Edrick was sent to the gallows by the partner he trusted most. Before he died, he heard the archbishop lean down and say something he didn't understand at the time:
"The Dark Rite. The seventh offering. Complete."
When he opens his eyes again, he's back in the bathtub at his sixteenth birthday party, thirty days before the betrayal.
There's something new in his left eye. He can see the cracks in the rules: loopholes in contracts, the tilt of the scales, the gap between life and death that can be bought and sold. He's the only person in the world who can make this deal: using other people's words, debts, and rules to send them to their own graves.
But he soon discovers something else: every time he makes a deal, the world loses something. It doesn't disappear. It was never there to begin with, and the name of that thing appears only in his own ledger.
The potted flower his mother grew, the old breakfast shop in the south of the city, the name someone once called an eight-year-old girl...
He's kept accounts his whole life. This time, what he has to work out is whether someone who can see the price of everything will eventually sell the whole world.
