you are. Not an afterlife. A realm. Parallel to yours. The old stories got fragments right and everything else wrong."
I filed it. Moved on. Because if I stopped to feel the full weight of what he was telling me—that I was in a parallel dimension, that Hell was real, that I'd been pulled through a hole in reality by a force I couldn't name—I would collapse, and I couldn't afford to collapse. Collapsing was a luxury. Data was a lifeline. Keep asking questions. Keep chewing.
"Why am I here?"
The muscle in his jaw jumped. Just once.
"You are my fated mate." Each word placed with the precision of a man laying stones. "A soul-bond. Older than me. Older than this realm. It was dormant. My father's decree activated it. The Rite of Ascension—a competition for the throne of Hell. Each of his sons must bond with a human mate. The bond pulled you here."
Mate. Fated. Bond.
The words stacked on top of each other like cards in a trick I couldn't see the bottom of. My hand tightened on the bread. The crust cracked.
"It will only complete if you surrender willingly." His voice dropped on the word surrender—not suggestive, not threatening, but weighted. Heavy with something I couldn't parse. "I cannot force it."
A pause. The fire breathed.
"I will not force it."
Cannot and will not. Two different sentences. Two different promises.
"Until you decide," he said, "you are under my protection. Nothing in Infernum will touch you."
The way he said it. With absolute certainty.
“If you choose to submit to me, then there will be a contract. Will you hear its terms?”
“No! I’m not submitting. I’m not even hearing the terms.”
Then he stopped.
“That is your choice and I respect it.”
Something charged. He was looking at me with those molten eyes, and for the first time since he'd dropped my hand in the entrance hall, his expression shifted. The hard line of his mouth loosened. Not softened—that was too gentle a word for what happened to his face. Opened, maybe. Like a door that had been sealed for a very long time developing a crack.
"I can feel your wrath."
The words landed in my body before they landed in my brain.
"It's in you." His voice had gone quieter. Not gentle—he didn't seem to have gentle in his register—but low, and careful, and precise. "Banked so deep you've forgotten it's there. But I am the Lord of Wrath. I feel anger the way you feel a pulse."
He looked at me. Through me. Into the place where the nameless thing lived, the enormous formless pressure that sat on my chest at night, the thing that ground my teeth and locked my jaw and sent me to an ER that found nothing wrong because the thing that was wrong didn't show up on a CT scan.
"Yours is screaming."
Nobody had ever said that to me before. No one had ever said: you are angry.
My throat closed. My eyes burned. I stared at him across the heavy table, and I had no words. None.
He looked away first.
The Lord of Wrath, the creature who had torn the sky open and killed with one hand and commanded a fortress of black stone, broke eye contact with a woman in a t-shirt and turned his face toward the fire.
The muscle in his jaw was still jumping. His hands, at his sides, were fists again. But his voice, when he spoke, was very quiet.
"Finish the bread."
