My brothers would rage. They would scheme. They would resist, negotiate, manipulate, and look for loopholes in a decree that had no loopholes because it had been spoken in the language that preceded loopholes. They would do what they always did: treat law as a suggestion shaped by whoever had the most power.
I would not.
I obeyed law. I always had. It was the single bright line that separated me from the mindless destruction my enemies—and some of my brothers—accused me of being. I was not chaos. I waswrath, and wrath served justice, and justice required law, and law required obedience even when it burned.Especiallywhen it burned.
I looked at my father on his fading throne, and he looked back at me.
He knew I would obey. He was counting on it.
I hated him for that. I hated that he was right.
The wrathfire in the floor's cracks dimmed to embers, then went dark.
I would obey.
Ileftwithoutspeakingtothem. Not a word to Pride, who was already composing his next argument against a decree that could not be argued against. Not a glance at Greed, whose calculations I could practically hear clicking behind his golden eyes like coins dropping into a vault. I walked out of the Throne room the way I'd walked in — upright, burning, alone — and the obsidian doors sealed behind me with a sound like a tomb closing.
My archdemons fell into step at the threshold.
"Leave me."
Two words. The tone did the rest. They peeled away without a sound, without a question, because they had served me long enough to know the difference between the anger I wielded and the anger that wielded me.
The Spite Road opened before me, long and black and mercilessly straight, and I walked it with wrathfire leaking from my boots in faint, molten footprints that cooled to dark glass behind me. I could not contain it. Thirty thousand years of discipline and I could not keep my fire from bleeding through my soles like blood through a bandage. The obsidian surface glowed briefly with each step—gold, then orange, then dark—a trail of diminishing embers marking my passage back toward the Teeth.
A bond. Amate. A human.
The words circled in my skull like carrion birds, and I turned them over with the clinical attention I gave to battle plans.
Someone in my fortress. In the Blackheart Citadel, where every stone had been laid by my command and every hall was calibrated to my heat and my temper. Someone in my war room, my training yard, my chambers. Someonethere, in the space where I slept.
Someone fragile.
The word landed wrong. Not fragile like glass—glass was honest, glass broke cleanly. Fragile like flesh. Warm, mortal flesh that bruised at a touch and broke at a blow and bled out in minutes if you weren't careful, and I had never been careful, had never needed to be careful, had built an entire kingdom on the principle that carefulness was a luxury for demons who couldn't afford to be strong.
I had killed humans. Not many—I was not Gluttony, who consumed indiscriminately, or Greed, who harvested souls like a farmer harvested wheat. But I had killed them. In wars, in border disputes, in the rare times the Veil thinned enough for my soldiers to cross and I led them through. I had been the thing in the darkness that their children whimpered about. I had earned that.
What would I do with a mate?
What would I do with something soft and breakable placed in hands that had only everdestroyed?
The thought cracked something open that I kept locked. Deep. Below the fury, below the discipline, below the identity I had welded shut over thirty thousand years of being exactly what my name demanded.
I remembered her.
Not much. The memory was old—old enough that it predated my capacity for coherent thought, which meant it was more sensation than narrative. Warmth. Not the volcanic heat of the Scourge, not wrathfire, but a different kind of warmth. Softer. The way sunlight felt on the rare occasions I crossed into thehuman world, filtered through atmosphere and clouds and all the gentle things that Infernum lacked. A voice, low and liquid, humming something without words. A hand—small, impossibly small against the side of my head—running fingers over the smooth nubs where my horns had not yet grown.
My mother. The King's Kept. Human. Mortal. Gone.
I remembered the day the warmth stopped. I was too young to understand absence—too newly forged, too raw—but I remembered the shape of it. A space where something had been that was suddenly, permanently empty. And my father, who had contained all seven sins in perfect balance, who had been the most powerful entity in creation, standing in a room that smelled of flowers and saying nothing. Saying nothing for a very long time. And then never speaking of her again.
I shoved the memory down with the same practiced violence I used to collapse unstable mine shafts—controlled detonation, ceiling brought down, passage sealed. Buried. Done. I walked faster, and my wrathfire surged brighter, and the Spite Road glowed in my wake like a line of lava drawn across the dark.
The Teeth rose ahead of me—the ring of jagged obsidian peaks that marked the Scourge's border, stabbing upward into a sky the colour of a bruise split by dry lightning. Home. My kingdom. The volcanic plateau where the air tasted of ozone and iron and everything was exactly as brutal and as honest as I had made it. The ground trembled faintly beneath my approach—the domain recognising its lord, the way it always did, a low vibration through the basalt that was as close to a greeting as stone could manage.
I was nearly through the outer pass when I felt it.
Not pain. Not magic—not in any form I recognised, and I had been steeped in the infernal arts since before I had a name. This was something else. Something that operated below thefrequency of power, below the architecture of sin, in a register I had no vocabulary for.
