The word comes out flat. Bored.
His mouth snaps shut.
"You sold me to cover your gambling debts and now you're giving speeches about disgrace? I'm not crying over it. Find a different audience."
His face goes purple. The color that means he's about to—
Seris.
She's behind him, partly hidden by his body. She still won't look at me, her eyes fixed on the ground, her shoulders hunched inward, and—
Bruising. Fresh bruising on her jaw. On her neck. Visible even from here, even in the chaos, dark marks against her pale skin.
My ears go hollow. Everything else—the blood, the body, the crowd, my father's performance—it all goes grey and distant. There's only the bruises. Only the purple-green marks on my sister's face. Only the way she's standing, hunched and small, trying to disappear.
He hit her. I'm not there to take it anymore, so he hit her.
I'm going to kill him.
The thought lands clean and simple. No heat behind it. No rage. Just a fact, settling into my bones the way truth always does. The sky is blue. Water is wet. I am going to open my father's throat and watch him bleed out on the stones.
"We're leaving." My father grabs Seris's arm and she flinches—flinches, my sister flinches, she never used to flinch because I was the one who— "This family has been humiliated enough."
Movement behind me. Koshin. I feel him coming before I see him, that pressure in the air, that sense of something heavy and wrong shifting closer, and I know—I know—what he's about to do.
I turn and step in front of him. My hand lands on his chest.
He stops.
Heat. Immediate, under my palm. His heart slamming against my fingers, fast and uneven, the blood on his coat wet and warm through the fabric.
He was going to kill my father.
Right here.
Right now.
Open his throat and add another body to the stone.
And I stopped him. Me. One hand and he just—stopped.
My pulse is in my throat.
Between my legs.
Everywhere.
"Not here." My voice comes out rough. My hand is pressing harder against him than it needs to. I can feel every breath he takes. "Not now."
Koshin's eyes drop to me. He's still wound up from the kill, still riding the high of violence and chaos and a House collapsing under his hands. Still vibrating with the need to break something else.
He looks at me with my hand on his chest and I watch him come back into himself. Watch the frenzy settle. Watch his pupils shrink down to something almost normal.
He heard me.
The power of that. The sheer insane power of it—that I can put my palm on his chest and bring a god—no, a Titan, back from the edge.
That he lets me.
