All Chapters of THE DEVIL'S LEDGER : Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

SERAPHINAThe car is too clean. That's the first thing I notice, sitting stiff in the back seat with a man on either side of me like bookends. No mud on the floor mats. No smell of sulfur or fungus-mash. Just leather and something sharp and cold, like metal, like money.I've never been in a car before. I hate that some small, stupid part of me is curious about it anyway."You can stop staring at the window," the man on my left says. He hasn't told me his name. None of them have. "Nothing out there you haven't already seen.""I've never seen it from up here," I say. "Forgive me for looking."He doesn't answer that. Good. I didn't want an answer, I wanted him to know I'm not afraid to talk, even now, even with my wrists still stinging from where they grabbed me.We climb. That's the only word for it the road spirals up and up, out of the fog, out of the Enclave, past the Under-Tunnels where I've never once been allowed to go, until the acid rain turns to ordinary rain and then to nothi

SERAPHINAThe knock on my door comes late, well past the hour any of the guards usually bother checking on me, and when I open it, I'm expecting Cato with another tray I won't finish.Instead I find a woman I've never met, standing with her arms crossed and an expression that is doing its very best to look casual and failing completely."You're the debt girl," she says, like that settles something."I have a name.""I know. Seraphina." She says it carefully, like she's testing the shape of it in her mouth. "I'm Vittoria. Dante's sister."I study her for a long second. Same dark hair as her brother, though hers falls loose instead of cropped "Depends," she says, and steps past me into the room without waiting to be invited, which I decide, after a moment, that I don't actually mind. "Are you planning to murder my brother in his sleep?""I've thought about it," I say honestly. "I decided against it. For now."That gets a startled laugh out of her—real, sudden, nothing careful about it a

SERAPHINAI don't sleep the night we come back from the Wood.I lie in the dark, turning Odette's words over and over. A Keeper.Once a generation. Rare enough that most Houses think the bloodline died out.I feel the shape of my own secret get heavier every time I turn it.He doesn't know. He sat three feet from the truth and didn't see it. Some small, cowardly part of me is relieved.Some other part, colder and more honest, knows exactly what that relief is worth.Nothing. It's borrowed time. And I know better than anyone in this tower what borrowed time eventually costs.I don't tell him. Not that night. Not the next morning either, when Vittoria knocks on my door before I've even dressed, trailing a woman I've never met behind her."Lena," Vittoria says, by way of introduction. "Works the Under-Tunnels.Her grandfather runs half the black market moving between the Houses. She's got something you both need to hear."Lena doesn't sit. She stands with her arms crossed, jaw tight, dir