ONE HELLISH YEAR.

Chapter 1 — Blood on the Page** The time read midnight. Sera glanced at her phone — 11:58 PM — then looked out at the parking lot one last time. It was quiet. Her neighbors had long gone to bed. The whole street felt still, like the world itself was holding its breath. Maybe that was fitting. Because she was about to do something she couldn't take back. She stepped inside and locked the door behind her. The living room was dark except for the six black candles she had arranged in a circle on the floor, exactly like the journal said. The flame from each one threw long, unsteady shadows across the walls. Her grandmother's handwriting stared up at her from the open page — faint and slanted, the ink already faded to a dull brownish rust that Sera had been trying very hard not to think about. She had found the journal three weeks ago. Tucked inside a false bottom of an old chest that had been sitting in her storage unit for two years. She had almost thrown it away. Then Mia got sick. Sera lowered herself to the floor in the center of the circle and pulled her sister's medical file onto her lap. The words had not changed no matter how many times she read them. *Idiopathic organ failure. Unknown cause. No treatment options.* The doctors had stopped meeting her eyes two weeks ago. That was how she knew they had already given up on Mia. She pressed her fingers against her temple and exhaled slowly. She didn't want to do this. She had stared at this journal for an hour, talking herself in and out of it, feeling the wrongness of it sitting heavy in her hands — old in a way that had nothing to do with age, wrong in a way she couldn't explain with words. Every instinct she had told her to close it and walk away. But every time she almost did, she thought about Mia. Twenty-two years old. “Okay Sera,” she told herself quietly. “You can do this.” She pressed her palm flat against the page. Her name was written there in the center, bold and waiting. “SERA VOSS.” She got up, went to the kitchen and came back with the small knife she had sterilized three times that evening. She stood over the circle for a moment, her heart beating too fast, her hands steady in spite of it. She didn't let herself hesitate. She pressed the blade to the tip of her index finger and cut. The pain was quick and sharp. A dark bead of blood rose to the surface immediately and she tilted her hand over the journal, watching it fall — watching it land directly on her name and spread slowly into the paper like the page had been thirsty for it. Then she spoke the words out loud. She didn't stumble over them. She had practiced enough times that they came out clean and clear, filling the quiet apartment in a way that made the air feel different. Heavier. Like the room was listening. The moment the last word left her lips The candles went out. All six. At once. No wind. No draft. No flicker or warning. Just — darkness, sudden and total, like a hand had closed over the room. Her phone screen died. The streetlight she could always see bleeding orange through her curtains — gone. Like the city outside had simply switched itself off. Sera stopped breathing. The temperature dropped so fast she could see her own breath clouding in front of her face. The silence that followed wasn't empty — it had “weight”to it, a presence, like something enormous, had just turned its attention in her direction. She should have run. She knew that. Some part of her brain was screaming it. But her legs had stopped working and her voice had sealed itself somewhere deep in her chest and all she could do was sit perfectly still in the dark and wait. Then she felt it. The air in front of her didn't shift gradually. There was no slow materializing, no theatrical swirl of smoke. One moment the space across from her was empty — And the next moment it simply wasn't. He stood just outside the circle of her candles and looked down at her. Sera's first thought — embarrassingly, absurdly — was that he didn't look like a demon. He looked like a man. Tall, dark haired, dressed in all black, with the kind of stillness about him that didn't belong to anything that had ever needed to hurry. His face gave nothing away. His hands were relaxed at his sides. He looked at her the way someone looks at a thing they have been expecting for a very long time. Then she saw his eyes. *Silver.* Not grey. Not light blue. Silver — the way old mirrors are silver, the way still water holds moonlight. A color that had no business being in a human face. They found hers immediately and she felt it like a physical thing, like a hand pressing flat and firm against the center of her chest. He already knew her name. She could see it. "Sera Voss," he said. His voice moved through the room the way distant thunder moves through walls — felt before it's properly heard. Low. Unhurried. Like a man who had never once needed to raise his voice to be obeyed. They spoke. He offered the deal. Mia's life in exchange for one year of Sera's. Simple. Clean. Final. Sera didn't beg. Didn't cry. She asked only one thing. *"Can I see her first?"* Something moved across his face at that. Too fast to catch. Like the question had found a crack in something he kept very tightly sealed. *"One hour,"* he said. She nodded and extended her hand. He looked at it for a long moment — at her open palm, her finger still stained faintly with blood — and something shifted behind his silver eyes. Like he hadn't expected that. Like the simplicity of the gesture had caught him somewhere completely unguarded. He took her hand. His grip was firm and cool and the moment his fingers closed around hers she felt it again — that pressure against her chest, that deep ancient pull, like shaking hands with something that had existed long before the world had a name. *"There is no going back Sera,"* he said quietly. *"I know,"* she said. And she meant it. What she didn't know — what she had absolutely no way of knowing as she sat on her living room floor holding a demon's hand in the dark — was that the contract she had just entered wasn't the one her grandmother had written. Someone had rewritten it. Changed it in ways that would change *everything.* And Kael — He had known from the very moment her blood hit the page.