“Yes.”
“And my brother?”
“Alive. The Ledger Master is keeping him intact—not processed, not consumed. Preserved.” Rathok’s jaw hardens. “As leverage. Against you.”
The crawlspace narrows around me. The walls press in, the ceiling drops, the earth beneath my hands feels like it’s breathing. I know it’s panic—know my body is rebelling against information it can’t absorb—but knowing doesn’t stop the feeling.
Gror.My idiot brother with his bad jokes and his worse decisions and his absolute certainty that things would work out, somehow, always. Sitting in whatever dark place the Ledger Master keeps his trophies, waiting for a rescue that might never come.
“So everything,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I have any right to expect, “was designed to bring me here. To this moment. Marked and desperate and running through the dark with an enforcer who should be dragging me in.”
“Yes.”
“And you? Were you part of the design?”
The question hangs between us. In the faint light that seeps through cracks in the stone above, I watch something move across his features—not guilt exactly, but the shadow of it. The memory of the shape.
“I was assigned the collection. Whether the Ledger Master expected me to hesitate—” He stops. Starts again. “I don’t know what he expected. I know what I’m choosing.”
I pull my mother’s ring from beneath my collar. The metal is warm from my skin, the band worn thin from years of her wearing it before me. She hid what she was to protect us. Hid it so well that I grew up thinking fortune-telling was the worst of her secrets.
And now the hiding is over. The Ledger Master found us anyway.
