Demon Contract

They pushed Victor back through the corridor in a loose formation, more wary than forceful, as if unsure whether he'd collapse or lash out. He didn't give them either. He walked because walking felt like the last thing he still controlled.

The prep hall met him with quiet. No roar of the arena, no clatter of weapons. Just the breath of torches and the thrum in his head. He stopped near the wall and let his hand rest against it, grounding himself. The stone was cold. Solid. Something real in a place that felt engineered to unmake him.

The brand pulsed again.

A deep, measured throb beneath the skin of his shoulder, like a second pulse overlaid on his own. It didn't hurt, but it pressed down on him like something testing its own weight inside his skin.

Victor drew a slow breath. His ribs complained. "That's enough out of you," he muttered, voice low. It wasn't a joke. It sounded more like a warning to something he wasn't sure could hear him.

He lowered himself until he was sitting with his back against the wall, muscles unsteady under him. The room wavered for a moment. He gripped the floor until it settled.

Something hard pressed against his thigh. The Marks.

He hesitated, then pulled them out.

Two gold coins lay in his palm, too clean for the Pit. They warmed almost instantly, heat blooming up his arm in a way that felt wrong precisely because it felt good.

A slow exhale slipped out of him before he could stop it.

The ache in his ribs eased. The ringing in his skull softened. His breath steadied without permission.

It hit him all at once how desperately he wanted to keep holding them.

He closed his fingers around the coins. Tight. "No," he said. No humour. No bravado. Just refusal.

The warmth kept trying anyway.

A faint sense of permission brushed the edge of his mind — the idea that he didn't have to hurt, not if he accepted what the Pit offered.

Victor shoved the coins back into his pocket like they were dangerous. They were.

He let his head rest against the wall. His hand was trembling now. He watched it for a moment as if it belonged to someone else.

He tried to piece together the fight. The Razor-Backs. The crowd. The blood on the sand. Most of it came back. Not all. There was a moment, a brief slice of time, where his memory turned to static. When the brand flared hot enough to blur the edges.

He didn't like not knowing what he'd done.

The brand pulsed again, softer this time.

Victor ran a hand over his face. His palm came away streaked with dried blood. He didn't remember when that happened either.

Isabella's voice surfaced. Calm. Certain. Claiming him as if years of grief had never happened.

You're mine.

His stomach twisted. He let out something that might've been a laugh, but there was no humour in it.

"Yeah," he whispered. "We'll see."

Seeing Isabella alive hadn't just rattled him. It had torn open a wound he'd spent years stitching shut.

He hadn't stopped looking for her after the world fell apart. When the hunt for Max kept leading him into dead ends and half-truths, he shifted the search to her. Grimm helped. The man had reach in places that shouldn't have survived the collapse: scattered agencies, broken networks, bunkers buried under ruined cities. Isabella had been famous once—front-page famous—so there were trails to follow.

The best Grimm could piece together was that she'd gone west. Somewhere in California. A fortified bunker or a private shelter she'd built before everything went sideways. Victor had been ready to go after her. It would've been a long shot, but it would've been something.

Then the U.S. Civil War tore the continent in half.

Then Belial's forces dropped atomic fire on California.

The maps changed. The borders shifted. The West Coast burned until nothing recognisable was left. What remained became the USG, a theocracy with a stitched-together government clinging to whatever it could salvage. Any hope Isabella had survived went with it. Victor had accepted that, eventually. He'd had to.

Yet she was here.

Alive. Standing beside a demon lord's throne. Wearing a Contractor's halo like she'd been born to it. She wasn't chained or hollow-eyed the way he'd pictured her. She stood with the kind of authority people stepped aside for, the kind that didn't come from survival but from ownership. She was the Warden of this place. A position with power. Authority. Intent.

None of it fit.

How had she lived through the collapse?
How had she become a Contractor?
How had she ended up in the heart of Orobas's domain?

A faint tremor rolled through the stone under his boots, the kind that came from some distant fight or some new cruelty in the depths. The Pit never slept. Even the air carried a low, restless hum. It reminded him he wasn't thinking in peace—he was thinking in a cage.

His mind wouldn't stop turning it over. None of the answers he came up with made sense. None of them were comforting.

He closed his eyes for a moment, breathing through the shaking, while the brand kept its steady, foreign rhythm in his shoulder.

The quiet wasn't comforting. It was waiting.

***

The quiet didn't last. Footsteps approached from the side corridor, deliberate but not heavy. Victor didn't lift his head at first; most people down here moved like that. Fighters who'd learned the value of silence.

Tamara stepped into the holding cell doorway and paused, taking him in the way someone assessed a storm cloud. Not afraid of it—just checking which direction the wind was blowing.

"You look worse than the last guy," she said. Her voice was steady, but her eyes were still tracking every tremor in his hands.

Victor let out a low sound. Might've been a laugh. "He didn't have my good looks."

She didn't smile exactly, but something in her posture eased. She moved farther inside and sat a few feet from him, careful not to crowd. The kind of courtesy only people who'd had their boundaries broken understood.

A drip echoed somewhere down the corridor, slow and irregular. Victor had learned the pattern of every sound in this place, but this one was new. It set his teeth on edge without him knowing why.

Her gaze settled on his shoulder. "It's hitting you already."

Victor followed her eyes. The brand had dimmed, but he could feel it still—quiet, pulsing, as if thinking its own thoughts.

"It's fine," he said.

"No. It isn't." She leaned her elbows on her knees. "That's the start of integration. The House pushes commands through the brand. Reflex-level stuff. Fight. Move. Don't think. Most people don't even notice it at first."

"Lucky me," Victor muttered.

Tamara studied him again. Not his injuries—his expression. She'd seen this before, he realized. The unease. The confusion. The horror of knowing your own instincts weren't entirely yours anymore.

"You use the Marks yet?" she asked quietly.

He shook his head.

Her relief was small but real. "Good. The first time feels like getting your life back. The second time feels like losing it if you stop."

Victor looked over at her then, really looked. She was exhausted. Bruised. But alert. There was experience in her eyes, and something older than that—something that had been scraped down but not erased.

"Why are you helping me?" he asked. Not hostile. Just tired.

Tamara's breath left her in a way that suggested she'd been expecting the question.

"Because you came back from that fight looking like the world had just taken something from you," she said. "And I remember what that feels like."

Victor didn't answer. He wasn't sure if he could.

She nodded toward his shaking hand. "And because you haven't used the Marks. That tells me you're either stubborn or stupid. And stupid doesn't survive long down here."

"Good news," he said softly. "I'm both."

This time, she almost smiled. A brief flicker before it faded back into the exhaustion everyone wore here.

For a moment, neither spoke. The silence didn't feel heavy; it felt like both of them were remembering different roads that somehow led to the same ruined room.

Tamara shifted her weight and lowered her voice. "You're not like the others. You fought… differently."

Victor stared at the floor. "Didn't feel different."

"It was." Her tone wasn't admiration. It was certainty. "Like something in you was fighting the brand as hard as it was pushing you."

He didn't know what to do with that. She didn't press.

Instead, she looked at him with the quiet patience of someone who had been broken toward kindness rather than away from it.

"Whatever you think this place is," she said, "it's worse. And whatever you think you're becoming… don't let it happen without a fight."

Victor swallowed. The brand pulsed once in answer.

Tamara noticed. She didn't flinch. She simply watched him with that same measured, tired curiosity—like she was piecing together a puzzle she'd seen before, but from a different angle.

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And for the first time since he'd walked into the Pit, Victor felt someone looking at him without seeing a weapon or a target.

Just a human being trying to stay one step ahead of collapse.

***

Tamara watched him for a while in silence, elbows resting on her knees, fingers laced. The kind of posture people adopted when they didn't fully trust themselves to speak yet. When she finally did, her voice was quieter than before.

"Victor," she said. "Can I ask you something without you biting my head off?"

He huffed. "I only bite demons."

"Good," she murmured. "Because this is about you."

She shifted slightly, studying his face the way a veteran studied an old scar.

"Are you a Contractor?"

Victor let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "Kind of. Not really."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

Tamara tilted her head. "You can fight like one. And you didn't die out there, which usually means someone owns your soul or you've learned how to make physics cry. So which is it?"

Victor leaned back against the wall, eyes drifting toward the ceiling. "Neither. My power… wasn't part of a deal."

She waited, patient in a way that made it strangely easy to keep talking.

"It came from my best friend," he said. "Years ago. Desperate times. Worse than this, believe it or not."

Tamara blinked. Something sharp flickered in her eyes. "Your friend gave you power?"

"Not willingly," Victor said. "My friend Dan was dying. He didn't have minutes left in him. And the one person who could save him had already burned himself half to death trying."

Tamara's voice softened. "Sounds like an idiot."

"Yeah," Victor said quietly. "The best kind."

She watched him, searching his expression for something he didn't know how to hide.

"What kind of power?" she asked.

Victor opened his mouth, then closed it. The brand pulsed faintly, as if sensing the direction the conversation was heading. He ignored it.

A faint ache curled up from his spine, the kind he only felt when he talked about what he'd become. His body reacted before his mind did, as if the beast inside him didn't enjoy being named.

"He fights like the world's ending," Victor said. "Fire in his hands. Chains that don't behave. Reflexes that shouldn't exist. And he pays for all of it. It tears through him every time, and he keeps going anyway."

Tamara had gone completely still.

Victor let his hands rest on his knees, eyes losing focus as he traced the memory. "It didn't start with me dying. I wasn't on the edge or anything. I was hurt, but I could still stand. Still make choices."

Tamara watched him carefully, as if the details mattered more to her than he realized.

"There was a night," he said, "when everything went sideways. One friend bleeding out. Another fighting past the point any human should. And someone we loved unconscious in the next room, slipping fast. We were surrounded, and every decision pointed toward losing someone."

His voice thinned slightly, but didn't waver.

"So I volunteered," Victor said. "He had this… power. Old. Heavy. Burning. He never wanted anyone else to carry it. But we didn't have the option to be noble. I told him to use it on me. To make me something that could hold the line while the others lived."

Tamara's posture tightened — not fear, not shock, something more intimate.

"It didn't hit all at once," Victor continued. "Strength first. The way my bones felt… different. Then the instincts. The kind that don't belong to people. I started picking up things before they happened. Smells. Sounds. Animals listening to me like we were having a conversation."

Her fingers curled slightly, recognition, fear and hope all compressed into one small motion.

"And when I'm cornered," Victor said quietly, "I don't stay human. Not entirely. There's a form I can take. Strong. Fast. Ugly as sin. It wins fights, but it scares the hell out of me."

She shifted her weight, a small movement, but enough to reveal she knew exactly what that meant.

He drew a slow breath. "He never meant to make me into that. He just refused to let one of us die. Whatever lives in him… some of it stayed in me."

His voice softened. "It broke things. Fixed other things. I've been learning how to carry it ever since."

Tamara's expression changed in a way that made the room feel smaller. The understanding there was deep, earned, and painfully honest.

"You don't have to explain it," she murmured. "I know what it feels like when someone gives you power they never meant to pass on."

He looked up then, surprised by the softness in her voice. She wasn't pitying him. She was studying him with an intensity that felt almost reverent — as if she were comparing him to someone she remembered, and the pieces were lining up too neatly.

"You said he fights with chains," she said. The words carried weight.

Victor frowned. "Among other things."

"And fire," she added. "Blue fire."

Victor's pulse stumbled. "I never said blue."

"You didn't need to."

She shifted closer—not invading his space, but close enough for him to see the wear beneath her calm. Close enough for him to see that she wasn't asking for information.

She was asking for confirmation.

"This friend of yours," she said softly. "Did he ever forget to save himself?"

Victor swallowed. "Every damn day."

Tamara's breath hitched — not loud, not dramatic. Just a small intake she couldn't hold back, like a door opening by itself.

She didn't say the name. Victor didn't offer it.

But the air between them shifted.
Recognition without the word.
Fear without panic.
Hope she didn't give permission for.

Tamara exhaled slowly. "You remind me of someone," she said. "Someone I didn't think survived the things this place does."

Victor held her gaze. "Maybe he didn't."

Tamara shook her head once, firm and quiet. "People like him don't just disappear."

Victor didn't know if that was comfort or a warning.

The brand pulsed again, softer this time, as if listening.

And Tamara watched Victor like she was looking at a man standing in the shadow of someone she owed her life to.

***

Tamara was quiet for a long moment, her gaze drifting down to her own hands as if studying a flaw only she could see. When she finally spoke, the words came slow, as though she'd rehearsed them in her head but never out loud.

"You're not the only one carrying something you didn't exactly ask for," she said. "Everyone here calls me a Contractor, but that's not really true. Not in the way they mean it."

Victor shifted slightly, giving her his attention.

Tamara drew her knees in closer, wrapping her arms around them. "Back then, I was just a kid thrown into a death match. Half-starved. No weapon. No contract. Nothing. And they dropped me in front of a monster big enough to break me in half without noticing."

She exhaled, the breath shaky but controlled.

"I wasn't supposed to live through that fight. Everyone in the stands knew it. I knew it." Her voice lowered. "Then he looked at me."

Victor didn't ask who. He didn't have to.

"He didn't give me power," she said, shaking her head. "He didn't push fire into me or share anything of himself. He just… woke something up. Something that belonged to me the whole time but never had the chance to surface."

She pressed her thumb into her palm, grounding herself.

"It felt like the world cracked open behind my ribs. My bones lit up like someone had struck a match inside them. It didn't make me faster or graceful or anything like that. It made me endure. It made me take the hit without folding. And when I hit back…" She hesitated, searching for the right words. "It was like the damage didn't stay in me. It rolled through me and out again, twice as hard."

She rubbed her sternum as though the memory still lived there, a phantom pressure her body hadn't learned to forget. The movement was small, but Victor knew it meant the moment had left more than a scar.

Victor's brow creased. "You redirect it."

Tamara nodded once. "That's the part that scares people. I get stronger the more I'm hurt. Not because it feels good — it doesn't — but because the pain charges something inside me. When I release it, I hit harder than I should be able to. Sometimes harder than I want to."

She rubbed her forearm, where the faint lightning-scars lived under the skin.

"It didn't stop there," she said. "The endurance came with regeneration. Not as fast as yours, probably, but fast enough to terrify me the first time. Bones knitting wrong, then fixing themselves again. Bruises fading while the blood was still warm."

Victor listened without judgment. It was the first time she'd ever given these details shape with words.

"But I had no control," she continued. "After that first fight, everything inside me felt like it was vibrating. Like my bones were still trying to wake up. I could barely stand, and the pain…" She shook her head, eyes lowering. "It didn't come from the injuries. It came from whatever I'd become."

Her voice tightened.

"That's when the Pit stepped in. They forced Marks into my hand and told me I needed them if I wanted to survive my own Awakening. The Marks don't give me strength. They stop my power from burning through me every time I tap it."

Victor's jaw flexed. "They made you dependent."

"On purpose," she said. "My abilities weren't stable. They still aren't. I'm durable, but the backlash builds up inside me. If I go too far without the Marks, I can feel myself tearing. Like a fault line in my chest waiting to break open."

She paused, then met his eyes.

"So no. I'm not a real Contractor. This wasn't a pact. This wasn't a gift. It was something he opened in me because I was going to die, and he refused to let that happen." Her voice softened, nearly cracking. "He awakened me. And the Pit figured out how to turn awakening into a leash."

The room felt smaller as she said it — not from fear, but from honesty.

"I've been living with whatever he saw in me ever since," she whispered. "Trying to shape it into something that won't kill me, or the people around me."

Victor didn't speak. But his eyes held the answer she'd been fearing and hoping for all at once.

***

The quiet in the holding cell changed once Tamara finished speaking. It wasn't comfortable silence. It was the kind that followed a confession, where both people were suddenly aware of how much weight had been laid between them.

Victor sat with his arms resting loosely over his knees, letting her words settle. He understood her in a way that felt too close, too familiar. Not because of the powers, but because someone like him had changed her life the same way he had changed his.

Tamara watched him with a steadier gaze now. There was no judgement in it, no calculation. Only recognition.

"You remind me of him," she said softly.

Victor let out a breath that didn't quite become a laugh. "Not the first time I've heard that. Usually followed by 'stop getting yourself killed.'"

She gave him a faint curve of a smile. "He said things like that too, didn't he?"

Victor stared at the floor for a moment. "Constantly."

Tamara leaned forward, elbows on her knees. Her voice dropped to a tone that didn't belong in this place. Too real. Too raw.

"He didn't stay here by choice," she said. "None of us did. But they paid special attention to him. Orobas treated him like he was… a resource. Something worth cultivating. Something to break in the right places."

Victor's jaw tightened. "What did they do to him?"

"I didn't see most of it," Tamara admitted. "I was still half a skeleton when he found me. But I heard things from the guards. The pits moved different when he was in them. Contractors kept their distance. Demons watched him like he was a blade waiting to swing."

She paused, searching Victor's face before continuing.

"He didn't hide the cost. He looked like he was dying every time he used his power. I think that's why they pushed him so hard. Someone that strong shouldn't look that breakable. They wanted to see where he'd snap."

Victor checked his own pulse without meaning to. The brand on his shoulder gave a faint tug, a reminder of Isabella's claim, of Orobas's interest, of the system closing around him.

"He didn't snap," he said.

"He didn't break," Tamara agreed. "But he bent. They bent him until he couldn't walk straight some nights. Until he staggered back into his cell like gravity had doubled around him. And every time, he got up again."

Her voice was a quiet mixture of awe and grief.

"I thought he'd escaped. I wanted to believe it. Then the guards started saying different things. That Orobas had let him go. Not because he won. Because he failed."

Victor's head came up sharply. "Failed how?"

Tamara swallowed. "Failed to break. Failed to surrender. Failed to become what they wanted him to be. They don't kill people like that. They set them loose and see what the world does."

He felt the words like cold water running through his chest.

If Tamara was telling the truth, then Max hadn't been freed. He had been weaponised by refusal. Turned into an experiment. Allowed to leave only so the Pit could watch what happened next.

Victor pressed his thumb into the edge of his palm until the pressure steadied him. "If he got out… he won't stay gone. Not with people trapped in here. Not with this place doing what it does."

Tamara's eyes flicked toward him. Something hopeful, something scared, something stubborn. "You really think he'd come back?"

"Of course he would," Victor said. "Someone he cared about was here. And someone he cared about is back now."

She blinked at that, caught off guard. "You think he cares about you that much?"

"Doesn't matter what I think." Victor met her eyes. "He won't leave anyone behind."

Tamara looked down at her hands again, a trembling breath escaping her. It was the first crack in her voice he'd heard since she walked in. "I don't want to hope for that. It hurts too much when hope is wrong."

Victor nodded slowly. "Then don't hope. Expect it. He's too stubborn to be dead."

She almost smiled at that, a small, pained thing that didn't reach her eyes but tried to.

The moment held.

A draft slipped through the corridor, cold and metallic, bringing with it the faint scent of blood and ozone. Victor had smelled it before every major fight. The room seemed to lean forward, waiting.

Then the iron horn blared through the stone walls.

It wasn't the usual call for blood or spectacle. This tone was sharper, personal, the kind that cut through conversation and made fighters look up. A shorter sound. Sharper. The tone they used when a specific fighter was required.

Victor and Tamara froze.

A second horn followed. A different pitch.

Tamara's expression drained to something brittle. "That's the selection call," she whispered. "Someone's been chosen for a private bout."

The third horn cut the air like a blade.

Victor felt it before Tamara said it. Felt the vibration in the brand. Felt the way the Pit seemed to inhale.

Her voice was barely audible.

"That third tone means the Warden picked them."

The door at the far end of the hallway unlocked with a heavy clank.

Footsteps approached. Slow. Intentional.

Victor stood.

Not because he wanted to.

Because something in the mark on his shoulder tugged upward like a hook had lodged beneath his skin.

The latch began to turn.

Tamara's eyes went wide.

"Victor… it's her."

His pulse kicked hard enough to blur the edges of his vision. For one heartbeat he wasn't in the Pit—he was back in a bunker doorway two years ago, holding a photograph of a woman he'd failed to save.

The door swung open.

And Isabella stepped through the threshold.