“Lilith wants to see you. Immediately.”
Four days since the retreat. Four days of Lilith’s office door staying closed, her absence from partner meetings noted but unexplained. Ava had hoped, foolishly, she now realized, that the demon was still licking her wounds.
Lilith didn’t lick wounds. Lilith sharpened knives.
“Right. Thanks.”
She saved her work with hands that had started to tremble and stood, smoothing her charcoal skirt. Two floors above, Victor’s attention sharpened—a sudden alertness that prickled across her skin, a question she couldn’t quite hear.
Lilith summoned me, she thought at him, not sure if he could receive it.
His concern flooded back, sharp and immediate. Then, deliberately, he banked it down to something manageable. Shefelt him fighting the urge to come down here, to stand beside her, to face whatever this was together.
Be careful.
“Good luck,” Cassandra said quietly. “You’ll need it.”
-—
The elevator ride to sixty-three felt endless.
Ava watched the floor numbers climb, each one ticking past like a countdown to something terrible. The elevator itself felt wrong. The mirrors on all four walls showed reflections that didn’t quite sync with her movements, a half-second delay that made her seasick if she looked too long.
She’d only been to Lilith’s floor once before, during her first week, when a filing error had sent her to the wrong office. She’d turned around in the doorway and fled before Lilith even noticed her.
This time, there would be no fleeing.
The doors opened onto a corridor that shouldn’t exist.
Floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides offered impossible simultaneous views of the Hudson and the East River. The city stretched out below in two directions at once, and looking at it made something in Ava’s brain ache: a wrongness that couldn’t be processed, only endured. The carpet beneath her feet was crimson, soft as fresh blood, and the walls were lined with artwork that seemed to move when she wasn’t looking directly at it. Faces in the paintings tracked her progress. Hands reached toward her from frames.
Lilith’s door stood open at the end of the hall. An invitation, or a trap. Probably both.
The office was a study in elegant menace. Polished oak desk, antique and massive, probably seized from some European palace during one of the demon’s centuries of collecting. Crimson silk drapes pooled at Lilith’s feet where she sat behindthe desk, their color exactly matching the carpet, the artwork, the painted nails drumming slowly on the wood.
And behind her, through windows that shouldn’t exist, both rivers glittered in morning light while the city below seemed to curve inward, bending toward this room like iron filings toward a magnet.
Lilith smiled as Ava entered, and for a moment—just a moment—her true form flickered visible. Wings of shadow folded behind her like the memory of flight. Eyes that held no whites, just endless dark shot through with veins of red lightning. A mouth that stretched too wide, showing rows of teeth that went back further than any throat should allow.
Then the beautiful mask slammed back into place.
“Ms. Feng.” Lilith gestured to a leather chair positioned precisely where a supplicant would sit. “Please. Sit.”
Ava sat. Kept her expression neutral through sheer force of will. In the back of her mind, Victor’s concern spiked sharply, then deliberately leveled out as he tried not to distract her.
“You’ve done excellent work these past weeks, Ava.” Lilith opened a drawer and withdrew a thick manila folder, handling it with theatrical care. “I think you’re ready for the case I’ve been holding for someone with your special talents.”
The folder landed on the desk with a soft thud.
The label read:Peterson Property Holdings vs. Lucky Restaurant Group LLC.
Her parents’ company name. In black and white. On a foreclosure filing.
Peterson Holdings.
Ava’s throat closed. Her pulse thundered in her ears so loud she was certain Lilith could hear it.
“It’s a simple foreclosure case,” Lilith continued, smile widening to show teeth that seemed slightly too sharp. “A restaurant property in Queens. Feng’s Kitchen, I believe? Lovelylittle place. Your mother makes excellent soup dumplings. I’ve dined there, actually. Terrible situation, really. The owners seem to have signed some rather predatory documents over the years. Catering contracts, supplier agreements, even their recent renovation loan. All perfectly legal, of course.”
