45. Chapter Forty Five #2
I lay there tangled with him in the dim of our quarters, the candles guttering low, wax making small glassy lakes on the shelf.
The cavern holds its breath beyond the ship—deep, dark, and studded with far-off lanterns like a night sky pressed underground.
The ship hums with its own quiet, not water, not wind—just the old timbers settling and the shy creak of rope where the anchors bite into the cavern wall.
We hang here—jutting out like a blade from the stone high above Riftreach.
If I look out, I can see the city falling away beneath us in ledges of light and shadow, stairways and alleys braided like ivy, the faint shimmer of heat from cooking fires, the low thrum of voices woven together until they sound like a single breath.
It isn’t peace. But we are getting there. His palm is wide and heavy at my waist, my cheek tucked to his sternum to count each steady lift, the bond a quiet, golden wire humming along with our heartbeats.
After a long while, when the candles were breath away from drowning themselves in their own wax, he murmured, “Sleep.”
“I don’t want to lose this,” I said. “If I close my eyes?—”
“You won’t,” he said simply, like certainty was something he could lay over me as a blanket.
My eyes stung. I closed them. When sleep came, it didn’t drag. It comforted me.
Morning in Riftreach is the city waking in layers.
First the soft clatter of pans in the terraces below, a laugh tossed up a level and caught by someone you can’t quite see.
Then the hiss of kettles, the tang of smoke and spice rising and thinned by the cave-cool air.
Light comes as one lantern switches from moonlight to sunlight.
It spills through our large picture window now, slanting across the bed and touching the edge of Drakes broad shoulder, the place where his scales gleam faintly like someone burnished him in sleep.
He’s already awake, watching the ceiling. I know the way his thoughts gather; I can feel it, like weather. When I move, his arm tightens reflexively, then relaxes; he lets me go like he’s teaching himself that he can.
“Morning,” I say, voice soft as featherlight.
He turns his head. That unguarded look—private, helpless—finds me, and the bond hums like a glass rung by a careful finger. “Morning.”
I sit up and pull the sheet with me. It smells like warm skin and old beeswax and the mint I tucked in the corner last night to keep the room from turning thick with us.
He watches me find my shirt—his, now, because mine is somewhere on the floor and refuses to be located—and the corner of his mouth fights a smile. He loses.
“You’re pleased with yourself,” I accuse.
“I’m relieved,” he says, honest enough to make my breath catch. “That you’re still here.”
“I live here,” I say, and then the rest of it arrives, not as a panic but as a firming in my bones. “We live here.”
A flare in his eyes, quick and bright. “We do,” he says, and the words stop being scary, and start being solid.
We take a quick bath, splashing one another, relishing in the comfort of being home. Being safe.
“I’m hungry,” I say, surprised by it. It might very well be the first time since…
He tilts his head. “Good.”
“Come with me to the market. But walk way behind me. If the old man at the flatbread stall sees you he will give us the tough ones out of spite.” I say, half joking.
He makes a noncommittal noise that might be agreement.
We step out into the narrow gangway clinging to the hull, one palm on the rope rail because the drop is a real thing, and begin the descent.
Stairs zigzag down along the cavern wall, hacked out of rock and shored up with beams older than I am, slick in places with the breath of the cave.
Voices float up. Somewhere, someone is singing—a low, work-song that has more humming than words.
We pass two teenagers hauling a slatted crate between them; they glare at Drake like he’s about to criticize their grip.
“Captain.” They nod. He nods back and doesn’t say another word, and their shoulders drop an inch.
The higher terraces are quieter—homes and small shrines, chalked marks on stone marking family names, strings of bone and ribbon crossing doorways for luck.
The lower we go, the more people, the tighter the air.
Familiar faces are nodding at us. Thanking us for saving them or their loved ones from the tower.
By the time we spill onto the main terrace, my heart is doing an odd little stutter of happiness I don’t recognize in myself.
It’s not joy, exactly. It’s… relief. Maybe everyone didn’t hate me.
The market spills itself out in ragged rows.
Fish dried to sturdy planks. Earthen jars stamped with thumbprints.
Piles of mushrooms, some with pale glow still trapped in their gills; baskets of roots shaped like fists; rounds of cheese sweating lightly beneath waxed cloth.
A girl with night-black eyes lets me smell a bundle of herbs and tuts when I guess wrong.
“Not thyme,” she says. “A cousin that grew in the old gardens. Stronger.” She presses a sprig into my palm anyway.
“For your tea,” she says. She means for your nerves. I tuck it behind my ear.
Drake and I argue about bread because it’s safe to argue about bread. The round loaf with the blistered crown looks like yummier. The long one looks crusty.
`“The long one keeps better,” he says again, squinting at it like he can shame it into beauty.
“It looks like someone stretched a frog,” I say, and he nearly smiles, which means I win, and then the baker laughs and drops both into our arms with a muttered: “Pay or I’ll charge you for the air you breathed while deciding.”
We buy figs too, and fresh cheese folded into leaves, and a paper cone of sugared nuts we absolutely do not share equally.
Fen is not here. Of course she isn’t. I feel the empty place where she would have stood like a black hole. I hear her silence as clearly as a voice. Her absence changes the way people approach me; they aren’t sure if I did what she thinks I did.
We climb back up slower, the basket heavier and my legs unaccustomed to carrying anything that isn’t guilt.
Drake walks half a step down from me, as if he means to catch me if the stairs betray me.
He just makes it true by placing himself where the world could break and turning that into a person instead.
He insisted on carrying the basket, but I insisted I wasn’t weak. I’m just an idiot.
Inside the cabin again, I set the bread on the desk and the cheese on the bed and the herbs in the water glass and every wrong thing in every wrong place because none of this has been practiced yet.
He corrects nothing. He pulls his coat off and hangs it on the peg he installed yesterday with exactly the number of taps it took to make the board accept it.
He moves around the room with the awkwardness of a bull in a china shop.
I tear a piece of bread and press it into his mouth. He takes it, eyes on mine, and the bond hums in approval.
“I’m wondering... if we should talk to Julian,” I say, hesitantly. “About the deal,”
He nods. “Together. He should hear it from you.”
“I don’t want him to feel like I’m keeping secrets.” I took another bite of bread, first dipping it in steaming mushroom soup.
Julian’s map room had the familiar smell of ink and damp stone. Vellum sheets lie like shed skins on the tables; lines of charcoal stitch districts to names and names to consequence. Ness perched on a stool, quill tucked behind their ear, watching us without pretending not to.
“We need to speak,” I say, as we charged through the door.
Julian’s mouth goes thin, not unkind, just accustomed to us barging in at this point. “Then speak.”
I don’t ask Drake to explain. I don’t hand my name away. I tell it myself.
“Azh’raim forced me into a bargain,” I say, letting the words be ugly and true. “If I don’t feed him souls, he’ll take our firstborn for his own. As you know, the child produced of a bond has the potential for great power. And in his hands, that could be…”
Silence opens—clean, cold, merciless. The word firstborn lands like a thrown blade. Drake doesn’t flinch. He stands at my shoulder the way a wall stands: not to pen me in, but to keep the room from pushing closer.
Ness inhales sharply. Julian’s gaze flicks, once, to Drake, then anchors on me. “You’re certain,” he says—not doubt, but the courtesy of a final door left to me to close or keep.
“Yes,” I answer. “He showed me enough that doubt would be a kindness I can’t afford.”
Julian’s hands settle on the edge of the table. “And you intend to pay?”
“I intend to choose how,” I say. “If there’s no other way. I won’t ignore the threat and let him come for a child that doesn’t yet exist.”
Ness finds their voice first. “We look for other ways,” they say, stubborn as a prayer. “Always. But if none?—”
Julian lifts a hand. Not to stop them—just to gather the air. He studies me, measuring something I can’t see. Then, quietly: “What if…”
Drake’s shoulders tighten.
“You could be… a blade ,” Julian continues, careful, precise.
“Not indiscriminately. Not as spectacle. As pressure. As consequence. Your curse could be fed by the worst of them so Azh’raim learns there is a cost to preying on us.
If the God demands souls, then let the debt be taken from men who have already sold their own. ”
The word assassin isn’t spoken, but it sits between us anyway, breathing.
“I won’t be your monster,” I say, and my voice surprises me with how steady it is.
Julian inclines his head. “Nor mine to command. Your choice. Your line. I’m offering a way to turn a noose into a leash—on them, not you.”
Drake steps forward a fraction, enough for me to feel the heat of him. “You don’t use her,” he says, iron laid flat on the table.
Julian meets his gaze without blinking. “I don’t intend to. I intend to give her the truth and let her decide what to do with it, with us standing where we said we’d stand.”
Ness’s voice threads through, softer. “And while we search for a way to break it—the bargain—we can at least decide that if something must be fed, it eats rot, not bread.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d caged. “General details,” I say, half to them, half to myself. “No timetables. No names yet. We don’t move in the dark and call it virtue. If I do this, it’s because the people truly deserve it.”
Julian nods once, as if this was the answer he hoped for and feared. “Then for now, we do nothing but know. We keep the thought. We sharpen it in silence. And if the day comes when we choose to use it, it’s because we can’t choose anything gentler.”
My hands have curled without my permission. I uncurl them. Felix’s face rises to the surface too often: the half-smiles he saved for me, his stupid little songs, the way he made even the worst moments feel like they remembered how to be kind.
“I keep thinking,” I say, and the words scrape going out, “that I could have saved him. That if I’d been faster, smarter—less… me—he would still be here.”
Drake turns toward me, but I don’t let him speak yet. I need the words to sit in the air where I can see how wrong they look in the light.
“But I couldn’t have,” I add, and the admission is small and stubborn and real. “We walked in together. He chose to stand where he stood. He knew the cost and took it anyway because he loved us. Because he loved me. I hate that that’s true and I am trying to be grateful for it at the same time.”
The ache in my chest shifts, not smaller, but different—like a knot worked loose enough to breathe through.
I set my palm flat on the map, over a blank piece of vellum where no routes are drawn yet. “I won’t let Azh’raim collect on his threat,” I say. “Not from me. Not from any child of mine. Not from any child of this city. If he wants a debt, he can choke on mine instead.”
Drake’s hand finds the back of my wrist—light, a single warm point. Ness looks away, giving me the privacy of not being watched.
Julian’s voice is very quiet. “Then we agree on this much: we don’t rush a single step. We search for a way to break the bargain. We keep your choice yours. And we remember who put the noose around our throats in the first place.”
“Azh’raim,” I say, and I taste the name like iron.
“For Felix,” Drake says.
“For Felix,” I echo, and it isn’t absolution, not yet, but it is a breath that doesn’t hurt to take.
I look down at that blank space on the map. In my mind, I draw a single line—nothing clever, nothing winding. A straight stroke from where I am to where he waits, through whatever halls or nights stand between. I don’t need tactics or tokens or code for this part.
I only need the promise.
“I’m coming for you,” I whisper to the God who thinks he owns me. “Not today. But soon.”
The stone seems to hold the words the way a hand holds heat. I let my palm rest there a moment longer, then lift it. And for the first time since the tower, I feel the tiniest slackening of the rope I tied around my own throat.