He sat across from me. The chair held him the way the landscape held him—barely, with visible effort, the iron frame groaning once beneath his weight before settling. His forearms rested on the table. The sigils on his chest had dimmed to a steady amber glow beneath his dark skin, visible in the silver light like veins of ore in coal face. His eyes found mine.
"This is the Sovereign-Kept contract." No preamble. No easing in. Words laid on the table like tools. "It is a binding magical agreement. Not symbolic. Not optional. Not breakable. Every clause spoken over this parchment becomes law—infernal law, woven into the structure of this realm. A violation causes physical pain to the violator and destabilises the bond itself."
He placed his hand flat on the dark surface, and the sigils nearest his palm flared gold. The light traveled outward in a wave, illuminating each column, each angular symbol, and the parchment hummed—a subsonic vibration I felt in my teeth and my wrist and the place behind my sternum where the bond lived.
“As I explain the clauses to you, they will become law. But this will fade if you don’t sign. The decision is yours, do you understand?”
“I do.”
"Good. My obligations first."
He spoke them the way he spoke everything—declarative, stripped to bone.
"I will provide for your safety. No being in Infernum will harm you while I exist. If I fail in this, the bond will extract the cost from my body, not yours."
The first column of sigils blazed. Gold light, bright enough to cast shadows, sinking into the parchment like ink absorbing into cloth. I watched the magic take his words and make them permanent.
"I will provide shelter, sustenance, and comfort. Your chambers are yours. Your needs will be met before my own."
Another flare. Another clause sealed.
"I will not touch you without your permission."
The sigils burned so bright I had to look away. When I looked back, his hand was still flat on the parchment, the ember-veins in his forearm pulsing in time with the magic, and his expression hadn't changed. Stone. Patient. Absolute.
"I will not command you in matters outside your wellbeing. My authority extends to your care. Not to your will."
Gold light. The parchment humming.
"I will defend your life with my own. This is not a negotiable clause. It does not require your consent. It simply is."
The final flare was the brightest—blinding, momentary, a flash that left afterimages swimming behind my eyelids. When it faded, his side of the contract was complete. Six columns of burning gold sigils, each one a chain he'd forged and locked around his own wrists, and he sat across from me with his hands open on the table and his jaw set and no indication that what he'd just done was anything other than obvious.
He pushed the parchment toward me. The dark surface slid across the stone table, sigils glowing, and stopped at my fingertips.
"Now yours." His voice was low, steady, the same tone he used for everything that mattered. "What do you need from me?"
The question hit the center of my chest.
As though the answer were mine to give. As though anyone had ever asked.
I opened my mouth. The words were there before I thought them—worn smooth, frictionless, the path of least resistance my tongue had been traveling for twenty-two years.
"Whatever you think is best."
He didn't move. His hands stayed flat. His expression didn't flicker.
"That's not an answer."
I tried again.
"I don't mind. Really. Whatever the standard terms are—"
"Still not an answer."
Same tone. Same words. No irritation. No impatience. No escalation of any kind, which was somehow worse than all of those things, because I knew how to navigate escalation. I'd been navigating escalation since before I could spell the word. What I couldn't navigate was stillness. A man who simply sat and waited and refused to fill the space I was leaving for him.
"I'm easy, honestly." The smile came with it—automatic, warm, the one that saidI don't want to be a bother. "I'm not picky about—"
