I don't know how long I sit there before I realize I'm not alone.
Koshin doesn't say anything. He's just... there. Leaning against the courtyard wall a few feet away, watching the same empty space where the carriage used to be. I don't know when he arrived. I didn't hear him move.
"You don't have to—" My voice comes out wrecked. I stop. Try again. "I'm fine."
"You're shaking."
"I'm fine."
He doesn't argue.
Doesn't move closer.
Doesn't offer comfort or platitudes or any of the things normal people say when someone's falling apart in front of them. He just stays where he is, silent and still, like he's got nowhere else to be and nothing better to do than watch me not-cry in the fading light.
It should be annoying. It should feel like pressure, like observation, like one more thing I have to perform through.
It doesn't.
The sun sinks lower. The shadows stretch longer. And when my legs finally stop shaking enough to trust them, I push myself up and find him watching me with that expression I can never quite read.
"Better?"
"No."
"Good." His mouth curves, just slightly. "Liars are boring."
I look down at my hands. The marks catch the last of the light—fine threads woven permanent into my skin, proof of something I still don't fully understand.
Cosmic tattoos.
Divine claim.
Evidence that my life split in two somewhere in the last week, and I'm never getting the old one back.
I should be terrified.
I flex my fingers. Watch the threads shift with the movement.
"I killed my father," I say. "Put a bullet through his head. Slept fine after. My sister is riding back into hell and I can't stop her. I'm bonded to a mad god who sees every lie anyone has ever told, and I don't even know what that means yet." I look up at him. "I should be falling apart. That's what normal people do, right? They fall apart."
"You're not normal people."
"No." I laugh, and it comes out wrong—too light, too easy, the sound of someone who's realized the abyss is actually kind of funny once you stop being scared of it. "I'm really not. I think something in me broke a long time ago and just... never told me. And now I'm standing here with blood under my fingernails and marks on my skin and I feel—" I stop. Try to find the word. "Fine. I feel fine. That's fucked up, right? That's deeply, profoundly fucked up."
"I wouldn’t know. Like you said, I’m not self aware." He tilts his head, and something in his expression shifts—not softer, just clearer. "Does it bother you? Being fucked up?"
I think about it. Actually think about it, standing in the fading light with a god who talks to himself and sees things that aren't there and chose me for reasons neither of us fully understand.
"No," I say, and the truth of it settles into my chest with a weight that feels right. "It really doesn't."
Koshin smiles. It's not a nice smile. It's not a comforting smile. It's the smile of someone who's been broken so many times the pieces stopped fitting back together centuries ago, and who's finally found someone whose pieces are just as wrong.
We stand there in the empty courtyard, two broken things watching the dark creep in, and I don't know whathappens next. I don't know what the marks mean or what the bond will do to us or how many people are going to try to kill me now that every House knows I exist.
But I'm not running.
I'm not hiding.
