Chapter 3
The campus is beautiful. Sprawling green quads, brick buildings that try too hard to look historic, students everywhere moving in clusters like schools of fish.
It’s a weekday afternoon, which means the walkways are crowded with backpacks and coffee cups, and the low hum of a thousand conversations I’m not part of.
I feel ancient walking through it. Thirty-six years old and moving through a sea of teenagers who think they have forever.
Maybe they do. Maybe that’s what normal looks like.
I find Luna exactly where she said she’d be: the campus coffee shop, tucked into a corner booth with her laptop open and textbooks spread around her like a fortress.
She’s wearing an oversized State sweatshirt, her dark hair pulled up in a messy bun, and she’s got that focused expression she gets when she’s deep in study mode, brow furrowed, bottom lip caught between her teeth.
She’s beautiful in a fresh-faced, nineteen-year-old way.
Dark hair like our mother’s, but her features are all her father’s —delicate bone structure, wide-set eyes, the pretty that photographs well.
We don’t look alike, not really. Half-sisters from Mom’s two marriages, seventeen years apart.
Different fathers, different bloodlines.
That difference saved her life.
Mom never made it past forty-nine, dying when Luna was two and I was nineteen. Car accident. Quick and brutal and completely devastatingly normal.
No angels. No sins. No supernatural bullshit.
Just bad luck and a drunk driver and grief that carves you hollow.
I raised Luna after that. Dropped out of college, got a job, figured out how to be a parent when I was barely more than a kid myself.
Gramms helped financially, at least, but the day-to-day stuff was all me.
Diapers and tantrums and homework and the slow, terrifying realization that I was responsible for keeping another human being alive.
And I did it. Kept her fed, kept her safe, kept her in school and out of trouble. Put her through seventeen years of normal childhood while I was learning to eat sins and break contracts and survive in a world she didn’t even know existed.
Worth it. Every sleepless night, every missed opportunity, every sacrifice, worth it to see her here, safe and whole, studying whatever the hell she wants just because she loves it.
I just have to make sure the world doesn’t find out about her first.
“Raven!” Luna looks up, her face breaking into a smile that makes my chest tight. She waves me over, already closing her laptop. “You came! You said you couldn’t.”
“Changed my mind.” I slide into the booth across from her, setting my coffee down. The shop is loud, with espresso machines hissing, music playing overhead, the constant chatter of students, but our corner feels oddly private. “How’s the studying going?”
“Ugh.” She makes a face, gestures at the textbooks. “Organic chemistry is killing me. I swear, every time I think I understand electron configurations, my brain just nopes out.”
“You’ll get it. You always do.”
“You have more faith in me than I do.” She takes a sip of her coffee, something with whipped cream and caramel drizzle that’s more dessert than beverage, and studies me. “You look tired.”
“Work’s been busy.”
“You always say that.” Her tone is gentle, concerned. “Are you taking care of yourself? Eating actual meals? Sleeping?”
The irony of my nineteen-year-old sister asking if I’m taking care of myself isn’t lost on me. But that’s always been our dynamic. I raised her, but she worries about me with the fierce protectiveness of someone who knows what it’s like to lose a parent.
“I’m fine,” I lie. “Promise.”
She doesn’t look convinced, but she lets it go. That’s Luna. She’ll push, but only so far. She respects boundaries, even when she shouldn’t.
“So,” she says, leaning forward with a grin which makes her look younger. “I wanted to tell you about this guy in my bio lab.”
“The one from your text?”
“Yes!” Her eyes light up, and she launches into the story. His name is Ethan, and he’s pre-med, and he’s funny and smart and apparently helped her understand cellular respiration last week.
I listen, watching her face as she talks. The way her hands move when she’s excited, the way she laughs at herself when she realizes she’s rambling. She’s so alive, so present, so beautifully, achingly normal.
This is what I’m protecting.
Not just her life, but this, the ability to get excited about boys in bio lab, to stress about organic chemistry, to exist in a world where the biggest dangers are bad grades and awkward first dates.
“...and then he asked if I wanted to study together sometime, and I said yes, but now I’m freaking out because what if he meant it as a date and I’m supposed to dress up or something?” Luna pauses, looking at me expectantly. “What do you think?”
I blink, realizing I missed part of the story. “What do I think about what?”
“Were you even listening?” But she’s smiling, not annoyed.
“Sorry. Spaced out for a second.” I force myself to focus, to be present. Three days. I have three days before I disappear into the House of Gold, and I don’t know when I’ll see her again. I need to be here. Now. Fully. “Tell me again?”
She does, and this time I listen for real. Give her the older sister advice she’s looking for; just be yourself, if he likes you he likes you, don’t overthink it. The normal stuff. The stuff that feels like playing a role I’ve perfected over the years.
Because I can’t tell her the truth. Can’t say: I’m leaving in three days to serve an angel of Greed, and I don’t know if I’ll survive it, and if something happens to me you need to run far and fast because they’ll come for you next.
I can’t tell her any of that.
So instead I smile and nod and pretend that my biggest concern is whether her study date is actually a date.
“You’re the best,” Luna says, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “I’m so glad you came. I know you’re busy with work and everything, but it means a lot that you made time.”
Her hand is warm in mine. Solid. Real.
I squeeze back, trying to memorize the feeling. “Always have time for you, kid.”
“I’m not a kid anymore.” But she’s grinning.
“You’ll always be a kid to me. I changed your diapers. I get to call you kid forever.”
She laughs, pulls her hand back to return to her coffee. “Fair enough.”
We sit there for a while, talking about nothing important.
Her classes. Her roommate. The club she joined, something environmental, working to reduce campus waste.
She tells me about the protest she’s organizing, about the petition she started, about her plans to make the campus carbon neutral by 2030.
She wants to save the world, and I want to let her try.
The conversation flows easily, the way it always does with her. She’s the only person I can be around for over twenty minutes without feeling exhausted. The only person whose presence doesn’t feel like work.
Maybe it’s because I raised her. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t know what I really am, so she expects nothing except the version of me I show her, the responsible older sister who has her shit together, who works a boring consulting job, who’s there when she needs her.
Maybe it’s just because I love her, and love makes everything easier.
“Oh!” Luna sits up suddenly, pulling her phone out. “I almost forgot. Look at this dog I saw yesterday.”
She shows me a picture, some kind of golden retriever mix with a goofy expression, and I dutifully admire it while she tells me about how it was on campus with its owner and she got to pet it for like ten minutes.
“You should get a dog,” she says.
“I can barely take care of myself.”
“That’s not true. You take care of everyone.” She says it casually, but there’s weight behind it. Truth she doesn’t even realize she’s speaking. “You took care of me my whole life. And you took care of Mom before she died.”
I didn’t know she was preparing me. Training me. Getting ready to pass me a debt I never agreed to carry.
“You okay?” Luna asks, and I realize I’ve gone quiet.
“Yeah. Just thinking about Gramms.”
Luna’s expression softens. “I miss her sometimes. I know she was kind of cold, but she was always nice to me.”
Because you’re not a sin eater. Because you don’t have angel blood. Because she didn’t need to train you for this life.
“She loved you.”
“She loved you too. I know she had a weird way of showing it, but she did.”
I’m not so sure about that. Gramms’ love, if that’s what it was, came with conditions. With expectations. With the understanding that was useful to her, both as a sin eater and, I guess, as an heir to pass her debts to when she was gone.
But Luna can’t know that. Hell, I didn’t work regularly for years and years while she grew up just to ensure she didn’t touch this part of the world. Took endless stupid jobs to make ends meet. Between those and the small inheritance left from our mother, and Gramms’ help, we made it work.
“Yeah,” I say. “She did.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I ignore it. Probably Ash checking in, or a potential client I’m going to have to turn down. Nothing matters more than this moment, this conversation, this last normal afternoon with my sister.
Luna glances at her watch, an old digital thing I gave her for her sixteenth birthday, and makes a face. “I have to get to class in twenty minutes. But I’m really glad we did this.”
“Me too.”
“When do you leave for your work thing?”
“Few days.” I keep my voice casual. Easy. “It’s a longer contract than usual. Out of state. Might be gone for a while.”
“How long?”
I hesitate. I can’t say seven years. Can’t tell her the truth.
“Few months, maybe. I’m not sure yet. Depends on how the project goes.”
It’s not entirely a lie. I don’t know how long I’ll actually be in the House of Gold. The letter said one year, but time moves differently in the supernatural world. A year there could be six months here. Or two years. Or...
I stop that train of thought before it derails me completely.
“That sucks.” Luna frowns. “But you’ll still call me every week, right?”
“Of course.” That will be part of my negotiation with Croesus. Weekly calls to check on Luna. If he allows me to negotiate. I might have a death wish. “Nothing’s going to change that.”
“Good.” She starts packing up her stuff, laptop into bag, textbooks stacked neatly, empty coffee cup tossed in the trash. “Because if you disappear on me, I’ll hunt you down.”
She says it jokingly, but something in my chest twists. Because she would. If I vanished, if something happened to me, Luna would come looking.
And that would get her killed.
I need to make sure that doesn’t happen. Need to make sure the seven years I’m about to serve are enough to satisfy the debt, to keep her name off any supernatural radar, to protect her from ever knowing this world exists.
“I won’t disappear,” I say, and I mean it. “I promise.”
We stand, and Luna comes around the table to hug me. She’s shorter than me, barely five-four to my five-seven, and she tucks herself against my shoulder like she used to do when she was little and scared of thunderstorms.
“Love you,” she says into my jacket.
“Love you too, kid.”
She pulls back, smiling. “Text me when you get home safe.”
“Will do.”
I watch her gather the last of her things, slinging her backpack over one shoulder. She waves as she heads toward the door, weaving through the crowded coffee shop with the easy confidence of someone who belongs here.
And then she’s gone.
I stand there for a moment longer, surrounded by the noise and warmth of the coffee shop, and let myself feel it.
The loss. The grief. The anger at a grandmother who left me this mess, at angels who think they can claim seven years of my life, at a world that’s so brutally unfair that loving someone means walking into hell to keep them safe.
But I’d do it again. Would make the same choice a thousand times over.
Because that’s what love is. That’s what it means to protect someone.
Even if it costs you everything.
I leave the coffee shop, stepping out into the late afternoon sun. The campus is still bustling, with students everywhere living their normal lives. I walk through it like a ghost, already half-gone.
Three days.
I pull out my phone as I walk back to my car. No messages from Ash. One missed call from a number I don’t recognize, probably a client.
I ignore it.
Right now, I need to get home to prepare.
But first, I sit in my car in the campus parking lot and let myself cry.
Just for a minute. Just long enough to let out the fear and rage and grief I’ve been holding back since I saw those letters on my kitchen table.
Then I wipe my face, start the engine, and drive home.
Because that’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done. Survive. Protect. Keep moving forward.
Even when forward leads straight into the dark.