The Devil's Debt: A Kiss That Binds the Damned

CHAPTER TEN: The Lock Beneath the Palace

"Do not," Seraphine said, "carry me."

He carried her anyway.

She was bleeding through the bandage the court physician had wound around her ribs, and her face was the color of candle wax, but her eyes were furious and clear. She had refused a bed, laudanum, and every attempt to tell her the wound was deep.

"The blade was forged in Wrath," said the bride from the doorway. She sat on the floor with her back against the wall, white as paper, one hand pressed to the matching wound in her own side. For the first time since she arrived, she did not smile. "It does not close the way mortal cuts do. It stays open until the one who threw it is dead."

"Who threw it?"

"A page in your livery. He vanished when the lights went out." Her gaze flicked to Kael. "I would not trust your palace."

He set Seraphine down on the edge of his father's bed. Blood had already dampened the linen. He knelt, took her wrist in both hands, and felt for the pulse. It was there, quick and thready. Behind him, the bride let out a faint, shuddering breath, and he understood that he had just felt one heartbeat in two bodies.

"That is why she has no pulse," he said slowly. "You have it. She has the memory."

"And when I kissed your wrist—"

"You kissed half a woman's life. And she felt it, too."

He looked up. She stared back, white-lipped, and he saw what she had been hiding. Not hatred. Not duty. Exhaustion, the weariness of someone who had lived twelve years in two halves and never once been allowed to be whole.

"If she dies, you die."

"If I die, she dies." Her mouth twisted. "That is why the Houses have not already killed one of us."

"And if I love one of you—"

"Do not finish that sentence."

He did not.

Past midnight, a bell tolled somewhere beyond the window and fell quiet, the third, silenced by Dravik's blood on his blade. Four remained, and four nights stood between him and the seventh sunrise.

He looked at the black panel behind the headboard.

"We are going down."

"It is sealed until the seventh sunrise."

"It is sealed against Hell. Against the contract." He rose. "You are a bound collector. She is the Devil's bride. Who else might be able to cross?"

"Your blood," the bride said softly. "The blood of both of us. We are not Hell's, and not quite Heaven's. A lock cannot be forbidden to its key."

Seraphine closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were hard as flint. "Help me stand." The bride followed them across the ward with a hiss of pain, and did not look back.

---

The chapel lay at the bottom of three hundred and sixty-six steps.

He held a candle in one hand, and Seraphine's arm in the other, and the bride followed. The air grew colder with every flight, and the walls changed from dressed stone to something that looked disturbingly like bone.

At the bottom, a black iron door waited. Seven locks. No keyholes.

Seraphine pressed her bleeding palm to the first. It hissed. Then the second, the third. The bride came forward, silent and grave, and laid her own palm beside her sister's, the blood the same color, the hand the same shape. The iron shuddered and swung wide.

Kael stepped into the chapel of his ancestors.

It was ruined. The vaulted ceiling had cracked, and pale roots hung down like hair. Beyond the altar, filling the eastern wall, rose a great gate of iron and bone, hung with seven huge locks, six dark and one burning faintly red.

At its foot, chained to the stone by a collar of black thorns, knelt a man.

He was thin, his beard white and wild, the robes of state hanging from him in rags, black veins creeping beneath his gray skin toward his heart. But the eyes that lifted when Kael entered were the same eyes that had stared at him across the council table all his life.

"Kael," said King Aldric Varyn.

His voice was a crumbling thing, but it held. "I did not think you would come in time."

Years of anger rose in Kael and found nothing to hold. He had never imagined the old man smaller than he was.

"You are alive," he said stupidly.

"Barely. I am the lock. It is a poor trade." Aldric's eyes moved past his son and found Seraphine, and something terrible happened to his face. "Seraphine."

"Do not say my name."

"I have said it every night for twelve years."

"Then you have wasted your breath."

Aldric's eyes were wet. "Kael, listen. Everything you have been told is half true. The Devil did not ask for your soul. He asked for you. His firstborn. I refused."

"You refused," said Kael flatly.

"So he asked for something else. A bride, with you written beneath her as surety." He looked at Seraphine, and his face crumpled. "I offered her. God forgive me, I told myself it would buy you twelve years. That she would be taken quickly, that it was a single life against a kingdom." His voice broke. "I was wrong about every part of it."

Seraphine stood with blood on her side and her chin up, staring at the man who had destroyed her with a face like a closed door.

"Why are you chained?" Kael said, because he could not bear the silence.

"Because a Varyn king must give the bride away. The Devil cannot step through the gate until one of us walks her to the altar of his own will. I bound myself here with my own blood so the rite could not be completed. But I am dying, boy, and the lock is failing. At the seventh sunrise, the last bolt will break, and you will be asked to walk her down the aisle."

"Which one?"

"That is the cruelty." Aldric looked at him with something close to horror. "He does not want your soul. Souls are cheap. He wants your love. The love of a Varyn king is the only key that opens his door. Whichever of them you love, whichever you cannot bear to lose, will be the one he takes."

The words fell into Kael like stones. He did not dare look at either woman.

"And if I love neither?"

"Then you are the first of our line who has not been a fool."

Behind the gate, something shifted.

It was a soft sound, no louder than a sigh, but every hair on Kael's arms rose. The six dark locks trembled. The seventh, the red one, pulsed once like a heart. And from the black beyond the bars, in a voice so tender and so tired that it went through him like a knife, came a whisper.

"Kael?"

He knew that voice. He had not heard it in seventeen years. He could not see the face it belonged to. He had given it away that morning. But the voice, low and soft and worn thin by love, singing a lullaby whose words he had never learned, was the one thing he had never been able to forget.

"Kael, darling," said his mother. "Open the door."

"No," Aldric said hoarsely. "Kael. No. It is not her. Whatever it says, it is not her—"

But Kael was already walking toward the gate.

His hand lifted toward the first lock. Seraphine's fingers closed around his sleeve, and he could not stop. Behind them, the old king was shouting, his chains clanking, his voice splintering.

And with a sound like a bone snapping in the dark, the first lock cracked.