“Just that you were looking for a way to make practical use of my skill.” I sink into a chair with an exhale. “Selen handed that to you.”
He gives a single nod, acknowledging without answering, and moves to the basin. He splashes cool water over his face, rivulets tracing the lines of his jaw before dripping down his collar.
The silence feels palpable, everything that is Zeriel suddenly pressing in on me now that we’re back in his small space. From here, I can see the raised outline of his wing scars beneath his thin shirt.
“Zeriel,I…” I start.
His eyes lift to meet mine in the mirror, the sharpness of a warrior’s glance.
I exhale again. “It just struck me how we’re basically still strangers. Strange, considering our lives depend on each other.”
His gaze holds mine for a moment, then flicks downward as he splashes more water on his face.
“That’s how it should be,” he says flatly. “There are no prizes here for making friends.”
“Not friends,” I counter, prickling. “But understanding has its uses. Especially when you’reforcedto work this close.”
He turns slowly, dragging the towel down his face, eyes locking on mine—intense, unblinking. “And what is it you’re so eager to understand about me?”
A faint tightness grips my throat. The question hangs in the air between us, daring me closer. I could ask a thousand things. What are you really fighting for? What would you do if you won? Would you even let me live to see it?
I might not survive this. But gods, I want to believe there’s a future worth surviving for. Something brighter, sharper, even if more dangerous than anything a girl from the Lower Wards was ever meant to imagine.
I draw a breath, searching for a place to start.
“The carving,” I say finally. “Behind the basin. The verse.”
His stillness is absolute. The towel in his hands goes subtly taut. “What about it?”
“‘My name was inked in blood, not gold,’” I quote softly, my eyes fixed on him. “‘And blood will call when tales are told.’” I watch his face, waiting for a flicker, a crack in the stone. “It sounds like a promise. Or a vow. I just… want to know who made it.”
For a long moment, he doesn't move. The only sound in the room is the faint drip of water from the basin. Then, slowly, he lowers the towel, his face a mask of stone. But it's a mask I’m learning to read, and beneath it, I see the splintered edges of a wound.
“Doesn’t matter who made it,” he says at last, his voice low but edged. “It’s just words. And words don’t change a damn thing.” He turns away, snapping the towel onto a chair as if severing the conversation.
“They don't feel like just words,” I counter, softer than I mean to. I take a step closer. “'Though scattered now, we share one breath. Our story waits beyond their death.'”
He stills again, his back to me, shoulders coiling tight beneath his shirt. The silence stretches, taut enough to strangle. I’ve pushed too far. Any second now, he’ll slam the wall back up and I’ll never get another glimpse past it.
But when he speaks, his voice is low, roughened. “I carved them. To remember.”
My breath catches. “Remember what?”
His gaze drifts toward the window, to the growing darkness beyond. “That a name isn’t a title the empire hands you. It’s what runs in your veins. What they can’t burn away, no matter how many pyres they light.” His words spill out with a cold, quiet fury more chilling than any shout. “It’s a promise—that the story isn’t over.”
I swallow hard. A story that waits. A reckoning. I’d suspected something like it, but hearing it in his voice leaves no doubt. This isn’t just about reclaiming honor in the eyes of others. It’s about vengeance. Whether that hunger is aimed mainly at Blaise, or at something far larger, I can’t tell yet. But it runs deep enough to consume him whole.
Looking at him now, I struggle to believe he murdered Celisse. I know the kind of death he deals: clean, efficient, impersonal. The pain he carries is nothing like that. It’s raw, unhidden, the kind that lingers, festers. Not the mark of someone who killed for gain but the weight of someone still trapped beneath it. Her death feels like one more quiet casualty of the empire, another name swallowed by its endless hunger.
I think of my own mother, of the secret she carried, and how they still found a way to take her from me. Zeriel’s story isn’tmine, but the ruin it left behind feels familiar. For the first time, the chasm between us seems to narrow, just enough to glimpse that we’re both haunted by ghosts in our bloodlines, both shaped by losses the world never bothered to name.
But he was blamed for his. That’s a pain I never had to bear.
The thought rises—that I believe him, that I don’t think he killed her—but the air between us is already drawn too taut. Celisse’s name would snap it. Not now.
“I think I understand,” I say instead, and this time I mean it, if only a part of it.
His gaze meets mine, steady and unblinking, and for a heartbeat it feels like he’s weighing me against every betrayal he’s ever known. Then something loosens. The suspicion in his eyes recedes enough to reveal a glint of recognition, the kind that comes when two wounds find the same shape.
