I scanned the space. Fishing nets, ropes, various hooks in strange shapes nailed to the far wall, and wire traps. Everything looked average. Except for that sensation I couldn’t name. It felt familiar in a way. I slowly walked around the perimeter, pausing at each piece of fishing gear. There had to be some reason we ended up here. And I was so close to figuring it out . . .

I picked up a rusted hook and let it fall back against the wall. It was perfectly ordinary.

I blew out a breath. I didn’t want to waste time, touching each old hook. Especially when I might possibly have a much better clue waiting for me at home in Vittoria’s diary. Still . . . I couldn’t quiet the insistent tug in my center. I did another sweep of the room, but nothing stood out. It seemed that the Aper demon attack and this empty building were unrelated.

“Well?” Wrath asked. “Do you recognize anything?”

Nothing aside from the symbol I was almost certain my sister had sketched in her diary. I shook my head, wanting to hurry to my house to retrieve it. “No.”

“Very well. Let’s go home.”

I didn’t point out that his stolen, ruined palace was not my home and never would be.

“I have to go collect my things,” I said. “I’ll meet you there soon. You should dispose of the demon outside.”

Before he could argue, I slipped out the door and headed to my house.

I slumped against the doorframe in my bedroom and surveyed the carnage. Floorboards were ripped up and broken. Wooden splinters littered the little knotted rug Nonna made for me and Vittoria when we were little. Feathers floated on the breeze blowing in from the shattered window. Someone had taken out a lot of aggression on my mattress.

Or something. Wrath said princes of Hell had to be invited into a mortal’s home, but, as I’d recently discovered, that rule didn’t hold true for all demons. Lower-caste creatures of Hell seemed to do as they pleased. The Umbra slipped beyond our protection charms, and no formal invitation had been sent to it. Wrath also mentioned magic didn’t work on them the same way it did on corporeal beings, so it was likely more an issue with that than our protection charms.

Which still wasn’t comforting.

Without even fully walking into the room I knew my sister’s diary was long gone, taking her many secrets with it. An Umbra demon was the likely perpetrator of this theft. And that brought Greed back to the top of my suspect list. He was the only prince of Hell thus far that I knew used them to do his bidding.