The word hangs between us.Yours.Possession. Ownership. Everything I should resist.
Instead, it settles into my chest with a weight that feels less like chains and more like an anchor.
“We need to move.” Rathok’s mask drops back into place—flat voice, controlled expression, the enforcer reassembling itself over whatever just cracked through. “The bargain bought us protection but not invisibility. The Ledger Master will test the terms. Probe for weaknesses.”
“Where are we going?”
“Below.” He moves toward the drainage pipe. “There are tunnels under the city—deep ones, older than Gravebind itself. The Debt Crypts. They connect everything—the districts, the Ledger Hall, places that don’t exist on any surface map.” He pauses at the pipe’s mouth. “Your brother is being heldsomewhere the Ledger Master controls. To reach that place, we go through the crypts.”
“The tunnels where debtors go to die.”
He looks back at me. Something flickers in his expression—surprise, maybe, that I know.
“Everyone in Gravebind knows.” I push myself to my feet. Dust off my knees. Square my shoulders the way I’ve been squaring them since I was nine and learned that the world doesn’t stop hitting you just because you’re already down. “The tunnels, the dead, the wraiths. Campfire stories to keep children from running when their parents can’t pay.”
“They’re not stories.”
“Didn’t think they were.”
He holds my gaze a moment longer. I don’t know what he’s looking for—fear, hesitation, the good sense to refuse. He doesn’t find it.
“Stay close. Don’t speak unless I tell you it’s safe.” The familiar instructions from the apartment but different now. Weighed down by the bargain between us, by the magic binding my steps to his. “The crypts are dangerous for anyone. For someone carrying a mark the Ledger can track, they’re?—”
“Don’t say complicated.”
Something shifts in his face. Not a smile—his features don’t seem built for that—but something adjacent. A crack in the stone.
“Deadly. I was going to say deadly.”
“Deadly, I can work with.”
He turns and leads me through the drainage pipe, through a network of tunnels that descend beneath the Ashmark district in increments. The air grows colder. The walls change—brick giving way to stone, stone giving way to something darker. We don’t speak. The bargain pulses between us like a secondheartbeat, the sigil on my palm warming whenever he moves too far ahead, cooling when I close the gap.
Mine.His word. His claim. The magic made it real, but the weight of it sits differently than I expected. Something more like a tether between two people falling, each holding the other’s line.
I think about my mother. About the truth-speaker who hid behind fortune-telling and palm-reading, who raised two children in a city built on lies and told them to be ordinary. I think about what Rathok said—she could see the lies woven into contracts. She could unravel what the Ledger Master built.
She must have been terrified. Every day, walking through Gravebind’s streets knowing what she could do, what she’d be killed for if anyone found out. Hiding in plain sight. Protecting us by being small.
I don’t know how to do what she did. Don’t know how to speak truth, how to see lies, how to unravel anything. All I know is that my brother is in the hands of a monster, and the orc ahead of me is the only person in this entire city who’s chosen to help me get him back.
For now, that’s enough.
We emerge from the tunnels onto the edge of a plaza I don’t recognize. The buildings here are older—pre-Ledger, maybe, built from stone that remembers when Gravebind had another name. Across the open space, silhouetted against the perpetual gray sky, a structure rises.
The desecrated temple.
I’ve heard of it. Everyone has. The spires are broken, the windows shattered, the door gaping like a mouth that’s been screaming for centuries and forgotten how to stop. Religious iconography clings to the facade in patches—saints with chiseled-off faces, symbols I don’t recognize scratched over with graffiti and obscenity.
Whatever faith lived here died a long time ago.
“The entrance to the crypts.” Rathok’s voice is barely a murmur. “Past the altar, there’s a staircase. It goes down a long way.”
I look at the temple. At the darkness beyond its ruined door. At the path my mother must have walked, years ago, when she was the one hunting the Ledger Master’s secrets.
I’m coming, Gror.
I step forward. Rathok falls into step beside me. Not behind. Not ahead. Beside.
The temple waits. The darkness waits. And somewhere far below, in tunnels carved from bone and filled with the dead, my brother waits too.
Seven days.
