Dinner was held in a smaller dining room than the one they had used for breakfast—an intimate space with a table for six, a lit fireplace, and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city center at night.
It was just the three of them.
Rhea, Ishtar, and Adrián.
Rhea ate little.
Drank more.
Spoke less.
Ishtar ate like she had just come out of a three-week fast while, between bites, explaining the formal procedures for human contracts.
"Okay, brother-in-law. Listen carefully, because I’m not repeating this. Contracts work like this. Humans in absolute desperation—and I mean real desperation, not some passing whim—give off a signal. It’s involuntary. They don’t even know they’re doing it. It comes from the soul when they’ve completely run out of options. House Alastor has a summoning chamber that picks up those signals from the territory assigned to us. When one comes in, it gets recorded on a parchment like the one Rhea gave you. The administrative staff evaluates them. Dangerous ones get discarded. Viable ones go into the black box."
"Okay."
"Now. Accepting a parchment is only the first step. The second is the actual summoning. You’re going down to the basement in a little while. You’ll enter the summoning chamber. You’ll stand inside the circle. And you’ll hear the human’s voice begging."
Adrián stopped chewing.
"You’ll hear them speak. You’ll hear them ask. You’ll hear exactly what they’re offering in exchange for exactly what they want."
Ishtar pointed at him with her chopsticks.
"And that’s when you decide whether you accept."
Adrián set his fork down.
"...I’m going to listen to a human beg me?"
"Yes."
"...That’s weird."
"It’s the oldest way of doing business there is. Ugly? Sure. But it’s honest. A demon never accepts a contract without knowing exactly what they’re being asked to do. No fine print. No tricks. The human talks, you listen, you decide."
"And if I say no?"
"The parchment gets destroyed and another member of the retinue gets the turn. Or nobody takes it, and the human is left on their own. A lot of contracts get rejected. A lot, brother-in-law. Because not all of them are good."
Ishtar set her chopsticks down.
She wiped her mouth with her napkin.
For the first time all dinner, her tone became serious.
"There’s something you need to understand."
Adrián looked at her.
"Some humans summon us because they truly have nowhere else to turn. Like this one. Nikolás Ríos. A broken father who’s spent three years searching for his daughter, dead or missing. He’ll offer whatever he has. You’re going to feel his pain through the ritual. It’s ugly, but it’s honest."
"..."
"But other humans summon us because they want horrible things."
The room seemed quieter.
"You’re going to hear contracts from people asking for someone else to die. You’re going to hear contracts from people asking for things I’m not going to say at the dinner table while your mistress is eating."
Rhea’s eyes flicked toward her.
Ishtar continued.
"You’re going to hear contracts from people who offer other humans as payment."
Adrián’s expression tightened.
"Children, usually."
Something cold slid down Adrián’s stomach.
"And those contracts," Ishtar said, "you can reject with pride. The House will back you."
"...That happens."
"That happens, brother-in-law."
"And there are demons who accept?"
"Yes."
"In this House?"
Silence.
Ishtar looked at Rhea.
Rhea looked down at her glass of wine.
"No," Rhea said without raising her eyes. "Not in this House."
Adrián looked at her.
"I review every parchment before it reaches the black box. Contracts offering humans as payment, I burn. Contracts asking for the murder of innocents, I burn. Contracts asking for things that are..."
She paused.
"...perverse..."
Her fingers tightened slightly around the stem of the glass.
"I burn those too."
Rhea finally looked at him.
"The only contracts that reach my reincarnates are contracts that can be fulfilled without staining their souls. That is a personal decision. It is a political decision. And it has cost me money and reputation for a very long time."
Adrián stared at her.
Rhea held his gaze for a second.
Then looked back at her wine.
"Other Houses don’t have those filters," she added. "Other Houses accept everything. Other Houses are..."
A tiny pause.
"Well."
"Other Houses."
She lifted her glass.
"We are not other Houses. At least not while I’m in charge."
"..."
"Eat. Your food’s getting cold."
Adrián ate.
Mechanically.
The food barely registered.
He was processing information that was rearranging the way he saw everything.
Demons weren’t monolithic.
There were ethical lines.
Rhea had one.
Other Houses didn’t.
The system wasn’t simple.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Rhea."
"Yes?"
"Thank you."
She looked at him.
"For what?"
"For not being another House."
Rhea held his gaze for two seconds.
Then she drank her wine.
Then, without any visible warmth, she said:
"Don’t thank me. It’s self-interest. Demons who accept rotten contracts eventually become rotten themselves. And I’m not spending three centuries building a House just so a handful of idiots can rot it from the inside."
"Okay."
"Eat."
"Okay."
At the other end of the table, Ishtar smiled around a piece of bread with a kind of satisfaction Adrián didn’t fully understand at the time.
Later, though, he would recognize it for what it had been.
Quiet pride in her older sister.
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