She possessed no weapons, no armor, no natural magic. Only a shattered ale bottle and a staggering, unbreakable will. When the trafficker crushed her windpipe, she fought with the desperation of a cornered stray, sinking her teeth into his veins. And when I stood before her—my steel smoking with hot gore—she refused to yield. The amber of her irises burned in the gloom, completely devoid of the abject terror my caste demands.
I yielded the Thosti coin because I recognized the brutal arithmetic of her survival. Patriarch Varynth bred me in a barren, cutthroat hierarchy, carving the lesson into my bones that control is the sole defense against ruin. I survived my bloodline through sheer, unrelenting strategy. Down in the mud, that mortal was executing the exact same maneuver.
But my wealth will not save her now.
By drawing my blade to butcher Kryven's men, I painted a Khuzuth target upon her back. Kryven will weaponize her slaughter to chip my authority, dismantling the stark order I have spent centuries engineering.
If she bleeds out in those alleys, Kryven secures a political foothold.
I rise from the leather chair. The frost on the inkwell shatters under a violent, restless surge of my magic.
"Tharion." I pitch the command into the ambient energy, letting the magic carry the echo down through the stone to the courtyard below.
Time collapses into forward momentum.I breach the downpour of the night, flanked by four of my most lethal Miou warriors. We take the reinforced carriage, the wheels grinding mercilessly against the cobblestones as we ascend the winding, subterranean ramps toward the Lowtowns.
The storm has escalated into a torrential deluge, drowning the streets in a wash of gray. I track her using the faint, lingering scent of hot copper and surface rain left in the wake of the alleyway butchery.
The scent trail winds deep into a labyrinth of rotting timber and rusted iron.
I raise a single, gauntleted fist. My warriors halt, blending into the soot-stained brick of a defunct alchemy forge.
Fifty paces ahead, Kryven’s hounds stalk through the deluge. Hooked chains and ironwood cudgels drag through the muck as they converge on a sagging storehouse. They have located their harvest.
I abandon the street, ascending the slick, moss-covered brick of the adjacent ruins. My boots scale the vertical drop flawlessly, bypassing the hounds to drop onto the storehouse roof.
Wet timber groans under my massive weight. I slip through a shattered skylight, striking the interior floorboards without a single sound.
The pitch-black air reeks of decaying wool and wet dust. I do not need light to locate her; the frantic, thrumming pulse of a cornered mortal vibrates from the far corner. The leather of my coat sweeps against the floorboards.
She lunges from the gloom.
A rusted iron spike slashes upward, aiming for the artery of my thigh. Her swiftness is startling for a mortal, fueled by sheer, desperate survival instinct, but her strength is vastly outmatched.
My hand snaps out, locking around her wrist mid-strike. It threatens to snap beneath my grip, a frail body of hollow bone and marrow, yet she thrashes with feral violence. Her jaw drops open to scream.
I step directly into her space, using my bulk to pin her spine against the rotting timber. My palm clamps over her mouth, stopping the sound. The physical contact strikes a jarring deficit through my senses—the scalding heat of her mouth against my calloused skin obliterates the calculated cold of my existence.
"Silence." I lower my face until my breath washes over her trembling jaw.
The violent halos of my irises ignite in the pitch-black. Recognition strikes her, but instead of cowering beneath theterror, she thrashes, driving a bare heel ruthlessly against the armor of my shin.
"Kryven’s hounds are thirty paces from that timber." I press the words against the shell of her ear, letting the glacial vibration of the warning sink into her skin. "If you make a sound, they will chain you to the brick and flay the skin from your bones. You are coming with me."
The defiance radiating from her small frame burns hotter than any alchemy fire. She refuses to nod. She refuses to yield.
I do not wait for her surrender.
In a singular, flawless motion, I lock her arm behind her spine with precise, painless leverage. My free arm bands around her waist, tearing her off the floor. I haul her thrashing form flush against my body and breach the rotting rear exit of the storehouse.
The reinforced door of my waiting carriage hangs ajar. I pitch her inside. Her temple collides against the iron doorframe with a brutal, sickening crack. She collapses onto the velvet cushions, her resistance evaporating as her body goes limp.
I step into the carriage and slam the ironwork shut, sealing her unconscious form in the dark with me.
3
MEGAN
The ache in my skull throbs with a punishing, relentless beat.
