Chapter 10 Torch
Torch
The church looked worse in the aftermath, all raw edges and torn guts.
Every pew was split like firewood. Stained glass sparkled across the floor, slicing color into the blood pools.
The observer’s corpse still smoked, tar bubbling from the hole where I’d cored its skull.
Jasmine sat slumped against the wreck of the altar, hair stuck to her cheek, skin crosshatched with burns where she’d gone full demon in sacred territory.
I should’ve finished it. Everything in me—training, scars, even the jitter in my trigger finger—screamed to end her now, before she could get up and try again.
But the longer I stared, the less it felt like a job.
She looked more like a person, and less like a problem to be solved. Not that I’d ever say it out loud.
Jasmine’s chest heaved. The slit in her dress ran thigh to navel, and under the fabric her flesh was stippled with ugly blisters. The sigil at her hip—Hell’s brand, still faintly glowing—looked like it was trying to eat the rest of her. She glared up at me, mouth bloody at the corner.
“Going to gloat, soldier?” Her voice was glass shards, wet and mean.
“I came to watch you die,” I said, and meant it. “But it looks like you’re too stubborn for that.”
She spat a tooth. It rattled down the marble and came to rest at my boot. “Didn’t realize it was a spectator sport.”
I flicked the safety off the 1911, sighted her center mass. “This is the part where you beg.”
She laughed, or tried to, and coughed up a thread of black. “Do you even know why you’re doing this?”
“I don’t need a reason.”
She looked past me, at the smoldering demon, at the ruined nave, at the stars through the broken window. “Neither do I,” she whispered.
Something in me snapped. The compulsion, the rage, all of it went hollow.
I could shoot her, and maybe I’d get a medal.
Maybe Vin would buy me another drink. But the memory of her on the ride, her body folded over mine, the way she’d smiled with blood on her teeth, it all felt too real to throw away on a mercy kill.
I clicked the gun to safe, dropped it at my side. “You’re not the only one who wants answers.”
Jasmine’s eyes flicked up, wary.
“We both know this isn’t about quota,” I said. “Someone sent that thing to make sure you failed. Hell doesn’t waste resources on insurance unless they’re expecting trouble.”
She rolled her head back, banged it against the altar. “You think you know Hell. That’s adorable.”
“I know more than you think.” I let the scars on my forearms light up, blue-white arcs pulsing against my skin. “I know they don’t like it when a soldier goes off script.”
She flinched, involuntary. “You want a confession, Torch? Fine.” Her eyes burned red, then flicked to violet.
“I’ve got until Halloween, tomorrow, to fill Lilith’s ledger.
Four souls. Three down, one to go. If I fail—” She bared her teeth, and this time the smile was brittle.
“You ever see what Hell does to its own?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Every time I look in a mirror.”
Jasmine shivered. The air in the church felt colder now, and not just from the draft through the windows. “So what? You kill me, and another girl gets the job.”
“I don’t want another girl,” I said, before I could stop myself.
She blinked, surprised. “You’re a real mess, you know that?”
“Story of my life.” I kicked aside the tooth, crouched down so we were eye to eye. “You want to live, or you want to make a deal?”
She looked at my hands, then her own, then the gory expanse of the nave. “You trust me?”
“Not even a little.” I unzipped my jacket, yanked out the small first aid kit I kept for emergencies that didn’t involve actual bullets. “But I trust you hate Hell more than you hate me.”
She took the gauze, fingers shaking. “What’s your angle, Torch?”
“Simple.” I thumbed open a bottle of holy water, poured it slow onto the gouges in my arm. “We make a truce. For as long as it takes to get Lilith off your ass, and mine.”
She barked a laugh, wiped the sweat from her brow. “You want to fuck me over in person, not by proxy.”
“I want to watch you finish the job. Then we see where it goes.” I tore open a packet of coagulant, dusted it over her shoulder. She didn’t wince, but her face went tight. “You in?”
She looked at the blood on her hands, the burns, the bruises. “Fine,” she said, and it was less a word than a dare.
I reached for the knife at my belt, the silvered one, and drew it quick. She tensed, expecting a double-cross. I just nicked my palm, squeezed out a bead of red onto the ruined marble.
Jasmine’s eyes widened. “You’re serious.”
“Blood pact.” I wiped the blade on my jeans and handed it to her. “Even odds.”
She studied the knife, then her own skin, then me. She ran the blade across her palm, not deep, but enough. Her blood came out black, thick as ink, with a shimmer of blue. She let it drip, the drops mixing with mine on the floor.
The reaction was instant. The air went stiff, like the inside of a switchblade.
My scars blazed, not just the normal fire but something deeper, a crawl of heat up my arm and into my skull.
I saw her, not just the girl in front of me, but the memories behind her eyes, the creation in Hell’s forges, the taste of iron and ash, the endless drills of manipulation and hunger and seduction until it was second nature.
I saw her first kill, the boy who begged her to stop, the centuries of faces that blurred together, the endless ache of never being enough.
I saw the pit, and the queen who ran it, and the hollow at the center of her chest where even hope had been stripped out.
And she saw me. The grave, the return, the way Vin had pulled me from the mud, broken and half-feral.
She saw the years of trying to be human again, the sleepless nights, the club as the only place that felt like home.
She saw my first kill after Hell, the way I’d torn the demon apart with my bare hands, not because I had to, but because it felt like the only way to prove I was still on the right side.
We both jerked back, clutching our heads. The rush faded, but the echo of it stayed, a pulse under the skin, a knowledge you couldn’t un-know.
“Well,” Jasmine panted, “that was unpleasant.”
“I’ve had worse first dates.” My pulse hammered, not from fear, but from a sick kind of excitement. “You got what you need?”
She nodded, but didn’t trust herself to speak. She wrapped the gauze around her palm, fingers slick with the mixed blood.
I picked up my gun, checked the slide. “It’s not over. Lilith will come herself if you don’t finish the job.”
“Then you better keep up, soldier.”
The look she gave me was raw, all mask gone. For the first time, I believed she wanted to live, and not just out of fear.
“We move at dawn,” I said.
She stood, swaying, but there was steel in her spine. “I’ll be ready.”
***
Jasmine’s penthouse looked like a luxury magazine had thrown up all over a glass tower, but tonight the whole place felt off.
Even from the street, you could sense the wrongness, the way the lights flickered just a half-beat behind the rest of the building.
She was already on edge when she unlocked the door.
I saw it in the way her hand hovered over the handle, in the way she checked the hallway three times before stepping inside.
The stench hit first: scorched hair, charred plastic, a low note of sulfur that made her eyes water.
She clicked the lights, but half the bulbs had been smashed, and the rest pulsed weakly against the dark.
Someone had ransacked the living room. The drawers were ripped open, furniture flipped, her collection of murder trophy lighters scattered across the marble floor like confetti.
Whatever had done this was long gone, but the message was obvious, even to someone who’d grown up in the Queen’s own school of psychological warfare.
It was in the bedroom that she found the main event. It was a single wall, once pristine, now blackened from floor to ceiling. The message was burned into the paint, each letter three feet high and still glowing at the edges, hellfire slow to cool in the mortal world. It read:
TRAITORS BURN ETERNALLY
Jasmine stared at the words for a long time, not moving, not breathing. The mark at her hip throbbed in sympathy, and for the first time, she understood that she wasn’t a freelancer anymore. She was property, and her owner was pissed.
She crossed the room, reached out, and touched the edge of the warning.
The heat singed her fingertips, but she didn’t pull away.
She let it hurt, let it sink all the way down to the bones.
She could still feel me, a phantom echo under her skin, a reminder that she wasn’t alone, even if it meant damnation.
She traced the letters, and her fingers left a new mark, a smear of ash that was more defiance than apology.
Jasmine stood in the center of her ruined palace, the city lights bleeding in through the glass, and let the truth settle.
There was no way back. Only forward, through fire and blood and whatever came next.
She smiled, faint and sharp, and whispered a promise to the dark. She would burn the world down herself—before Hell had the chance.