Fatima laid the gun on the table. “You said something to me, once. When I was torturing you, admittedly. But I’ll never forget it. You said you’d take everything from me, the way you had from Raine. My face, my license, my lover, my daughters. You know what I did after that? I joined the high council, so if I lost my bel dame license, I wouldn’t lose my livelihood. I stopped taking serious lovers, so there was no one to care about. And I happily sent my daughters off to war, so you could not take them from me. Last year I got word that the last of my children had died on the frontier, defending some mealy little outpost in Khairi.”

“That’s not my—”

“I’m not finished. Now I’m telling you the same. You will work for us this final time, Nyx, or I will take everything from you. I know where your house is. I had Mercia tailed, though the sorry little kitten thought us beat. You bleed on this page or I hunt down Anneke and her militant brats one by one and burn that place to the ground. The woman, though, I’ll save for you. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out about your little lover? Your little happy home? I’m a fucking bel dame. I can sense one of ours going soft on sight.”

Nyx stared at the gun. Then the paper. She felt as if she was watching everything from a great distance. There was a story, she knew, about bargaining with Iblis, and how the promises made meant nothing.

She had a choice. Die here, now, trying to murder Fatima. Or take the job, and see how deep this well went.

Fatima tapped the paper with the gun.

8.

The cell was dirty, bare, and dark. The withered husk curled against the wall had been a person at some point in the hazy past, though it did not often recall it. Once, the world had been full of light—blazing, blistering, blaring light—like a chorus of angels burning in the sun. It had showered the world in stars, and danced on the graves of a thousand screaming points of life, and been content.

They fed it oranges in the mornings and rice and saffron at night, year upon year. The tainted food made the world even more muted, as if covered in a soft, gray shroud. Time yawned and stretched and twisted back in on itself, meaningless. The blinking syringes wielded by pleasant, humming Plague Sisters pinched and measured. Weighed and calculated. Plague Sisters only cared for the best and the worst of Nasheen’s monsters. But it did not remember which it was.

Time drifted. Ate itself.

And then, one day, they opened the door.

It garbled at them and laughed, the way it did whenever it conversed with those misty-honey illusions it summoned up for company.