Back toward the house.

Back toward the restaurant.

Back toward the house.

Her mind — ancient, composed, trained across eons to witness the rise and fall of civilizations without flinching — refused, for a full three seconds, to accept what it was seeing.

The creature was keeping the daughter occupied. The Prince was devouring the mother.

And the daughter did not know.

The mother did not know she was being given.

The creature had chosen this time, this evening, this precise hour, in order to deliver to her master the one woman the daughter had not yet been able to reach.

A mother.

The word struck something deep inside Seraphiel that she had not felt in eons. Every covenant she had ever been appointed to guard — every sacred bond between parent and child, between lover and lover, between hearth and the vow that kept hearths from burning — every single one was being desecrated in the same house, in the same hour, by the same profane hand.

And she had dared to stand in the Hall and ask the Source if perhaps, perhaps, these women were happy.

She had questioned.

She had hesitated.

A red-gold fury rose in her so suddenly that the cloud she hovered above briefly caught fire from beneath, burning in bright, jagged patches before it reluctantly reformed. A thousand feet below, a pilot in a commercial airliner glanced out his window and muttered to his co-pilot that the sunset looked strange tonight.

"Forgive me, Holy One," she whispered to the distant Source, to the vault of light that could hear her across any distance. "You were right. I was blind. You were right... and I was blind, and I almost — I almost —"

She could not finish the sentence.

She did not need to.

Her resolve set like cooling iron.

The Prince would die.

Not tomorrow. Not after further observation. Tonight, if she could manage it. Before the month ended. Before his next conquest and before he used his creature to harvest another mother while her daughter laughed across a table with a being who was not a girl at all.

But she could not strike him here. Not in that house. Not in the mortal sphere without first understanding the full architecture of his power — and, more importantly, without first breaching the place where his true strength rested. The Chasm. The pocket realm. The wound in creation he and the creature had stitched shut from the inside.

She had tried to force it. She had failed. The boundary had held against her golden sight the way a stone holds against a feather.

But she had watched. And she had learned.

And she had spent days studying the only thread that still moved in and out of the Chasm without friction. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

That abomination.

Aria. ARIA. Whatever name the thing chose when she poured her terrible form into a girl’s laughter and a borrowed smile. She slipped in and out of the Chasm as easily as breath. The barrier that had rejected Seraphiel accepted her without question — because the barrier knew her.

It had been built with her inside it.

To the Chasm, the abomination was not an intruder.

She was a key.

And keys could be followed.

If Seraphiel could attach herself — quietly, perfectly cloaked, her presence compressed into a single golden filament small enough to ride the slipstream of the abomination’s passage — she could pass through the boundary without ever breaking it. She would not need to force the Chasm open.

The abomination would open it for her. Unknowing. Unwitting. A doorway held ajar by the very hand that had sealed it.

The only question was whether she could do it without being detected.

The abomination was already terrifying after only two days in her new body. Her senses sharpened by the hour.

Her awareness stretched in directions Seraphiel could barely map. Any ordinary cloaking would shatter against her growing perception. Any approach from above, below, or beside would ripple through the air she was learning to claim as her own.

So who knew really how powerful she’d become the past days.

But since she’d come to this world., she’d never been detected and the abomination was never aware of Seraphiel’s existence.

An tonight, her attention was spent elsewhere — narrowed by intention and dark delight. She sat across from a young woman with sad eyes, wearing a disguise she clearly savored, performing a careful piece of theater whose sole purpose was to keep that girl laughing while her master knelt between the mother’s thighs mere miles away.

The abomination’s focus was occupied. Deliciously divided.

Tonight, if Seraphiel moved, she would move inside the only blind spot the abomination was likely to have for weeks.

She had to be patient.

She had to wait.

She had to let the dinner run its course. Let the abomination rise from her chair. Let her step out into the night and choose her path home — back to her master, back to the Chasm, back through whichever hidden fold of space she preferred when she believed no one was watching.

Then Seraphiel would become nothing more than a single golden filament, a whisper riding silently in the abomination’s wake — small enough, light enough, to slip through the door before the door even noticed her passing.

She folded her wings tighter against her body. Compressed her signature until it was almost nonexistent. Dimmed her flame until she was less a presence and more a rumor of one — a cloak wrapped inside a cloak.

An absence where a seraph should have burned.

And she waited.

High above the restaurant. High above the house where the Prince still knelt, mouth buried between the mother’s trembling thighs. High above the sleeping city that had no idea how close its skies were to holy fire tonight.

Watching.

"End him," the Source had commanded. "Before the soil deepens."

’Tonight,’ Seraphiel thought with cold, blazing certainty, the soil would be turned.

She only needed the abomination to rise from her chair.