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Something moves inside.
My heart slams against my ribs. “Malgrave?”
He doesn’t answer, and for the first time since I walked into this place, the Hellwarden looks scared.
The fire suddenly drops.
Not dies.
It bows.
Every flame bends toward the center of the chasm. Malgrave lowers his head, and my stomach fucking drops.
Because I know who Hell bows to.
Heat punches through the chamber as something pushes against the opening from below. I can’t see a body. There’s no hand reaching through, no horned monster climbing out of the fire. There doesn’t need to be.
Because I feel him.
Every flame bends toward the center of the chasm.
I brace for something huge. Horns, claws, wings. Some nightmare dragged straight out of every warning ever whispered about the thing ruling Hell.
But a man steps through instead.
My breath catches as he walks out of the fire in a black suit that doesn’t carry a single scorch mark, one hand slipping casually into his pocket as polished shoes meet stone still glowing from the heat.
That’s it?
No monster.
No beast.
Just… a man.
A really fucking handsome man.
Somehow, that scares me more.
He looks like someone I could pass on a crowded street without thinking twice. Someone who could sit across from me at a restaurant, order a drink, and smile while the world carried on around him.
Until he lifts his head.
His eyes are red. Not glowing or burning. Red.
Deep enough that there’s nothing human left inside them.
And they find me immediately.
Everything I heard beneath Malgrave comes rushing back at once. The thing buried beneath Thessaly’s words. The laughter from the bottom of the chasm. That ancient presence pulling strings while everyone above it thought they were making their own choices.
It was him.
It was always fucking him.
The Devil looks me over slowly, without anger or urgency, and that scares me more than if he’d come through those flames screaming.
He doesn’t need to prove what he is.
