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Holy fucking Christ, this hurts!

The Devil isn’t just holding what Malgrave stole.

He can still reach me through it.

Another twist of his fist and the connection yanks harder, dragging fire up my throat with nowhere for the roar behind it to go.

My jaws open on instinct—nothing comes out.

Across the chamber, the Devil watches me choke on the silence.

And the asshole smiles.

But underneath the pain, something else lands.

I know exactly where it is.

My head snaps toward the chasm on instinct, and Echo catches it immediately.

“What? Carnage, what is it?” she snaps.

I press a fist to my sternum, then point straight down into the fire, and Sentinel gets there before I can force the words out.

“You can still feel it,” he says, staring at me like I just handed him the first piece of good news all night. “You can feel exactly where it is.”

I nod, and across the chamber, the Devil’s smile falters, only for a second. But I catch it, and so does everyone standing behind me.

Echo goes very still, her head tilting the way it does when she’s listening to something the rest of us can’t hear. “Now that the binding’s gone,” she says slowly, “I can hear your signature clearer than I ever have. Part of you is standing right here.” Her eyes lift to mine. “The rest of you is roaring through Hell.”

And there’s still a connection running between both halves.

Malgrave needed me alive because I was the anchor holding the fusion together. The Devil intends to keep using that same connection every time he wants to reach through it. But an anchor was never built to work in only one direction.

It gives you a way back too.

Echo’s hand finds mine, her grip fierce enough to bruise. “I called you home once already.” Something steadies behind her eyes, the guilt burning off into something harder. “I can do it again.”

Except this time there’s no Hellwarden binding standing between us to break.

This time, nothing is stopping her but him.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

CARNAGE

Echo’s grip on my hand doesn’t loosen, and for the first time since Malgrave carved the silence into me, I don’t need words to answer her. I just nod. Whatever’s left of me down in that fire, she can reach it. My hellhound knows it, and so do I.

Sentinel reads the plan off my face before I finish forming it, which is either years of friendship or the fact that I’m not exactly subtle when I want something. “You’re not fighting him,” he says, his voice low, glancing toward the giant chasm where the Devil hasn’t moved an inch. Fire burns behind him, lava crawls across the floor, and the bastard stands there smiling. “You’re stealing from him.”

Damn right.

Raze catches the shift in the cavern before I even signal it, because centuries of leading men do that to a King—he feels the air change before anyone opens their mouth. He turns, his dragon eyes flaring blue beneath the ice already crawling up his forearms, and understands in half a second flat. “Then we buy them the time,” he orders, keeping his instructions quiet enough so only we can hear, and just like that, the chamber stops being a battlefield we’re losing and starts being one we’re about to rig in our favor.

Wreck rolls his shoulders, the movement pulling his gaunt frame taller as his claws slide free. Ruckus reaches automatically for the coin in his pocket, catches himself halfway there, and lets his hand fall.

There’s no luck this close to Hell.

So he pulls a blade instead.