Dante had been backed into corners before.

  Drunken bar fights where the wrong insult got him a broken bottle aimed at his throat. Unpaid rent that left him sleeping with one eye open, waiting for the landlord’s goons to kick down the door. Loan sharks with grins like knives, reminding him in soft, almost sympathetic voices that missing another payment wouldn’t just cost him money. He had spent years dancing along the edge of bad decisions, thinking he understood what it meant to have no good options.

  He was wrong.

  This was worse.

  Three offers lay before him like a hand of cursed cards, each one dangerous in its own unique, soul-devouring way. There was no room for bluffing, no space to fold and walk away. The only way out was through, and every path promised a different kind of ruin.

  The Abyssal Brokers, ever the enterprising monsters that they were, didn’t just want repayment. They wanted him on the payroll. Not just a debtor struggling to crawl out of the pit, but an enforcer, the kind who made sure no one else even thought about escaping. Break legs. Break spirits. Drag debtors into the abyss. He’d seen their work before, watched men who were once desperate, just like him, get turned into predators out of necessity. And now they were offering him the same poisoned chalice.

  "You’re already owned,” the Broker had said, swirling his drink lazily, eyes gleaming with amusement. "Might as well get paid for it."

  Dante had seen what happened to the ones who took that deal. The ones who thought working for the Brokers was just another job, just another way to buy time. At first, it was easy—track down some poor bastard who’d gotten in too deep, remind them of their obligations with a few well-placed threats. Then came the harder assignments. The ones where reminders weren’t enough. Where the debtors ran, begged, fought. And the Brokers didn’t tolerate loose ends. They turned men into monsters, one favor at a time, until there was nothing left but an efficient, remorseless collector with a ledger where his soul used to be.

  He thought of Zane. Once just another Pactmaker, scraping by, barely keeping ahead of the jaws snapping at his heels. Then the debts piled up, the offers started coming in, and before long, Zane wasn’t running anymore—he was the one hunting. The last time Dante saw him, there was nothing left of the man he used to know. Just a cold, dead-eyed shadow in a perfectly tailored suit, delivering ultimatums with the same casual ease as a man ordering coffee. No hesitation. No remorse. Just another cog in the machine.

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  And now they wanted Dante to step into that same role, to trade what was left of himself for survival. The math wasn’t hard to figure out. The moment he said yes, the countdown started—the slow death of who he was, until one day he woke up and didn’t even remember why he had fought so hard to stay free.

  Dante’s stomach churned. Next.

  The Celestial Legate had a different approach. More refined. More elegant. But no less suffocating.

  A man in pristine white robes had come to him. No introductions, no small talk, just a quiet, almost reverent gesture as he placed a contract before Dante—gold-trimmed parchment, humming with power, oaths woven into every thread.

  "Absolution," the man had murmured, his voice heavy with certainty. "We will cleanse your contract. Burn away the corruption in your soul. But in return, you will serve. You will become a Keeper of Oaths, ensuring the divine order is upheld.”

  Translation? Become a zealot. A watchdog. A glorified hitman for their holy law.

  He had met their kind before—the true believers, the ones who spoke in absolutes and saw the world in stark, unyielding contrasts. To them, Pactmaking wasn’t just a transaction, wasn’t just survival. It was sacred. Every contract was a thread in the grand design, and to break one was to spit in the face of creation itself. The Legate didn’t negotiate, didn’t bargain like the Brokers. They judged. And if you were found wanting? There were no second chances.

  Dante could already picture what “service” under them would look like. Hunting down oathbreakers, not for profit, not even for revenge, but for the purity of it. There would be no bending the rules, no clever loopholes, no last-minute plays to escape the consequences. Just cold, merciless enforcement. A life spent chasing down desperate men and dragging them to their rightful punishment, knowing that one misstep—one moment of doubt, of hesitation—would put him on the other end of the executioner’s blade.

  The worst part? They believed they were doing you a favor. Burn away the corruption. Cleanse the soul. The same way you “cleanse” a house by burning it to the ground. Dante could survive a lot of things, but being hollowed out, reshaped into some righteous, unquestioning tool of divine order? That wasn’t survival. That was something worse.

  Dante barely held back a laugh. No matter how you dressed it up in divine rhetoric and sacred duty, it was still a leash. The only difference was that this one came with a halo instead of a shackle.

  And then there were the Free Binders.

  No representatives. No gilded offers. Just a single message, scrawled in jagged ink across a torn scrap of cloth, slipped beneath his door in the dead of night:

  “If you want out, meet us in the Ashen Hollow. Bring a shovel.”

  No explanation. No promises. Just a cryptic, open-ended threat—or invitation. A hint that somewhere, someone had found a way to break the game entirely. Maybe it was a lie. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe it was worse.

  Dante clenched his jaw.

  Three choices. Three devils.

  And rejecting them all?

  That wasn’t an option. Not anymore.

  The factions had noticed him. And if he didn’t make a move soon, they’d make one for him.