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I hadn’t noticed him through the panic and the blurred vision, but there’s a second chair right next to mine. And slumped in it, looking like a discarded marionette, is Malachi. He’s out cold, chin buried in his chest, his wrists bound to the armrests too. Seeing him like this—this absolute unit of a demon reduced to a drooling, unconscious heap—makes my stomach do a cold somersault.

“I thought you were his boss,” I say quietly, my tongue feeling thick and clumsy.

She arches a single brow, her vertical pupils narrowing into razor-thin slits. “Is the concept of a female superior so alien to your species, or are you just struggling with the sibling dynamic?”

She reaches for a crystal tumbler of water sitting on a coaster, and with a casual flick of her wrist, she launches the contents across the desk.

The sheet of water hits Malachi’s face and he surges forward against the restraints with a violence that makes the chair tip. “What the fuck?!”

“Hm,” Veraxia hums, setting the empty glass back down delicately. “How pleasant. You always did wake up with the grace of a drowning rat.”

He ignores her, blinking the water out of his eyes, his chest heaving, and immediately locks onto me. The feral confusion vanishes, replaced by a desperate, frantic scan of my face.

“Eden?” he rasps. “Oh, thank Satan. You’re alive.” He strains against the armrests, the tendons in his neck pulling taut as wire as he tries to force his body toward mine. “Are you hurt? Did she touch you? Did anyone touch you?”

“I’m—I’m okay,” I stammer, nodding quickly.

Satisfied I’m not currently bleeding out or actually a ghost, he snaps his head toward Veraxia, baring his fangs with a growl.

“Stop that, you petulant brat,” she scolds, tapping a quill against the desk. “You are not a feral animal, despite your best efforts to have behaved like one as of late.” She gestures vaguely at the air with it, looking at him like he’s a stain on her resume. “I mean, unsanctioned murder? Theft in the Slag Heaps? Come on, Malachi. You were raised better. You’re acting like common street trash. And it’s all because of this?” Her disgusted gaze drifts to me. “Seriously, Malachi? After all your years, this is the grand finale?”

She leans forward, pointing a long, accusing finger at him. “For your entire adult life, Mother and Father have wanted you to settle down. To find happiness, maybe even a partner to breed with. And you finally do it… with a sack of expiring meat? I mean, look at it. It’s soft. It’s fragile. It probably breaks if you drop it from more than three feet.”

“Vee, shut up,” Malachi warns lowly.

“You’ve always been like this,” she continues. “So desperately, pathetically bored that you’d latch onto the first shiny, short-lived toy you found. You bound your eternal soul to something that’s going to rot and die in, what? Sixty years? It’s a bad investment, Malachi. It’s embarrassing.”

“That’s enough, Veraxia,” he rumbles, leaning forward as far as his cuffs will allow.

“Don’t you defend this⁠—”

“I said, enough.” He surges forward again, golden eyes blazing. “If you speak to my mortal like that again, I will find a way to break these cuffs and rip that tongue out of your⁠—”

“Your mortal?!” She cuts him off, her eyebrows shooting up so high they almost hit her hairline.

”Yes,” he snarls. “My mortal. And I suggest you adjust your tone before I adjust it for you.”

“Behave,” she snaps. “I think you are forgetting who is holding every single card right now, little brother. I am the one with the keys. You are the one in chains. Do not confuse my patience for weakness.”

She leans across the desk, her fingers digging into the mahogany hard enough to splinter the wood.

“I warned you,” she hisses, her vertical pupils blowing wide until her eyes are almost entirely black. “I gave you a notice to return. I told you exactly what would happen if you didn’t come back. And instead of listening, you decided to double down, make a mess, and drag a mortal into the fray. You have taken a minor infraction and turned it into a catastrophe. Do you have any idea how much cleaning up I’ve had to do since you went AWOL?”

She blows out a heavy breath and slumps back into her chair, rubbing her temples as if she’s trying to massage away a migraine the size of a continent. “It has been one catastrophe after another. The paperwork alone is enough to kill a lesser demon. I was hoping the bind was a joke. I honestly thought the comms were messing up when the Warden flagged it.”

“Nope,” he says, popping the ‘p’ with infuriating satisfaction. “Not a joke, Vee. Real blood. Real bond. Real headache.”

“Well, yes. I know that now, you incompetent moron.” Her hand drops to the desk. “Serena was dragged in for questioning the second the Wardens brought you in. She’s pissed, by the way—scorched-earth levels of pissed. And from her, I find out it’s all true. The bind, the accidental summoning... the sheer, blinding stupidity of the ritual.”

She leans forward, her eyes pinning Malachi to the seat. “You do know that simply severing the bind with her methods would have actually killed both of you, right?”

Malachi goes very still, his smirk freezing.

“Serena is a hack with a Satan complex, Malachi,” she muses. “She admitted—after some light persuasion—that she didn't care about your structural integrity. She only agreed to the ritual so she could get someone down to the Slag Heaps to pick up an illegal rattle for her. She was so desperate for it that she would’ve cut the cords and fried your brains in the process.”

“You’re fucking joking,” Malachi chokes out.

“Nope,” Veraxia says, mimicking his earlier pop. “You’d have liquefied before the blade even finished the stroke. Pop goes the weasel.”