Chapter 17
Rell
He knew now. He’d suspected it before—back in the woods on their way to Kilfaire, when he recognized her cloak as his own, when she’d brought up the northern villages and the holes in her memory—but he’d shoved the thought down.
Too cruel. Too impossible. But here she was, standing in the same square she’d grown up in, asking her real father to describe Kira and that was it.
No room left to pretend otherwise. She hadn’t recognized the name for what it was, hadn’t known it was hers, but he had.
That flicker across her face when she heard it.
That faint, confused tug she didn’t even try to hide, because she didn’t know what it meant. She was Kira. The girl he hadn’t saved.
He didn’t stop moving until the butcher’s voice was gone behind them, swallowed up by the square. Elora followed without a word, that quiet, dangerous kind of rage coming off her like heat.
Rell still had his hand on her arm. Just enough to keep her moving before she did something he’d have to explain to The Hive later. When she quit fighting it, he let go.
She didn’t move. Her eyes were still on the square behind them, on the man who’d said those names the way you’d read off a ledger.
“Don’t,” Rell said quietly.
Her gaze snapped toward him. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t make it worse.”
She didn’t say anything, but the look she gave him said plenty. Her claws were itching for release.
He probably shouldn’t have brought her anywhere near that man. Eamon.
Just the name made something tighten in his chest. The years hadn’t done much to him: a few more wrinkles, fewer teeth, but the same steady hands, the same flat eyes. The man had sold his own kids and slept fine after.
Rell had been fourteen when he struck that deal with him. Smuggle a healing draught. One vial or he’d have to sell his eldest to get the coin. It was dumb to think he could actually do it.
When Rell had failed to get it, he’d gone back. Tried to warn her. Get her out. She hadn’t believed him. Said her father would never—
He did.
Rell followed the wagon tracks through the trees until he found The Snatchers came.
Watched from the ridge while Eamon walked his daughter into the clearing like he was delivering a sack of grain.
Watched him count the coins, one by one, while Kira—Elora—swayed on her feet, drugged and dazed.
Watched them drag her into a cage and lock the door.
The click of it should have told him that he didn’t stand a chance. He didn’t care.
He’d gone in after midnight with a knife and absolutely no plan, too young and too angry to think past the next thirty seconds. He’d whispered through the bars. Told her he’d get her out. Promised.
But he’d been a dumb kid. Bravery wasn’t a plan. He’d woken up half-buried in snow at the edge of the village, a wound between his ribs, the camp already gone.
Maybe her not remembering was the mercy in it.
Would she even be better off knowing? Would it undo everything she’d scraped together since The Institute—all that hard-won strength, that distance, that control she wore like armor? Or did she deserve the truth? Wasn’t that something that belonged to her?
He didn’t know.
If it all came back—her name, her father, her childhood—when she looked at him, what would she see?
The man who found her.
Or the boy who didn’t?
∞∞∞
The road through Grayhollow was exactly that, a road.
One. Singular. A strip of packed dirt wide enough for a cart, running arrow-straight through the village from the northern gate to the southern edge where the tree line swallowed it whole.
Everything else was mud paths and shortcuts through someone’s yard.
Rell fell into step beside Elora, hands in his pockets, the cold working its way through the seams of his coat.
The square fell away behind them. The market chatter faded to distant murmurs.
The further they walked, the worse it got—timber frames gone grey, roofs sagging under their own weight, shutters split from too many winters nobody bothered to fix.
The Empire liked its villages like this. Kept people busy just surviving.
Elora kept pace without complaint, which meant she was either too tired to argue or still burning through the last of whatever rage she’d swallowed back at the square. He didn’t push it. He let her walk.
Then she veered left.
Toward the inn.
A warped sign swung overhead, something painted on it that had probably been a fish once, or maybe a boot, hard to say after this many winters. Warm light leaked through the shuttered windows. It smelled like stale ale, wet wool, and whatever had been frying in the same fat since last week.
“Where you going, Sunshine?”
Elora stopped walking. A flush crept up her cheek, visible even in the flat grey light, and she turned her face away, quick, like that would do anything.
“I assumed—” she started.
“The Hive doesn’t do inns.” He didn’t slow down. Just kept moving, past the swinging sign, past the warm light bleeding through the shutters, past the smell of old fat and bad decisions.
“It looked—”
“It looked like somewhere you catch fleas and wake up lighter on coin than you went in.” He glanced back at her over his shoulder. “Come on.”
She stared at the inn for a half-second longer, then followed. The flush hadn’t fully faded. He didn’t mention it again.
Rell guided her to the manor—if it could still be called that.
From the outside it looked ready to collapse in on itself: crooked rooflines, rotted shutters, ivy strangling every stone.
A place no sane person would enter unless they wanted splinters or tetanus.
It made the inn look like a much more suitable option.
But the moment he pushed open the door, the illusion broke.
Warmth hit them the moment the door swung open.
Real warmth—hearth heat, scented oil, the kind that cost coin.
Elora’s step slowed almost immediately. Her eyes moved across the lantern-lit hall, the polished floors, the long burgundy-and-gold rug running the length of the entryway.
He watched her take it in. Watched her recalibrate.
“It’s charmed,” Rell said, pushing the door shut behind them. “Exterior is painted with an illusion potion to look like a ruin. Keeps the thieves away.”
She glanced around again, frowning. “This doesn’t look like a Hive camp.”
“Wasn’t, at first,” he said. “Boss sent a crew up here last year. Said she wanted proper safe-houses in the north. Didn’t make much sense back then, but…” He gave a small shrug. “Now that her plan’s rolling forward…”
Questions flickered behind her eyes, but before she could voice one—
Footsteps sounded on the stairs.
Three figures appeared halfway down the stairwell. Rowan, Marcus, and Nevin.
Apprentices from Elora’s class. The ones who’d passed their trials, earned their apprenticeships… and then never made it to the capital.
Rell watched them freeze on the stairs. Rowan’s hand locked around the railing. Marcus stopped breathing. Nevin just stared at her, blinking slowly, like his brain had gone somewhere quiet and wasn’t coming back.
Nobody moved.
Rell’s jacket creaked as he shifted his weight. “Close your mouths before something flies into them.”
Marcus released a sound halfway between a cough and a laugh. Rowan’s fingers uncurled from the railing, leaving damp prints behind. Nevin’s shoulders dropped an inch from where they’d been hovering near his ears.
They descended the remaining stairs, boots heavy on the wood.
Rell kept his eyes on Elora.
Beside him, Elora’s breathing changed. A hitch, then a breath let out too slow, too careful. Her fingers had curled in on themselves. When she swallowed, he could hear it. Her eyes cut to the door behind them, deciding if she should run.
Seeing them scared her. Of course it did.
She wasn’t the same person they’d known. Not even close.
What if they couldn’t see past that?
Rowan was the first to speak.
“Elora?” His voice was quiet, careful. “We heard you got out,” he said. “Heard some other stuff too.” He rubbed the nape of his neck. “Didn’t know what to believe.”
A muscle twitched beneath her eye. Her shoulders climbed toward her ears.
Rowan opened his arms a little. “Can I— “
Elora’s eyes widened. “No.”
Rell stepped an inch closer to her. Didn’t mean to, just felt necessary.
Rowan dropped his arms. “Okay.” He said it the way you say okay when you mean it.
Elora and the boys moved into the common room—a wide space with mismatched sofas arranged in a loose circle around a low table.
It wasn’t fancy, but the cushions were soft and the fire in the hearth made it feel warmer than most places in the north.
She sat at one end, Rowan and Marcus beside her though visibly distant.
Nevin perched at the edge of the opposite couch.
Rell brought in plates of food—a mix of roasted root vegetables, dried fruit, and salted meat—and set them on the table without a word.
Elora murmured a quiet thank-you that he pretended not to hear.
He sat himself at the nearby writing desk, pen in hand, mission ledger open, doing everything in his power not to look over his shoulder every thirty seconds.
He had a report to fill out.
Rescued three children; transferred to Hive care. No casualties. No pursuit.
He wrote mechanically, but when he reached the line about the attack, he hesitated.
Hostile encounter: nightglider. Beast driven off. Minimal injuries.
That was all he wrote. He signed it, blotted it, and set it aside. But focusing was pointless.
Every few seconds, conversation drifted from the sofas to him—Marcus’s too loud voice, Nevin’s breathless corrections, Rowan’s steadying commentary.
Marcus waved his hands wildly as he recounted the pirate attack. “We didn’t even see them at first, they came out of the fog like ghosts. Their captain jumped onto our deck and screamed something in Al’teran—well, I think it was Al’teran.”
“It wasn’t,” Nevin piped in. “I speak a little Al’teran. He was just screaming nonsense.”