“No. But you might.” He leans forward. I sense his focus sharpening even with my eyes closed. “You have something she didn’t.”
I open my eyes. Meet his gaze through the fractured light of the chapel.
“What?”
“Me.” The word is simple. Absolute. “Your mother worked alone. Hid alone. Died alone. You won’t.”
Something cracks open in my chest. The wall I’ve been building since Gror’s apartment—the barrier between me and everything I’m feeling—develops a fissure.
The chapel fills with silence—heavy, weighted, thick with dust and old prayers and the ghost of faith that died here long ago.
He crosses the space between us. Sinks to his knees beside my pew, bringing his face level with mine.
“Rathok—“
His hand rises and cups my face. I can’t breathe. Can’t think. His palm is hot against my jaw, his gaze burning into mine, and every nerve in my body is singing with awareness.
“I don’t know why that matters.” His voice drops lower. Rougher. “I don’t know why you matter. But you do. And I’m done pretending otherwise.”
The mark glows. Not pain—not anymore. Something else. Something that pulses in time with my heartbeat, with the heat building between us, with the truth neither of us is speaking aloud.
I lean into his palm. Let myself feel the warmth, the roughness of his skin, the careful way he holds me like I’m something precious and dangerous at once.
“You broke your contract for me.” The words come out barely a whisper. “You threw away two hundred years.”
“I remember.”
“Is that—“ I reach up. Cover his hand with mine. Feel the sigil pulse between our palms. “Is that enough? Is one choice enough to undo everything?”
I feel his pulse racing beneath my fingers—too fast, too hot, the rhythm of someone fighting to maintain control.
“I don’t know.” The admission sounds like it costs him. “I don’t know what redemption is anymore. It’s been too long since I let myself feel anything that wasn’t hollow.”
“Do you feel hollow now?”
His fingers brush along my jaw—slow, deliberate, memorizing.
“No.”
The word hangs between us. Heavy with meaning. Trembling on the edge of something neither of us is ready to name.
The chapel doors explode inward.
Wood splinters across the pews. Stone cracks and showers debris. The stained glass windows shatter as the force of the impact reverberates through the building, shards of colored glass raining down around us.
Something massive tears through the entrance, filling the doorway, filling the chapel, filling my vision with scrolling text and compressed paper and the faces of the damned.
A debt-golem.
I’ve never seen one, but I know what it is immediately. The construct is built from contracts—thousands of them, compressed and folded into something approximating flesh. Where a face should be, there’s only endless script, terms and conditions scrolling across the surface in languages I can’t read. Its arms split and multiply as I watch, each tendril tipped with something that might once have been human.
The smell hits next—old ink and older rot, the particular reek of souls left too long without bodies. The same smell from the crypts, but concentrated. Weaponized.
Rathok is on his feet in an instant, axes in hand, positioning himself between me and the creature. But the golem doesn’t attack.
It speaks.
Not with one voice. With thousands. The voices of the dead, the defaulted, the souls the Ledger Master has consumed over three hundred years. They layer over each other, creating a chorus that makes my skull vibrate.
“IVALYS VANE.”The golem’s tendrils writhe, reaching toward me.“YOUR BROTHER BEGS FOR YOU. COME HOME.”
Gror’s voice. Buried in that chorus of the damned, I hear my brother’s voice. Pleading. Crying. Begging me to save him.
The mark glows white-hot.
And for just a moment—just a heartbeat—I see it. The truth beneath the golem’s surface. The contracts that form its flesh, the fraud woven through every one of them, the stolen souls screaming to be free.
My mother’s gift. Waking up.
Then Rathok roars, and everything dissolves into violence.
