She made it to the bathroom on sixty-one before the shaking started. Full-body tremors sent her stumbling into a stall, sinking to the floor, the folder scattering pages across cold tile. Her breath came in ragged gasps. Her vision blurred. The bond roared with Victor’s desperate concern, his need to reach her, his rage at being too far away to help.
I’m okay, she tried to send him.I’m okay, I’m?—
She wasn’t okay.
Her parents were going to lose everything. Their restaurant, their building, their life’s work. The place where she’d done homework in the back booth while they worked eighteen-hourdays. The kitchen where her grandmother had taught her to fold dumplings. And if she was reading those soul-debt clauses correctly, they were going to lose more than that. Pieces of themselves. Their essence. Things they didn’t even know they had.
And she’d done this to them. By existing. By being born. By being fated to love a demon.
She didn’t know how long she sat there. The trembling eased. Her vision cleared. She gathered the scattered pages and put them back in order, each document a small piece of the trap that had been building around her family for fifteen years.
Her phone buzzed. Victor:My office. Now. Please.
The please undid her more than anything else.
-—
Victor pulled her into his arms the second the door closed.
“I felt everything,” he murmured against her hair. His hands shook where they gripped her. “Every word she said, I couldn’t hear it, but I felt what it did to you. The fear. The rage. The moment you understood what she’d done.”
“She’s been planning this since before I started law school.” Ava pulled back to look at him, to see the ancient fury burning in his eyes. “Fifteen years. Since I was a child. She manipulated my entire life to get to this moment.”
“I can’t directly interfere. The partnership agreements forbid us from sabotaging each other’s cases or clients.” His jaw was tight enough to crack. “If I openly challenge Lilith’s handling of Peterson Holdings, the partners would be forced to sanction me.”
“I know.” She pressed her forehead to his chest, feeling his heartbeat, slower than a human’s, but racing now with rage. “She’s using legitimate channels. That’s the whole point.”
“But.” He tilted her chin up, forcing her to meet his eyes. “The agreements only restrict direct action. I can mentormy associate. Point you toward relevant research. Ensure you have access to the archives.” Something dangerous flickered in his expression. “That’s not interference. That’s professional development.”
“She’s attacking my family, Victor.” Ava struggled to keep her voice steady. “They don’t even know what they signed. They don’t know demons exist. They came here with nothing and built that restaurant with their own hands.”
“We’ll fix this.”
“How?”
His fury reached her—ancient, quiet, patient.
“You’re brilliant, Ava. And you’re not alone. Derek knows the archives better than anyone. Cassandra has been here since the founding; she knows where the bodies are buried, sometimes literally. And I…” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “I can’t break demon law. But I’ve had six thousand years to learn how to bend it.”
Her phone rang. Dad.
“Go to them,” Victor said, pressing his lips to her forehead. “Explain what you can. They’re probably terrified. I’ll have Derek start pulling every Peterson Holdings file we have. Fifteen years of documents. There has to be a crack somewhere.”
-—
Three hours later, Ava returned to find Derek surrounded by file boxes.
The conference room looked like a paper tornado had touched down: documents spread across every surface, Derek’s laptop displaying multiple windows of corporate filings, empty coffee cups forming a perimeter around his workspace. His tie was gone, his sleeves rolled up, and his expression made her stomach drop before he said a word.
“Tell me you found something.”
Derek’s face was pale beneath the fluorescent lights. “You’re not going to like it.”
He spread papers across the table with hands that shook slightly, organizing them into a pattern. “Peterson Holdings isn’t just a shell company. It’s part of a network. A big one.”
She traced the ownership structure with her finger. Forty subsidiaries feeding into a Cayman Islands holding company, owned by a Luxembourg trust, owned by a Delaware shell corporation. And there, buried deep in the filing structure:
“Malphas Holdings, LLC.”
