19. Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
Julian
M y brothers and cousins are helping me empty Ophelia’s apartment.
Which, in practice, means sorting her life into boxes while mercilessly roasting mine.
“She owns three different tea steepers,” Seth says from the kitchen, holding one like it’s a cursed artifact. “Are we dealing with a hot beverage cultist?”
“Who alphabetizes their spices?” Owen mutters, peering into the cabinet. “Is that cute or deeply concerning?”
“Depends,” Adrian chimes in, rifling through a bathroom drawer. “If she has color-coded cotton balls, I’m calling a priest.”
“That’s rich coming from a guy who labels his sock drawer,” Lucas throws back as he passes with a box.
Every drawer they open is just another excuse to dissect the woman I’m bonded to, like judgment is part of the packing process.
“Found some journals,” Caleb calls, flipping one open like he’s unveiling ancient secrets. “Passive-aggressive poems, a paper to-do list titled End the Bloodline , and a lot of scratched-out groceries. I think she was either writing a spell or hexing someone named Carol.”
“Poor Carol,” Damian mutters. “Never stood a chance.”
The teasing is familiar—easy. The kind only brothers and cousins can pull off while packing up your life like it's both a comedy show and sacred rite. Damian opens the hall closet.
“Uh… guys?” His voice shifts—no sarcasm, just quiet urgency. “You need to see this.”
We gather around. He pulls out a few canvases. Each one wrapped and tucked carefully behind coats and storage bins, like secrets sealed in linen.
Seth’s the first to say it. “These are hers?”
We unwrap one slowly. The room stills. Color explodes across the them in sweeping strokes—riotous, delicate, deliberate. Emotion breathes beneath every layer of paint. Grief wrapped in shadow. Joy barely veiled in gold. It’s the kind of beauty that looks like it bled to exist.
“Holy shit,” Owen murmurs.
No one laughs or teases. They just… stare.
We keep unwrapping. Portraits. Dreams. Worlds she built inside herself and had nowhere to send. Each one more impossible than the last. They don’t just depict feeling—they are feeling.
“She’s not just talented,” Lucas says.
“She’s…” Adrian starts. “Unreal.”
I crouch in front of a self-portrait. Her expression isn’t posed. She looks straight out—unguarded, unafraid. Like she didn’t paint it for anyone else. Just to remember who she was.
“She painted these before the deal,” I say. “Before everything was taken.”
They don’t answer. They don’t need to. The room already knows what she lost. And now—what she’s about to take back.
Owen straightens with a grunt, stretching his back like he carried the emotional weight of every canvas. “So,” he says. “Do we bubble-wrap her soul, or is that, like, a deluxe upgrade?”
Lucas runs a thumb along the edge of a box. “We’re gonna need a new system. These can’t go in a portal with your leftover mugs.”
Adrian snaps his fingers. “Art gets its own stack. And if anyone lets a painting touch their protein powder box, I swear by all ten hells—”
“Nine,” Seth interjects.
“Whatever. If it happens, I’ll smite your ass with a rolled-up canvas.”
Caleb reappears holding duct tape like it’s a threat. “Who needs labels when you have fear?”
“We’ll stack them by category,” Damian says, already moving. “Books. Paintings. Weirdly aggressive tea accessories.”
“And teleport each stack one at a time,” Lucas adds. “Safer. Less chaos. Less chance of turning the Van Gogh of the underworld into a pile of abstract firewood.”
I nod, still beside the self-portrait. “She’d hate that. We do it right.”
“Also,” Seth says, hefting a heavy box, “remind me to apologize when she realizes we’ve read her journal entries about ‘severing the mortal coil through bad spaghetti.’”
“She’s definitely cursing Carol,” Caleb mutters.
“And the pasta.”
We start stacking again—but it’s not the same kind of silence as before. This one hums with meaning. It’s filled with effort, with care. The occasional grunt of lifting, the low thrum of teleportation runes—little sounds that say, we’re bringing her home.
This isn’t just about moving her things. It’s about carrying the pieces of her she lost—and making sure she gets every single one back.
Once everything is in place, we start sorting out who’s taking what. I claim the paintings. There’s a spare room in my house—empty, quiet and untouched. I could make it into something just for her. Maybe we’ll finish it before she comes back.
It feels like a small promise.
Soft embers catch in the air—not a flame, not fire, but the familiar hiss of infernal magic slipping between realms.
A contract. My spine locks. I know that sound. I know what it means.
Someone’s deal has come due.
But it can’t be mine. I don’t have any open contracts. Not anymore. And the only one I’ve been tracking closely is Cassius Arden’s—but his isn’t ready. Not yet.
I don’t move. Not until the parchment folds out of nothing and drops directly into my hands.
The parchment is ice against my skin. The room stills as I look down.
Payment Due.
My heart doesn’t just stop—it drops out of rhythm entirely. This isn’t possible. It shouldn’t exist.
This should’ve been voided. The second our bond was sealed, any previous claim should’ve unraveled. That’s law. That’s structure. That’s the one constant in all this chaos.
I swallow and hold out the contract. No one speaks right away. They just read. One by one.
Seth is the first to break the silence. “That can’t be real.”
“It’s not just real,” Caleb mutters, eyes narrowing, “it’s current. That flame mark means it’s already in motion.”
“But it shouldn’t exist,” Lucas says, sharper now. “You’re bonded. That’s a full override. Nothing’s supposed to touch her now—not legally, not magically.”
“There must be a mistake,” Adrian says. “Or a manipulation. Something someone slipped past the system.”
Damian folds his arms. “Unless this wasn’t a normal deal. Or it was set so deep that even the bond didn’t kill it.”
“No,” I say quietly. “Even Echo Cases dissolve once a soul is claimed. That’s the whole point.”
“But it didn’t,” Seth says, looking at me. “So what does that mean?”
It means I’m done standing here.
“I’m going to her,” I say, already pulling my magic into my hands. “Now.”
“You think she’s in danger?” Owen asks.
“I don’t know what this is,” I answer, gaze still locked on the name seared into the parchment, “but I’m not waiting for a second notice.”
The air tears open around me, heat pressing at my back as I step through the portal. Smoke trails behind my coat, the contract still gripped in my hand, burning faintly at the edges like it knows what it’s about to do.
I glance down at the scroll, expecting confirmation of what I already feared.
Her name is slashed through in thick, final ink.
And beneath it—another. One that shouldn’t be here. One that rewrites everything.
My chest goes tight. My heart sinks, hard and sudden, like it’s dropped straight through me. This isn’t possible. There are no names left in this bloodline. No terms active. No reason for the contract to shift. Except it has. And now it’s binding.
I don’t speak right away.
The others are already watching—Ophelia, her family, Cassius with that slow-spreading smirk like he’s known something all along.
“Right on time,” Cassius says, teeth flashing through the grin.
“What is that?” Melanie asks, folding her arms.
“The contract,” I say, my voice low. Tired. “The last clause is active.”
Ophelia’s eyes are on me now. Searching. Already knowing.
“Who?” she asks, and it’s not just a question—it’s a prayer.
“Julian…” she says, soft—like she already knows.
Our eyes meet, and it hits me all over again. The contract has chosen. And no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many loopholes I chased or seals I reinforced, it was never going to let go. Not without blood.
“I tried to stop it,” I say, and the words barely make it past my throat. “But the contract has to be fulfilled.”
I can’t look at her anymore. My gaze drops, my grip tightening around the scroll as if I could crush the outcome just by willing it.
“It’s not your soul I’m here for,” I say, and my voice barely holds. “It’s hers.”
Ophelia steps forward before anyone else moves. She takes the scroll from my hand, too calm at first—like denial still shields her from what she’s about to see. But the moment her fingers touch the parchment, it pulses with heat. Magic recognizes her, even as the contract tries to resist her grip.
She tears it open anyway.
The scroll unfurls in her hands with a crackle, ink bleeding across the page like it's trying to rewrite itself. Cassius’s name burns first—sharp, bold, final. Next is hers. Written in blood.
She exhales once—too sharp, too fast.
ere it is. A single, brutal slash through her name.
And beneath it, glowing freshly, impossibly, irrevocably.
Arabella Arden.
Her breath catches. She doesn’t speak at first, just stares. Her hands start to shake. Her throat works around words that won’t come out. When she finally does speak, it’s thin and cracking.
“No.” She blinks, like the page might change if she just looks again. “No, that’s wrong. That’s not— That’s not supposed to—”
She presses her palm to the bloodprint, trying to rub it away like it’ll come off. Like it’s just ink and not a signature carved into the bones of Hell.
“Julian,” she says, her voice rising now, breaking apart. “This was mine. The deal was mine. How is this—how is this happening?”
I don’t have an answer. Not one that would matter. The contract has chosen. It’s binding.
And she knows it.
Her chest heaves. Panic spreads in her eyes like wildfire—fast, feral, uncontrollable.
“I was supposed to pay for it,” she says, more to herself than to me. “Not her. Not her. I was the one who made the choice—”
The scroll curls in her grip as magic settles into place, final and absolute. Her hands drop. Her body doesn’t collapse, but something in her expression does.
I reach out to Owen. Maybe he is able to get more information from the council.
Julian: Do you know anything?
Owen: Yeah. She was added to the list. Aunt Selene says there's no such thing as loopholes. So she went to the archives and looked to see how Arabella was added to the contract.
He sends me a telepathic link to what she found. All of this information. It's all coming to light.
"How could this happen?" Ophelia begs me for an answer. Unfortunately, now I have one to give her.
She looks at me like I’m the only one who can make this make sense. A telepathic surge hits me—raw and fast. It's the trail she found, the pieces she didn’t know she was collecting until now. Headlines. Reports. Data. Rhys’s article. The awards. The case. Bella. It's all there. And as I sift through it, the truth clicks into place with brutal precision.
I look around the circle—at the faces waiting for me to fix this, to lie maybe, to say there's still a way out.
“There was no loophole,” I say quietly, my voice low but heavy. “There never was.” “The deal was simple,” I continue, my eyes locking with Ophelia’s. “The most famous would be taken. That was the clause. That was the price. At the time, it was you.”
She stiffens.
“Even after you stopped painting for yourself—even doing the ghost commissions—you were still everywhere. Your name carried weight. Your work kept you at the top, whether you wanted it to or not. But you disappeared. You vanished from the scene. You stopped producing. You stayed in Hell for too long.”
She swallows hard, but doesn’t interrupt.
“In your absence,” I say, turning slightly to the others now, “your name faded. You lost your clients. You dropped out of the public eye. And while all of that was happening…” I glance toward Bella, my chest tightening. “Arabella cracked the trafficking case.”
Cassius’s jaw ticks.
“She exposed something massive. Rhys wrote the article. It went viral. Her face—her name—was everywhere. She won awards. Gave speeches. Became internet famous overnight.”
Ophelia’s lips part in horror. “No…”
“She became the most famous Arden,” I say. “And when Melanie fell, the deal didn’t dissolve. It adjusted. It took the next in line.”
I glance down at the scroll in her hands. The blood signature still burns there. A record, unchangeable and absolute.
“It had to be fulfilled. And since I spared you…” I force the words out. “Someone had to take your place.”
The silence that follows isn’t empty. It’s thick. Devastating.
Ophelia turns to Bella—who hasn’t spoken, hasn’t moved, frozen in disbelief. And for a long moment, no one knows what to say.
Ophelia is already at Bella’s side, her fingers digging into her sister’s arms like she can anchor her to the world. “There has to be something we can do,” she says. “Say there’s something. Please.”
I want to. I want to tear the sky open and rewrite the laws myself. But I’ve already read the contract. Already seen the ink shift. Already felt the pull of Hell binding itself around a new name.
And Bella knows.
She’s not asking questions. She’s just… still. Her expression isn’t blank, it’s resigned. A quiet kind of understanding that looks far too much like peace.
“I’ll go,” she says.
Ophelia recoils. “No. Don’t say that.”
Bella meets my gaze. “It’s my name on the scroll. It’s my signature in blood. It doesn’t matter how it got here, or if I asked for it. It’s me.”
“No, it’s not,” Rosalind snaps. “It was never supposed to be.”
“It’s always someone,” Bella says, voice soft. “And I’d rather it be me than—”
“No,” Rhys says, stepping forward like the word costs him. “Don’t you dare finish that sentence.”
Bella turns to him, and her composure cracks, just a little.
“I was going to ask you to marry me,” Rhys says. “I had the ring. I had the words. You don’t get to just give yourself up.”
Her eyes flood with tears, but she blinks them back. “Rhys, I love you. But this isn’t a choice. It’s already written.”
Ophelia shakes her head, frantic. “We rewrite it.”
“I’m going to fix this,” I say, already feeling the beginning of a plan start to form in the back of my mind. “There’s a way to break it. There has to be.”
"Do it, demon," Rhys says, stomping towards me.
"Stop! This isn't his fault, Rhys," Ophelia says.
Rhys looks at Ophelia like he doesn’t even recognize her.
“You left,” he says. No rage yet—just the tremor in his voice. “You disappeared. No call. No note. Just gone.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You didn’t mean ?” His voice spikes. “You didn’t mean to vanish while Bella cried herself to sleep every night? While I had to lie to her, day after day, saying you’d come back? You didn’t mean to shatter her entire world just so you could run off and play immortal soulmate with a demon?”
Ophelia flinches. “Rhys, that’s not what happened—”
“Oh, isn’t it?” he snaps, eyes flashing. “You always find a way to make yourself the victim. But this time, this time , someone else is paying the price for your absence.”
He steps closer, and she doesn't back away. She just stands there, swallowing down whatever's clawing its way up her throat.
“You should’ve stayed gone,” Rhys says, his voice quieter now, but shaking with fury. “At least she’d still have a future.”
Ophelia’s breath hitches. “I never wanted this.”
“No,” he says. “You just made it inevitable.”
She stares at him, stunned silent, her pulse pounding in her ears. Her fingers twitch at her sides like she’s searching for something to hold onto—anything to anchor herself.
Rhys’s voice drops lower. “And for the record? I hope you look at that contract every single day. I hope you remember what it cost to keep your name off it.” He pauses, breathes once. His next words are ice. “I wish it was his name on that scroll instead.”
“I wish it was too,” I say quietly—flat, without heat. “Because if it were, you wouldn’t be talking right now.” Rhys freezes. “You think you’re angry?” my eyes narrow, just a sliver of the fury I keep buried leaking through. “You don’t know what it means to lose someone piece by piece and not be allowed to fall apart.”
I look at Ophelia—not at Rhys. My voice softens, but only for her. “You think pain gives you a license to destroy her? You don’t get to break the people she loves just because you’re hurting.”
Rhys says nothing.
“She’s already lost everything once. She doesn’t owe you her grief just because it’s more convenient than yours. But…” I say, almost to myself. “You just gave me an idea.”
I lean in and kiss Ophelia.
She doesn’t realize it, but I’m already letting go. This isn’t a promise—it’s a farewell dressed in silence. She kisses me like we still have time, unaware the moment is already slipping through my fingers.
The scroll burns hotter in my grip, the blood ink blistering the air around it.
“I refuse the contract!” I shout to Hell itself.
“What are you doing?” Ophelia’s voice cuts through the haze, panicked, rising. She grabs my arm, eyes wide. “What’s happening?”
I can’t answer. The ground splits, heat surges beneath our feet, but it’s not fire—it’s pressure. Old magic. A summons that no one made, but someone answered.
From the scorched line in the earth, shadows begin to rise. The Infernal Council has come. And the world holds its breath.
Ophelia’s eyes are wide, terrified as she repeats herself. “What are you doing? What’s happening?”
I don’t answer yet. Not until the Council speaks, voices fused into one that echoes in the marrow of my bones. “You reject the contract?”
I stare at the scroll in my hand—Bella’s name carved into it like it was always meant to be there. My fist tightens around it until the paper begins to burn.
“I know the rules,” I say, lifting my head.But I can take her place.”
“No,” Ophelia breathes. “No, don’t do this. Don’t you dare—”
“I have to.” I look at her like it’s the last time I’ll ever get to. I need to memorize her while I still have the chance.
“Julian, please,” she chokes, stumbling forward. “Don’t go. We can find another way. There has to be something—”
“There isn’t.” My voice is raw now, but I keep it steady. “Deals have no loopholes. You know that.”
The Council speaks, voices like stone grinding against fate. “Are you certain?”
I don’t look away from her. Not even for them. “I am.”
Cassius staggers back like he’s seen death itself. Melanie doesn’t move. Her expression is unreadable.
I glance at them only once. “You lose.”
The air splits with a thundercrack as infernal arms—burning, skeletal, merciless—erupt from the earth. They wrap around me, binding tight, dragging me backward.
Ophelia screams. “Julian!”
She runs forward, reaching for me. But she can’t touch me—her hands pass through ash and flame. I’m already being pulled under.
“Don’t take him,” she sobs. “Take me. Please—take me instead—”
I shake my head. “No. You survived for too long to be taken now.”
“I love you,” she cries.
“Across lifetimes. Through every version of you. In every form of me,” I say, and I let it be the last thing she hears.
The heat swallows the light. The sky fractures above me, and the last thing I hear isn’t the Council, or the tearing earth. It’s her voice—shaking, shattering, screaming my name into the dark.
But I’m gone.
And this time, I don’t get to come back.