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"You need to stop being surprised by this, Hazel. It's beneath you." Danika folded her hands on the desk. "I have had every door in this city watched since the day you were born. The fact that you have only recently begun walking through the interesting ones does not mean the watching ever stopped."

The anger came quickly, but something else got there first.

"You knew where they lived."

"I know where they lived."

"You've always known."

"Yes."

She confirmed it with all the emotion of a dead lizard.

Twenty-six years of questions tried to come out of me at once and managed to produce only one.

"Why?"

For the first time since I'd entered the office, something shifted in her expression.

"Why I didn't tell you?" There was pity in her eyes that I hated more than anything. "Because it was the only address in the world where the two of them were ever ordinary," she said. "And I am not a sentimental woman, but I have never been able to make myself burn it down."

I sat down then.

There was no conscious decision involved. The chair was there, my legs abruptly stopped participating in the conversation, and that was that.

Danika had known about the apartment all along. She'd known my parents had lived there, known enough about whatever they'd been to each other to understand that those rooms represented something no other place did.

And she had protected it.

My grandmother treated sentimentality like a communicable disease, yet for twenty-six years she'd left standing the one place where my parents had been allowed to be ordinary. Dare I say happy?

Before I could decide what the hell to do with that, Danika drew a breath. Something in her shoulders lowered by half an inch, such a small movement that anyone else might have missed it.

I didn't.

My grandmother was about to tell me the truth, and she had been dreading it.

"The Council votes at eleven on whether you are permitted to exist as a free person. I want you to understand exactly what is in that room before you walk into it."

"Fine."

"My contract with Leviathan comes due in nine days."

Nothing dramatic happened. The blue flames continued burning. The black marble stayed just that. Somewhere beyond the office, people went about their morning while my grandmother calmly informed me that her soul was nine days from collection.

"You told me he's been missing three years."

"He has."

"Then who collects?"

"Nobody."

The smile she gave me contained absolutely no joy in it.

"That is precisely the difficulty. A soul contract does not lapse because the holder is inconvenienced, Hazel. It comes due. If Leviathan is present, he collects. If he is not, the contract goes to auction among the fallen, and whoever can demonstrate the strongest claim takes possession of me. At that point, the creature does not merely own my soul. It owns the High Priestess of the Gatekeeper's Coven, along with everything I know and every ward I have ever laid."

I stared at her. "Nine days."