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And then she’d knelt on the crumbling stone steps, the river mere feet behind her, the arches of the bone gates above her, and waited.
The Under-King, veiled in black and silent as death, had appeared moments later.
It has been an age since a mortal dared set foot on my isle.
The voice had been old and young, male and female, kind and full of hatred. She’d never heard anything so hideous—and beckoning.
I wish to trade my place.
I know why you are here, Bryce Quinlan. Whose passage you seek to barter. An amused pause. Do you not wish to one day dwell here among the honored dead? Your balance remains skewed toward acceptance—continue on your path, and you shall be welcomed when your time comes.
I wish to trade my place. For Danika Fendyr.
Do this and know that no other Quiet Realms of Midgard shall be open to you. Not the Bone Quarter, not the Catacombs of the Eternal City, not the Summer Isles of the north. None, Bryce Quinlan. To barter your resting place here is to barter your place everywhere.
I wish to trade my place.
You are young, and you are weighed with grief. Consider that your life may seem long, but it is a mere flutter of eternity.
I wish to trade my place.
Are you so certain Danika Fendyr will be denied welcome? Have you so little faith in her actions and deeds that you must make this bargain?
I wish to trade my place. She’d sobbed the words.
There is no undoing this.
I wish to trade my place.
Then say it, Bryce Quinlan, and let the trade be done. Say it a seventh and final time, and let the gods and the dead and all those between hear your vow. Say it, and it shall be done.
She hadn’t hesitated, knowing this was the ancient rite. She’d looked it up in the gallery archives. Had stolen the Death Mark from there, too. It had been given to Jesiba by the Under-King himself, the sorceress had told her, when she’d sworn fealty to the House of Flame and Shadow.
I wish to trade my place.
And so it had been done.
Bryce had not felt any different afterward, when she’d been sent back over the river. Or in the days after that. Even her mother had not been able to tell—hadn’t noticed that Bryce had snuck from her hotel room in the dead of night.
In the two years since, Bryce had sometimes wondered if she’d dreamed it, but then she’d look through the drawer in the gallery where all the old coins were kept and see the empty, dark spot where the Death Mark had been. Jesiba had never noticed it was gone.
Bryce liked to think of her chance at eternal rest as missing with it. To imagine the coins nestled in their velvet compartments in the drawer as all the souls of those she loved, dwelling together forever. And there was hers—missing and drifting, wiped away the moment she died.
But what Sabine had claimed about Danika suffering in the Bone Quarter … Bryce refused to believe it. Because the alternative—No. Danika had deserved to go to the Bone Quarter, had nothing to be ashamed about, whether Sabine or the other assholes disagreed or not. Whether the Under-King or whoever the Hel deemed their souls worthy disagreed or not.
Bryce ran her hand through Hunt’s silken hair, the sounds of his breathing filling the room.
It sucked. This stupid fucking world they lived in.
It sucked, and it was full of awful people. And the good ones always paid for it.
She pulled her phone from the nightstand and began typing out a message.
She fired it off a moment later, not giving herself time to reconsider what she’d written to Ithan. Her first message to him in two years. His frantic messages from that horrible night, then his cold order to stay away, were still the last things in a thread that went back five years before that.
You tell your Alpha that Connor never bothered to notice her because he always knew what a piece of shit she was. And tell Sabine that if I see her again, I will kill her.
Bryce lay down next to Hunt, not daring to touch his ravaged back.
