Fuck.
Straightening my jacket, I moved toward the door, pushing down the surge of irritation threatening to boil over. There was no denying the magistrate. They held power no one in The Below could challenge, not even me.
The past slid back into me like a blade—slick, familiar, and always just under the skin. I pressed at my temples, willing the memory back down into the dark, but it rose anyway, oily and cloying like the scent of Lorde Thorne’s favorite cologne.
I’d been seventeen the first time they came.
The manor had gone quiet in that unnatural way that precedes storms or death. I was halfway down the staircase, shirt sleeves damp against my wrists, the linen stuck to split flesh where the cuffs had rubbed raw. My fingers ached from the latest lesson. The manacles my father used had been tighter that day. Less correction, more punishment.
My father’s voice was already echoing across the marble foyer, thunderous and triumphant. Lorde Thorne never needed a script. Arrogance poured from him like old wine—bitter and constant.
They arrived without ceremony. No guard. No insignia.
Three of them: Eldric, draped in shadows and trimmed in gold; Caladorn, fox-eyed and unreadable; and Vaelen, the quiet one with the haunted stare. They didn’t look like judges. They looked like consequences.
Eldric’s voice was velvet. “We’ve come to evaluate the legacy of House Gallanti. We have heard interesting things about the boy.”
Not the heir. Not the son. The legacy. Cold. Vague. Purposefully dehumanizing.
My father’s chuckle came from the top of the stairs, descending with all the regality of a man who thought he belonged in their ranks. “Legacy,” he repeated, as if the word tasted foul on his tongue. “Then you’ve come too late. All that remains is disappointment.”
I didn’t flinch. I’d long learned the art of stillness. My shadows curled close at my heels, recoiling not from the magistrates, but from the look in my father’s eyes.
Anticipation.
Not for my elevation.
For my sale.
Eldric turned to me without emotion. “This is your son?”
“He is the blood of my blood,” my father replied. “Though I often wonder how that could be true.”
The shadows under my skin pulsed.
They saw the bruises on my neck. The stiffness in my knee from being forced to kneel for hours in a warded circle. They saw the welts at my collar, the barely healed ring around my wrist. They saw everything.
And they turned away.
Caladorn’s eyes narrowed, assessing me like one might inspect a flawed gem. “We have no need for disobedience,” he said. “But potential? That is always of interest.”
“He is unstable,” my father snapped. “The shadow within him answers to no law—not even mine.”
I kept my eyes on the floor, clenching my jaw so hard that my molars ached. Every word stung less than the silence. The silence meant agreement. The silence meant consent.
Then Vaelen spoke, quiet as dust. “Yet you want to sell him to us.”
That made my father pause.
It made me lift my gaze.
He recovered quickly, of course. Lord Thorne never let weakness linger. “Sell is a crude word. I offer cooperation if the price is right, but as ineffectual as he is, something is to be said for blood. Alliance. My legacy—my name—still commands value.”
Eldric raised a single hand. “And we trust that House Gallanti still understands discretion. Which is why this conversation must occur without the ears of obsolete children.”
Obsolete.
I’d been called many things—useless, errant, corrupted—but never obsolete.
