Chapter 31 Eden
Eden
Ijerk my head up—a mistake, as the room tilts—and nearly pass right back out. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to bring my hands up to cradle my throbbing skull, but my wrists jerk to a halt.
I force my eyes open, blinking through the blur. I’m shackled, my wrists bound by heavy iron cuffs—but I’m not chained to a dripping stone wall. I’m sitting in a chair. A very expensive, very comfortable, black leather executive chair that spins smoothly on its axis as I shift my dead weight.
And sitting behind the desk opposite me is a silver-skinned woman, staring at me with a raised brow, scratching the magma-crusted head resting on her knee.
Chain-Chewer…
“You’re very fleshy aren’t you?” she muses, tilting her head to the side, snake-like pupils contracting in her golden eyes. “I never realized how meaty mortals would be when they were living. It’s… disconcerting.”
I blink again, my brain stalling out. “I—what?”
The Hellhound lets out a high, desperate whine as it strains against some invisible leash, claws skittering on the tile.
“Security Hound Three-Oh-One, heel,” she snaps.
The Hound drops its butt to the floor instantly, tongue lolling out.
“Security Hound Three-Oh-One?” I choke out.
“Yes. Not ‘Chain-Chewer’ or whatever aggressive monosyllable grunt of a name has been given to him,” she says, her voice dripping with disdain. She reaches down, scratching the beast. “I’ve known this creature for most of his life. He was stolen from the family kennels quite a few centuries ago.”
She harrumphs at my slack-jawed expression and leans back in her chair, dismissing my confusion with a lazy, elegant wave of a manicured hand.
“Of course. You have no idea what’s going on. The lights are on, but clearly no one is home.” She sighs deeply. “I’m Veraxia. Veraxia Virezeal. And you, along with my idiot brother, are becoming a significant administrative headache.”
Brother…?
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.”
She smooths down the lapels of her blazer before giving Chain-Chewer another scratch. “Which is why I am going to fix it for you.”
Hope, hot and bright, flares in my blood, nearly making me dizzy. The bind. The nightmare of being tethered to Malachi. It’s all going to be gone. I can get Vesper. I can go home. I can go back to a life where my biggest problem is paying the electric bill, not dodging demons in Hell.
“You know how to do it?” I ask hesitantly.
“Of course I know how to do it,” she snaps.
My eyes dart between the two of them—the lethal sister and my protective demon—tracking the invisible sparks of violence flying in the air.
Malachi clears his throat, looking very interested in a smudge on the ceiling. “Vee did a stint. Before she went into... administration.”
“A stint?” Veraxia scoffs. “I spent eighty years in the Occult Research Program while you were busy dicking around doing fuck-knows-what.”
I stare at Malachi, pulse throbbing in my ears. “You’re telling me your sister is a literal expert in the one thing that’s upended my life, and you didn't think to mention it?”
“Usually, you don't ask the person trying to put you in a cage for medical advice!” he snaps back.
Veraxia ignores us both and yanks open a desk drawer, pulling out a stack of parchment so thick it lands on the wood with a dust-displacing thud.
“Section 4, Paragraph C of the Soul-Tether Act states that nature abhors a vacuum, and so does magic,” she sighs, wetting a silver finger to flip through the yellowed pages.
“There is no such thing as a bind without terms, little mortal. If you didn’t speak the terms aloud, the magic simply bypassed your vocal cords and drafted the contract based on your subconscious intent. ”
She stops on a page covered in dense, shifting black script, tapping it with a nail.
“It calcified around the loudest emotion you were feeling at the exact moment of summoning,” she says, looking up at me. “To break the bind, we have to complete the terms. And to know what the terms were, we have to excavate the specific frequency of the desire that fueled the spell.”
A hot wave of nausea lurches through my stomach, instantly coating the back of my tongue with the taste of bile.
Excavate. What the fuck does that mean?
“I... I can just tell you what it was,” I say quickly, my hands sweating against my thighs. “We don’t need to dig for anything. I know what it was. I was sad. I was... I was lonely. I wanted to see Matthew again—my dead boyfriend. There. Solved.”
She looks at me with a flat, dead-eyed stare that makes me want to dissolve into the floorboards.
“When you go to a hospital and tell the doctor you have a fever,” she says slowly, sounding like she’s explaining quantum physics to a toddler, “do they simply take your word for it? Do they scribble a prescription based on your vibes? Or do they shove a thermometer up your ass to verify the data?”
I wince, my face heating up. “I—uh...”
“Exactly,” she clips. “Subjective testimony is useless in a binding of this magnitude. Mortals are fickle, wet, and unreliable observers of their own lives. I need the raw data.” She reshuffles the stack of parchment, banging the edges against the desk to straighten them.
“So I’m just going to use standard cranial extraction.
I’ll file the requisite authorization forms, obviously—I’m not running a circus here—but once the ink’s dry, we’re going to the Pit. ”
Cranial extraction? In the Pit?
The blood drains from my face so fast the room tilts, grey spots dancing in the corners of my vision.
No.
I can’t let them do that. I can’t let them crack my skull open like a walnut and rummage through my memories. Because if they look… if they dig past the surface-level fear and the adrenaline… they’ll find it.
They’ll find the rot I’ve been hiding. And if he sees what’s inside my head—if he sees what I really am—he’ll drag me to the deepest depths of Hell himself, and he’ll make sure they torture me and peel my skin off for everything that I’ve done.
“No,” Malachi growls.
“Excuse me?” Veraxia blinks, pausing with her pen hovering over the inkwell, a single drop of black ink suspended from the nib.
“I said no. You are not taking her to the Pit.” The sound of splintering metal cracks through the room as Malachi stands up, his thighs firing.
He moves so fast he takes the furniture with him—the executive chair screeches across the floor before shattering against the back of his legs, wood and leather raining down like confetti until the armrests dangle against his shackled wrists.
The sudden noise startles the Hellhound, and the beast lurches forward with a guttural roar, jaws snapping at her face, but Veraxia doesn't even flinch.
“Oh, shut up, Three-Oh-One,” she hisses at the hound, and the terrifying creature instantly cowers, whining and sliding onto its belly like a kicked puppy.
“I will not allow you to take her there,” Malachi snarls, stepping over the remains of the chair to loom over the desk.
He looks at his sister with a level of hatred that could curdle milk.
“You know what that place does to the mind.
I won't let you butcher her sanity just to fill out a spreadsheet.”
“Oh, spare me the theatrics,” Veraxia sneers, her golden eyes flashing dangerously.
“I’m not going to leave her hollowed out, Malachi.
She won’t even remember it anyway. We’ll find the terms, sever the bind, then I’ll perform a factory reset after—a full wipe.
I’ll drop her back in her shoebox apartment safe, sound, and blissfully ignorant.
No memory of you, no memory of Hell. And then I’ll turn my attention to your punishment. ”
“Over my dead body,” Malachi spits.
“That can be arranged,” she says, pressing a glowing rune carved into the surface of her desk.
“Wardens!”
The doors behind us burst open, the room flooding with the clatter of boots and the clack of pincers.
“Take Malachi and his mortal to a holding cell,” she commands, waving a hand as if swatting away a fly. “Let them cool off until the paperwork clears.”