The men with guns step aside and he thinks: I am pardoned. At least in part. This, then, a sign he is not welcome home, but at least a sign that he is still allowed to be with his family. He runs to embrace her at the top of the steps. He holds her close.

“Where are the children?” he whispers in her ear after kissing it. He calls for them: “Oscar! Adelina!”

She pulls away from him. Icily, she says, “They did not come.”

The men with guns step in behind him.

“Renata–”

“The family is displeased.” A pause. “All the families are.”

“My love–”

“Our bond is broken,” she says. “I am no longer your wife. I am once again a Glasstower. I am not a Candlefly.” His heart breaks. He almost collapses. “And neither are you. Goodbye, Ernesto.”

She cups his face with both hands, and then pushes past him. He reaches for her, tries to go with her – but the men with guns push him back. He tries to strike one.

A butt of an AK-47 crashes into his face. He feels an explosion behind his eyes.

They drag him into the church. And it’s then he sees what is to be his fate.

An old gate. To one of the many hells. The Underworld beneath New York is just one of many – one of nine major hells, to be exact. All of them dead-ending in the Expanse. Where the Hungry Ones still dwell.

This gate is just a hole ringed with stone. The rest of the church innards never existed. It’s just a façade, a false temple meant to fool crusaders so many years before.

Above it is a rope on an old pulley. At the end of that rope hangs a noose.

He screams. Tries to fight. Another hit to the nose. The nose breaks. He can’t see through the tears now. He tastes blood along with the salt air.

They wind the rope, not around his neck, but around his ankles.

Then they push him down, down, down–

He cries, “I cannot go! It is forbidden! Wait! Wait–” But his words are drowned out as the pain seizes him. The pain is like being robed in fire and ice, like being drowned in lava and frozen in a glacier. It feels as though his skin is being stripped away. As though hot iron rods are thrust up into the marrow of his bones. It hurts in his teeth. His balls. His soul.

It hurts eternally.

For he is immortal. And now, so is his pain.