Chapter 2 #2
More nothing. Just references to the historical King Croesus, the one from ancient Lydia who was supposedly the richest man in the world. Whose name became synonymous with wealth. Did the angels choose their own names? Were they something else before they fell?
Fitting for an angel of greed.
I try different search terms, different combinations. Seven Houses supernatural. Angel contracts. Sin eaters.
Every search comes up empty, or worse, filled with fantasy fiction and role-playing games and conspiracy theories that are somehow both too close and completely wrong.
The real world–the one where angels make deals and sins can be eaten and people like me exist in the cracks between normal and nightmare—doesn’t show up on Google.
We’re ghosts. Myths. The kind of thing people tell stories about but don’t actually believe in.
Which is exactly how we’ve survived this long.
I close the laptop, scrub my hands over my face.
My skin feels gritty, unwashed. I haven’t showered since yesterday morning.
I haven’t slept more than a few hours. My body is running on caffeine and adrenaline and the sheer stubborn refusal to break down before I’ve figured out what the hell I’m supposed to do.
Think, Raven. Think.
Gramms served two years. That means she had direct experience with at least two of the Houses.
If only I had her notes, her journals, her records.
I blink, remembering the two years where it had been impossible to reach her.
She called but never invited me over, never asked about my clients.
She went quiet, and I thought maybe she’d decided to stop sin eating and settle into her cottage.
But then she was gone, and she left nothing behind except a cottage full of furniture I sold to pay for the funeral, and a debt I’m now obligated to fulfill.
No notes. No warnings. No instruction manual for How To Survive Seven Years of Supernatural Servitude Without Losing Your Mind.
Just seven letters and three days.
I look at them again, spread across the table like playing cards in a game I don’t know the rules to.
“What are you willing to sacrifice to stay free?”
Gramms’ voice in my head, cold and sharp as January wind. One of her lessons, delivered over tea in her kitchen while I was still learning what it meant to be a sin eater. I was eighteen, maybe nineteen. Had just broken my first contract and was still shaking from it.
“Freedom isn’t free,” she’d said, watching me with those pale gray eyes that missed nothing. “Everything costs something. The question you have to ask yourself, Raven, is: what are you willing to sacrifice to stay free?”
“Nothing,” I’d said. Young and stupid and convinced I could do this work without paying the price. “I won’t sacrifice anything.”
She’d smiled then. Thin and bitter and sad. “Then you’ve already lost.”
I didn’t understand what she meant. Not then.
I’m starting to now.
Freedom isn’t on the table anymore. The only question is what I’m willing to sacrifice to keep Luna safe. To keep her in her dorm room studying for biology exams and texting me about cute boys and living the normal life I’ve never had.
The answer, I realize with a clarity which feels like breaking glass, is simple: everything.
I’ll sacrifice seven years. I’ll sacrifice my autonomy, my safety, my sanity if that’s what it takes. I’ll walk into the House of Gold and serve the angel of greed if it means Luna stays in the light.
Because that’s what love is, isn’t it? The willingness to walk into darkness so someone else doesn’t have to.
Gramms taught me that, too, though she never said it out loud. She just lived it.
I just wish I knew why she bound herself to the angels to begin with. She’d warned me against it again and again.
But maybe, maybe, she did it for the same reason I’m about to.
To protect someone she loved.
The thought sits heavy in my chest, uncomfortable and unwelcome. I’ve spent the last six months being angry at Gramms. Angry that she died and left me alone. Angry that she raised me to be a sin eater and then disappeared before teaching me how to survive it.
But what if she was protecting me? What if the debt was never meant to pass to me? What if she thought she’d live long enough to serve all seven years herself?
Inherited debts are ironclad. Blood calls to blood. The granddaughter inherits the grandmother’s obligations.
It’s one of the oldest laws in the supernatural world, etched so deep into the fabric of how things work that even angels and demons respect it. If someone wanted to force my hand, wanted to compel me into service, killing Gramms and invoking the inherited debt would do it.
The question is: why?
Why me specifically? I’m good at what I do, yeah. Eighteen years of breaking contracts, forty-three, well, forty-four now, successful purges. But I’m not the best. There are older sin eaters. More experienced ones. More powerful bloodlines.
I gather the letters, stack them neatly, and tuck them into the drawer where I keep important documents, birth certificate, lease agreement, etc.
I need information, and I need to understand what I’m walking into.
There are people I can ask, other sin eaters, contacts in the supernatural community, but that will have to wait.
First, I need to take care of something more important.
Luna.
I need to see her. Need to look her in the eye and lie convincingly about where I’m going and why. Need to memorize her face, her laugh, the way she gestures when she’s excited about something, because I don’t know when I’ll see her again after I report to the House of Gold.
Three days isn’t much time.
But it’s enough to say goodbye without saying goodbye.
I head for the shower. The water is scalding when I step under it, hot enough to hurt, and I let it. Let the heat turn my skin pink, let the steam fill my lungs, let the water wash away the residue of last night’s lust purge, Ash’s scent, the feeling of being trapped in my skin.
I need to be clean. Sharp. Ready.
The water pounds against my shoulders, and I close my eyes, letting myself feel the fear I’ve been holding at bay since I saw those seven letters on my kitchen table.
Seven years is a long time.
Long enough to forget who you are.
Long enough to become someone else entirely.
I think about Gramms’ last words to me on the phone three weeks before she died.
“Remember who you are, Raven. No matter what happens. No matter what they take from you. Remember.”
The water runs cold, so I shut it off. Step out into the steam-filled bathroom, wrap myself in a towel more hole than fabric. Look at myself in the mirror.
Black hair plastered to my skull. Dark eyes with shadows underneath. Lean body covered in scars, some from purges, some from the rare occasions when breaking a contract didn’t end well. Forty-four tattoos mark forty-four successful breaks.
This is who I am right now.
I need to remember this moment. This version of myself.
Because I don’t know who I’ll be when I come back.
If I come back.
I dry off, get dressed. Black jeans, a gray t-shirt, leather jacket. Boots. The armor of the every day. The costume of someone who’s got their shit together even when they absolutely don’t.
Three days.
The question Gramms asked me echoes in my head, relentless: What are you willing to sacrifice to stay free?
And my answer whispered into the back of my mind
Everything. I’m willing to sacrifice everything.
For Luna.
For the chance that she gets to stay in the light.
Even if it means I have to walk into the dark.