Dante didn’t trust anyone anymore.

  But he especially didn’t trust people who said they could break the unbreakable.

  That kind of confidence always came with a price—a hidden blade tucked behind a handshake, a trap disguised as salvation. The world of Pactmakers thrived on rules, on debts, on contracts that bound tighter than iron chains. Breaking them? That was like saying you could walk into a king’s vault and rewrite the laws of gravity on the way out.

  So when he followed the cryptic message to the Ashen Hollow, deep in the Undermarket’s forgotten tunnels, he kept his guard high and his expectations low.

  He wasn’t disappointed.

  The meeting place wasn’t a throne room or a grand hideout. It wasn’t some candlelit sanctum where rebels whispered forbidden knowledge. It was a graveyard.

  Not of bodies, but of contracts.

  Tattered parchments were nailed to the walls, hanging like flayed skin from rusted spikes. Some were torn clean through, others only half-burned, their blackened edges still flickering with dying embers. Promises made, debts unpaid, fates rewritten—or erased entirely. A graveyard of obligations, of bindings that had once been absolute.

  Dante stepped carefully, boots crunching over charred scrolls, some of which still pulsed with traces of Pact magic. He could almost hear them whispering—faint, desperate echoes of deals that no longer existed. And at the center of it all, leaning lazily against a rusted iron pillar, was her.

  A woman with sharp eyes, a coat patched together from stolen insignias, and a cigarette that smelled like burning ink.

  "Dante Lucero," she said, smirking like she already knew everything about him. "The Pactmaker who doesn’t know what he signed. Welcome to the wrong side of history."

  Dante crossed his arms. “I take it you’re the Free Binders.”

  She took a long drag, then flicked the cigarette away. It landed on a half-burned contract, igniting a brief green spark before fizzling out. "I’m Aela. And yeah. We’re the ones who break what shouldn’t be broken.”

  She gestured around at the wreckage of parchment and ink. "We burn debts. Cut chains. Find the loopholes the Brokers and the Legate pretend don’t exist.”

  Dante frowned. This was dangerous talk. Treason, heresy—whatever you wanted to call it, it was the kind of ideology that got people erased from existence.

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  "And what do you want from me?"

  Aela grinned, and it wasn’t the kind of grin that promised good things.

  “That’s the fun part.”

  She pulled out a single contract—ink still wet, its edges flickering with strange shifting symbols that refused to stay in place.

  Dante didn’t reach for it. Not yet. His instincts screamed at him—a contract was never just a contract. It was a cage, a noose, a leash that tightened the second you let your guard down. The fact that this one wouldn’t hold still, wouldn’t even decide on a fixed shape, made it even worse. Pact magic was binding, rigid. But this? This was something else. Something alive.

  He eyed the shifting ink, the way the letters twisted like they were trying to slip through the cracks of reality itself. This wasn’t just a deal—it was a paradox, a loophole weaponized into an agreement. A contract that existed to undo contracts. It shouldn’t have been possible. And yet, here it was, flickering in Aela’s hands like a dying star, offering him something no other faction had: a way out.

  Dante exhaled sharply. “This thing actually works?” His voice came out rougher than he intended, because if the answer was yes—if she wasn’t bluffing—then everything he knew about the rules of Pactmaking was about to burn.

  "We’re offering you a way out, Dante. A chance to slip the chains before the Abyss drags you under.”

  His pulse quickened. He wanted to grab it, to sign before she changed her mind, before the opportunity vanished like smoke. Freedom. The thing they all claimed didn’t exist. A loophole in a system built to have none.

  But this was the Undermarket. Nothing came for free.

  Aela didn’t answer right away. Instead, she let the question hang in the air, stretching the silence just long enough to make it clear—the price wasn’t going to be simple. She turned the contract over in her hands, watching the ink shift, as if even the words themselves weren’t ready to be spoken aloud.

  Then, finally, she met his gaze. “A test,” she said, and there was something almost amused in her voice, like she was offering him a game rather than a trial. “You want out? You prove you deserve it. We don’t waste time on people who are just looking for an easier cage.”

  Dante’s jaw tightened. That was the catch—it wasn’t a rescue. It was a gamble. A chance to break free, or a deeper fall into something he still didn’t understand. And the worst part? He was already considering it.

  His voice was steady. "And in return?"

  Aela’s grin didn’t fade. If anything, it sharpened.

  “We test if you’re worth saving.”

  She snapped her fingers.

  The sigils on the contract flared—not with light, but with absence.

  For half a second, there was nothing—just a breath held too long, a silence stretched too thin. Then the world lurched. The floor beneath him wasn’t stone anymore; it was something older, something hungry. The cracks didn’t just spread—they consumed, swallowing the space beneath his boots like ink bleeding through paper.

  Dante moved on instinct, trying to step back, but the air itself seemed to tilt. Gravity twisted sideways, reality slurring like a half-finished sentence. His stomach dropped before the rest of him did, and suddenly he was falling—not down, not up, but elsewhere. The Undermarket vanished in a smear of color and shadow, the last thing he saw being Aela’s smirk, untouched by the chaos she’d unleashed.

  Then came the cold. Not the chill of wind or ice, but the kind that settled into bone and soul, whispering with the voices of things that should not exist. Dante clenched his teeth, bracing for the landing—if there even was one.

  And beneath Dante’s feet, the ground cracked open.

  He fell.