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It lasted only a few seconds. When she looked up, her eyes were dry and absolutely furious.

"Twenty-six years." The words came through clenched teeth and tightly held control. "For twenty-six years I have carried a contract I took to keep that girl's child alive. I have been resented for it by the child, despised for it by covens that suspect what I did, and forced to spend every year since knowing exactly what would happen when it came due."

Her palm struck the desk hard enough to make my book and me jump.

"And the entire time, that stupid, reckless, magnificent little fool had already handled it. She could have told me. One sentence. That was all she needed to give me. Mother, it's done. I could have had twenty-six years of a different life."

There were a hundred things I could have said to that. Instead, the simplest escaped.

"Would you have believed her?"

Danika froze, her head tilting slightly to the side in a way nothing human would have managed. It sent a shiver down my spine. The anger remained on her face. She stared at me long enough that I knew the answer before she finally leaned back in her chair. "No," she admitted. "I would not have."

My mother had spent everything protecting me and hadn't trusted her own mother enough to share that with her. Danika had spent twenty-six years preparing to sacrifice me because she hadn't trusted her daughter enough to believe the problem was already solved. And I had spent most of my life hating my grandmother for choices she'd made while trapped inside a story neither of us could see the shape of.

Lesson number thirty-four: sometimes the person you've spent your whole life resenting turns out to have been standing in the same hole with you, just facing the other way.

It didn't excuse her. The seal was still on me, the lies were still told, and she had just admitted to standing at the foot of my bed for two hours while preparing to steal my soul.

But it changed the shape of my anger.

"So the contract still comes due on Saturday," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. When Danika nodded, I forced myself through the rest. "You can't use me, and you don't have anything else to offer."

"I have no offer that I am able to make." She straightened one sleeve with precise fingers, smoothing fabric that wasn't wrinkled, and the gesture stopped me. I'd watched her do that all my life. Until that moment, I'd never understood that she did it when she needed her hands under control. "The auction proceeds regardless. I have six days, Hazel, and the only thing I have managed to arrange is that whatever happens to me when it does, I will not be taking you with me."

The urge to reach across the desk startled me badly enough that I curled my fingers around the armrest of the uncomfortable chair instead. River spoke for the first time since we'd entered the office, startling me.

"Where are your people?"

Danika looked at him as if she had temporarily forgotten he was there.

River had moved away from the doorway. His attention wasn't on either of us now. It had settled on the corridor beyond the office.

"Your apprentices and clerks," he continued. "There are two hundred witches attached to this coven, yet we haven't seen another person since we entered the building. The wards on your front doors are down, and every flame in that corridor has been extinguished from inside."

My grandmother's expression changed immediately. I knew her anger. I knew contempt, irritation, calculation, and the particular look she wore immediately before somebody regretted speaking. I had never seen the one she wore at that moment.

"What did you say about the flames?"

"The wax ran toward the entrance. Whatever moved through that corridor was traveling toward the front doors when they went out."

Danika came out of the chair so fast it overturned behind her with a loud crash.

"I sent everyone home on Friday." She was already moving around the desk. "Every apprentice, every clerk, every junior priest. I didn't want anyone in this building when the contract came due."

"That's still a week away."

"I wasn't willing to gamble their lives on my calendar being accurate." Her eyes had gone to the open door. "There has been nobody here since Friday afternoon except me."

I thought of the dead blue flames, the wax running toward the entrance, and the front doors sitting open beneath wards that should have been strong enough to stop me.

"If nobody else has been here, then what put out the candles?"

Nobody answered. They didn't have to, because we all felt it at the same time.

The first warning came through the floor, a deep pulse of power that traveled up through my feet and settled into my bones. The air seemed to tighten around us, heavy enough that drawing my next breath took effort. Heat stabbed through the pentagram on my finger, and before I could react, every sigil along my forearms blazed gold.

I shoved myself out of the chair on instinct, my magic already awake and searching for whatever had just entered the building.