Bound in Brimstone

The corridor curved left when it should have gone straight.

Corrine stopped walking. Brennan didn't. He kept moving down the hallway that hadn't existed three seconds ago, shoulders tight, footsteps silent on marble that seemed to swallow sound. She'd had a whole mental map, had been feeling competent for approximately four minutes, and now the architecture was doing whatever it wanted.

She looked at the curve again and let her vision shift.

Written into the angle of the wall, faint as watermarks: Shall not proceed in straight lines within these premises. The text curled along the architecture like ivy, dictating what the space could be. Someone had literally written "be annoying" into the foundation.

She opened her mouth, but Brennan was already ten feet ahead. "Wait—the corridor's—"

He didn't slow. His hellhound pupils had contracted to slits, darkness pooling at his heels like a loyal pack. "Problem, contract-girl?"

"I—" The words died. He wasn't asking. He was already gone, and she was talking to marble that probably understood her better than he did. "Nope. No problem."

The Halls of Avarice tasted like old paper, copper, and burnt sugar. Her stomach turned over, and she pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth. If she listened long enough, she could hear the walls whispering in languages that predated human throats.

Matthias walked behind her, maintaining enough distance to make clear he wasn't with her so much as near her. His footsteps echoed where Brennan's didn't, because physics had apparently taken the night off.

"The archive should be two levels down." She pulled up the mental map she'd built from the intake documents, the one that was now as useful as a chocolate teapot. "But if the layout keeps—"

"It's been shifting since before your grandmother's grandmother was a stain on history." Brennan still hadn't turned. "Find me a goddamned door."

He was already rounding the corner ahead, not slowing for a response. Her jaw tightened. Fine. She'd save her breath for things that mattered.

Find the door. Sure. In a building that rearranged itself according to rules that hated common sense. The place vibrated through her bones in a frequency that made her teeth ache.

The corridor split ahead into three passages. Brennan stopped at the junction, head tilted, nostrils flaring. Tracking scents no human nose could catch.

A muscle jumped in Brennan's cheek, but he picked left without hesitation. Corrine tucked herself between them, not thinking about the eyes she couldn't see. The ones watching from the walls or the ceiling or the probably-sentient marble.

The corridor opened into a rotunda that shouldn't have fit inside the building's exterior dimensions. Pillars rose toward a ceiling lost in shadow, carved with faces that shifted when her gaze slid past—mouths opening and closing in silent screams. Staff drifted between them without walking, existing in a series of locations without bothering with the transition. If she had to use her legs like a peasant, so should everyone else.

One of them turned toward Corrine and smiled.

She stopped breathing. Burnt sugar coated her tongue thick as syrup. She forced the air back in and smiled back—stretched too tight, but she'd been smiling through worse since she was fifteen.

Its face had features the way a mannequin did: present but uncommitted to the concept. Incense and old blood drifted from it like perfume. When she looked—let her vision shift—the blankness resolved into scrolling text where expressions should be, written in the angular script of demonic contracts.

"Archive access requires authorization. State your business." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Brennan's lips twitched, revealing a hint of fangs. Matthias tilted his head, hand going to his hip.

Corrine stepped forward before either of them could escalate. Her heart hammered, but her professional smile held. If it worked on the guy who wanted to return water-damaged library books and claim they came that way, it would work here too.

"Filing correction. Document 7749-B, Marchetti estate." She kept her smile wide and her shoulders loose. "The intake clerk flagged a transcription error in the beneficiary clause. We're just here to clean it up."

"Authorization source?"

"Internal audit provision." She didn't blink. "Subsection 14.3."

The silence stretched. Corrine's nails bit crescents into her palms. More text scrolled across the entity's face.

Then: "Authorization incomplete. Subsection 14.3 requires counter-signature from the originating department."

Shit.

Brennan's hand was on his weapon now. Matthias' weight shifted onto the balls of his feet.

"The counter-signature was filed in a different batch." Corrine's smile didn't waver, though the muscles in her cheeks had started to ache. "You know how the third-quarter filings get backed up."

"Verification required. Please hold for—"

"We're on a deadline." She stepped closer, let a note of exasperation creep into her voice—real exasperation, borrowed from a hundred frustrating phone calls and redirected into something useful. This part was easy. This part she could do in her sleep. "The Marchetti beneficiaries have a hearing tomorrow morning. If this correction isn't filed by then, the whole estate goes into arbitration. Do you want to explain to Lord Marchetti why his inheritance got tangled up in bureaucratic delays?"

The entity's face flickered.

"Lord Marchetti's account carries priority status." A pause. "Access granted. Archive level three. You have forty minutes."

The breath she'd been holding escaped in a rush. She locked her knees to keep them from buckling.

"The access window has been flagged for review," the entity added. "Irregularities will be noted."

She'd add that to her list of things to have a breakdown about later.

The floor beneath them shifted—a polite suggestion that they should be somewhere else now.

When Corrine's vision cleared, they were in a different room. She swayed, caught herself on nothing. The Halls had taken something from her just for looking—the supernatural equivalent of an entry fee.

"You told us this would be clean." Brennan's voice dropped low, each word bitten off. He was in her space now, close enough that she could see the gold flecks in his eyes, the barely-restrained predator beneath the human mask.

"I told you I could get us in."

She didn't wait for his response and headed in. One more second and she'd either snap back at him or throw up, and neither would help. Rows of shelves stretched in three directions, too much text at once, layered so thick it pressed against her skull. She narrowed her awareness just to walk straight.

Contracts hung in the air like sleeping bats, bound in materials from parchment to human skin. Some whispered as she passed. Names. Pleas. A woman's voice, barely audible: I didn't know. I didn't understand what I was signing.

Corrine's throat tightened. Her feet slowed, but she didn't stop.

She'd feel guilty about it at two in the morning like a normal person.

"Forty minutes," Brennan said. "Clock's running."

"I know how time works."

His silence said then why are your feet still planted? louder than words would have.

She bit back the retort and moved through the shelves instead, reading the filing system's logic rather than scanning for physical markers. The pressure behind her eyes built with every passing second.

There.

The contract hung between two others, bound in cream-colored vellum with gold leaf that caught light. She reached for it.

Matthias's hand cut between her and the contract. "Wait. Let me check the wards first."

She didn't pull back. Her fingers hovered inches from the vellum, trembling slightly. "They're dormant. I can see them."

"And if they activate?" His voice stayed level. "Can you see yourself surviving that?"

She thought of Alex's contract, still in Rian's hands. What happened to it if she died here, in this archive, reaching for something pretty and trapped?

Phoenix flesh regenerated. If the wards flared, he'd burn and heal. She'd just burn. She stepped back.

Matthias examined the contract without touching it. Heat shimmered at his fingertips—not fire, not yet. His hands moved through the air above the vellum.

She watched him probe at what she could already read. But he was checking whether the wards would kill; she was checking what they said.

After a long moment, a furrow appeared between his brows. The corners of his mouth tightened. He withdrew his hand.

"The surface layer is aggressive." He met her eyes. "If you trip the wrong wire, we're not walking out of here."

The warning settled into her chest. "That's not what the brief said. This is—"

"Someone knew the contract might be targeted." Matthias's voice went flat—not angry, just stating facts the way you'd state that water was wet. "The question is whether you can still do it in the time we have."

She couldn't fail. Alex couldn't afford for her to fail.

She reached for the contract instead of answering. She'd spent her whole life ignoring the bad outcomes until they were already happening. Why start now?

The moment her fingers touched the vellum, the world tilted.

Everything else fell away. Only the contract remained: layer upon layer of binding clauses, decorative flourishes that hid teeth.

And underneath—a soul pressed into the document's structure like a butterfly pinned under glass, still alive, still aware, frozen in the moment of signing for sixty years.

Don't look. Don't think about it. Just do the job.

The Marchetti will favored the eldest son. Standard inheritance structure, primogeniture default. But the beneficiary clause had a weakness: it relied on a definition of "legitimate heir" that the original drafter hadn't specified.

The load-bearing clause. A single sentence that determined everything else.

She pushed.

The contract pushed back. The outer layer reared up like a snake, coiling around her intrusion, trying to trap her.

She pulled back. Her heart slammed against her ribs, her hands shaking where they gripped the vellum.

"Corrine?" Matthias's voice, distant. Like hearing someone call from the far end of a tunnel.

"I'm fine." The words came out rough. It was a lie. But fine was a state of mind and she was choosing to have it.

She found the first defensive layer and worked at its edges, looking for gaps, weaknesses, anything she could exploit without triggering it.

The mark pulsed under her collarbone—Rian's claim, offering power like always.

She ignored it and bore down harder. The contract's defenses resisted with equal force. The outer layer twisted, reformed, presented new barriers every time she found a gap.

Brennan's voice barely registered. "Twenty-four minutes."

Sweat ran down her temple. Her vision blurred. She was spending herself against walls that didn't tire, didn't weaken, didn't care.

Brennan's shadow crossed her peripheral vision—shifting, coiling, the hellhound barely leashed beneath his skin. "She's not going to make it."

Matthias scoffed. "She might if you stop counting down in her ear."

"Look at her. She's burning out."

He wasn't wrong. Gray crept across her fingertips—the visible cost of pushing too hard without the buffer she'd been refusing. The color leached out of her, life converted to power. Her hands looked like they belonged to someone much older, someone already fading.

The mark pulsed again, warmer now. More insistent.

She found a gap. A place where two defensive clauses overlapped, creating a hair-thin seam in the contract's armor.

She pushed through it.

The contract screamed.

Not a sound—a sensation. The defenses she'd bypassed recognized the breach and collapsed inward, sealing the gap, trying to trap her inside.

"Corrine—"

She couldn't answer, couldn't pull back. She was in now, past the outer layer, but the contract was crushing her, infernal magic pressing in from all sides, and she didn't have the strength to—

The mark blazed.

"Fifteen minutes." Brennan's voice was urgent now. "And something's happening to the shelves. The text is moving."

The archive was waking up.

She was failing. Her hands had gone gray to the knuckles. She had maybe two minutes before she collapsed—and then Brennan and Matthias would have to drag her out, and she'd have to explain to Rian why she couldn't deliver what she'd promised.

Her breath caught.

She reached for the bond.

Rian's power flooded through like water through a broken dam. The mark blazed against her chest, the connection tightening, him settling deeper into whatever space they shared.

She turned that power against the contract's defenses and tore.

The maze collapsed into rubble, and the load-bearing clause lay exposed.

The definition of "legitimate heir."

She rewrote it.

The words reshaped themselves under her touch, the contract accepting her edits as though they'd always been there. The Marchetti estate would pass to a different heir now.

The archive settled. The surrounding shelves returned to dormancy.

Corrine released the contract.

Her hands were gray to the wrists. Her whole body was shaking. The mark pulsed against her chest—Rian's attention pressing against her throat like a thumb, even from miles away.

And underneath the exhaustion—something that felt almost like satisfaction. Like she'd been starving without knowing it, and he'd finally let her eat.

Brennan and Matthias were staring at her. Not at her hands—at her face. At whatever expression she wore through the numbness.

Brennan's voice came out hoarse. "What the hell was that?"

"My job."

"That wasn't—" He stopped and shook his head. "Whatever. We're leaving."

He was already moving toward the exit. Matthias followed, but he kept looking back at her, like he expected her to collapse before they reached the door.

Corrine made herself move. One foot in front of the other.

The mark burned steady under her skin.

Worth it, she told herself. As long as Alex was safe, everything was worth it.

---

The walk back through the Halls took longer than the walk in. The layout had shifted again, corridors folding in on themselves like origami. Corrine followed the two of them, cradling her grayed hands against her chest. She was too drained to filter the text now, and the words blurred into noise—names and dates and terms of surrender, centuries of souls signed away, all of it pressing against her skull like fingers prying inside.

But underneath the exhaustion, underneath the pain—

A door she'd been keeping closed was now wedged open.

And the worst part was how good it had felt. How easy it would be to do it again.

She fixed her gaze on Brennan's back because looking at her own hands made her want to scream. He moved through the shifting corridors like he'd been born to hunt in darkness. The shadows followed him, loyal in a way that felt less like magic and more like kinship.

The exit deposited them in an alley that smelled like rain and garbage. Real scents. Human. Just the city, dirty and alive.

Corrine breathed it in like she'd been drowning.

A van waited at the curb, engine running. Corrine climbed into the back while Brennan took the passenger seat and Matthias drove.

Her fingers shook against her thighs. She pressed them flat, but the gray looked worse in the van's overhead light—ashen, corpse-like.

"Northwest approach had eyes on it." Brennan's voice cut sharp through the silence.

"I know."

"And yet we took it anyway."

Matthias took a slow breath, held it, then let it out through his nose. "The alternative was worse. I made a call."

"The ones we spotted could have followed us back."

"Could have. Didn't."

"That's your professional analysis?"

Matthias's grip tightened on the wheel. "The contract's edited, the job's done, and we're all breathing. You want a longer report, write it yourself. I'm driving."

Streetlights slid past the back window. The mark pulsed steady, and she pressed her hand over it.

Four months of drawing only what she needed, keeping the connection as thin as thread—and tonight she'd grabbed the whole rope.

The van turned onto a familiar street and stopped. Brennan opened his door. Matthias cut the engine.

Corrine reached for the handle. The mark flared—a burn, not a pulse. Her hand flew to her collarbone.

Rian was already at the safehouse.

The van doors opened, and evening air rushed in. Brennan's posture changed—shoulders tightening, shadows coiling at his feet.

Corrine climbed out of the van on legs that wanted to fold. He knew. He'd felt her reach for him.

The safehouse door opened. Light spilled out, warm and false.

She walked toward it anyway. Toward the demon lord who held her brother's life in his hands, who kept Alex safe only as long as she delivered.

She lifted her chin, arranged her mouth into something bright and easy—the kind of smile that was starting to feel like its own kind of trap.

The safehouse looked like money straining to seem casual.

Exposed brick walls, but tasteful exposed brick. Industrial lighting straight out of a catalog. A long table dominated the center, surrounded by chairs designed to make comfort look like weakness.

The rest of the crew was already there. Gideon occupied the shadows along the far wall—the wraith's edges blurred into darkness like watercolors bleeding past their lines, impossible to tell where he ended and the shadow realm began.

And at the table, positioned like two chess players who'd agreed to share the board without agreeing on who got to be white: Tarek and Rian.

Tarek sat at one end, notepad open, pen moving in careful strokes. Heat shimmered at the edges of his form when his attention flickered toward the door—there and gone. His gaze passed over her without greeting, returned to his notes.

Rude.

At the other end—Rian.

He looked up when she entered, and the mark flared hot against her collarbone.

Her fingers curled against her thighs. Somewhere across the city, Alex was sitting in his quarters within Rian's territory—comfortable captivity, supervised visits that reminded her exactly what she was working for.

Rian was beautiful the way a knife was beautiful—elegant lines, perfect balance, designed for a single purpose. Dark hair swept back from a face that sculptors would have killed for. Silver eyes caught the light wrong, reflecting things that weren't in the room.

She needed to stop noticing how pretty he was. It wasn't helpful.

"Ms. Ashwick." His voice made promises and threats sound exactly the same. "How good of you to join us. I trust the Marchetti job went smoothly?"

She kept her voice light, her smile bright. Sunshine for the man who held her leash. "I had to improvise, but the heir situation is adjusted."

"So I felt." His gaze dropped to her hands—still faintly gray, still trembling. His head tilted, eyes narrowing, the way someone might examine a blade for chips after hard use.

She tucked her hands behind her back.

He rose and moved toward her, each step measured.

When he reached her, his hand lifted—fingers settling on her shoulder, over where the brand sat beneath her shirt. A contact that said mine without bothering with words.

"You pushed hard tonight." His thumb traced a small circle against her collarbone. "I could feel it."

Yeah, well, I could feel you enjoying it. We both had a great time.

She didn't pull away. Couldn't—and even if she could, she knew better than to flinch from Rian Caeldre. Flinching was for people who could afford to show weakness. "The protections were deeper than expected. But I handled it."

"You did." He studied her a moment longer—that silver gaze cataloging her—then released her shoulder and moved to the table.

She stayed where she was, breathing through the ghost-warmth of his touch clinging above the mark. Her shoulders had started to curve toward where he'd stood. She caught herself and straightened, jaw tight.

She forced herself to move toward the table. She couldn't afford to show weakness—not here, not with Tarek watching her like she was a math problem he didn't know how to solve.

Documents covered the table—maps, photographs, blueprints. Rian spread his hands across the surface like a dealer arranging cards he'd already marked.

"Our next target." He tapped a finger on the map. "Lord Delmarre's private archive."

The room went quiet.

Brennan's spine locked. She'd seen his eyes shift through many expressions—predatory assessment, lazy contempt, that particular gleam before he said something designed to make her want to punch him. She'd never seen them go flat like that, as if something inside him had switched off.

Don't react. Don't you dare react.

Delmarre.

The name hit her like ice water. Lord Delmarre, whose vault held Alex's original contract—the one Rian borrowed, the one he made interest payments on to keep her brother out of Delmarre's direct control. A name she had only found after months of discrete questions and dead ends, piecing together information Rian never meant for her to have.

Brennan's visible distress was a gift—everyone was watching him. She used the cover to press her nails into her palms until the sharp pain gave her something to focus on.

Brennan's chair scraped back. His gaze cut to Tarek—not Rian. "You can't let him do this."

Tarek's pen had stopped moving. His expression was unreadable, but Corrine caught his jaw tightening, heat shimmering at the edges of his form, there and gone.

"I'm sending the crew into Delmarre's territory." Rian kept his eyes on the papers, as if Brennan's appeal to Tarek hadn't happened. "Your particular history with the family is also why you're essential."

"Essential?" The question escaped before she could bite it back.

Brennan's laugh cracked in the middle, ugly and sharp. "That's a fun word for it. You want to tell the new girl, or should I?"

Matthias's gaze lifted from his phone. Tarek's pen paused mid-stroke. Even Gideon's edges solidified, pulling into sharper focus against the wall.

She kept her expression neutral. Brennan was spiraling, and spiraling people said dangerous things. If he made her react, if he accidentally stumbled onto the fact that she had her own reasons to care about Delmarre's vault—

"I know about the Forged," she said carefully.

Brennan's smile was all teeth. "Did you read about us in a book somewhere? 'Infernal Hellhounds: A Spotter's Guide'?"

She wanted to shake him for making her the center of attention. "I prefer audiobooks, actually."

It was the wrong moment to joke—she knew it even as she said it, watching something in Brennan's expression sharpen.

"Brennan," Tarek said, low and tired.

"No, no," Brennan spread his hands in mockery of invitation. "Go ahead, sunshine. Tell me what you think you know."

He'd been calling her that since she joined the crew—sometimes mocking, sometimes something else. Right now it landed like a slap.

She met his gaze. "The Forged are created, not born. Shaped for a purpose. And legally—"

"Stop tiptoeing around. I'm property, sunshine. Like a chair. Like a fucking lamp." His pupils contracted further, darkness coiling beneath his skin. "And Delmarre's wards? They don't check for permission slips. They read blood. My blood still says his."

No one moved.

"The outer wards," Rian said, his voice sliding through the tension like it wasn't even there, "will read your blood as belonging to the household. That grants us passage through the outer perimeter without triggering the alarm network."

"And when they realize I'm not there for a family reunion?"

Rian tapped the blueprints. "The Conclave begins Thursday at sunset. Delmarre's entire household—inner circle, senior staff, the vault-master himself—will be in attendance. Seventy-two hours. Ideally, you'll be in and out before anyone knows you were there."

"And non-ideally?" Matthias asked, raising an eyebrow.

Rian's smile didn't reach his eyes. "Then Brennan's concerns become everyone's concerns."

The mark pulsed against her chest. Could Rian feel the shape of her panic through it?

She pressed her hands flat against her thighs and gave them her best customer service face.

"The objective is threefold." Rian's voice pulled her back. He spread his hands across the blueprints. "First, we access the vault itself. Brennan's blood gets us through the outer wards. Gideon handles interior surveillance."

Gideon's form rippled in acknowledgment, edges bleeding into darkness before pulling back into coherence.

"Second, we locate specific contracts belonging to Lord Cassius."

Chairs creaked. Matthias's thumb stilled on his phone screen.

"You're going after Cassius?" He said it the way someone might say cancer.

"I'm acquiring leverage. Three contracts held in Delmarre's vault as collateral for a territorial dispute. I want copies."

Tarek's pen stopped. "You want to steal from one old power to blackmail another."

"Is there an echo in here?"

"That's not ambition, Rian. That's a death wish." Matthias leaned forward. "Cassius has been collecting souls since before the Romans figured out concrete. And you want to—what? Give yourself leverage against him?"

"Cassius has been expanding into territories he has no claim to. The old powers tolerate it because no one wants to be the first to push back." Rian's smile didn't waver. "I intend to give them reasons."

"This wasn't the agreement."

Tarek's voice cut through the room. He hadn't raised it—didn't need to. The temperature shifted, heat gathering at the edges of the space.

Rian turned to face him. Neither blinked. Whatever passed between them, Corrine wasn't meant to follow it.

"The agreement," Rian said slowly, "was that I provide opportunities and you provide personnel. I'm providing an opportunity."

"A slaughter waiting to happen."

"Only if she can't do what I've been paying for." Rian's gaze found Corrine, and the mark flared warm. "Can you, Ms. Ashwick?"

Every eye turned to her.

She felt the collective focus land—Brennan's suspicion, Tarek's doubt, Matthias's flat appraisal. And Rian, who had stopped smiling, who watched her with his chin lifted and his hands still spread across the blueprints.

"You've gotta be kidding." Brennan's earlier distress calcified into something colder. "Sunshine here could barely handle the Marchetti contract."

Corrine's heart slammed against her ribs. The Marchetti job had nearly broken her.

But Alex.

Alex is in that vault.

"I handled it, didn't I? I can do this."

Tarek's pen tapped once against the notepad. "I'm sorry, Rian. I won't send my people into Delmarre's vault on the word of someone who's been with us for four months."

The words landed like a door slamming in her face.

She thought of Alex. Nine years old, bent over the kitchen table with stolen markers, drawing a stick figure in a cape. Contract Killer, he'd labeled it in his terrible handwriting—because she'd told him once that she could read the fine print demons used to trap people. She'd meant it as a warning. He'd turned it into a superhero name.

She hadn't saved him from making that deal. Hadn't done anything except bargain with another demon and pray it would be enough.

And now Tarek was going to shut this down.

Corrine stepped forward.

She didn't stop at the table. She walked past it, past Rian, past Tarek, until she stood in the center of the room.

"Ms. Ashwick." Rian's voice carried a note of warning. "What are you doing?"

She didn't answer. Instead, she let her vision shift.

The safehouse bloomed into language.

Binding text crawled across every surface—the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the exposed brick that had looked so tastefully industrial. Rian's territorial claim, layered over older things, ancient things, the bones of whatever building had stood here before. The world's most complicated legal document written in light and blood and ancient promises.

She reached for the mark and pulled—dragging Rian's power through the bond like water through a burst pipe. The mark blazed against her chest, and his attention snapped toward her.

Good. Watch this.

Her hands came up, gray already spreading across her fingers, and she pressed her palms flat to the nearest wall.

The wards fought her. Of course they did—centuries old, reinforced, designed to keep things out and keep things in. But she was inside, finding the connections, understanding how every clause linked to every other.

Then she started cutting.

She tore through the protection clauses like tissue paper, ripped them out by the roots, shredded the bindings into fragments that dissolved before they hit the ground. The defensive wards rose against her and she ate them—absorbed the power, channeled it back via the mark, used it to fuel the next cut.

The room shuddered.

She heard someone swear—Brennan, probably. Heard Matthias's chair scrape back. The temperature spiked and then plummeted, the ambient magic going haywire as she tore down every binding Rian had spent centuries building into these walls.

Rian's attention pressed against her like a hand around her throat. But he wasn't stopping her.

The last of the protection clauses shattered.

Corrine pulled her hands from the wall and turned around.

Her arms trembled, vision spotty at the edges.

But the safehouse was silent.

Every binding, every ward, every protection Rian had built into this place—gone. The walls were just brick and plaster now.

Tarek stared at her. His pen had fallen from his fingers.

And Rian—

Rian was smiling.

Not the smile he wore for negotiations. Something private and sharp, something that made the mark pulse hot against her chest.

That look should have terrified her. Instead it felt like validation, and she hated herself for wanting that from him.

"Well." His voice was soft. "That was quite a demonstration, Ms. Ashwick."

She made herself meet his gaze and hold it. "You wanted to know if I could handle Delmarre's vault. Now you know."

Neither of them spoke.

She didn't look away. Her knees trembled beneath her, hidden by her loose pants.

You're a superhero, remember? Contract Killer. Cape and everything.

Then Tarek picked up his pen and pulled his notepad toward him. "The secondary passage." He looked at her instead of Rian. "You can edit the binding seals?"

Something loosened in her chest. "Yes."

"Even the old ones?"

"I just ate three centuries of Rian's territorial bindings in forty seconds." She let the exhaustion show in her smile—couldn't have hidden it if she'd tried. "I can handle Delmarre's antiques."

Another silence. Shorter this time.

Then Brennan laughed.

It wasn't a nice laugh. When she looked at him, his pupils had gone to slits. His mouth twisted—not quite a sneer, not quite a grin.

"Color me corrected." He leaned back against the window frame, crossing his arms. The darkness beneath his skin had settled, though his shoulders stayed tense. "Sunshine has some bite after all."

"The mission proceeds." Tarek's voice was final. "But I want contingencies. Real ones. If this goes wrong—"

Rian's smile hadn't faded. "It won't."

Corrine locked her knees and kept her expression neutral.

The mission was happening.

She didn't look at Rian. The mark stayed warm against her collarbone, a slow steady pulse that matched her heartbeat.

He didn't know she'd found out about Delmarre. Didn't know that for her, this mission wasn't about Cassius or leverage or his political games.

She didn't have a plan. She had skills that had sent a room full of monsters quiet, and the memory of her brother's face.

She was going to Delmarre's vault, where her brother's name was waiting in a ledger.

And she was finally going to be close enough to reach it.

The forest smelled like home.

Brennan's lip curled before he could stop it. His lungs knew this rot before his brain caught up. Mineral undertone from the creek bed where he'd learned to hunt frogs. Sweet vegetable decay composting dark and rich. His feet found the path without permission, muscle memory slotting into worn grooves like a key fitting a lock.

Welcome back. The forest didn't say it, but his body heard it anyway.

His hands shook. He shoved them into his pockets. Pathetic. A grown monster, scared of trees.

Gideon drifted beside him, form rippling like smoke that couldn't commit to a shape. The wraith had been quieter than usual since they'd left the safehouse, and Brennan hadn't asked why. He had enough ghosts of his own.

The perimeter ward hummed fifty meters ahead. Brennan felt it in his molars first, that subsonic vibration that meant property line. He'd mapped that distance by pacing it barefoot in the dark, long before anyone taught him what meters were. His gut clenched.

"There's a gap where the wards overlap." He kept his legs moving forward instead of bolting back. "Sixteen seconds to cross before they adjust."

"You're certain it's still there?"

"Vorn built this grid to catch hellhounds." The name scraped his throat. "We're predictable animals. He doesn't fix what isn't broken."

They reached the overlap gap. Brennan counted down in his head. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen...

Gideon stopped moving.

"What—?"

The wraith's form guttered. Not a gentle ripple—this was violent, blurring and snapping back like a television losing signal, his torso going translucent for a full second before solidifying. Gideon's hands clenched at his sides.

"Keep moving." Gideon's voice came out shredded. "Don't wait for me."

Brennan held his ground. The countdown in his head stuttered, lost.

"What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing you can fix."

Another flicker. Tree trunks showed through his chest, bark and lichen rendered in sharp detail where solid flesh should be. His face became a smear of features struggling for shape.

The ward's hum changed pitch. Shit, they'd missed the window.

Brennan's spine locked. His fingers went numb inside his pockets, and the shaking turned into something deeper, bone-level tremors that no amount of clenched jaw could control. The ward's new frequency burrowed into his skull. He knew that pitch.

"Fuck, move." He grabbed Gideon's arm and barely kept from recoiling from the strange, slimy feeling—like touching the memory of flesh instead of the thing itself. He hauled them both sideways toward the drainage culvert.

They were ten meters from cover when the ground lit up.

Silver-white binding lines erupted from the soil in a grid pattern, humming with a frequency that hit Brennan's nervous system like a fist to the solar plexus.

His legs locked.

Stay. Vorn's voice in his head, patient as it had been when Brennan was nine and bleeding from the night's hunt. Good boy. You're mine.

The woods blurred. Present and past collapsed, and he was standing in the kennels' training yard again, frozen while the grid hummed its ownership into his marrow. The trembling had stopped, and that was worse. Good dog. Stay. Stay.

He registered movement outside the static filling his skull.

Gideon.

The wraith still flickered, form fighting to hold, but he was on his knees now, clearing dead leaves off the ground until the silver threads of the containment grid were visible. Four anchor stones. One on each corner. His hands shook, but he kept moving.

"Stop. You'll get fried, you idiot." The word tore out of Brennan's throat, cracked and desperate. "The grid's designed to hold until handlers—" He couldn't finish.

Gideon's fingers closed around the nearest anchor stone. Silver light blazed up his arms, his outline blurring until he looked less like a person and more like a smear of darkness fighting to exist.

But he didn't let go.

The anchor stone came free with a sound like tearing fabric. The grid's light flickered, destabilized, and Gideon shoved them both sideways into the culvert as the containment field collapsed behind them in a cascade of silver light.

They crouched in the blackness. Tremors ran through Brennan like aftershocks, muscles locked in that frozen-prey posture. He could still feel the grid's hum in his bones, the way an amputee feels a missing limb. Except the limb wasn't missing. The leash wasn't missing. It had just slackened for a moment, and he'd mistaken slack for freedom.

He pressed his spine against the culvert wall and counted the cold metal ridges against his vertebrae. One. Two. Three. Four. He wasn't a scared nine-year-old anymore. He hadn't belonged to Vorn for years.

Five. Six. Seven.

Gideon's form solidified by degrees, outline pulling back toward definition like disturbed water settling. His breath came ragged.

Neither of them looked at each other.

The ward's resonance faded to baseline hum. No alert triggered. No handlers converging. The silence stretched, filled only with the sound of their breathing—Brennan's too fast, Gideon's too deliberate.

Brennan let his head fall back against the metal ridges. Good dog, Vorn's voice whispered. You came back. You always come back.

His muscles unlocked all at once, leaving him hollowed out. "What the hell was that?"

The wraith didn't answer, gaze fixed on some middle distance. His hands had stopped shaking, but he held them pressed flat against his thighs as if he didn't trust them yet.

"You've got until I can feel my legs again to start talking. Then I'm dragging you back to Rian and letting him sort you out."

Gideon's eyes, dark and bottomless, fixed on Brennan. "You wouldn't."

"Try me."

The words hung between them. Gideon's shoulders dropped first, then the rigid lines of his form softened, his hands unclenching.

Gideon's jaw worked. "Corrine."

Brennan's nails bit his palms. "What did she do?"

"Something happened when we first met. When she touched my hand. I need to be near her now. To stay... this." He gestured at his own form, disgust curdling the motion.

"You're tied to her."

"Wraiths anchor to the shadow realm—we return there to hold our form in physical reality." The words came fast, defensive. "But when she touched me, she became my anchor instead." His jaw worked. "I don't know how. I don't think she does either. I'm not sure she even realizes what happened."

Brennan's fingers curled tighter. Anchored. Bound. Leashed. The words were different; the meaning was the same. "How long can you hold without her?"

Gideon's mouth twisted. "The anchor stone cost me. An hour, if I'm lucky."

"Then we move fast and stay quiet. No more surprises."

Brennan led them through the gap in ward coverage. He cataloged the changes in the terrain as they went, forcing himself to focus. New triggers where the old ones had been. Different response protocols.

But the bones remained. He mapped it with the part of his brain that tracked angles of approach, lines of retreat, which shadows would hide a body and which would give it away.

He wanted to burn this whole forest down.

Delmarre's Fortress spread below them when they reached the ridge. The Core sat at the center like a spider in its web, surrounded by outbuildings and manicured perfection that cost more than most people's lives.

Brennan's stomach lurched. He looked away, then looked back. Made himself see it.

The vault was inside the Core.

"We should go." Gideon's voice had thinned again. The pull showed in how he stood, body angled backward, leaning toward something miles away.

Brennan nodded. They turned back, pace faster now. He didn't comment on the way Gideon's stride lengthened the closer they got to the safehouse. He understood that pull too well to mock it.

By the time the safehouse came into view, Gideon's outline had already sharpened, shoulders dropping with each step closer.

Brennan watched him through the window instead of following him in. He needed a moment. His own hands hadn't stopped shaking.

Corrine looked up when Gideon walked through the door—her book already half-closed, thumb holding her place. Her smile bloomed, and Gideon's shoulders dropped two inches.

Over four months, Brennan had watched her check on Gideon without being asked. A glance toward the door when he'd been gone too long. She'd smile at Brennan sometimes too, like he was a person instead of a weapon. Leave tea near wherever he was sitting, never making eye contact, never waiting for thanks.

He'd started reaching for those cups without checking them first.

His hand found his chest, pressing against the ache beneath his ribs.

His mother had done that too. She'd brushed his hair back from his forehead the morning the nice man came to visit, humming while she counted what he pressed into her palm. It's just for a while, she'd said. I'll come get you soon. Her smile hadn't wavered once.

Corrine's smile when Gideon walked through the door looked exactly the same.

Brennan's hand dropped. He shoved it back into his pocket and kept walking.