[ Chapter 1 ]
Lilith Vale had rehearsed her death in a dozen different finales—knife fights, police sirens, a messy curtain of noise and pain. She'd pictured the taste of the last breath, the way lungs would complain before surrendering. She had catalogued possible endings like trophies.
Not like this.
Rain hammered the cracked pavement, turned the gutter into a dark vein. Her body lay where it had been put: skin gone milk-gray, a neat, clean hole between the eyes. Blood loosened from her temple and pooled, darkening the water until it looked like spilled ink.
There was a terrible sort of beauty to it—clinical and absolute—an art that demanded silence.
She'd always wanted to know what it felt like to go: the second before the light left, the tiny private truth behind a dying face. She'd asked it of her victims in the way criminals ask favors—by taking, by watching. Now she had the answer.
It wasn't pain. It wasn't peace. It was…odd, like reading someone else's handwriting.
A figure in a dark coat blurred at the edges—rain sheening the fabric, the hem lashing in the storm. His face dissolved into the downpour, featureless until he stepped into the little pool of light from a broken streetlamp.
Voices cut through the weather—raw, small, human.
"What are you doing? How can you even hold a gun like that?" one voice shouted, half-hysterical. Young. Too young.
"You just killed someone!" another argued, high and thin.
Lilith's mouth twitched, part reflex, part scorn. Killed by kids. The thought pricked like a splinter. She watched the first boy stumble closer, shoes slapping shallow puddles. His uniform clung to his frame; the smell of cheap detergent and wet cotton followed him. He dropped to his knees, fingers fumbling at a throat that would not answer.
"…You killed her," he mouthed, each word brittle as cracked glass. "She's— she's dead."
The other boy—coat too big, hands shaking—collapsed beside him. "I… I don't know. What do we do?"
Lilith's amusement was a slow, curling thing. Of all the finales—ambush, messy flurry, a blaze of red—this felt petty. A headline you couldn't help but snarl at: KILLED BY KIDS.
"Let's run," the uniformed boy hissed, panic trying to pass as resolve. "Take the gun. Go. Run!"
They fled, feet slapping the pavement until the rain swallowed the sound.
She watched them go, not with hope but with a familiar, sharpened irritation: responsibility had a taste, and they were already rinsing theirs away. Maybe the cops wouldn't catch them. Maybe they would. Either way, a hand closed over her—something cold and inevitable.
The city noises cut out as if someone had flipped a switch. Wind stilling. Rain frozen half-fall, droplets hanging like glass beads. The air compressed; every breath tasted metallic.
Something moved behind her. Not a presence so much as a pressure—like a fist of cold pressed against the back of her ribs. She turned.
Two crimson eyes were there, burning where no human eyes should burn.
He was wrong in every small way: slick black hair clinging to his temples as if he'd crawled from a river, skin with the faint gray of things kept too long in cold. Even standing still, he carried the smell of damp earth and old iron.
"You see me, right?" Lilith asked, sharper than curiosity.
He didn't answer. He just watched, the look a surgeon gives a body: clinical, curious, amused.
Then his mouth split. The smile was too clean—teeth like porcelain knives.
"I should be asking you that, Lilith Vale." His voice slid out, silk over a blade.
"Who the fuck are you?" she said. Rage kept her voice steady even as something like vertigo unfurled in her chest.
He circled her, boots whispering on wet concrete. Predators study the smallest habits before striking.
"After all the blood—after everything—where did you expect to end up?" he asked, casual as weather.
"To hell," she answered bluntly. The word sat flat; she didn't pretend to be brave. Her chest tightened under the admission.
His eyes lit at that, amusement at the edge. "Do you really think hell still takes people like you?"
The sentence landed like a hook. Her jaw worked. For the first time in a long while, breath came shallow.
"No," he said. "Hell is for sinners someone might save. You—" His voice sharpened. "You played God. That rent you out of mercy."
Something inside her cracked like thin ice. She glanced down. The rain no longer ran; droplets hung in midair, tiny suspended rubies. Closer at hand, her fingers were changing—gray flakes where calluses had been, dust unthreading from bone.
"In five—maybe six minutes," he said, casual and cruel, "you'll stop being."
Her nails bit into her palms until pain flared. "Why tell me?" The question scraped her throat raw.
"Everyone of your kind is told," he said. "Not unique."
Rage and something colder braided into her spine. "And yet you said—"
"Except you're different." He bent close and the smell of ozone and iron filled her. "Because I'm the one telling you."
"Meaning?" she said. The word was an edge.
He smiled, the knife under silk showing. "I have an offer."
She felt the old hunger—the animal logic that had kept her alive—stir. "What kind?"
"Play. Win and you return. Lose and you vanish." He paused, as if selling a simple wager. "Simple, right?"
Her laugh was a dry exhale. "You're lying. Life doesn't—" Her voice cracked on the word.
"Look." He didn't shout. He didn't need to. He merely turned her hand. Where skin should have been, dust puffed with the motion—gray as ash, flaking away.
Panic that had been dormant since the first kill thundered up her spine. She remembered the heat then, the small, precise terror that rose before every cut. The dust spread faster now, nibbling at her wrists.
She could feel the bargain like a pressure on her sinuses: choice—an impossible ledger. Live and be marked, or let this—whatever this was—close the book.
"I can do it," she whispered. Bravado and desperation braided together.
His eyes brightened like a thing lighting a match. "Then say it. Say you give me your soul."
The words tasted wrong and necessary. Her stomach turned; bile rose hot and metallic. The dust was at her knuckles now.
She shut her eyes and spoke the thing, the syllables foreign and final. "I give you permission to my soul."
The man's laughter broke the quiet like glass. "Good luck, Lilith Vale. You'll need it."
Darkness wasn't a soft curtain. It was a hand closing, firm and absolute.
Fuck. She had just signed the worst deal of her life.