POV: Adam SwiftThe training yard had gone silent by the time Adam pulled his blade free from the dirt where it had landed after being knocked from his hand twice already, and Commander Bertrand Voss lay on his back in the sand, chest heaving, a thin line of blood tracing from his lip to his jaw. The strongest sword in the King's standing army, undefeated in seven years of formal duels, stared up at the grey morning sky and did not immediately move to rise.Adam offered a hand. Voss looked at it for a long moment before taking it."Seven years," Voss said, getting to his feet with visible effort, "and I've never been put on my back twice in one match." He wiped the blood from his jaw with the back of his wrist, studying Adam with an expression that had shifted, somewhere in the last exchange, from contempt to something more complicated. "Where does a street rat learn to fight like that?""Doesn't matter where," Adam said. "Only that I did."A murmur ran through the assembled officers

Adam Swift Pov The battle above had gone quiet by the time Adam found the second entrance—a collapsed section of the keep's cellar wall, torn open by one of Cray's men chasing a fleeing straggler, that opened onto the same black passage Cole had vanished into. Adam grabbed a torch from its bracket and dropped into the gap without waiting for anyone to follow.The tunnel ran narrow and low, hewn roughly from the bedrock beneath the fortress, water seeping through cracks in the stone and pooling ankle-deep in places. Old. Older than the garrison above it, older probably than Cole's claim to this territory—the kind of passage that had been dug by men with reasons long since forgotten, and simply inherited by whoever came after.He moved fast, torch held low to keep the light from announcing him too far ahead, following the only trail available: drops of blood, fresh and dark, spaced further apart than they should have been for a man running at full speed. Cole was hurt. Adam didn't reme

Adam Swift Pov The report reached Adam three days after Cole's death, carried by a rider who'd pushed his horse hard enough to leave it lathered and trembling in the courtyard. Adam read the message twice before he fully trusted what it said, and even then, something in his chest went cold in a way that battle rarely managed anymore.A mercenary company had crossed the eastern border into Quinzerland. Not a raiding party, not a company for hire in the usual sense of soldiers looking for coin and plunder—an organized force, disciplined, moving with the kind of purpose that suggested a single contract and a single target.The Black Wolves.Adam had heard the name before, the way most soldiers eventually did, passed between campfires as a story meant to unsettle rather than inform. A company of killers with no allegiance to any crown, no code beyond the price they were paid, hired by whoever could afford them and feared by everyone who couldn't. They didn't take garrisons. They didn't f

POV: Adam Swift"I'm alive," Dax finally said, voice rough with the particular disbelief of a man who'd just watched death miss him by the width of a shoulder. "Commander, that shot—""Was meant for you." Adam was already up, eyes scanning the rooftops along the street's western edge, tracing the angle back from the splintered hole in the stall to whatever vantage point could have produced it. "Get the wounded to cover. Deep cover, not this." He was moving before he finished the sentence, blade sheathed, senses narrowed to the single problem of finding a man who didn't want to be found.The shot had come from high and distant, which meant a rooftop several buildings back from the street itself, positioned to cover the alley without being caught in the ambush's own chaos. Adam ran the geometry in his head as he sprinted toward the nearest access point—a drainpipe scaling the side of a grain merchant's warehouse—and started climbing before the calculation had even fully resolved.He rea

POV: Adam SwiftAdam moved through the cellar slowly now, torch held low, letting the wreckage tell him what the silence couldn't. Smoke curled along the ceiling in thickening layers, and somewhere above he could hear timber groaning under the strain of the spreading fire, a clock counting down on how much longer he had before this place became too dangerous to search at all. He ignored it. This scene mattered more than the time it cost him.The first body he crouched beside told him nothing new—a guard, throat opened in a single clean stroke, the kind of wound that came from a blade moving with total confidence rather than desperate improvisation. He'd seen wounds like this before. He'd made wounds like this himself, more times than he cared to count.The second body told him more. This guard had died from a strike beneath the arm, upward through the gap in a raised weapon, a wound that required the attacker to close distance inside the reach of a drawn blade and commit fully to the