The Devil in the Ashes
The fire still burned behind her eyes.
Smoke and screams—she could still hear them. Faces she loved, turned to ash. Her wedding dress lay in tatters, soaked in blood and betrayal.
And him.
The man who pulled the trigger.
He didn't wear guilt.
He wore a crown.
---
Two weeks later, Kaia Seraphine was no longer a bride. She was a ghost wrapped in fury, dressed in black, living under a false name in the back alleys of Ravenhold.
She wasn't here to grieve.
She was here to hunt.
In the underworld's hierarchy of devils, one name sat at the top: **Damon Alaric Valen**—The Black Viper of the East Syndicate. Her groom. Her executioner. The man who whispered *forever* and then signed her death warrant before the cake was even cut.
But Kaia had survived.
Barely.
Brutally.
And survival changed her.
Now, she wasn't the innocent heiress of the Seraphine family.
She was their last curse.
---
"Are you sure about this?" Tali's voice cracked through the quiet safehouse.
Her friend's hands trembled around a stolen pistol. "You *died,* Kaia. Everyone thinks you're gone."
"Not everyone." Kaia strapped on a blade under her thigh, tugged leather over bruised skin. "He'll know."
"Damon thinks he buried you. He won't be looking over his shoulder."
Kaia's lips curved, feral. "Then he'll die with his back turned."
---
The gala was perfect for an ambush.
House Valen was celebrating another weapons merger. A thousand bodies in silk and secrets, toasting beneath chandeliers stained with blood money.
Kaia melted into the crowd like sin incarnate.
Hair like midnight. Eyes like war.
No one noticed her.
Except him.
---
Across the ballroom, Damon turned his head—and froze.
A phantom.
He blinked. She was gone.
No.
No—he'd *killed* her. She was dead. They told him she *burned*.
Yet now, something cold slithered up his spine, the way it only ever did before a kill.
He excused himself. Walked out into the hall. Silence.
Then—
A whisper of movement behind him. A scent—familiar, electric, dangerous.
He turned.
No one.
Only shadows.
---
Kaia pressed herself to the pillar, heartbeat thrumming in her ears. She'd come close. Too close.
Not yet.
Not tonight.
Tonight was for warning shots.
She dropped a velvet envelope in the coatroom—unmarked, save for a single name inside, handwritten in ink:
**Valen.**
---
**Elsewhere — in the shadows beneath the city.**
A voice slithered across a phone line, smooth as silk over razors.
"She's alive," the man said.
"How sure are you?" replied a female voice—low, cold, unbothered.
"I saw her. She was at the gala."
A pause.
"Does Damon know?"
"Not yet."
"Good." The woman's voice turned sharp. "Let him chase a ghost. It'll make the fall more painful."
---
**Damon**
The devil did not lose sleep.
But something about tonight…
About *her*...
He poured himself a drink in his private study. Closed the door. Lit a cigar.
And stared at the name written on a single scrap of paper, dropped on his desk like a dagger to the chest.
**KAIA.**
No last name. No address. Just her name—like a curse returned to sender.
He gripped the glass tighter.
If she was alive… if she had survived…
Then the world had no idea what storm was coming.
---
**Kaia**
She stood on the rooftop across from House Valen, wind tearing through her coat, the city below glowing like a lie.
She had no army.
No backup.
No mercy.
But she had fire.
And she had a vow:
Burn them all.