Chapter 27
Ican't sleep.
It's been hours since Croesus and I stood in the library, my grandmother's research folder between us like a bomb waiting to detonate.
Hours since he promised to call a meeting of all seven houses.
Hours since we acknowledged, again, that someone powerful enough to kill my grandmother is probably coming for me next.
And I can't stop thinking about those forty-seven names. Forty-seven people who made deals and vanished. Forty-seven souls that should have been collected but weren't. Forty-seven people who were probably just like me.
I stare down at my arms. Forty-seven tattoos marking the sins of others. Of people I’ve saved? A coincidence, I’d find this now?
I'm lying in my bed, the too-soft bed in my gilded room, staring at the ceiling that shifts due to the gold swirls, depending on the light.
Through the binding, I can feel Croesus somewhere else in the house.
I sense his alertness, his tension, the constant vigilance of a predator who knows something is hunting in his territory.
The clock on my nightstand reads three am. Not that time means much here.
I'm about to give up on sleep entirely when the binding flares with sudden, sharp alarm.
Croesus.
Something's wrong.
I'm out of bed before I consciously decide to move, grabbing my ritual knife from the nightstand. The floor is cold under my bare feet. I'm still in the oversized shirt I sleep in, but there's no time to change.
Through the binding, I feel Croesus's emotions spike, fury, territorial rage, and underneath it all, fear.
Fear for me.
The house shudders.
It's subtle at first, just a tremor in the walls, a flicker in the golden light. But then it happens again, stronger. The floor tilts slightly beneath my feet. Somewhere in the distance, glass shatters.
The house is under attack.
I run.
The corridors shift as I move through them, but for once they're not fighting me. They're pulling me toward Croesus, toward the source of the disturbance. I can feel the house itself responding to the threat, wards activating, defenses rising, the entire pocket dimension tightening like a fist.
I round a corner and nearly collide with Nat.
He's not wearing his usual dress shirts and slacks. Instead, he's in black combat gear, and he's holding what looks like a sword made of crystallized gold. His truth-seeing eyes are blazing silver.
"Get back to your room," he says. "Lock the door. Ward it if you know how."
"What's happening?"
"Collectors." He pushes past me. "They're trying to breach the vault."
My blood chills. "The Vault? Why?"
But he's already gone, running toward the sounds of fighting I can now hear echoing through the halls.
Collectors. I thought they only came when you denied the seven a debt.
Are they trying to steal Croesus's souls? or?
Oh Gods.
They're not after his collection. They're after me?
I should run back to my room like Nat said. Should lock myself in, hide, let Croesus and his people handle this.
Instead, I run toward the fighting.
The entrance hall is chaos.
Servants lie motionless on the floor, their bodies wrapped in what looks like living shadow. More servants are fighting, moving with inhuman speed and precision, wielding weapons I've never seen them carry before. Not servants at all, I realize. Guards. Croesus's personal guard, disguised as staff.
And in the center of it all is Croesus.
He's magnificent and terrible.
His power fills the room like pressure before a storm. Gold light pours from his hands, from his eyes, from his skin. As I watch, one of the shadow creatures, tall, humanoid, but wrong in ways that hurt to look at, lunges at him. Croesus catches it mid-leap.
The creature turns to solid gold.
It happens in a heartbeat. Living shadow to perfect golden statue, frozen mid-attack. Croesus shoves it and it shatters on the floor like glass.
But there are more. So many more.
They're pouring in through gaps in reality itself, tears in the fabric of the house that shimmer and pulse like open wounds. Collectors, Nat called them. They look like people-shaped holes in existence, darkness given form and hunger.
And they're not going for the collection, or Croesus’ vault.
They're coming toward me.
"Raven, RUN!" Croesus's voice cuts through the chaos.
I try. I spin, looking for an exit, but the shadows are everywhere. The doors I came through have sealed themselves. The house is in lockdown, keeping the threat contained.
Keeping me trapped with them.
One of the creatures breaks through the defensive line. It moves faster than anything that size should move, flowing across the floor like spilled ink. I raise my ritual knife, useless, but it's all I have, and the creature reaches for me.
Its touch is ice and void and wrong.
I try to do what I always do when faced with sin, absorb it, pull it into myself, purge it later. My power reaches out instinctively, trying to take the darkness into my body where I can control it.
But there's nothing to absorb.
Not sin. Not emotion. Not even malice.
Just... emptiness.
Void.
The realization hits a split second before the agony does.
I'm screaming. I must be screaming because I can hear it, distant and raw. The creature's essence, if you can call nothing an essence, pours into me like liquid nitrogen. Freezing. Erasing. Unmaking everything it touches.
This is what it feels like to not exist.
Through the binding, I feel Croesus's fury spike into something beyond rage. Beyond territory or possession or greed.
Pure, primal terror.
The creature holding me explodes.
Not metaphorically. It literally explodes, detonates from the inside out as Croesus's power hits it like a hammer. The void essence scatters, and suddenly I can breathe again.
I'm on my knees. When did I fall? My hands are shaking so hard I drop the ritual knife. It clatters on the marble, and I stare at it like I've never seen a knife before.
The cold is still inside me. The void. The nothing.
I'm dying.
I can feel it, my life force, my soul, whatever makes me me, it's being consumed by the emptiness the shadow walker left behind. Like frost spreading through my veins, killing everything it touches.
Strong hands grab my shoulders. Croesus, kneeling in front of me. His gold eyes are wild, terrified in a way I've never seen.
"Stay with me." His voice is raw. "Raven, stay with me. Don't leave me."
"Can't." My voice doesn't sound right. Too distant. "It's inside me."
"I know. I can feel it through the binding." His hands move to my face, forcing me to look at him. "Listen to me. You tried to absorb it like it was sin. But it's not sin. It's the opposite. It's absence. Negation."
"Make it stop."
"I can't pull it out. If I try, it'll kill you faster." His jaw clenches. "But I can give you something to fight it with. My power. My essence. Greed to counter the void."
Through the haze of cold and pain, I understand what he's offering. Not just power, part of himself. His sin, unfiltered and raw, directly into my soul.
It could save me.
Or it could destroy me just as surely as the void.
"Do it." I gasp.
He doesn't hesitate.
His hands press flat against my chest, right over my heart, and golden light pours into me.
Not like the binding, this is deeper, more intimate, more intense. This is Croesus himself, the core of what he is, flooding into my body to fill the spaces the void is trying to erase.
Greed. Pure, distilled, overwhelming greed.
I want. I want everything. I want to live. I want to take and keep and possess and hoard. I want to fill every empty space with more, always more, never enough, never satisfied,
It's too much. Both sensations at once, the void trying to unmake me and the greed trying to make me into something that can never be unmade.
I'm being torn apart between nothing and everything.
But slowly, agonizingly, the greed starts to win.
Because greed, at its core, is survival. The desperate need to have, to hold, to keep existing. And right now, that's exactly what I need.
The void burns away under the weight of Croesus's power. I feel it retreating, dissolving, until finally, finally, there's nothing left but warmth and gold and the overwhelming sensation of being alive.
I gasp and fall forward. Croesus catches me, pulling me against his chest. His heart is racing against my cheek.
Through the binding, I feel his emotions, relief so profound it's almost painful, lingering terror, and that something else that’s been there more and more. Something that feels like love.
"You're alive," he breathes into my hair. "You're alive. Don't ever do that again."
"Wasn't... planning on it..."
Around us, the fighting has stopped. I lift my head enough to see that the entrance hall is empty of shadow walkers. The tears in reality have sealed. Bodies of Croesus's guards lie scattered, but most are moving, getting up, checking wounds.
We won.
Barely.
"How many?" Croesus asks, not to me. His voice is cold again, controlled. The vulnerable moment already passing.
Nat appears from somewhere, blood on his face but otherwise intact. "Seven breached the wards. All destroyed. We have injuries but no deaths among the guard." His silver eyes find me. "She tried to absorb one."
"I know." Croesus's arms tighten around me. "Raven, collectors aren't creatures. They're tools. Weapons. Someone sent them specifically to collect you."
"The same someone who killed my grandmother?" I say.
"Yes." He helps me stand, though his hands don't leave my shoulders. "And they just declared war."
Through the binding, I feel his rage crystallizing into something colder. More dangerous. Not hot fury but calculated vengeance.
"We're calling that meeting," he says. "Tonight. Emergency protocols. All seven houses." His gold eyes meet mine. "Because whoever sent those things has power we can't fight alone. And they know where you are."
I want to argue. Want to say I'm fine, that we can handle this ourselves.
But my hands are still shaking. My body still feels wrong, too cold in some places, too hot in others, like I'm not quite put back together correctly. And through the binding, I can feel that Croesus is barely holding himself together. The fear of losing me still echoing through his bones.
"Okay," I whisper. "Call them. All of them."
He nods once, then turns to Nat. "Send the summons. Neutral ground. Two hours from now. Tell them it's not a request. Even Caspian has to come."
Nat bows and disappears.
Croesus looks back at me, and for just a moment, his carefully constructed mask slips. "I almost lost you."
"But you didn't."
"This time." His hand cups my cheek. "But there will be a next time. And a time after that. Until we stop whoever is behind this."
"Then we stop them."
Through the binding, I feel his grim determination. His absolute refusal to let anyone hurt me.
And underneath it all, that thing he still won't say:
He loves me, andnd he will burn Heaven, Hell, and everything in between before he lets anyone take me from him.
"Can you walk?" he asks.
I test my legs. They hold. Barely. "Yeah."
"Good. Because you're about to see the six angels." His mouth quirks in something that's not quite a smile. "And I guarantee they're not going to like what they see."
"What will they see?"
His eyes meet mine, and through the binding I feel his possessiveness flare.
"Mine," he says simply. "They're going to see that you're mine. And that I will destroy anyone who tries to take you. They saw a glimpse last time, and I know it irked them."
I should argue with the "mine" part.
I don't.
Because right now, after almost dying, after feeling the void try to erase me from existence, right now, belonging to someone feels like the only solid thing in a reality that keeps trying to tear itself apart.
"Two hours," Croesus says. "That's how long you have to recover before we meet with the most dangerous beings in existence."
"Great," I mutter. "Just great."
Nat steps up and almost smiles. "Welcome to supernatural politics, little sin eater. Try not to die."
"Again," I add.
"Again," he agrees.
And despite everything, the attack, the fear, the cold still lingering in my bones, I find myself laughing.
Because what else can you do when the universe is trying to kill you and your only protection is a fallen angel who's too greedy to let you go?
You laugh.
And you prepare to meet with six more of them, one of whom you have never met and one whom you helped their rival to breach his house and steal a soul.
Two hours.
I'm going to need more coffee.