And I'm going to owe him for it.
That's the last coherent thought I have before the dark swallows me whole.
Kairis is still warm on the floor behind me and I don't look back.
Iowyn's head rests against my shoulder, her body slack, her breathing too thin, and I adjust my grip so the arm under her knees takes more weight, so the pressure eases off her ribs. She makes no sound. Her face is turned into my chest, dried blood on her lip, fresh bruises darkening across her cheekbone and throat where his fingers pressed. I can see the marks. Four points on one side, thumb on the other. I want to put my mouth there and bite until the shape of my teeth replaces his grip. I want to taste the bruise and feel her pulse jump under my tongue.
I keep walking.
Renan fills the doorway ahead, pistol already holstered, eyes moving over Iowyn once before they find mine. He doesn't ask. He reads the situation the way he reads everything—fast, complete, already three steps ahead. His mouth curves at one corner..
"You look happy," he says.
"He screamed."
"I heard." Renan steps aside to let me through. "The gurgling at the end was a nice touch. Very theatrical."
"I wasn't trying to be theatrical."
"I know. That's what makes it art."
I step over broken wood and gold fragments and keep moving. Iowyn shifts in my arms, a small involuntary motion, and her forehead presses harder against my collarbone. Her breath catches. Even unconscious, her body knows it hurts to breathe.
The corridor is chaos behind us—smoke rolling through the lower hall, shouts cutting off into silence, the wet thud of bodies hitting stone. My people work fast. Clean. Coin's guards didn't expect an assault from below, and by the time they understood what was happening, they were already bleeding out on their pristine marble floors.
A thread flickers in my peripheral vision. Someone lying. Dying and lying at the same time, a guard thirty feet back choking on his own blood while he tries to pray to a god who won't answer. The thread pulses gray-yellow, rot at the center, and I watch it without meaning to watch it. His faith is a lie. He doesn't believe. He's just scared and saying the words he was taught to say.
Iowyn's hair brushes my jaw.
The thread disappears.
"You're bleeding," Renan says, falling into step beside me.
I look at my hand. Knuckles split. Bone visible through the skin on the middle finger. I don't remember it happening.
"Her throat is bruised," I say instead of answering.
"I see that."
"Four fingers. Thumb on the trachea. He held her for—" I calculate from the coloring, the spread, the depth of the marks. "Twelve seconds. Maybe fifteen. Long enough to cut off air completely."
"Koshin."
"Her ribs are damaged. Left side. She's breathing shallow to compensate. Every inhale costs her." My voice sounds wrong. Too flat. Too calm. "I want to find out if he had family. I want to send them pieces."
"He's already dead."
"I know. I want to dig him up."
Renan's hand touches my shoulder. Light. Brief. Grounding.
"She's breathing," he says. "Focus on that."
I blink. The corridor snaps back into focus. Staff are flattened against the walls, maids and runners and a half-god in Coin livery who presses his back to the stone and stares at his own feet. I don't remember the last twenty steps. I don't know when we passed the intersection. My body carried her while my mind went somewhere else, and that's dangerous, that's the fracture showing, but I can't—
Her pulse flutters against my ribs where her chest presses to mine.
Alive. She's alive. Focus on that.
