Dante barely had time to process the sheer, world-ending implications before the first hunter came knocking.

  Not literally, of course.

  That would’ve been polite.

  Instead, the entire front wall of the Broker’s den ceased to exist in any meaningful sense. One second, it was there—solid, dependable, a barrier between Dante and whatever fresh nightmare lurked outside—and the next, it was nothing but a thunderous detonation of stone, splintered wood, and glass turned to airborne razors.

  Dante hit the ground hard, instinct overriding thought, as the room erupted into chaos. Dust and smoke roiled through the air in thick, choking waves, turning the world into a half-formed nightmare of blurred motion and muffled echoes. His ears rang. His lungs burned. And through it all, he saw a figure emerging from the wreckage like a shadow given form—

  Tall. Cloaked. A grin full of knives.

  "Well, well," the intruder drawled, rolling their shoulders with a languid ease that suggested they had done this before. Many, many times. "Took me a while to track you down, but here you are. Alive. Against all odds."

  Dante’s pulse hammered against his ribs, breath ragged and uneven. His right hand throbbed—deep, ugly, bone-deep— still darkened from the Ashen Pact, the mark seared into his flesh a permanent reminder of his newest, most spectacularly bad decision. He could feel the weight of the stolen contract coiled in his veins, its unseen chains dragging at his very bones. A power that wasn’t his. A debt that wasn’t his.

  And now?

  Someone wanted it back.

  The Broker, to his eternal credit, reacted with all the urgency of a man inconvenienced by a minor clerical error. With an air of almost academic displeasure, he plucked a jagged shard of glass from his sleeve, inspected it for a moment, then sighed. "You're paying for that."

  The hunter did not so much as glance in his direction. Their eyes—sharp, amber, carrying the predatory gleam of something that had spent its entire existence at the top of the food chain—fixed solely on Dante.

  "You don't even know what you're carrying, do you?"

  Dante swallowed, the weight in his chest growing heavier by the second. "Starting to get that impression."

  The hunter chuckled. A low, knowing sound. "Bad news, kid. You're wearing a dead man's debt." Their knuckles cracked, slow and deliberate, punctuating the words with the kind of finality that came with violence long since decided. "And a lot of people are very, very interested in seeing who’s stupid enough to be holding it."

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  Dante exhaled sharply, forcing himself upright. His legs protested. His head screamed at him to run. Instead, he squared his shoulders, swallowed the fear clogging his throat, and met the hunter’s gaze head-on.

  The hunter tilted their head, considering him like a particularly amusing lab rat that had, against all odds, learned to bare its teeth. Then, with infuriating patience, they took a slow step forward, boots crunching over the debris-strewn floor. The movement was unhurried, casual—predatory in the way of things that never needed to rush. Every instinct in Dante screamed to move, to bolt, to do anything but stand there as the hunter closed the distance one deliberate step at a time. But he held his ground, jaw clenched, hands twitching at his sides, waiting for the moment to act.

  The air between them stretched tight, humming with unspoken violence. Outside, the city rumbled on, oblivious. Somewhere in the distance, a bell tolled, marking the hour with the slow, steady certainty of time marching forward, uncaring of who lived or died in the ruins below. Dante felt the weight of it all pressing down—the smoke, the dust, the chains in his blood, the gaze of a killer who had already decided how this would end. The hunter’s expression never wavered, but there was something expectant in the way they watched him, as if waiting to see exactly how much fight he had in him before they took it away.

  Dante flexed his fingers, forcing his breath to steady. If he let the fear take hold, he was already dead. Think. He had no idea what this hunter was truly capable of, but he knew one thing—if they were here for the contract, they weren’t the last. Even if he survived this fight, the next one was coming. And the next. And the next. The weight in his chest tightened. He needed a plan. He needed a way out. But first? He needed to make sure he didn’t die in the next sixty seconds.

  Then, finally, he spoke.

  "Let me guess," he said. "You're one of them."

  The hunter’s grin widened, a crescent moon of teeth and intent. "Nah. I don’t care about the contract."

  Their fingers flexed, curling into a fist, and the air around them shuddered. A weight pressed down on the room, not physical, but something deeper—something ancient, something hungry.

  "I just wanna see if you die easy."

  Dante’s stomach plummeted straight through the floor.

  Dante didn’t have time to think, only react. His body moved before his mind caught up, weight shifting, knees bending—a fighter’s instinct screaming at him to move or die. The air around the hunter crackled with something unseen but unmistakable, a force pressing against his skin like the promise of a storm about to break. Whatever they were about to do, it wasn’t going to be subtle. It wasn’t going to be fair. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to leave him in one piece if he stood there like an idiot waiting to find out.

  Behind him, the Broker exhaled—bored. Utterly, maddeningly bored. "If you're going to wreck the rest of the place," he muttered, brushing dust from his lapel, "do try to aim away from the good furniture." A ridiculous statement, given that most of the good furniture was already reduced to splinters, but Dante didn't have time to be annoyed about it. Not when the hunter’s grin sharpened, their eyes narrowing in something far too pleased.

  The room lurched. No—that wasn’t right. The space between them rippled, twisted, folded in on itself like something was reaching through reality and pulling the edges closer. Dante felt his stomach lurch sideways, like the ground beneath him had momentarily stopped obeying the usual rules of existence. And in that half-second of warped space, of reality bending around the hunter’s presence, Dante realized—too late—that they had already moved.

  Oh, come on.

  Oh, come on.

  The fight wasn’t over.

  It was just beginning.