“I’m ready to fight,” she said. “Whatever happens after that, we’ll deal with it together.”
Victor squeezed her hand once. Then they joined the crowd moving toward the Bazaar’s great gates, two small figures in a river of demons, carrying a golden idol and twenty-five years of debt and the desperate hope that sometimes, even in Hell, the right argument could change everything.
CHAPTER 23
The chains pulled harder with every step.
Ava walked toward the massive structure rising from Pandemonium’s heart, every vein in her body glowing gold. Not fading. Not dying.Claimed. The light pulsed in rhythm with something she couldn’t hear: Marchosias’s heartbeat, maybe, or something older.
Victor walked beside her, one hand on her arm, the golden idol tucked inside his jacket. His presence through the bond was a counterweight; not strong enough to break the chains, but enough to keep her moving on her own terms.
The Eternal Bazaar sprawled across the city’s center, towers and walkways defying geometry, packed with demons conducting business that would damn or save souls. At the heart of it all stood the Court of the Merchant Duke: black stone and red glass folding in on itself, stairways leading in directions that shouldn’t exist.
Guards flanked the entrance. Massive demons in masks carved from volcanic glass, weapons crossed to bar the way.
“State your business.”
“Contestant Feng.” Victor’s voice carried the weight of someone who had done this before. “Petitioning to contest a substitution before formal acceptance.”
The guards’ eyes went to the chains glowing beneath Ava’s skin. One of them laughed, a grinding sound like stones in a mill.
“A substitute wants to contest her own binding? The Duke doesn’t grant audiences for?—”
Victor produced the golden idol.
The laughter died. Both guards fixed on the small figure in his palm, and their weapons lowered before they seemed to realize they’d done it.
“Where did you get that?”
“The Duke will want to see this.” The other guard was already signaling to someone inside. “Immediately.”
The doors opened. Not with thunder or drama; they simply swung inward, revealing darkness beyond. The guards stepped aside, weapons lowered.
Victor’s hand found Ava’s. She felt how badly he wanted this to work, and how certain he was that it wouldn’t.
“Ready?” he asked.
“No.” She straightened her spine anyway. “But I didn’t bind myself to Hell just to give up at the door.”
The interior wasa cathedral of commerce.
Tier after tier of seats carved from black stone rose toward a ceiling that vanished into darkness punctuated by slowly rotating stars. Demon nobility filled the gallery: silk and gems and gold worn like armor, wings folded against backs, too many limbs arranged in poses of studied boredom. Contracts floatedthrough the air like luminous snow, thousands of them, each one representing a soul bound or traded or lost.
At the center, elevated on a dais of black glass, sat a throne built for something enormous.
Marchosias filled it.
Twenty feet of muscle and cracked turquoise hide, hunched forward with one massive hand resting on a golden sword taller than a man. The blade’s point was driven into the stone floor, the hilt level with his shoulder. His head was lupine but wrong: too many eyes scattered across the skull, some human, some animal, all of them watching. Above him, not quite touching, a crown of burning wheat dropped embers onto his shoulders.
The gallery murmured as they walked down the central aisle. The chains on Ava’s skin blazed brighter with every step, responding to proximity, to power, to him.
The pull behind her sternum intensified. Marchosias’s claim, demanding she kneel.
She kept walking.
On a platform to the right, draped in crimson silk, Lilith watched them approach. Her expression was carefully neutral, but her hands gripped the railing too tight. She hadn’t expected them to make it this far.
Good.
