His arms tightened around her.
“Together.”
They stood like that, holding each other in the ruined living room, scorch marks still smoking on the floor. She could feel his heartbeat against her cheek, faster than usual, driven by fear rather than exertion.
Then Victor stepped back. His expression had hardened into something she recognized: the look he wore when facing impossible odds. The look that said he’d already calculated every variable and decided to fight anyway.
“The tablet,” he said. “We’ll need it. And we’ll need to find someone in Hell who can get us to Marchosias before midnight.”
“Do you know someone?”
“I know people who know people.” He moved toward his desk, grabbing the tablet, shoving it into a leather bag. “Hell operates on favors and debts. Someone will want something I have. We just have to find them before the clock runs out.”
He paused at the desk, looking at the tablet in his hands. The artifact they’d stolen from the archives. The leverage they’d planned to use against Marchosias.
“This might not be enough anymore,” he said. “We were going to argue your family’s case. Now we’re arguing yours.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Legally? Yes.” He slung the bag over his shoulder. “Your family was bound without informed consent. You bound yourself deliberately. Willingly. The defenses are different.”
“But the underlying fraud is the same. Lilith used Marchosias’s authority without permission.”
“That’s our argument.” He crossed back to her, taking her hand. “Let’s hope it’s enough.”
Ava looked down at their joined hands. Her skin glowed gold where it touched his. The chains pulsed beneath the surface, marking her as claimed, as owned, as something that no longer entirely belonged to herself.
Thirteen hours to save her soul.
She followed Victor toward the elevator, toward the basement, toward the door that led to Hell.
She didn’t look back at the scorch marks on the floor. Didn’t look back at the life she’d just burned away.
There wasn’t time.
CHAPTER 21
The door to Hell was in a sub-basement no blueprint had ever recorded.
Water trickled down walls of roughly cut stone, pooling in depressions worn into bedrock. They’d gone past the building’s foundation three levels ago. Past concrete and rebar, past anything modern. This was Manhattan’s bones: gray stone scarred with quartz that caught the lantern light.
The air tasted stale. The way caves taste when you’re too far from the surface.
Victor’s hand found hers in the darkness. The golden chains beneath her skin pulsed at his touch, not painful, but aware. Like they knew where she was being taken.
Symbols had been carved into the walls. Spirals within spirals. Geometric patterns repeating at impossible scales. The jade pendant lay cold against her chest, competing with the warmth of the chains for her attention.
At the corridor’s end: a door.
Not a door that belonged to this building, or this century. Black wood, cracked like charcoal. Iron bands crossed it, rust flaking where the metal had surrendered to time. No lock.No handle. Just a door that had been here since before New Amsterdam became New York.
Victor stopped a few feet back. He didn’t let go of her hand.
“Last chance.” His voice was low. “We can still find another way. Appeal to the firm. Petition through proper channels.”
“There’s no time.”
“There’s always?—”
