Page 37

CONDEMNED CONFECTIONS

Ember

E mber narrowed her gaze, curled her lip, and carefully dragged a knife through the cream as she bent to keep her eyes level with the cake.

It still wasn’t even, and though that probably had something to do with one of the other layers of sponge, she couldn’t very well take the whole thing apart and start over—she’d done that three times already.

But it wasn’t…it wasn’t bad . The cake wasn’t exactly good either, but it was recognizable enough as a poor imitation of what had so much more beautifully sat on the shelf in Davarox and Lazerath’s bakery.

Under the flickering lanterns of the kitchen, she stepped back and inspected her work.

Indeed, it was lopsided, but then maybe Severath would take that as a compliment.

At the very least, she’d gotten it done before he returned from his summons, a thing she hadn’t expected when he left because Brioni had stuck around.

Brioni quite enjoyed talking, so Ember had let her.

The woman was a wealth of information about Heck, rattling on about which demons were feuding and which were canoodling—a word she couldn’t use without giggling outrageously—and she sprinkled in bits of information about the other humans as well, the sisters who were feuding and the ones she expected were canoodling with the locals.

Her deluge of information slowed only when offered one of Lazerath’s cookies, which she recognized and then gushed about, but it was a short-lived deterrent.

It was almost as if they were friends despite very few meetings, and instead of that thought making Ember want to squirm uncomfortably in her seat, she only tipped her head as she watched Brioni’s mouth and hands move in unison and smiled.

“Oh, I actually have some more things for you!” she finally announced as if suddenly remembering.

Brioni rummaged around in her bag, commenting on how her schedule had been so thrown off and apologizing for not coming back sooner, then handed over another embroidered dress, a few human necessities, and a vial.

“For canoodling,” she said and devolved into more laughter.

Ember tipped it upside down, the liquid inside sloshing. “What’s it really?”

“Well, Aofe made it so that time of the month goes a lot smoother, but it stops you from getting pregnant too.” Brioni waggled her ginger brows.

That thought hadn’t even crossed Ember’s mind—she’d been drawing Severath’s pleasure out for days and commanding him to spill his seed in all sorts of places, but not inside her.

She fought the sudden urge to swallow the entire draught right there and instead stuffed it in a pocket.

There were other things she needed to do before all that.

“Bri, do you think you could help me with something?”

The woman had been more than happy to read Davarox’s recipe aloud to Ember.

She didn’t even ask why Ember needed the assistance, just took the parchment and did exactly as she was asked twice over.

“I can do it again,” she said as Ember drummed fingers on the counter, committing what she could to memory.

“No, I think I got it.” She held a hand out for the recipe, but when the woman deflated, Ember was quick to add, “You did a great job. Thank you.” It was like dousing dried tea leaves, watching the woman immediately unfurl and float back up to the surface of whatever she’d been slipping under.

Brioni left soon after because she had more packages to deliver and a date to get to. “Not that he knows it,” she had said with a wink just before bouncing out the front door.

So Ember was left alone in Severath’s house, and she meticulously worked to recall the amounts of ingredients and directions, referencing what she could make out on the parchment to the best of her abilities, which were admittedly still very rudimentary.

But she had a cake in the end, and with a sprinkle of pinkcurrants atop, it looked almost good enough to eat.

It would be a surprise when Severath returned, but the surprise would be a drippy puddle if she didn’t get it in the icebox.

Not that Severath didn’t exactly like drippy puddles…

Ember snickered to herself and stared down at the pinkcurrants without really seeing them.

Instead, she saw the hunger in Severath’s black eye when she looked down at him between her legs and the gush of seed from his cock when she wrung him dry.

Last night she’d coaxed him to release in her mouth, and it was…

well, it would probably rival the cake that was tilting dangerously in front of her.

Pulling herself out of the reverie, she shoved the questionable confection into the icebox for safekeeping, took a long bath, downed the concoction Brioni delivered from Aofe, and then wandered about the house.

She expected him home sooner, but as the day dragged, worry mounted, and she found herself checking the front window and then cracking the front door to peek out into the dim afternoon.

A flicker across the way had Ember pausing before she shut the door for the third time.

She squinted into the lantern light to see an orange demon emerge from the home there and give her a wave.

Hesitantly, Ember waved back, made a mental note to ask Severath about joining the neighbor for tea, and then shut herself up inside.

She paced the entry, losing time, nerves stretched thin, until she heard heavy steps coming up the front stones. Ember’s heart leapt and she pulled open the front door. “Sev!”

It was not Sev.

The purple demon who had escorted Ember out of the infirmary and across town the first time stood on the stoop, and her blood froze.

“Did something happen to Severath?” she asked, breathless and shaking. Gods, hells, blazes, what if he’d been hurt? Lost? Killed?

“He isn’t here?” A second demon, also from her initial escort, walked up behind the first.

Ember shook her head.

Drolmoth smirked. “That should make this much easier.”

The room was larger and cleaner than a cell, but Ember could think of it as nothing else, the walls stone, floor stone, all of it stone, hard and pressing in.

She sat on a stiff-backed chair with fisted hands in her lap and stared down at her wrist. The silver cuff pulsed with a new magical glow, but she didn’t know what it was doing—no one had told her anything, and even if they had, the world was a muffled mess beyond her own mind and the words running through it.

It’s all right.

They can’t hurt you .

You are safe.

She took a steadying breath, but her body still shook with the exhale.

Being taken from Severath’s house and carted across Heck once again was like a nightmare.

But there would be no waking up from this to a demon’s calming timbre and a tail wrapped around her middle.

Still, she had to believe he would come because, well, he just had to .

The door cracked, and her next trembling breath caught, but it was not a red demon who entered. It was, however, the second-best thing.

“Rosalind?”

The human woman’s dark hair was pulled back and her jaw was set like she’d been holding in a scream all day. “Ridiculous!”

Apparently she had.

Ember’s skin prickled, nostrils flaring. “What’s going on?” Her snappiness was perhaps not the best greeting for the only person who tried to help her back in Ankerick when she’d been on trial, but considering the situation, her anger was under better wraps than she expected.

“I wish I knew.” The woman walked up to the small table Ember was sitting at and dropped a stack of parchment.

“What’s all that?”

“Schedules, letters, but it’s mostly useless.

” She sank into the room’s only other seat.

“I’m sorry, I would read it all to you, but I don’t think it’s much help.

” There was sleepiness under her eyes, the olive skin there gone blue even under the warm lanterns lighting the room, and rogue curls jutted out from her pulled-back hair so that she looked almost as frazzled as that day Ember went before the triumvirate.

Suddenly things felt all too familiar.

“How did you know to come here?”

“Elder Zaretha.” She shuffled through the pages, but it seemed like a fruitless gesture. “She said she saw you being taken, and she was worried because you were alone.”

“She lives across the way,” Ember whispered mostly to herself. “But isn’t Severath supposed to be here for my assessment? How can they do it without him?”

Rosalind’s dark brow narrowed. “Assessment?”

Ember raised her shoulders, but even that small movement made her feel too exposed, so she tugged herself back inward.

“Wait, you really don’t know why you’re here?”

Confusion overwhelmed the anger and panic that Ember had been losing to. “There’s another reason?”

“Elliran is missing.”

Ember looked about the empty room as if there might be an answer written in the cracks between the stones, though it wouldn’t have mattered if there was—she still struggled with half the alphabet, let alone whole words. She held up her wrist cuff. “This Elliran?”

Rosalind nodded slowly, dark eyes going sharp, exhaustion chased away by intrigue.

“What does that have to do with me?”

“Well, that.” Rosalind pointed to the rune-carved metal. “Her last official task was modifying your cuff the morning of the summer festival. She was supposed to recast your cuff the next day, but she disappeared.”

“The festival? But that was a week ago. And I saw her there—everyone did. She was one of those dancers.”

“Yes, but you were separated from Severath at the festival. It’s in his notes.”

The pounding of Ember’s heart almost drowned out Rosalind’s words.

Of course Severath recorded everything that happened that day, but…

was he blaming her? Is that why he wasn’t here now?

How could he think she had something to do with— no .

She shook her head. Severath would never believe she had anything to do with Elliran’s disappearance, but he would tell the truth.

“We were separated,” she recalled, mind spinning so fast that the details blurred. “But we saw Elliran after.”

“Was it just the two of you?” Rosalind leaned in closer.

Ember breathed through the rising panic of the memory of that night. “No, there was another demon there—Zaiya!”

As Ember explained, Rosalind nodded along, picking up a quill and taking fast notes. “Okay, this is good,” she said as she underlined some of what she’d written. “I can find this demon woman called Zaiya, and I’ll get Severath here too. Anything else?”

Ember held out her empty hands. “This isn’t like the time before. I didn’t do anything to Elliran like I did to?—”

“I know you didn’t.” Rosalind snorted, conviction laced in the exhale. “We don’t even know if anything did happen to her, but there are a few too many demons willing to pin every little problem in this city on us.”

The quiet in the wake of Rosalind’s words hung heavily in the air, and into it Ember’s fury simmered.

She took an angry breath and her body trembled.

Fear and fury were so intrinsically linked that deciphering them was like separating egg yolks, but she knew she had to try.

Bad fortune seemed to always put her on the guilty end of someone else’s transgressions until she made an effort with Severath.

He hated what she was when they met, human and murderer both, but it had been worth proving to him what she really was.

Her next breath was steady as she gazed up at Rosalind. “I’m sorry you have to do this again for me.”

“No, I’m sorry you have to do this again. I was so sure…” Rosalind shook her head. “I think I should be the one apologizing. I know it wasn’t my place to say, but I told the council everything that happened in Ankerick with the triumvirate and why you did what you did.”

Ember sighed. “I don’t care what you tell the council at this point—anything might help.”

“I mean when we arrived.” Rosalind shrugged a shoulder apologetically. “I wasn’t sure who was conscious and who wasn’t when I woke in the infirmary, but I remembered your voice in the cart, and I was afraid for all of us, so I told Argeth and Fineril everything I knew.”

Her brand burned suddenly, but there was no heat when Ember touched it. “They’ve known this whole time?”

Rosalind nodded.

Ember thought she knew how she should feel, but betrayal never came.

All Rosalind had was a voice, a flicker of a horrible memory nestled inside an even worse one, and yet she had mustered the courage to speak up for a woman she knew undoubtedly was a killer.

Ember had always thought she was alone, but then she’d come to Heck—to the terrifying Achreos Barrens —and somehow everything had changed.

She pushed her shoulders back as she sat straight. “Thank you, Rosalind. For everything.”