Chapter Thirty-Nine
ELYSSARA
The Barrier District greets us like a fist to the ribs—clamor, torchlight, steel. We burst from The Underbelly’s throat into streets already barricaded, guards thick as flies on rot. Banners of the crown hang limp in the night air, but the patrols are sharp-eyed, restless, too many.
“We need to get to the roofs,” Tess rushes out, panic thick in her tone.
She’s right. Because if there’s anything I know about Virellin, it’s how to get around unseen, and the roofs are the best way to do it.
I drag air into my lungs, damp and cold compared to The Underbelly’s humid stench.
My boots slip on cobbles slick with ale and piss, but I move fast, trusting that the others will keep up, and I scale a wall before the guards can round the corner.
My fingers find holds where others would see only stone.
Muscle memory. The old me. The thief. The shadow.
The others follow in fractured silence—Therion grunting as his axe catches on the climb, Ronyn muttering curses about being hungry under his breath, Rubi too wild to be quiet but quick enough for that not to matter.
Jax merges with the shadows, quiet and compliant for a change.
Kael doesn’t stumble. He never does. His presence is steady at my back, tether humming with dark calm that pulses in time with mine.
We slip across rooftops, slide into alleys, cut through the night itself. One wrong step and we’re done. But I don’t misstep. Not here.
I move like the night. I am the night. The hunter again.
Tess’s boots step steady and sure across thatched roofs—she’s done this before. Gone is the meek child sold onto the Flesh Circuit to feed her brothers. No. This is a woman. A warrior. A daughter of the slums, just as I am.
“We’re close,” she whispers, ducking behind a choking chimney, and out of sight of the crawling guards that cover The Barrier District like ants on sweets.
From this vantage point I can see the blockade already set up before the bridge across The Black Stream. There’s no running. No escape. Only hiding now.
I fucking hate being prey.
“Where are we going?” I whisper, wearing the night like a second skin.
Without looking at me, she throws over her shoulder, “The Tainted Veil.”
Did she just say The Tainted fucking Veil?
“The whorehouse?” I ask, incredulous.
“Friends of the rebellion,” she answers. “And Madame Amarisse prefers to call it a pleasure parlor.”
I scoff. A pleasure parlor.
If it looks like a whorehouse, and smells like a whorehouse…
“I mean it. She’ll gut you like a pig for the spit if you call it a whorehouse,” Tess snips, reading my look of disdain.
The delicate woman has her hair pulled back in a tight knot at the nape of her neck, worn leathers—at least second-hand—fit her petite frame snugly, and her hazel eyes are hardened in the thick of the moment. Gellesk’s been training her. He’s recruited her.
“Fine,” I allow. I’ll call it a fucking pleasure parlor if it means refuge for me and my friends. I’ll call it a luxury establishment if I have to.
Tess nods curtly, and crouches low across the roofs, leaping over narrow alleyways.
She’s tracking the movements of the guards, staying away from heavy foot traffic, and places frequented by nobles—they always sing like fucking canaries when it comes to lawbreakers if it means getting in Thalmyr’s good graces.
“Two more streets,” Tess grits out, and she checks the latch on her satchel is secured.
That’s when I realize—
“You have the Shards.”
“Yes,” she breathes. “You need to steep them in boiling water for at least one hundred heartbeats. Drink a cup full, and the effects will be instant,” she pants, sprawling onto her belly as guards search the street directly below us.
We follow suit and drop to our bellies.
The guards still.
They heard us.
Therion is gripping the corner of the chimney, desperately clinging to it to keep him from sliding down the peaked roof.
But I can see him grimacing.
His arm is mangled from the beast’s bite—blood dark and slick. Even from here I can smell the iron. If he slips, if they see us, we’re done.
The guards below shift their torches higher, searching the roofs. And Tess—Stars save me—keeps crawling toward the glow of crimson lanterns in the distance.
But Therion’s strangled grunt cuts through my fragile hope—
He’s sliding.
His arm’s given out.
“They’re here!” one guard shouts, locking eyes with me, and I know he’s taking them in—etching them into his memory like scripture. The same emerald-green of my mother.
My Lightborne mark and my panic flare in unison.
Fuck.
Before Therion slips over the edge and into the team of guards in the street, Kael’s arm flies out, gripping Therion’s chest plate in his palm.
“I’ve got you, brother,” Kael says between gritted teeth, arms straining under the weight of Therion.
“Move!” Tess bellows, staying low on her belly, dragging herself forward to the next building.
“He’s injured!” one of the guards yells, and I realize Therion’s forearm drips rivulets of blood that cascade onto the street below. “Wound on the left forearm!” the guard notes.
“They’re fucking profiling him,” Kael grunts.
Fuck.
Ronyn’s hand grips Therion’s thigh sheath—he’s leveraging himself by clinging to the chimney with his other hand.
“No one gets left behind,” he breathes through clenched teeth.
Ronyn and Kael heave Therion’s tall frame up, and he cries out in pain.
I’ve never seen him hurt. I’ve never seen him in pain.
It’s unsettling.
Unnerving.
Seren’s face is ghostly pale.
She’s panicking.
“We need to move!” I bellow, urging Tess on, as the guards below plan to surround the building.
“Get to the crimson lanterns,” Tess breathes.
Therion’s eyes are glazed and unfocused. He’s losing consciousness.
“We need to jump across to the next roof,” Tess says, eyeing the gap between buildings. But we’re both thinking the same thing: I don’t know if he can.
“Tarrakai does not like the plan, just for the record,” Ronyn breathes.
“Well, unless he’d like to make an appearance and eat our enemies, tell him to fuck off,” I stab back.
“He’s actually up for that plan,” Ronyn pants, still clinging to Therion.
Kael doesn’t hesitate.
He shoves Ronyn off him with a growl, then crouches low and hauls Therion bodily across his shoulders. Dead weight, blood-slick armor, axe and all—he lifts him like nothing.
“Hold on,” Kael snarls—not to Therion, who’s half-gone already, but to the rest of us. To me. Because this is about to get reckless.
He runs.
The roof trembles under his boots as he charges across the tiles, and before I can blink, he launches into the gap.
He lands hard, shoulders dipping under Therion’s weight, then surges forward again.
Another roof. Another leap. Guards below howl, pointing, blades flashing in torchlight, but Kael doesn’t falter.
He is a storm, a war given form, carrying his brother as if he were light as a feather.
We follow.
We scramble to keep up.
Leaping.
Soaring across alleyways and plunging deeper into the heart of The Barrier District, further from The Lightborne Barrier itself and its glow that kept us visible.
Now, we let the darkness swallow us whole, as if the darkness itself is an ally.
And like I told Vessira before I relieved her of her head—the darkness knows me intimately.
The tether thrums so fiercely I can’t breathe. I see him—not the brooding king, not the shadow of Zerynthia—but the man who would carry us all if he had to. My chest tightens painfully.
“Move!” he bellows, voice reverberating through the night. And we do. Because how could we not?
We chase him harder across the rooftops, hearts hammering.
Tess flies ahead, guiding with frantic gestures, crimson lanterns bobbing in the smoke-choked distance.
Ronyn mutters curses as he vaults the gap, Jax is a silent shadow, Rubi all wild hair and skirts in the night.
Seren stumbles but presses on, eyes fixed on Therion’s limp body bouncing across Kael’s shoulders.
The guards swarm below, a tide of steel and torchlight, but they can’t keep up. Not with him. Not tonight.
And then—the glow of the crimson lanterns is right there, bleeding through the dark like a lighthouse in the wild seas. The air changes—perfume, smoke, incense masking the stink of sex and grime. The Tainted Veil.
Kael doesn’t slow until he scales down the building and drops heavily into the shadow of the pleasure parlor’s awning, crouched low with Therion still slung across his back. Tess is already pounding on the side door, frantic.
“Open up, open up, now!” she hisses.
The door cracks. Smoke and perfume billow out. A silhouette framed in golden light leans lazily against the doorframe, jeweled bangles clinking at her wrist. The madame herself.
“Well,” Madame Amarisse drawls, eyes raking over our bloodied, panting forms. “If it isn’t Gellesk’s strays.”