He doesn't move. His good hand comes up—slow, deliberate—and his knuckles drag down my cheek. Brief. Proprietary. His thumb catches on my lower lip for half a second before he pulls away.
"Renan."
"Yeah." Renan's already moving closer.
"Medical tent. Stay with her." Koshin's voice is flat, but his hand is still raised, still hovering near my face like he's forgotten it's there. "She doesn't leave your sight."
"Got it."
Koshin looks at me one more time. Something unreadable moving behind those silver-edged eyes. Then he turns and walks away, and Discord moves around him—parting and reforming, a current of bodies responding to a center of gravity I can't see but everyone else feels.
I stay where I am. Bleeding and filthy and tied to a god who saves children and orders genocide before the dust settles. My cheek is warm where he touched it.
"Iowyn."
Renan's next to me now, looking far too amused for someone standing in a disaster zone.
"Yeah?"
"That was the hottest thing I've ever seen, and I've lived a very long time."
"Fuck off."
"I'm serious. I thought he was going to either kill you or propose. Possibly both." He tilts his head. "You good?"
"Temporary insanity." My hands are shaking. I clock it the way you clock weather. "Did it actually work?"
"Yes." He sounds almost offended by the fact. "Come on. Medical tent. You heard the man."
He grabs my arm and steers me toward the tent. My legs move because they're told to.
The Hollow is tense when we arrive.
Koshin's already at the head of the table, cleaned up somehow—blood wiped from his face, arm in a sling that looks temporary and too tight. The usual faces fill the room: Discord leadership, the scarred man whose name I still don't know, the silver-haired woman who watched me the first time Koshin dragged me in here.
They're all staring at me again. Different reason this time.
One of them—the scarred man—makes a sound in his throat. "The mortal."
The gunshot is so fast I don't see Koshin draw.
One second the scarred man is sneering, the next he's screaming, clutching his shoulder, blood seeping between his fingers. The sound echoes off the stone walls. No one moves. No one breathes.
Koshin's gun is already holstered again. Like it never happened.
"Iowyn," he says, voice even, "stopped me from launching an assault that would have killed half our remaining forces."
He pulls out the chair at the head of the table—his chair, the one no one else sits in—and looks at me.
I sit. Because what am I going to do, refuse? After he justshotone of his men for scoffing at me.
Come on, I havesomesurvival instincts.
Koshin stays standing behind me. Close enough that I can feel him there. Renan takes the chair to my left, hands folded on the table.
"Faith's involvement is confirmed." The scarred man speaks first, voice tight with pain but steady. Apparently deciding not to die on the hill of my presence after already taking a bullet for it. "Ritual remnants at the blast site. Materials marked with their seal. This was sanctioned. Leadership-level."
"Sanctioned means authority." A woman with silver streaks in her hair. "If we strike now—"
