Callum's hand stayed in the air between us, patient as stone.I didn't take it. I didn't need to. The offer was already sitting in the space he'd left open, and taking his hand would have meant something neither of us could take back."No," I said.He didn't flinch. If anything, something in his face settled, like a man who has just watched a stone land exactly where he threw it. "You misunderstand me. I am not asking you to submit.""You're asking me to become useful to you. That's the same thing wearing better clothes.""Perhaps." He lowered his hand. "But you are already useful to me, Elias. You became useful to me the moment you walked into that hall and undid forty of my finest soldiers in a single breath. The only question left is whether I get to choose the terms of that usefulness, or whether I let the realm choose them for me. I promise you, the realm will choose worse than I would."Behind me, past the frost-cracked stone of the antechamber, I could hear Drek's breathing, ra

The cellar smelled of old earth, damp wood, and rot, the stillness settling over us like grease. Drek sat folded into the far corner, his breathing heavy and uneven, one hand remaining buried inside his coat, clamped tight over his father’s letter. He looked smaller like that—stripped of his birthright, stripped of his shift, just a man shivering on cold stone.I leaned back against the rough wall, pulling my knees up toward my chest. The dagger at my hip gave off that faint, rhythmic vibration, a pulse that matched the steady beat of my own blood. It wasn't warm, exactly, but it was alive in a way the rest of this dying city wasn't.Tobin.My mind kept going back to the boy. Nineteen years old, skin scarred from a childhood spent in the lower ward's brass foundries, his hands perpetually stained with lampblack. He was the one who had cleared the maintenance passage doors three nights ago, his knuckles bleeding from forcing a rusted latch without making a sound. He had looked at me wi

The lower ward, given seventy-two hours of quiet, did what people always do when a boot lifts off their neck even briefly: it started, cautiously, to live again.Shutters that had stayed closed for a week came open. The fish market at the culvert bridge reopened with half its usual stock and twice its usual noise, vendors shouting prices like they were daring the Order to come back and stop them.Children who'd been kept indoors reappeared in the alleys, running games that mimicked, with the casual cruelty of children everywhere, the thing that had made them safe enough to play in the first place — small boys chasing each other shouting strip him, strip him until an exasperated mother somewhere hauled one off by the collar.I hated it. I want to be honest about that, because I think it would be easy, telling this part, to make it sound like the beginning of something triumphant. It wasn't. It felt like standing very still while a wave built somewhere out of sight, knowing it was going