Hellfire – Princess of Hell

I woke to softness and warmth on all sides.

Not my bed.

Isabella’s apartment. Right.

My eyes opened to unfamiliar ceiling panels, black wood with silver inlay catching the dim ambient light from the enchanted crystals. Aria’s face was buried between my breasts, her breath hot against my sternum. She muttered something indistinct through whatever dream she was having.

Isabella’s leg hooked over my thigh, her cool skin a sharp contrast to Aria’s heat.

My tail had wrapped itself around Isabella’s calf sometime during the night. Possessive. Claiming.

My right hand cupped Aria’s breast.

I stared at the ceiling and didn’t move.

This wasn’t research. Wasn’t tactical networking or maintaining cover or any of the half-dozen excuses I’d been cycling through.

This was me waking up between two people I’d fucked senseless, in a bed that wasn’t mine, with my body declaring ownership while I slept.

Twenty-six days.

Twenty-six days since I’d collapsed in my London flat.

Ten days since I’d met Aria.

Six since Isabella had inserted herself into our lives with that calculated offer of protection.

And now I was here. Wrapped around both of them like I belonged.

I needed to get back to Earth. Soon. Before the window closed entirely.

The summoning circle worked. I could do it again, properly this time. Land in London instead of some random Japanese attic. Search my apartment for any trace of where the real Lilithiel had gone. What she’d done with my life.

Before that exchange became something I couldn’t bring myself to make.

Before I decided this—the weight of Aria against my chest, Isabella’s fingers twitching against my hip in her sleep, the bone-deep satisfaction still thrumming through my stolen body—was better than what I’d had.

Each day made it harder.

Each night made the rationalizations thinner.

I felt Aria shift. Her breathing changed rhythm.

Then teeth closed gently on my nipple.

My back arched before I could stop it. A sound I refused to categorize escaped my throat.

Aria lifted her head, grinning. Sleep-mussed and entirely too pleased with herself.

“Morning.”

Isabella stirred. Her leg tightened around mine briefly before she opened those ice-blue eyes and assessed the situation with her usual efficiency.

“Mm. Good morning.”

Neither of them moved to untangle themselves.

Neither did I.

That should concern me more than it did.

Aria stretched, pressing closer before finally pulling back. “We should probably get moving. What’s first today?”

I sorted through the mental schedule I’d been maintaining. “Practice of the Flesh. Double period.”

Aria’s grin widened.

I waited for the dread to surface. The resistance. The internal argument about how I couldn’t possibly participate in whatever Professor Nyara had planned for practical instruction.

Nothing.

Just a flicker of curiosity and the muscle memory of everything I’d done last night rising to the surface like it had always been there.

“After what you pulled last night?” Aria sat up fully, no modesty, no hesitation. “You’re going to destroy that class.”

Isabella made a quiet sound of agreement as she extracted herself from the bed with her usual grace.

I lay there another moment.

Catalogued the absence of panic.

The presence of anticipation instead.

Right.

That was a problem.

I sat up. Reached for my uniform with hands that didn’t shake.

“We should shower first.”

“Together?” Aria bounced off the bed. “I can help with those hard-to-reach places.”

“Separately,” I said. Then caught myself. “Actually—”

Isabella glanced back from the bathroom door.

I looked at Aria’s hopeful expression. At Isabella’s raised eyebrow.

At the fact that I’d just spent the night with my tail wrapped around one of them and my hand on the other.

“Together is fine.”

The words came out steady.

Easy.

Like I’d stopped fighting sometime between falling asleep and waking up.

Aria grabbed my hand and pulled.

I followed her toward the bathroom where Isabella was already adjusting the water temperature.

And didn’t let myself think about how natural that felt.

* * *

I walked out of the amphitheatre with my spine straight and my hands loose at my sides.

The other students gave me space in the corridor.

Aria caught up within three steps, falling into stride beside me. Her mouth opened.

I raised one finger.

She closed it. Grinned instead, all teeth and mischief, but kept quiet.

The image was still fresh. Valentina on her knees, pupils blown wide, chest heaving. The way her defiance had crumbled the moment I’d wrapped my tail around her throat and pulled her close enough to feel my breath.

Professor Nyara had called it textbook dominance establishment.

I’d called it survival.

Valentina had made the mistake of volunteering us both for the practical demonstration. Probably thought I’d freeze. That the commoner girl would fumble in front of an audience while Valentina showed everyone how a proper pureblood performed.

She’d learned otherwise.

“Okay, seriously though.” Aria bumped my shoulder. “You didn’t have to go that far.”

“She picked the fight.”

“Oh, I’m not complaining.” Aria’s grin widened. “Just saying. You made your point around the time you had her begging. Everything after that was just showing off.”

Footsteps behind us. Quick, angry.

“You.”

The shriek echoed down the corridor.

I stopped. Turned.

Valentina stormed toward us, face flushed, platinum hair dishevelled. Her finger jabbed the air between us like a weapon.

“This isn’t over. You’ll see. You’ll—”

“Careful.” I kept my voice level. “People might think you’re asking for a repeat performance.”

Her mouth opened. Closed. The flush deepened.

She spun and stalked away, wings rigid against her back.

I sighed and resumed walking.

Aria laughed.

“Worth it though, right?” She linked her arm through mine. “The look on her face when you—”

“It’ll come back to bite me.”

“Obviously.” Isabella’s voice cut in from my other side. She’d materialized sometime during Valentina’s exit, footsteps silent as always. “But it was certainly entertaining.”

The corridor opened into the main courtyard. Other students scattered across the space, some heading toward the cafeteria, others clustered near the fountain.

“You could genuinely make a living as a domina,” Isabella continued. “There’s significant demand for—”

“Don’t.”

“I’m simply noting marketable skills.”

Aria bounced slightly as we walked. “Shame the professor ended it before things got fun.”

I glanced at her. “Nyara stopped it because it was already past educational and into public spectacle.”

“Exactly. Fun.”

“I don’t need to give Valentina more ammunition for her revenge fantasies.”

Isabella’s expression shifted into something that might have been amusement on anyone else. “You’re welcome to stay at my apartment if you’re concerned about retaliation. The security wards are significantly more robust than dormitory standard.”

I laughed. Couldn’t help it.

Both of them looked at me.

“I’ll think about it.”

“That’s not a no,” Aria observed.

“It’s not a yes either.”

We crossed into the shadow of the main academic building. Students flowed around us, conversations bleeding together into white noise.

Aria’s expression shifted. Calculated casual. “So when are you planning another trip to the mortal realms?”

My stride didn’t break. “After I do more research.”

“You’re going to fossilize in that library.”

“I need to make sure everything’s perfect.”

“We don’t want to get stuck there,” Isabella added. “Proper preparation is—”

Aria threw her hands up. “Not you too.”

I felt the corner of my mouth twitch.

The summoning circle had worked. Too well. Landing in that Japanese attic had confirmed the mechanics were sound, the targeting was functional, the whole apparatus viable.

It also confirmed I could go back anytime I wanted.

Find my apartment. Track down what happened to my body. Confront Lilithiel or whatever remained of her.

Trade this back.

Anytime.

The weight of Aria’s arm through mine registered. Isabella’s presence on my other side, measured and certain.

The phantom sensation of Valentina’s pulse against my tail, rapid and desperate, still hummed through my nervous system.

Twenty-six days.

“Come on,” I said. “We’ll be late for Occult Law.”

Aria groaned but followed.

Isabella fell into step.

And I ignored the part of me that noted how we moved together now. Synchronized. Natural.

Like we’d been doing this for years instead of days.

* * *

Occult Law ran long. Magecraft ran longer.

By the time we climbed the last stairwell to the fifth floor, my feet ached in a way that suggested the body had opinions about seven consecutive hours of academia. Aria slouched against my shoulder. Isabella walked straight as ever, but the slight tension around her eyes betrayed her.

The door to 413 was unlocked.

I noticed before I pushed it open. My key was still in my ring.

The room smelled of good wine.

I stepped through.

Two figures sat in the chairs by the window. Bellas stood beside them, pouring red into a second glass with the focused care of someone acutely aware he was being watched. The woman accepted it without looking at him. She was dressed simply, dark fabric, minimal jewellery, a glamour that made her look like a moderately successful merchant. The man beside her wore darker clothes, relaxed posture, one ankle crossed over his knee.

My stomach dropped.

I knew the line of those shoulders. Knew the exact particular stillness of him, the way he occupied a chair like a throne he’d temporarily decided to demean himself by sitting in.

“Surprise,” Lilith said.

Right. This week.

Aria walked into my back.

“Oh, sorry, why did you—” She looked past me. Clocked the strangers in our room. Straightened immediately, the casual drape of exhaustion evaporating. “Oh.”

“We could have used some warning,” I said.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Lucifer’s mouth curved. His voice carried none of its usual weight, scrubbed clean for the performance. Luther, I reminded myself. He was Luther tonight.

“Even a brief warning,” I tried.

Lilith laughed, low and warm. The sound was slightly wrong, calibrated down from what I knew, but the texture of it was still hers. “Come here.”

I crossed the room and accepted the embrace she offered. Brief. Practiced in the way a merchant’s affection is practiced, warm enough to be real, measured enough to communicate investment. I felt the performance in it, the deliberate absence of the particular fierceness I’d seen in the palace.

This was the character.

“Introduce us,” she said, releasing me and looking past my shoulder.

I turned. “Ariasielle Nova. Aria. My roommate.” I gestured. “Isabella Lilitu.”

Lilith’s gaze moved between them the way a jeweller assesses stones, a slow inventory that she softened into a smile before either of them could identify what it was.

“Carmilla,” she said. “This is Luther.” A small gesture toward Lucifer, who inclined his head exactly as much as a devoted incubus consort would. “We’re Lily’s family, more or less. I turned her myself, so.” She spread her hands. “Luther’s claimed her since she first called him insufferable to his face.”

Lucifer’s expression didn’t change. “I considered it a promising sign.”

“It’s wonderful to meet you both,” Lilith continued, turning the warmth up precisely one degree. “Lily doesn’t write often enough about the people she spends time with. I was beginning to think she was making you up.”

“She’s not making us up,” Aria said. She’d recovered fast, the instinctive social awareness that made her genuinely good at what she was. “We’re very real. Arguably too real.”

“Are you settling in well? The Academy can be difficult in the first weeks.” Lilith set her wine down. “I always worry she gets too absorbed in her studies and forgets to eat.”

“Please,” Aria said. “I am personally ensuring she feeds properly. That’s basically my entire job at this point.”

Something in Lilith’s face shifted, small and genuine, before the composed warmth reasserted itself.

“I’m glad she has you for that,” she said.

* * *

The conversation ran easier than it should have.

Lilith, wearing Carmilla like a well-fitted coat, asked Aria about the Academy’s tailoring options with the measured interest of a merchant assessing a market. Aria needed no further invitation. Within three minutes she had produced, from some architectural mystery of her corset, a folded page of sketches she’d apparently been carrying since last week, and was explaining at length why the standard uniform hemline represented both an aesthetic failure and a structural injustice.

Lucifer, which is to say Luther, listened with the patient attention of a man who had nothing to prove and therefore nothing to perform. He asked Isabella two questions about House Lilitu’s territorial arrangements and absorbed her brief, precise answers without follow-up. When he smiled, it reached his eyes in a way that felt borrowed from someone else’s warmth.

I sat slightly to the side and watched them work the room.

They were good. Carmilla laughed at the right moments. Luther deployed a dry observation about Aria’s hemline argument that made Isabella’s mouth twitch. They asked questions that felt personal and weren’t. The whole performance had the texture of parents who loved their daughter primarily as an asset—concerned enough to inspect her circumstances, relieved to find them profitable, ready to leave once the audit was complete.

The thing was, I’d seen behind the mask. The fierceness in Lilith when she’d looked at me in the palace. The way Lucifer’s entire bearing changed in private. What I was watching now was technically more plausible as demonic parenthood, and it read completely hollow.

The crystal above the desk cycled through amber. Somewhere between forty minutes and an hour, Lilith set down her empty glass.

“We should leave you to your evening.” She rose, unhurried. “I’m satisfied.”

“The company speaks well of you,” Lucifer said, his gaze passing over Aria and Isabella in the tone of a compliment that was also an assessment.

Lilith touched my cheek, brief, a practised warmth. “Don’t forget to write. I mean it this time.”

“I will.”

“You won’t. Write anyway.” She turned toward the door.

They left without ceremony. The latch clicked shut, and the room changed registers.

Aria collapsed backward onto the nearest bed, arms wide, staring at the ceiling.

“Your parents,” she said, “are absolutely terrifying.”

Isabella, still standing, straightened the cuff of her sleeve. “I am a pureblood of one of Hell’s foremost houses.” A pause. “They made me feel like an apprentice.”

“They’re just like that.” I stayed in my chair. “Intense people.”

Aria turned her head to look at me without lifting it from the mattress. “No wonder you walked into Valentina like it was nothing. That just… rubs off, doesn’t it. You grow up around that and certain things stop registering as threats.”

I exhaled through my nose.

“Mm.” Aria’s gaze went back to the ceiling. “I’m a little jealous, honestly.”

“Of what?”

She was quiet for a second. “At least they showed up. At least they played the game.” Her fingers picked at a loose thread in the silk. “Sombra doesn’t even bother with that part.”

The room held the shape of what she hadn’t said.

I moved to the bed and sat beside her, pressing my arm against hers. She didn’t look at me, but some of the tension in her shoulders shifted.

“You have us,” I said.

“Indeed.” Isabella settled into the chair Lucifer had vacated, crossing one leg over the other. Her tone was flat, factual, the way she said things she meant too much to decorate.

Aria was quiet for another moment. Then the corner of her mouth pulled upward.

“Yeah.” She turned her head toward me. “Yeah, I suppose I do.”

Something moved in my chest that I filed away without examining. I’d stood at the edge of this particular calculation before. I knew what I was supposed to conclude. I knew what I would do with an emotional anchor in the wrong world.

The problem was that sitting here felt like the natural end of a sentence I’d forgotten I was writing.

“So,” Aria said, sitting up straighter, the pivot already happening in her voice. “The mortal realms.” She turned to look at me with the particular brightness that preceded logistical chaos. “Where exactly are you thinking? Because I’ve heard the Arborean forests are gorgeous and there’s this market in—”

I pinched the bridge of my nose.

* * *

Three days of lectures, library stacks, and the particular mental sediment that accumulates when you learn things you’d have preferred not to know.

The anatomy seminar on Tuesday covered succubus feeding escalation in clinical detail. Wednesday’s occult law session explained, at length, the legal framework for demonic possession of partially-willing hosts. I took notes on both. The library filled the gaps with a treatise on soul fragmentation that I read in one sitting and couldn’t unread afterward.

Between those, I found what I actually needed.

The summoning circle could be refined. Not just to a realm but to a city within it, a specific population centre, the probability weights shifting until the circle fished from a much smaller pool. The trade-off was obvious: fewer potential summoners meant longer waits, sometimes no response at all. But I wasn’t fishing for strangers anymore.

I needed London.

The chalk made a dry sound against the stone floor as I finished the outermost ring. The geometry had taken forty minutes. I’d measured twice, corrected once, and was reasonably confident about everything except the anchor variables, which were theoretical until tested.

“How are you doing that,” Aria said, from somewhere above my left shoulder.

“Carefully.”

“No, I mean—” She crouched beside me, close enough that her breath disturbed the chalk dust. “A perfect circle. That size. By hand. I could never.”

“You could.”

“I genuinely could not. I’ve tried. It always goes a bit egg-shaped.”

“Aria.” Isabella’s voice, from the doorway where she’d positioned herself with her arms folded and the patient expression she reserved for managing Aria’s commentary. “Let her finish.”

Aria pressed her lips together and mimed locking them. She held it for perhaps four seconds, then pointed silently at a section of the inner ring, eyebrows raised in a question she technically wasn’t asking.

I corrected the symbol she’d noticed without acknowledging that she’d spotted something worth noticing.

The final rune took another three minutes. I sat back on my heels and looked at the completed circle. Twenty-nine days in Hell, thirteen days since I’d met Aria, and I was kneeling on a dormitory floor drawing a door home with chalk I’d bought from an academy supply shop.

“Done,” I said.

Aria made a sound that could only be described as a squeal, immediately clapping a hand over her own mouth when Isabella’s expression sharpened. She removed the hand. “I can’t wait,” she said, at a more regulated volume. “Untouched mortals. Actual untouched ones, not the technically-untouched ones Malthus tried to pass off on us.”

“Don’t agree to anything before I’ve assessed the situation,” Isabella said. She moved from the doorway and looked down at the circle with the same attention she gave Professor Scarlet’s simulation boards, reading for the thing underneath the thing.

“I’m not going to just agree to anything.”

“I know. I’m saying it anyway.”

Aria turned to me. “So how does it work exactly? We just—what? Stand in it?”

“We step inside and wait.” I stood, rolling my shoulder where it had stiffened. “Someone on the other end decides to summon a succubus. The circle catches the call.”

She stared at me. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“There’s no—incantation? We don’t have to do anything?”

“We wait.”

She looked at the circle, then at Isabella, then back at me with the expression of someone who had been prepared for something considerably more complicated. “Huh.”

Isabella stepped across the outer line first. The chalk didn’t react to her weight. I followed, moving to the centre, and felt the geometry settle around us the way a tuned instrument finds its note—not dramatic, just a faint correctness in the air pressure.

Aria hopped in last, landing on both feet. “Right. How long does this usually take?”

“Depends on the mortals.” I kept my eyes on the runes. The anchor variables were responding, which meant the directional weighting had held. London. “Hopefully not long.”

“Mortals are reliably foolish,” Isabella said, examining her nails with complete serenity. “Someone will try.”

Aria shifted her weight. “And then what? We just—appear wherever they are?”

“In whatever passes for their ritual space, yes.”

“What if they’re not ready for three of us?”

“They won’t be,” I said.

She grinned. “Perfect.”

The runes along the innermost ring began to warm from white to amber. Not quickly. The kind of change you’d miss if you weren’t watching for it.

I watched for it.

Aria rocked onto her toes. “Oh, something’s happening—”

The amber deepened to gold, and the floor dropped out from under us.

* * *

The landing was harder than Japan.

Not physically—the circle deposited us without ceremony onto a concrete floor, the chalk lines of someone else’s geometry already fading at the edges. The room was dim, lit by a single bare bulb on a cord that swayed slightly with our arrival. No windows. The air smelled like damp stone and something older underneath, the way Underground stations smelled when the ventilation failed.

The circle was the only feature. That and two people standing across its boundary, watching us arrive with very different expressions.

The man was maybe fifty, rumpled suit, the kind of face that had weathered several things it hadn’t expected to weather. The woman beside him was younger, dark blazer, glasses she pushed up her nose in the first second our eyes met. A manila folder tucked under her arm.

“Perfect,” Aria breathed, low enough for only me to hear.

The man leaned toward the woman. “Miriam—just be careful.”

“Charles.” She didn’t look at him. She was already reading us the way I’d seen Isabella read a room, sorting, filing. “This is what I’m for. I didn’t study law to get tricked by demons.”

Charles nodded once. He had the expression of someone who had accepted this logic without fully believing it.

Aria pressed her shoulder against mine. “That,” she murmured, “makes me want to trick them so much more.”

“The plan,” I said.

“I know the plan. Weekend pass. Maximum fun, minimum obligation.” She was already moving toward the boundary line, her voice shifting up into something warm and easy. “So. You’re the ones who summoned us. What do you need?”

The woman opened the folder.

What followed was meticulous. She described the London Underground with the careful precision of someone explaining geography to a tourist—junctions, platforms, the Jubilee line, a maintenance access corridor below the Northern line that wasn’t on any public record. Beneath it, a gateway. Ancient. Currently unstable. Widening.

Charles, she explained, worked on a contract basis with an organisation she declined to name. The gateway predated the tunnel by several centuries. He had the skill to locate it and the knowledge to perform the sealing, but not the capacity to manage what was already bleeding through—lesser spirits, she called them, astral parasites, things with enough coherence to be dangerous but not enough to negotiate with. What they needed were three entities capable of drawing those things in and neutralizing them while Charles worked.

“Like bait,” Isabella said.

Miriam paused. “More like a sanitation function.”

Isabella held her gaze. “Like bait.”

“…Functionally, yes.”

Aria made a sound beside me that I could only describe as a stifled groan wearing the disguise of a polite cough.

“How large is the breach?” I asked. “Currently.”

Miriam glanced at Charles.

“Manageable,” he said. “Tonight. Another week and that changes.”

“How many incursions since it opened?”

He looked at me more carefully. “Three. Nothing that made the news.”

“And the gateway itself—sealed by what mechanism? You mentioned knowledge.” I kept my voice level. “I want to understand what you’re doing while we’re working around you, not adjacent to it.”

The folder lowered slightly. Miriam exchanged a look with Charles that lasted exactly as long as people look at each other when they’re recalibrating.

“A binding sequence,” Charles said. “Layered. Takes about forty minutes of uninterrupted concentration.”

Aria’s elbow found my ribs, very gently, in the tone of forty minutes, are you serious.

I didn’t react.

“Compensation,” Isabella said, from slightly behind me. Not impatient. Just moving things along.

Miriam straightened. “Our souls are not on the table. That should be stated clearly and at the outset.”

“Noted,” I said.

“But we’re prepared to negotiate.”

* * *

The contract took twenty minutes and filled three pages of Miriam’s parchment—her paper, she’d clarified, with a slight defensive edge, as though she’d expected us to have opinions about it. We didn’t. Isabella read every clause with the expression she wore in Professor Scarlet’s seminars, and I let her, because she caught one ambiguity I’d missed and had it corrected before I could open my mouth.

The short version: we helped, we stayed glamoured in public, we didn’t deliberately injure anyone who wasn’t already trying to injure us, and we didn’t cause sufficient property damage to require an explanation. When the job was done, we went home.

Simple enough.

Miriam produced a small rectangle of black glass from her blazer pocket and held it out. “For tomorrow. Call the number already saved—it’s labelled C.H. The sealing begins at nine in the evening. We’ll need you there by half past eight.”

I reached for it on instinct, two fingers extended to drop it into the ring.

“What,” Aria said, “is that.”

I stopped.

Miriam blinked. Then something shifted in her expression—a recalibration, the same one from earlier, faster this time. She turned the device over in her palm.

“It’s called a phone. A mobile phone.” She paused, assembling a starting point. “Mortals use it to communicate over distances. You press this button here to wake it—” the screen lit up, “—and this application here allows you to speak to someone in another location in real time. Similar to, I don’t know, whatever the demonic equivalent might be.”

“Communication runes,” Isabella said. She was studying the screen with her head tilted at precisely the angle she used when something had earned provisional interest. “So mortals engineered a functional analogue without any mana architecture. Through entirely physical means.”

“Electromagnetic waves,” Charles offered.

Isabella considered this for a moment. “Interesting.”

Aria had already closed the distance and plucked the phone from Miriam’s hand. The screen went dark. She pressed the button. It lit again and she made a small, delighted sound.

“There’s a tiny mirror in it,” she said.

“That’s the camera,” Miriam said. “It captures—”

Aria had already raised it, angled it toward her face, and taken a picture. The shutter sound made her flinch. Then she took three more in rapid succession.

“Lily.” She turned the screen toward me. There she was, four times, grinning. “It makes a portrait instantly. Without a painter.” She looked at Miriam with the expression of someone reassessing the entire mortal enterprise. “You’re so inventive. Like little ants building things because they can’t do magic properly.”

Miriam opened her mouth.

“She means that as a compliment,” I said.

Miriam closed her mouth.

I took the phone from Aria before she could photograph Charles. The glass was warm from Miriam’s hand and lighter than it looked. I turned to Charles.

“You’re comfortable,” I said, “releasing three succubi into London.”

“Comfortable is a strong word.” He tucked his hands into his pockets. “But you’ll be monitored. And Miriam’s contract work is—” he glanced at her, “—thorough.”

“The contract was solid,” I said. Which was true. It was also true that I’d identified three workable gaps in the first reading and two more on the second. The exit clause, for instance, specified we departed when the business concluded, but said nothing about who determined when the business was concluded. A small omission. The kind a barrister would love.

Not that I needed it. I had a flat and a missing body somewhere in this city.

“The summons next week,” I said. “You haven’t forgotten.”

Charles’s expression suggested he would very much like to have forgotten. “It’s in the contract.”

“Good.”

“We won’t drain you too much,” Aria said, from somewhere behind me. She was still cycling through the phone’s functions with the systematic enthusiasm of someone who had found an excellent toy. “Probably just a little. Maybe a little more than that, actually, it depends how the evening goes—”

“Aria.”

“I’m being honest, it’s a virtue.”

Charles looked at me with the expression of a man revising his threat assessment in real time.

I thought, briefly and without intending to, about what his vital essence would taste like. Something steady, I suspected. Methodical. The kind that sat warm and even rather than bright.

I turned away and moved toward where Aria and Isabella were drifting toward the room’s only door. The ceiling above it was low, water-stained, the whole place carrying the particular exhaustion of London basements—the weight of a city that had been here too long stacked above it.

Aria held the phone up as I reached her, angling it to capture all three of us in its tiny frame.

“Portrait,” she announced.

The shutter sound echoed off the concrete.