Renan moves past me, takes the next stairs, turns to look back. His expression is something I can't read—not concern, not judgment, something closer to satisfaction.
"Good," he says. "About time you gave a shit about something… Other than me of course."
I start walking again. The darkness swallows us as the stairwell bottoms out, and I hear Renan's low laugh echo off the walls, and it sounds right. It sounds like we're both exactly where we should be—him finding this funny, me finding nothing funny at all, both of us moving through the dark toward the same violent future.
The hidden door is ahead. Stone that looks like stone until you know where to press. I adjust Iowyn's weight, freeingone hand, and my palm hits the release mechanism. Metal groans inside the wall. The seam splits.
Cold air pours through, and the thread-sight quiets. Fewer people down here. Fewer lies. The relief is physical—pressure behind my eyes easing, the constant scraping noise in my skull dimming to something I can ignore.
Her silence still holds. Even unconscious, she's the quietest thing I've ever touched.
"Ladies first," Renan says.
"Fuck off."
"Just trying to be chivalrous."
"You don't know what that word means."
"Neither do you."
I duck through the opening with Iowyn pressed to my chest, and the air turns damp and heavy, thick with mineral and old water and the particular stillness of a place no one has found for centuries.
The tunnels run deep under Arkenhold—older than the Concord, older than the Houses, cut into the stone by hands that stopped existing before my imprisonment. I know every inch of them. I walked them blind during the years when the thread-sight was too loud and I needed somewhere without lies. I walked them until my feet bled and the quiet became bearable.
She'd like it here. The thought surfaces and I don't push it away. She'd like the honesty of stone.
My boots hit wet rock and Iowyn's fingers curl against my coat. Small movement. Involuntary. But her hand tightens in the fabric and doesn't let go, and somewhere in my chest something responds to that grip.
"Koshin." Renan's voice. Sharp. "You're muttering."
I stop. Look at him. "Was I?"
"Numbers. You were counting something."
"I don't remember."
"Yeah." His eyes track over my face. "I know."
Three of my elites materialize from the shadows ahead—silent, armed, faces professionally blank. They see me carrying her and they don't ask, but their threads shift. Curiosity. Calculation. One of them is lying to himself about why he joined Discord, some pretty story about freedom and truth, and the lie grates against my awareness until I want to reach into his skull and rip it out.
I don't. I keep walking. Iowyn's weight is good in my arms.
"Path's clear to the second gate," the closest elite says. "Two Coin patrols came down from the service wing. They're dead."
"How?"
"Quick. Clean."
I adjust my grip on Iowyn. Her head falls more securely against my shoulder. "Next time, make it hurt. Leave a message."
"Move," Renan says behind me, and the elites scatter into formation—two ahead, one behind, flanking without needing instruction.
I keep walking. Iowyn's breath catches and releases, catches and releases, and I time my steps to the rhythm of her lungs without meaning to. Her body is trying to stabilize. Her ribs are damaged but not broken. Her throat will heal. The split lip will heal. Everything will heal, and she'll wake up in my bed with my scent on her skin and she'll remember that she didn't break. She stood in that room with blood on her mouth and looked at Kairis like he was nothing, like his hands on her throat were an inconvenience and not a threat, like she'd already decided he wasn't worth her fear.
I want to fuck that defiance out of her.
I want to fuck it deeper into her until it's the only thing either of us can remember.
