Page 2

Piper’s voice nags against the edges of my mind. She’d tell me to sleep it off, call a hotline, eat some soup, and breathe.

Maybe I should. The logical move is to blow out the candles, toss the parchment, pretend this kit was just a fifty-dollar lapse in judgment, and shut the fuck up.

But the silence is too damn heavy, and the ash on the mantelpiece is heavier still.

I stare at the twelve flickering wicks, my resolve hardening.

Stop thinking about the ‘shoulds.’ Think about ‘now.’

I want him back. I want the mindless humming and the tapping of his fingers on the worktops. I broke the only thing that mattered. If there’s even a fractional, one-in-a-million chance to stitch the universe back together, I’m taking it.

I swipe a hand across my eyes, smearing tears and crusted mascara across my cheek, and look down at the fluffy bundle in my lap.

“Alright, Vesper. Duty calls,” I say, my voice cracking as I hoist her up and set her on the floor. “This is about to get messy, and frankly, you’ve seen enough of my mental health spirals over the last year. Go nap. Go be a cat. Don’t look at me.”

Vesper shoots me a look of profound, feline judgment, tail twitching once before she melts into the shadows of the hallway, leaving me alone with my bad ideas.

If it works, I get to see him. If it doesn’t… well, I’m already living in misery. What’s there to lose?

I reach for the parchment—the ink already smudged by my earlier tears—and scan over the instructions, the words almost writhing, swirling into a sigil of loops and points that look like a map of a broken heart.

The cool metal of the blade sends a shiver across my skin as I pick it up and turn it over in my fingers.

I’m going to fix this, you infuriating man.

My hands are shaking so violently I’m afraid I’ll slip and cut myself completely wrong, but I keep the mantra steady in my head: Across for a secret, down for a grave.

I position the edge against the pale skin of my forearm, where the blue veins map a path just above the wrist. I grit my teeth and in one fluid motion, drag the steel across.

Heat blooms instantly as the blade tracks a straight line, the skin parting with a soft, wet zip. I lean into the sting, my eyes wide, fascinated by the way the layers give way to reveal that brilliant, hidden crimson.

A cloud of lazy dizziness washes over me in one fell swoop as I watch the first heavy, dark droplets hit the center of the sigil, soaking into the fibers, crawling along the curves and lines, turning the ink a heavy, visceral red that seems to pulse. It makes me feel more awake, more real, than any of the breathing exercises or the forced smiles ever did.

I swallow against the lump in my throat, my eyes locked on the way my own warmth is staining the page, turning the mass-produced paper into something ancient and sacred. This is it. The moment of truth—where the red line on my arm becomes the bridge back to him—where my delusional act of desperation makes or breaks me.

Come on, Eden. Don’t choke now. Read.

“By name and blood, I call you home. By ash and breath, by skin and bone. By the silence that screams and the love that remains, I break the locks and cut the chains. Through the shadowed path where the light goes blind, I reach for the soul you left behind. By the flames that burn and the heart that stays, I call you back from the end of days.”

Fucking bargaining.

Chapter 2

Malachi

Hell.

Eternal damnation.

An inferno of death, fire, brimstone, torment on repeat—the whole apocalyptic brochure.

That’s what they sell you, anyway.

Truth is, Hell’s less inferno and torment and more paperwork and passive-aggressive memos.

Eternal damnation hasn’t gone anywhere—it’s simply been repackaged in tailored suits and mandatory compliance briefings. A bureaucracy so dense it makes mortal governments look like lemonade stands.

Ink splatters across paper as I scrawl my name across the bottom of another report—Malachi, Torture Administrator of the Ninth Division.