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“Stop trying to protect her⁠—”

“Enough,” Helion snapped over the top of her, voice echoing with a power that grated against every nerve in my body like a thousand pins.

I flinched automatically, the power swirling through my veins rising as if sensing a threat.

“At least your power has returned,” she said on a huff of air and crossed her arms.

He ignored her, using his flames to melt the next-door handle, pushing it open.

“Oh good, you’re drunk,” he mumbled, running a frustrated hand down his face before disappearing into the room.

He strode back out a moment later, dragging Edgar by the collar of his shirt.

“Princess,” he slurred, making bile rise in the back of my throat. It didn’t matter that he was a pathetic drunk, or that what he had done to me was eating away at him. Seeing his face brought back the feeling of chains around my wrists. The bite of a blade. The hot breath against the back of my neck. The unwanted pounding of his flesh against mine echoing off dungeon walls.

The last door was Selkie’s. She stood on the other side of the door as if expecting to find us on the other side.

“The witch is still below ground,” she said, her lilac hair falling like a silken veil over one shoulder, her voice soft enough that the warning beneath it felt almost holy. “Astaroth will sense us enter the Nether, but…” She paused, her eyes turning the same glowing shade of the moon on its fullest night. “He is currently in the second ring of the Hells assessing the flames consuming their lands. That will buy us some time.”

Helion’s flames curled higher around his fingers, painting gold over the sharp lines of his face.

“He will send the souls after us, but that’s nothing we can’t handle,” he said. “Lead us to Cerilla.”

Selkie must have seen the question written across my face because she smiled—a small, uncertain thing that somehow felt older than the Hells themselves.

She offered no answers, only turned and disappeared farther into the corridor.

We moved through the manor like ghosts slipping through a cathedral built for beautiful sins, past white marble walls veined with gold and the unsettling pastel paintings of torture that Helion lit with his flames.

I eyed them, wondering if anyone was watching us through the other side.

Helion’s fire reflected against the white walls, until it felt as though everything burned with him.

We reached the end of the hallway, nothing but a large oil painting of a garden of wilted roses clinging to the white marble. Their petals seemed to darken and wilt further the longer I looked at them, sending an unsettled shiver through my body.

Selkie wrapped her fingers around one side of the painting, and it opened like a door to reveal a narrow stairwell carved into the stone like a wound the manor had tried to hide.

The walls turned black and wet, sweating salt and heat that repelled me.

Not one part of me wanted to go down there.

My mouth turned dry, and my pulse pounded in my ears.

Helion placed his hand on the small of my back, urging me forwards.

“Just a little further, Lyra,” he soothed. “This is for Rythos, remember?”

I followed the others through the dark opening despite every nerve in my body screaming for me to run.

The air was thick with old smoke and suffering, laced with a sour rotting stench that made my stomach churn.

Each step dragged us farther beneath the polished lie of Astaroth’s manor, down into the bones of the Hells.

Screams stifled by distance hung in the stale air, making gooseflesh pebble across my skin.

I placed a hand over my mouth as I followed the light flickering off Helion in front of me.

The deeper into the Nether we went, the more I realised the beauty of the manor was nothing but a bandage on a festering wound.