Page 39 of Orc’s Gallows

The Judge’s hand closes around my windpipe.

The strength is inhuman. Impossible. I’m lifted off my feet like a child, my blade clattering to the platform as my hands claw uselessly at the grip crushing my airway.

“Twenty years.” The Judge’s faces cycle through its victims—the young, the old, the guilty and innocent alike. “You served this platform for twenty years. Pulled the lever. And now you think you can defy it?”

Black spots dance across my vision. My lungs scream for air that won’t come. Through the haze of suffocation, I see Ismerie—still bound, still struggling, tears streaming down her face as she watches me die.

The claiming sigil blazes between us. Heat spreading from my neck through my chest, down my arms, into my hands⁠—

Into my hands.

The sigil’s power floods through me with sudden intensity. Not magic—something older, something primal, the bond’s desperate response to the threat of permanent separation. Strength I shouldn’t have floods my muscles.

I grab the Judge’s wrist. Twist. Feel something that isn’t bone snap beneath my grip.

The entity releases me with a shriek of surprise. I drop to the platform, gasping, reaching for my fallen blade as the Judge recoils.

“Impossible.” The stolen visages contort with confusion. “The claiming bond cannot⁠—”

“The bond knows what I want.” I rise to my feet, blade in hand, the mating sigil still searing against my flesh. “And I want her free.”

I attack again.

This time I don’t aim for the Judge. I aim for Ismerie.

My blade slices through the ropes binding her wrists. Through the coils around her waist. She’s already moving, her freed hands reaching for the noose around her neck, her ending magic surging now that the suppression bonds are broken.

The Judge screams with fury.

The platform buckles beneath us. The entire gallows structure shudders, old timber groaning as the entity pours its rage into the wood that serves as its throne. Ropes whip through the air like striking serpents, death wards blaze with killing light, and the spirits of the executed dead rise in waves to drag us down.

“You think you can escape?” The Judge’s harmonized voices shake the square. “This is my court! My throne! My domain!”

“Not anymore.” Ismerie’s hand finds mine. Her dark power mingles with the bond’s heat, and for a moment I sense what she senses—the scaffold’s corruption, the centuries of wrongful death pooled beneath its foundations, the anchor stone that binds the Judge to this place.

“We need to go.” She pulls me toward the stairs. “Now. Before it recovers.”

We run.

The platform collapses behind us as we descend—boards snapping, supports cracking, the entire execution apparatus tearing itself apart in the Judge’s fury. Revenants claw at us from every side, but between my blade and her magic, nothing can touch us.

We burst from the execution square into the chaos of a city in upheaval.

Behind us, the Judge’s scream echoes across Blackhook City—a promise of vengeance, a declaration of war.

We don’t look back.

The Execution Hall has never felt safe.

But tonight, with Ismerie’s hand in mine and the mating bond thrumming between us, it’s the closest thing to sanctuary we have.

Halvard’s guards have retreated to the perimeter. The revenants didn’t follow us far—without the Judge’s direct control, they collapsed back into ordinary corpses within minutes of leaving the square. But the damage is done. The city knows something terrible is happening. The council knows their Warden has turned against them.

And the Judge knows we’re coming for it.

“We need to destroy the anchor.” Ismerie sits on the edge of my bed—our bed, now, though neither of us has said it aloud. Her hair is tangled, her clothes torn, dark bruises forming where the ropes bound her. She’s never looked more beautiful. “The stone beneath the gallows. It’s the source of the Judge’s power.”

“I know.” I kneel before her, checking her injuries with hands that refuse to stay clinical. My fingers trace the rope burns on her wrists, the marks on her neck, the places where the Judge’s bindings cut deepest.