Purgatory is the ground-floor restaurant and bar of The Inferno, a three-level establishment belonging to Venus and serving as one of the Coterie’s public faces in Boston. Its candlelit refinement disguises a dangerous supernatural hierarchy: ordinary patrons can enter Purgatory, but the upper and lower levels are restricted, and human visitors to a Coterie venue may be treated as prey. Across Ava’s visits, Purgatory shifts from an elegant place she dreads entering to a guarded refuge among friends and, after Venus’s fall, a working center of Alistair’s new administration.

Setting and Place in The Inferno

The Inferno is arranged vertically. Heaven, the top floor, is a dance club and bar; Purgatory occupies ground level; and Hell lies below. Purgatory is open to the general public, while Heaven and Hell are VIP spaces. Its restaurant receives guests in either formal clothes or ripped jeans, with a maître d’ taking names and seating them. The menu ranges from surf and turf to a fancy burger, and the candlelit atmosphere gives the room an upscale character without making it snooty. Ava recognizes that the restaurant might have delighted her if Venus did not own it.

That qualification matters. The Coterie is compared to a mob family, but membership is supernatural: its people descend from bloodlines associated with fangs, communication with trees, or the ability to start fires. Some, including Lock, Ezra, and Ava, entered through coercion; others joined by choice. Purgatory’s public accessibility therefore does not make the larger venue safe for humans. Ava understands that a human in a Coterie establishment could become someone’s meal, and she worries about bringing Venus human victims. Boston once had a Council to restrain this kind of predation, but it no longer does. Purgatory’s warm dining-room manners stand in sharp contrast with the power operating behind them.

The Bar and Ava’s Visits

The Purgatory bar is the smallest of the several bars in The Inferno, staffed by only one or two bartenders. Like the restaurant, it is dimly lit: candles and chandeliers designed to resemble candlelight illuminate the room, while red backlighting reflects from burnished copper set into the wall. The décor gives the bar a carefully composed, intimate atmosphere within the larger complex.

Ava comes behind the counter to see Lock and Ezra, whom she still considers her two favorite bartenders despite their earlier behavior. Lock’s bleached, spiked hair appears magenta in the light; dressed in a black Purgatory shirt and black pants, he attracts attention from women at the bar. Ava playfully pinches him, and he catches her hand rather than leaping or startling. Their teasing familiarity briefly makes the workplace feel like a place among friends rather than an extension of Venus’s power.

That ease has limits. Lock warns Ava not to visit while he is angry because bartenders can tamper with drinks. She jokes that he would not poison her or eject her for being underage, noting that neither Lock nor Ezra is twenty-one and that the Coterie supplies its workers with convincing fake identification. Venus had even made Ava take one so her age would not obstruct assignments in bars or voting booths. Ava does not want to use it merely to enter a Coterie bar; she goes to see her friends or to carry out work.

The friends’ own precautions are stricter than the room’s casual banter suggests. In Purgatory, only Lock and Ezra are permitted to give Ava food or drinks. She has worked for years as one of Venus’s enforcers, and staff members who hold grudges might retaliate against her for harm she caused, even if she acted under orders. Lock gives her a Coke with a cherry, and Ezra and Lock check how her meeting went. When Ava says she has turned down a job, both men go still. Their reaction makes the bar a place where her choices carry immediate consequences, not just a social stop between assignments.

A Guarded Threshold

The bar also marks the boundary between ordinary companionship and danger. After their exchange, Ezra takes Lock’s place behind the counter, and Lock escorts Ava toward the elevators. Ava mocks the idea that an attacker might jump her in the short distance between the bar and the elevators, but Lock says that, given how the night has gone, he would follow her even into a bathroom. His insistence is protective rather than merely comic: the threat Ava faces follows her into familiar spaces, and the friends’ watchfulness shapes how she can move through the venue.

This guardedness makes Purgatory a threshold within The Inferno. From the public restaurant and bar, elevators lead toward restricted parts of the building; for Ava, even a brief visit to friends takes place inside the territory of the organization she serves and resists. The bar’s ordinary gestures—a drink handed across the counter, a check-in about a job, an escort to the elevators—are therefore charged with the danger that the polished setting cannot erase.

After Venus: A New Center of Power

After the battle and Venus’s fall, Purgatory remains in use, but its institutional meaning changes. Ezra recognizes some staff members as people who fought on Ava’s side and observes that Alistair is removing others. He leads Ava and Cade through the restaurant’s maze of tables, past the elevators and away from the route Ava expected, to a secluded booth at the back of Purgatory. Ezra walks with crutches, yet navigates the restaurant as though doing so were second nature.

Alistair sits alone at the booth, sleeves rolled up, hair slightly ruffled, with papers spread across the table and still largely unsorted. He says Venus did not even have an office; damage to the lower levels will require remodeling. He presents the Coterie as a large corporation whose head functions like a chief executive overseeing several businesses, arguing that such an organization requires structure. Ava counters that its former leader seemed less like a corporate executive than a despot stained by the blood of her own people. Their exchange brings the venue’s dual character into focus: a restaurant with a businesslike public surface and a criminal organization whose authority has been enforced through violence.

The booth becomes a site where the new order is negotiated. Cade thanks Alistair for helping rescue him, a debt Ava inwardly recognizes as politically dangerous to admit. Later, Alistair tells Ava that she is important to his new order and asks her to perform compliance around him, even though her paperwork does not require her to be agreeable. He frames cooperation as a way for her to do less work. Purgatory thus survives the regime change not as neutral ground but as a place where its new leader sorts papers, staff, obligations, and loyalties. Its candlelit rooms and secluded booth remain part of The Inferno’s public-facing architecture, while the conversations held there expose who now controls the empire behind it.