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

CHAPTER TWELVE: The Fine Print

Seraphine

Seraphine Vale had spent twelve years learning not to want things, and in a single night the king of Varyn had undone most of it.

She sat in his father's chair in the gray hour before dawn, exactly an arm's length from the hearth rug, which she had measured twice, one arm wrapped around her ribs, the stolen blanket from his bed drawn up to her chin. The wound had stopped bleeding. It had not stopped aching. Across the room, on the hearth rug, Kael slept as though he had been felled, one arm flung over his eyes, his bandaged hand curled against his chest. He had not said a word since the Devil spoke. He had climbed three hundred and sixty-six steps in silence, set her gently in this chair, and lain down where he stood.

She was afraid for him. It was an unwelcome discovery. When she had tackled him across the flagstones she had felt his heart against hers, slow and steady and alive, and she had not wanted to move.

Five sunrises, she told herself, and began the sums she did every night. Five sunrises until the last bolt broke. Five sunrises until a king of Varyn must walk a bride to an altar. Five sunrises until she did what she had come here to do.

She had been so sure, once.

She closed her eyes, and it was twelve years ago, and she was twenty-four, kneeling in the east garden with dirt under her nails and a boy's laughter in her ears. A seventeen-year-old prince with a stone in his pocket, trying to whistle through a blade of grass and failing, and she had laughed and told him that he would get it by summer. He had grinned at her as though it were the greatest gift he had ever been given.

He had been so young. She had spent twelve years not thinking about that.

She had watched him run. She had seen it from the middle of the great hall with red cord cutting her wrists, a boy at the top of the stairs with his face gone white, and when he turned his back she had felt something inside her break that Hell itself had needed another hour to finish. She had hated him for it. She had built her whole cold, careful self on that hatred.

And tonight he had knelt in front of the man who had sold her, and she had seen him struggle not to despise him, and she had thought, helplessly: He is not his father.

It was the most dangerous thought she had ever had. A woman who thinks it has already begun to forgive, and forgiveness was the one thing Hell had never taught her to survive.

"You are doing it again."

The bride lay across the king's bed with her head propped on one hand, watching her. In the gray light she looked very young and very tired. She had not slept either.

"Doing what?"

"Looking at him as though you are trying to decide whether to kill him." A small smile. "Or kiss him. From here, the expressions are rather similar."

"Go to sleep."

"I cannot. We share a heart, and yours is making far too much noise." The bride's gaze softened. "Seraphine. You held my hand tonight."

"The lock needed two."

"Yes." She said it so gently that it hurt. "That must have been why."

Seraphine looked away. She slid her hand into the sleeve of her gown, into the lining where she had carried it for twelve years, and drew out a scroll no longer than her finger. Black parchment, tied with a thread of red silk. The Collector's copy. She had read it so many times the words had worn smooth in her mind, but she unrolled it now, in the failing dark, because she needed something to hold on to.

Upon delivery of the heir's soul at the seventh sunrise, the Collector shall be released.

Released. It was the only word in the whole contract she had ever allowed herself to love.

That was the bargain. Twelve years in Hell's service, twelve years as its knife, and at the end of it, one soul delivered, one grudge settled, and she would walk out of the Houses' hold as free as the day she was born. Free of the debt. Free of Aldric. Free of the grief that sat in her chest like a stone. It was why she had been willing to come up out of the earth and stand in front of the son of the man who had destroyed her, and call it justice.

"Read the verb," said the bride.

Seraphine went still.

"What?"

"The verb." The bride sat up, and her face was no longer teasing. "I have kept the vows for twelve years, sister. I know how Hell writes a contract. It does not lie. It cannot. It only chooses which meaning to leave you." She touched the edge of the parchment with one cold fingertip. "In the old tongue, the word they used is solvere. To release."

"Yes. I know what it means."

"It means to set free." The bride's voice dropped. "It also means to dissolve."

The room tilted.

Seraphine stared at the word. It lay on the black parchment in its small, neat, tidy letters, and she read it again, and again, and it changed with every reading. Released. Freed. Unmade. A salt cube released into water. A knot released from rope. A woman released from her body.

Twelve years of her life, and she had never once looked at the verb.

"They would not," she whispered. "They said I would be free."

"They did not say how."

She looked across the room at the sleeping king. At the line of his shoulder, and the scar on his palm where her own silk was still tied, and the stubborn tilt of his jaw even in sleep. She thought of the vision in his father's chamber, when he had finally looked at her, twelve years too late, and she had seen the horror of it dawn on his face.

She had come to collect his soul.

If she did, it would kill her.

The bride was watching her with enormous, sorrowful eyes. "That is why I never told you," she said softly. "You would not have believed me, and you would have gone anyway. And I could not bear to lose the only other half of me."

Seraphine closed her fist around the scroll.

Outside, far above the palace, the first thin line of morning cracked across the sky.

Five sunrises remained.

And for the first time in twelve years, she did not know whether she wanted to win.