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His face darkened, his wolf now fully present in his eyes, a predator ready to pounce. "You think you can dismiss me? How dare you be so disrespectful. You need to learn how to treat your Alpha."

I pointed at the door, my hand shaking with rage and heartache. "Get. Out. I never want to see you again. You've killed everything we had and will never gain an ounce of my power."

He snarled, the sound echoing through the room like a death knell.

"You should have known better than to cross me, Hazel. If I can't have you, no one can." His hand shot out, wrapping around my throat.

Rage filled me, a pathetic trickle of magick sparking to life inside of me and swelling.

Or trying to. I'd never been a strong witch. Hence why the inheritance ritual was so important to complete.

How dare he! I'd kill him. I'd rip his claws out. I'd–

A harsh squeeze, a brutal twist, and darkness claimed me.

Chapter

Two

PRIDE

“Sir. Sir.”

The voice was nothing more than an irritating fly. People down here didn’t talk to me. That’s why the Bluetooth chip hanging off my ear existed—so I could filter out the noise of the wailing souls waking up in my own personal hellscape.

That was a little joke of mine.

The Underworld used to be a gray void, back in the day. Ideas from the human realm gave us a fully functional city in our own plane of existence. My brothers had bitched about how dull it all was in the beginning, and they were right. So I recreated a city I’d visited in the living realm down here—a recreation of…Philadelphia, I think? There was even a park with trees. Not that anyone here was able to enjoy it.

That part was for me.

Though I hadn’t yet managed to create light in this environment that mimicked the sun. I’d tried my best, but fucked it up badly. It had come through too artificially bright, like those human LEDs or whatever. It was jarring andupsetting. To cover my error, I made it permanently night time down here. After all, I could create all the actual ‘artificial’ lights I wanted. And the nightlife vibe was my current mood.

Gluttony could help me fix it later. He was the only one I trusted to actually help, instead of berating and giving me shit the whole time.

Regardless of what any of my brothers thought, this entire plane was my domain, as much as it wasn’t a human city.

Except my city was filled with confused, wailing souls at all hours.

So pretty much the same as a human city.

A grin stretched itself across my face at my little quip.

“Sir. Pride. SIR!” Someone physically grabbed my arm, and I whirled around, taken aback. Nothingtouchedme in this realm! I relaxed as I recognized my assistant, Janine. Her blond hair was pulled back into an efficient bun, secured with her wand that I also knew doubled as a shank.

“The Bluetooths aren’t working!” she gushed out before I could scold her, her hands still raised protectively in front of her.

I paused. “That means?—”

“A large magickal disturbance from an incoming soul. You might want to get over there; she’s warping the fabric of reality slightly.”

Wonderful. Just how I wanted to start my Tuesday morning—with an enraged supernatural dead lady. And it needed to be handled, especially since Hades was away.

If anything went wrong, he had full rights to kill me where I stood: there was a natural order to things. The gods and goddesses were at the top, followed by deities, the minor other beings, then supernaturals, then the legends, and humans were at the bottom.

“Come.”

Janine trotted obediently behind me as I followed the source of the disruption; it wasn’t hard. Souls fled, screaming and wailing in pain and terror. The air vibrated around us the closer we got, until I saw her.