"Comforting."
We move through the tunnels, Discord's underground quiet tonight, cleared out ahead of us. Renan walks point, checking corners, and Caius strides behind us with the confidence of someone who assumes any threat will simply announce itself before dying.
My hand keeps drifting to the gun at my thigh. I can't see the green detailing in this light, but I know it's there anyway.
We surface three blocks from House Solyne. The night air hits my face, cool and damp, and my stomach clenches because I know these streets.
That alley—I hid there once, when I was twelve, after he threw a glass at my head. Crouched behind the bins for an hour before I realized no one was coming to find me. Not because they couldn't. Because they didn't bother. The tavern on the corner was where I bribed a courier to send a letter to Seris that never arrived. The fountain at the intersection is where my mother used to bring us, before she got too sick to walk.
Great. Memory lane. My favorite place to visit while armed.
"I'll take the east entrance." Koshin's voice pulls me back. "The father."
"I'll take Seris." Steady. Good. "Her room is on the second floor, northwest corner. Window faces the garden."
"I'll hold the perimeter." Caius sounds bored. "If anyone runs, they meet me."
I don't ask what meet me means.
"Once you have her," Koshin says, "meet me with your father."
"Fine."
We split.
The east wall of House Solyne has the same loose stone it did when I was sixteen and climbing out after curfew. My fingers find the crack without thinking, and I haul myself up.
Arms burning. Ribs protesting. I used to do this drunk at midnight and now my body wants to revolt. Getting sold to a god was supposed to come with some kind of upgrade, but apparently I just get the same shitty joints and a fancier wardrobe.
The garden below is empty—no guards at the servant entrance, no lights in the lower windows.
I drop into the garden, the grass soft under my boots, and crouch to listen. Silence. Nothing but my own breathing and the distant sound of the city beyond the walls. I move.
The servant door isn't locked. It's never locked—my father thinks his staff loves him, the fucking idiot—and I slip inside without a sound.
The kitchen is dark and smells the same as it always did: bread and ash and the sharp bite of lye soap. I used to steal pastries from the counter when the cook wasn't looking, back before I figured out that kindness in this house always came with a price tag. The doorway to the hall is ahead.
The back stairs. Third step creaks, seventh is loose, avoid both. My feet know this; they step wide before I think about it.
Second floor. The corridor stretches ahead, doors closed on both sides. Seris is in the northwest corner, and I move toward it with the floorboards silent under my weight. Thick rugs, expensive, bought with money my father didn't have. Everything in this house is a lie propped up by other lies.
Her door is closed with no light underneath. I press my ear to the wood and listen for breathing, for footsteps, for the soft exhale that means someone's awake and pretending not to be.
Quiet.
I turn the handle.
The room is dark, bed against the far wall, curtains drawn. In the middle of the mattress, a small shape curled tight—knees to chest, arms wrapped around herself. I know that position. I slept like that for years.
Seris.
I cross to the bed in three steps and shake her shoulder gently. "Seris. Wake up."
She startles. I feel it—the full-body flinch, the sharp inhale, hands come up to protect her face.
"It's me." My voice cracks.
"It's Iowyn. I'm here."
