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Malgrave is still bowing.

Hell itself moved out of his way.

And the most powerful evil I have ever felt is standing ten feet from me, looking like a man who could straighten his cuffs and walk into any room in the world unnoticed.

His red eyes settle on my throat, and a smile touches his mouth. “Well, if it isn’t my little siren.”

Fuck.

The Devil has been waiting for me.

He doesn’t waste time confirming anything I haven’t already worked out on my own. Malgrave built the container. Thessaly carried the key across the world and set it down exactly where it needed to land. And I walked myself straight to the lock, singing the whole way, certain I was the one disrupting his plan.

He doesn’t want Carnage’s roar. He never did. He wants what’s fused inside it, Heaven and Hell held together in one body without tearing each other apart. Something that’s only ever happened by accident before, in catastrophes that leveled cities and swallowed coastlines whole. He wants to take an accident and turn it into something he can aim. Something repeatable. A weapon he can reach for every time he wants the world to remember exactly what Atlantis and Pompeii felt like from the inside.

Now that I have broken Malgrave’s binding, that power stops being trapped behind a lock even its own creator can’t turn.

It becomes his for the taking.

And the horror of it lands somewhere deep beneath my ribs, in the place where I’ve been so certain, this entire time, that I was the one fighting back.

I didn’t disrupt his ritual.

I have fucking finished it.

Chapter Twenty-Six

CARNAGE

The chamber door goes down under my shoulder, stone cracking as I tear through, and the rest of the Kings flood in behind me.

Heat hits hard enough to steal my first breath.

Lava spills from a massive chasm splitting the chamber floor, thick orange-red streams spreading across black stone while fire surges from somewhere far below. The walls glow with it, the whole fucking place lit by Hell burning beneath our feet.

My eyes find Echo. She’s near the edge of the chasm, down on one knee with one hand braced against the stone, silver hair flowing around her face. Malgrave stands several feet away, close enough that every instinct in me immediately locks onto the distance between them.

I start toward her, but then I see who’s standing between us, and my boots stop.

Black suit.

Polished shoes inches from the lava.

Not a goddamn scorch mark on him. Not a hair out of place while Hell itself burns through the fucking floor around him. He turns his head, red eyes meet mine, and my hellhound goes dead still beneath my skin.

I know those fucking eyes.

For one second, the chamber disappears, and memories tear through me…

Chains around my wrists.

Iron biting into my ankles.

My own blood warm against my back while another Hellwarden leans over me and tells me, ‘Obedience will make the pain stop.’

Weeks of them trying to teach a young hellhound what happens when he forgot who owned him.

And above every fucking one of them…