"WHERE ARE WE GOING?" Mailah repeated.

Grayson’s eyes remained closed. "You’ll find out."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the only one you’re getting."

She turned to look at his profile — the clean, unhurried lines of it, the particular quality of his stillness that she had learned to distinguish from sleep and from thought and from the specific variety of silence he used when he had made a decision and was not interested in discussing it.

This was the last one.

"Grayson."

"Mailah."

"If you don’t tell me where we’re going, I’m going to spend the entire journey asking you."

"I’m aware," he said. "I’ve factored that in."

She stared at him. He remained precisely as he was — eyes closed, arm around her shoulders, chin tilted slightly down in the attitude of a man who has barricaded a door and is waiting out the siege with complete confidence in his own fortifications.

She lasted approximately four minutes.

"Is it another estate?"

"No."

"A safe house?"

"No."

"A bunker? A — demon realm access point? Some kind of—"

"You’ll see when we arrive."

"That is genuinely the most irritating thing you’ve ever said to me, and you once told me my survival probability was sixty percent."

His mouth curved. Not a full smile — it never was — but enough. "Go to sleep, Mailah."

"I’m not tired."

"You’ve been awake for—"

"Don’t," she said. "Do not tell me how many hours I’ve been awake. We are not doing the sleep deprivation mathematics again."

He exhaled through his nose. The sound of a man exercising patience he hadn’t known he possessed until recently.

The rail hummed beneath them, silent and fast, the blue floor panels throwing a cold light across the ceiling. Somewhere above them, the estate’s grounds were receding — the ruined greenhouse, the security rotations, the lower level where Theron was contained and being managed by brothers who were more than competent to manage him. All of it moving further away with every kilometer the rail swallowed in silence.

She looked at his hands.

"You’re not going to tell me," she said.

"No."

"Why not?"

A pause. He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. "Because you’ll argue about it," he said. "And I’d rather you argue once, when we arrive, than the entire way there."

She considered this. "That’s almost reasonable."

"It’s completely reasonable."

"It’s also slightly infuriating."

"Also noted."

She settled back against his side with the resigned energy of someone who has identified the limits of a negotiation and is deciding how to occupy themselves within those limits.

His arm adjusted around her shoulders — not tighter, just differently, the shift of someone getting comfortable rather than someone making a point.

The rail curved slightly. The blue light shifted.

She closed her eyes, not because she was tired — she wasn’t, or she was choosing not to be, which was nearly the same thing — but because the warmth of him was doing the same thing it always did, working through her with the specific efficiency of something that burned from the inside, and fighting it required more energy than she currently had allocated for the purpose.

She was not asleep — not fully — when his phone buzzed.

He reached into his jacket without disturbing her, which required a small adjustment she felt but didn’t respond to, and answered it with the economic brevity of a man who had decided how long this conversation was going to take before it began.

"James," he said.

The voice on the other end was audible enough that Mailah could catch the shape of it — warm, unhurried, the voice of someone who was not intimidated by Grayson Ashford and had apparently made peace with that fact some time ago.

You’re calling me at this hour, which means you’re either about to tell me something I don’t want to hear or something I’ll find hilarious. Based on your tone, I’m going with both.

"I’m going to be unavailable," Grayson said. "Indefinitely."

A pause on the other end.

Define indefinitely.

"For as long as it takes."

Takes for what?

Grayson said nothing. The silence was answer enough, apparently, because James made a sound that was unmistakably a laugh — not a polite laugh, a genuine one, the kind that couldn’t be managed.

Well, he said. I’ve been waiting for this phone call for approximately eight months. What took you so long?

"Don’t be amusing," Grayson said.

Someone has to be. You’re certainly not. A pause, and when James spoke again, the amusement had a different quality — still warm, but steadier. The company will be here when you get back. We’ve been running it competently for years and I’ll continue to run it competently. Go. Another pause. And Grayson — don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

"That," Grayson said, "is an exceptionally low bar."

I know. That’s why I set it there. James laughed again. Take care of her.

Grayson’s jaw shifted. "Don’t do anything that requires me to come back early and remind you why you work for me."

I work with you. I’ve been correcting that for eleven years. A beat. Go. I’ve got it.

Grayson ended the call.

He held the phone in his hand for a moment, looking at it with the focused attention of a man running a final calculation.

Then he reached past Mailah, cracked the window two inches — the rail had a window, which she hadn’t noticed, a narrow slit that let in a rush of underground air — and threw the phone through it.

There was a brief pause.

Then a sound like a small contained explosion, and a flash of light through the window slit that was orange and immediate and gone.

Mailah sat upright.

She stared at the window. At the place where the phone had been. At Grayson’s hand, which was now resting on his knee, perfectly composed, a faint ember of blue-silver fading from his fingertips.

"Did you just," she said, "set fire to your phone."

"After breaking it," he said. "Yes."

"You broke and then incinerated your phone."

"I don’t want to be tracked."

"You could have turned it off."

"This was more thorough."

She stared at him. He looked back at her with complete equanimity, the blue-silver entirely gone from his fingers now, his expression that of a man who had done something entirely sensible and was mildly puzzled by the response it was generating.

She had been living in his estate for weeks. She had watched him conduct interrogations, pin an archdemon to a concrete floor with a sigil spike, and construct an entire dream spa from residual nightmare architecture. She knew what he was. She had known it from the first conversation, when his eyes had gone silver and the air pressure in the room had changed.

And yet.

Watching him throw a phone out a window and casually incinerate it in midair, in a suit, on a mag-lev rail that was currently hurtling through the earth’s crust at an unspecified velocity, was somehow the thing that landed.

"You’re a demon," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"I keep forgetting that."

He looked at her steadily. "I’m aware," he said. "You look at me like I’m a difficult man. Not like I’m an ancient supernatural entity who could reduce this rail to slag if the mood struck."

"Could you?"

"Easily."

"Does the mood strike often?"

"Less recently," he said, and looked at the ceiling, and the particular quality of the admission — dry, unannounced, aimed at the ceiling rather than at her — made her press her lips together to keep from smiling.

She settled back against his side. His arm resettled around her shoulders. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

"James," she said.

"He sounded like he was happy for you."

Grayson said nothing.

"About us," she said.

Still nothing.

"Grayson."

"Go to sleep, Mailah."

"That’s the third time today."

"The instruction hasn’t changed."

She did sleep, in the end.

Not because she had decided to, but because the rail’s hum and Grayson’s warmth and the specific exhaustion of a body that had been through too much in too short a time collectively overrode her intentions, and she went under between one breath and the next.

She woke to stillness.

The rail had stopped. The blue floor panels were dark.

Grayson was standing — she registered the absence of him before she registered anything else, the cool air where his warmth had been — and he was looking at something through the forward viewport with his hands behind his back.

She sat up.

"We’re here," he said, without turning.

"Where is here?"

He moved to the door and opened it, and the air that came in was nothing like the underground mineral cold of the rail tunnel. It was warm and carried salt — the particular heavy salt of open water, thick with it, the smell of an ocean that was close and large and not particularly interested in human drama.

She stood up.

The door opened onto a platform that ended in a short set of stone stairs, and the stairs ended in — she stopped on the second step and looked.