The ledger was closed. Serafina had watched Dante sign the last line himself, ink bleeding into the crease where her father's name used to sit, and she had felt nothing she could name.

Five years of numbers, gone in the time it took a man to write eleven letters.

"You're free," he said, and did not look up. "The debt is settled. You can walk out of this house tonight and no one in this city will touch you."

She stayed where she was, at the edge of the desk, her hands still smelling faintly of ash from the fire he had made of the old contracts an hour before.

"That isn't what you wanted to ask me," she said.

Dante set the pen down with the terrible gentleness of a man who had learned, too late, that not everything could be bought back. Then he opened the drawer and took out the second contract.