Avada refuses to assassinate Duncan

Ava’s refusal to assassinate Duncan is an open challenge to Venus’s authority and the blood pact that binds her to the Coterie. Faced with an order aimed at someone she considers family, Ava chooses to risk the pact’s punishment rather than let Duncan become a target.

The Assignment and Its Stakes

Venus hands Ava a file containing her next assignment, coming soon after two earlier jobs. Ava tries to return it without accepting it, but Venus refuses to take it back. The pages scatter across the pristine carpet; after a flunky gathers them and returns the file to Venus, she holds it out to Ava again. The silent insistence makes the assignment difficult to mistake for a request.

When Ava sees that Duncan is the target, she says no. She insists that she does not care what grievance Venus has against him: Duncan is off limits. Ava’s refusal is not simply a dispute over the assignment’s merits. She knows that the blood pact, written by Coterie lawyers, signed in her blood, and sealed by a blood witch, gives Venus power over her. The pact also helped ensure that Ava and Cade were allowed to live. Defying the order therefore risks more than Ava’s position as an asset; it puts her safety and Cade’s future in question.

Venus’s Rationale and the Threat She Claims

Ava cannot make sense of why Venus presses the assignment when she must know that Duncan is the one target Ava will refuse. The timing sharpens her suspicion: the job arrives too soon after two others, and Venus is risking the loss of a valuable asset. Ava turns over two possibilities without settling on either—that Venus wants Duncan badly enough to accept that risk, or that the assignment is a trap. When she asks why Duncan and why now, the room’s occupants quietly retreat; questioning Venus is dangerous, and punishment is likely to precede any answer. Owen alone stays where he is, apparently unafraid of her.

Venus justifies the order by saying that she has well-substantiated reports that Duncan is building an army near her doorstep. Ava cannot reconcile the claim with the Duncan she knows, and wonders whether Venus means an army of golems. Venus dismisses the threat as irrelevant to Owen, stroking his arm as she does so. The gesture makes her priorities visible without clarifying the evidence: she frames Duncan’s alleged preparations as a danger, yet treats a wooden army as no match for Owen. Ava is left unsure whether the report conceals a real threat, an undisclosed motive, or an attempt to unsettle her. That uncertainty deepens when Venus refuses to explain what she knows, warning Ava not to make her question her loyalty.

The Refusal Becomes Open Defiance

Ava does not soften her answer when Venus keeps the file in play. She scowls at Owen and makes her refusal final, warning that if he comes within burn range of Duncan, she will roast him herself. Owen answers by making a small flame dance from one knuckle to another and lightly suggests she will only try; Ava insists she means to do it. Their exchange turns the order into a second confrontation: Owen’s practiced control displays the rival firebug’s finesse, while Ava’s threat makes plain that she is prepared to meet force with force.

Venus cuts across their quarrel by warning that she can make them behave. The threat makes Ava’s heartbeat quicken and her palms sweat. She knows that her earlier acts of resistance have been small provocations, but this refusal openly defies an order she has no contractual right to reject. What tips the decision is not an abstract judgment about Duncan’s innocence but a remembered token of his place in their family: the previous winter, he brought Cade and Ava a hand-whittled ornament shaped like Horatio, a cat relaxing on a book. Cade loved it so much that it remained on the bookstore counter after Christmas. The small carving gives Ava a concrete measure of what Duncan means to them, and she decides he is worth the danger. She asks Venus to leave him alone, adding that he is outside Coterie business and that the information against him is wrong.

Venus responds not by withdrawing the assignment but by striking Ava. She first touches Ava’s temple, then slaps her hard enough to draw blood inside her cheek and drop her to her knees, though not hard enough to knock her unconscious. As Venus’s ward swings close, Ava remembers its place in her blood and cannot reach for it: the pact forbids her from tearing it away. The assault turns the contract’s abstract terms into bodily fact. Ava understands that it has no safe escape clause available to her; her options are Venus’s release, Venus’s death, or her own, while seeking out the blood witch who sealed it would bring execution for both of them.

Ava gets back to her feet despite the protest of her head, wipes the blood from her mouth with the file, and returns it to Venus with a tight-lipped smile. The room falls quiet as those present wait to see whether Venus will punish her further. Ava knows the pact gives Venus the right to kill her for disobedience and wonders whether Cade would be safe if she were gone; she can only hope Duncan would protect him. After several breaths, Venus dismisses her, telling her to rejoin her friends. Ava gives a slight dip of her head and leaves Hell at an ordinary pace, though she is desperate to get out. The assignment remains an assertion of Venus’s power, but Ava’s refusal has made her loyalty to Duncan—and the cost she is willing to risk for it—impossible to ignore.

Duncan’s Place in Cade’s Family

Duncan’s bond with Cade began when Cade was still a teenager. At sixteen, Cade left home with a bag and a car he had bought himself, intending to live in it; after a week, Duncan found him camping in the woods and took him in. Cade stayed with Duncan until he was old enough to get his own place. His parents soon moved to Vermont, and their sparse annual cards—signed only with their names—offered little sign of affection or longing. This history makes Duncan more than an old acquaintance in Ava’s eyes: he had stepped into the space Cade’s parents left behind.

The cards became the cue for a quiet family ritual. Duncan seemed to know when one had arrived, and would come by on Cade’s birthday with stout or during the winter holidays with mulled cider and whiskey. He sat by the fire whittling while Ava asked him for stories about Cade as a teenager. Remembering that steady presence helps explain why Ava’s refusal is rooted in personal loyalty, not merely suspicion of Venus’s accusation: Duncan’s care for Cade had been repeated over years, in visits and small acts that made him part of their family.