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Every protective instinct in me rose up with its teeth bared.

Maisie looked at me across the table. She said nothing. She did not have to. I had spent the whole damned night learning not to choose for her. Apparently, the Universe had decided the lesson came with a practical exam.

Karma was a bitch, and apparently, she kept office hours in Arrhythmia.

Guy held my stare. “My call.”

I closed my eyes for one second. Long enough to swallow every no I already had locked and loaded. Long enough to feel Sully’s quiet approval and resent him for it.

Then I opened my eyes. “Your call.”

Guy’s face changed. Not much. MacAllen men were not built for visible emotional breakthroughs unless someone first removed a load-bearing wall. But I saw it. The tight line around his mouth eased by a fraction.

Carrick cut through the moment before any of us could get sentimental enough to injure ourselves. “No one builds anything yet.”

Maisie pointed at him. “Thank you. I was about thirty seconds away from objecting to the construction of a Magical bomb in Guy’s kitchen before breakfast.”

“Calculations first,” Carrick said. “Controls. Isolation point. We have one chance to do this without teaching the enemy what we intend.”

I looked around the kitchen. Guy. Maisie. Bernie. Hank. Carrick’s spell. The preserved Hellmark imprint burning faintly in stolen light. Coffee had gone bitter in the air, scorched and oversteeped, mixing with the cold-metal bite of Magic and the faintest thread of sulfur that never quite left my skin anymore. The old floorboards creaked under Guy’s boots. Somewhere in the walls, the house ticked and settled as if it had been listening the whole time. Outside the window, morning had begun bleaching the last of the dark from the sky, and the Wards pulsed once—a dim purple heartbeat that trembled through the panes and brushed over my bones. The Hellmark answered with a low, sullen heat beneath my sleeve. Not pain. Recognition. Every connection Hell had spent a century treating like a vulnerability stood in that room with me, breathing.

“They mistook our Bonds for chains, Lad,” Sully said quietly. His voice moved through me like banked flame under stone, old and furious and steady enough to lean on.

I looked at Maisie’s hand where it rested beside mine, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her through the charged air between us. Her fingers were still. Not trapped. Not taken. There by choice. Then I looked at my brother, standing in the flicker of the Wards with his jaw set and his eyes on mine, offering himself because he had the right to do it.

“Then let’s teach them the difference.”

15

By later that morning, no one had slept.

Obviously.

Carrick had been doing calculations with Ginnie on his end, their voices occasionally overlapping through the communication spell in a way that sounded less like collaboration and more like two brilliant people trying to murder math with precision. Bernie had been studying Fogarty’s preserved imprint until her eyes looked sharp enough to cut glass. Guy had been testing how little of his and Lou’s Magic he could safely feed into a false signature without letting the Hellmark decide he looked delicious.

Hank had made more coffee.

We had reached that Magical point in a crisis where everyone was too tired to be trusted with sharp objects, so naturally we were preparing to bait Hell.

Carrick chose the isolation point just before Guy’s kitchen clock dragged itself past ten. “The old Warden’s cabin.”

I stared at him. “So, we’re going back to the murder cabin. Woohoo.”

Knox, leaning against the counter with his arms folded and his eyes half-lidded in that deeply annoying way that meant he was absolutely awake, said, "Watch station."

“It had monsters crawling through the walls.”

“Still a watch station.”

“That is exactly the kind of branding problem that gets people eaten.”

The choice made horrible sense. The cabin's old Warden system could be physically isolated from the larger Ward network. Guy's red-bronze Warden key already controlled that separation. It was not a miracle object. It wouldn't sever a Hellmark, cleanse an ancient tether, or solve everybody’s trauma with a tasteful glow. Its job was simple: cut the cabin loose if the larger system became a liability.

“If something goes wrong,” Carrick said, “Guy severs the cabin’s local connection. The independent emergency Wards take over, as they did before. The larger network remains uncontaminated.”

“Great,” I said. “Emergency Wards, murder cabin, baiting Hell. Very normal morning.”

Carrick divided the countertrap into two phases because apparently even apocalyptic Magical nonsense benefited from project management.