“Fuck that.” He sat down across her, his leg bouncing causing her tea to slosh around in her cup. “I’m sick of the forge. I want to actually do something. Something with purpose.”
Violette sat back, her tea growing cold in front of her. Instead of having a child to focus his protective instincts on—something that might have given him purpose—he was spiraling deeper into whatever hell was eating him alive. What purpose could she give him that wouldn’t drive him further away?
He needed help. Real help, not the kind that came in blue vials, alcohol, or woman at the brothel. But every time she'd tried to offerit, he'd brushed her off with that maddening insistence that he was fine, that he had everything under control.
Clearly, he didn't.
“I’ll try to find an assignment for you, but right now I need to meet Auren in the basement.”
“The basement? For what?”
"An interrogation," she said, hating the way his eyes went wide as she said it. She already knew where this was going.
“I’m coming with.”
Violette paused, studying his face. "That's not necessary, Symond."
"No." His jaw set with familiar stubbornness. "I’m not going back to the forge so let me help be a worthy member of the Hive."
Every instinct screamed at her to refuse. He was barely holding himself together, pumped full of numbing agents, running on spite and chemical calm. The last thing their prisoner needed was Symond's particular brand of barely controlled volatility in the interrogation room.
But she could see the desperate need in his eyes, the way he was clinging to this like a lifeline. Purpose. He needed something to focus on before he decided there was nothing left for him in this world.
"Fine," she said finally. "But you’re just watching. Not participating."
"Okay, okay. I'll be fine," he said, and they both knew it was a lie.
Violette hated the basement.
Not because it was dark or cold or filled with the ghosts of bad decisions—though it was all three—but because it wasquiet. Notthe surface quiet of padded footsteps and hushed conversations, but the kind that pressed against your skin, like a held breath waiting to break.
The air was dense with moisture and the stink of metal and mildew. Moss crept along the cracks in the stone walls. The torches lining the corridor sputtered low and uneven, casting flickering light across a floor that had seen far too much blood scrubbed into it.
Two guards stood watch. Both straightened at the sight of her, one nodding with recognition. She returned it with a curt gesture. No words. Just protocol.
“Is he ready?” she asked quietly.
The older of the two guards—Crislan, maybe, she never remembered his name—opened the viewing slot in the door. “They’ve started. Few minutes ago.”
She glanced through.
Inside, the room was a study in calculated cruelty. Windowless, claustrophobic, lined with racks of instruments ranging from delicate to brutal.
One man was strapped to a reinforced chair, wrists bound in metal cuffs that pulsed with a faint reddish glow—designed to burn just enough when resistance was felt. His hair was matted with sweat. Blood trickled down his temple, and the cloth stuffed in his mouth had been recently replaced.
Across from him, a second man leaned against the wall, gloved fingers flicking through a set of enchanted tools with clinical boredom. The torturer. She recognized him—Auren, one of the freelancers the Hive sometimes brought in when they wanted a clean read on a dirty job.
Nothing personal. That was his motto. Just answers.
She stepped back from the viewing slot and looked at Symond.
His face was unreadable, shoulders relaxed, gaze forward.
“Last chance,” she said. “We go in, you flinch, I pull you out. No arguments.”
He gave a single nod.
Not a word. Not a breath. Not a soul.
