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He doesn’t come at me. He doesn’t raise a hand or open his mouth to counter what I’m doing. He simply stands at the edge of the chamber, arms folded, watching me unravel his work with something that looks disturbingly close… to pleasure.

I keep singing, chasing the last thread of Carnage’s power through a lattice of infernal sigils that scream every time I get close, until Sentinel drops into the chamber behind me, wings still smoking from whatever he just fought his way through. “Echo, stop!”

I barely register him. The binding is answering harder now, sigils blazing brighter, the whole structure groaning like something enormous is turning over in its sleep on the other side of that connection.

“Echo.” Something in his voice finally cuts through, sharp enough that I falter mid-note. “Stop fucking singing!”

I stop, and the silence that follows is worse than anything I could have sung into being. Because the binding already heard me. My voice already touched it, already left a mark on something that was never meant to recognize a sound like mine, and there is no pulling that back.

Malgrave finally speaks, his voice quieter now, all that earlier anger suddenly gone. “You still don’t understand, do you?”

“Understand what?”

His eyes drop to the cracked symbol between us, then he smiles.

Not the pissed-off curl I’ve seen from him before.

A real-fucking-smile.

Whatever comes next, he thinks he has already won.

Malgrave steps toward the chasm and looks down into Hell. “There’s a rule about Hellwarden bindings no one thought you needed to know.” He glances back at me. “I can build one. Strengthen it. Move anything trapped inside it wherever I choose.”

He gestures toward the chasm. “Even across realms.”

Fuck.

“But once I seal that binding, I can’t open it again.”

I stare at him. “What?”

“Neither can any other Hellwarden. It was built into our power long before either of us existed. We were given the ability to contain dangerous things, not release them whenever we felt like it.”

My eyes drop to the cracked symbol.

Malgrave’s smile widens. “Do you understand yet?”

No. I don’t fucking want to.

“Carnage and the angel created something Hell has never possessed. Hellfire fused with Divine Grace.” He looks down into the chasm again. “Powerful enough to level cities. Break realms. Change the world in ways your little club can’t begin to imagine.”

“You stole it,” I snap.

“I contained it.”

I throw my hands to the side. “You fucking ripped it out of him.”

“Because loose, it would never have survived the crossing.”

The words hit me so hard that my next breath doesn’t come.

Malgrave bound it because he had to. He couldn’t send something that unstable into Hell without containing it first.

But once he bound it…

… he couldn’t get it back out.

My gaze drops to the broken sigil again.