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They were not weaknesses.

They were the reason I stayed on my feet.

Then I looked into the dark.

“My name is Knox MacAllen.”

17

Silence answered me.

Not peace. Not mercy. Just the absence of an immediate answer from the wound in the air, and somehow that was worse than a roar.

Then Mammon laughed.

It was a small sound. Low. Almost amused. He did not need to fill the room with thunder when every board beneath my boots already remembered the shape of his hand.

“Kneel.”

My body tried.

Not my will. That mattered. The Hellmark did not slide into my mind and take the controls. No command settled over me. No collar clicked shut. But muscles did not need Magic to remember. Lungs did not need possession to forget their work. A century of survival screamed the same lesson it had screamed through blood, smoke, and chains.

Obey first. Survive after.

My knees threatened to bend.

Sully stood with me inside the shared place where our soul had learned to hold more than pain. Not over me. Not between me and the dark. Beside me.

“Aye, lad.”

I locked my knees.

“No.”

The laughter stopped.

In that sudden quiet, I understood something brutal enough to steady me. Mammon had spent a century mistaking survival for obedience.

“I had you for a century,” Mammon said.

“No.” My voice was rough. “I survived you for a century.”

The tether pulled hard enough to drag a sound from my throat.

The black and red wound stretched wider, still not a doorway, still not a Hellmouth, but enough that the line from my arm into the dark showed itself. Pain made it bright. Magic made it undeniable.

Bernie saw it. “There.”

Carrick’s projection cracked hard enough to split his face into pieces of light. “Hold it.”

“Working on it,” I ground out.

Maisie stared at the exposed tether with Alicorn Sight, then looked at my arm. Her face changed.

“Three seconds,” she said.

I knew exactly what she meant. So did Bernie.