Chapter 10 Kragna
KRAGNA
Kyrdonis rises on the horizon like a spider’s fortress spun from black stone. The towers are too thin, too tall, like spears driven up into the sky. Bridges lace between them, webbing across empty air, and banners flutter like torn wings in the wind.
It’s the kind of sight that would awe a human, maybe even humble one. But me? I feel my hackles rise, every instinct clawing against my bones.
It’s beautiful in the way venom can be beautiful—gleaming, intricate, mesmerizing. A thing that demands you stare even as it kills you.
And I hate it. Every inch.
The stench reaches us before the gates do.
Not filth—not here. Elves don’t tolerate mess.
Their stink is worse. Clean stone scrubbed raw with alchemical sharpness, perfume curling from balconies to mask the blood in the gutters, incense burned not for gods but for power.
Slave pens hide down alleys, but the iron tang of them rides the air anyway.
River doesn’t flinch at the smell. She pulls her hood lower, sets her shoulders, and steps into the city flow without hesitation. She moves like she belongs, like she’s walked these streets a thousand times. Maybe she has.
Me, I don’t belong. I loom. Even with my skin muted to dull stone-gray and my cloak drawn close, I’m a mountain trying to pretend I’m a boulder. I feel eyes catch on me—curious, suspicious, afraid. Whispers brush the air behind my back.
River glances once over her shoulder and shoots me a look sharp as a knife: let me lead.
So I do.
The streets hum like a hive. Cobblestones clatter under hooves, sandals, bare feet.
Merchants shout from stalls draped in silks, their wares glittering with gold leaf and cruel edge.
I pass a stand with collars on display, some jeweled, some spiked, each a work of art meant to hide the shackle underneath.
Children dart between legs—thin, quick, ears tapering to sharp points. One snatches a purse, vanishes down an alley. The man robbed raises his hand to strike, but the child’s gone, and instead he cuffs another smaller boy standing too close.
I hear the crack of it. My claws flex.
River doesn’t stop. Her pace never breaks, her eyes flicking to every archway, every guard rotation, every alley mouth that yawns too dark. She doesn’t miss a thing.
It costs her. I can see it. The slight tightening in her jaw as we pass a plaza where women kneel, wrists bound, heads bowed for auction. Their chains glint in the torchlight. A crowd gathers, dark elf men shouting bids.
River’s fingers twitch at her side, just once. Then she pulls her hood lower and keeps walking.
I hate Kyrdonis. But I hate it more through her eyes.
A guard patrol rounds the corner ahead—six elves in lacquered armor black as beetle shell, pikes in hand, expressions smooth and cold. Their eyes rake the crowd, sliding past River without pause.
When they hit me, they linger.
I bare my teeth without meaning to. Not a smile. A warning.
River steps into my line of sight, blocking me. Her voice is sharp but low. “Don’t.”
“They’re staring,” I growl.
“Let them. You glare any harder and they’ll drag us both to the pits.”
“I’m not glaring.”
“You’re always glaring.”
That earns her a snort, which she ignores. She adjusts her hood and keeps moving.
We cut down a narrower street, quieter, the crowd thinning. Tavern shutters are bolted tight, lamps smashed out. The cobblestones here are uneven, slick with damp. My shoulders ease with the space, though I keep my cloak close.
River slows, checking the alleys with a glance before relaxing her pace. She walks like she knows the pulse of the city, like every corner has a rhythm she’s memorized. I follow a beat behind, heat rolling off me, my eyes tracking every face that dares glance too long.
“You move like smoke,” I murmur. My voice comes out low, a rumble.
She huffs, lips twitching. “You move like a thunderclap. Subtle isn’t really your thing.”
“Subtle’s overrated.”
She finally glances back, a spark in her eye that might almost be humor. “Here? Subtle keeps you alive.”
I grunt, but keep my tone light. Truth is, if I had my way, I’d rip these streets up stone by stone, scatter the bones of this place across the mountains.
But here, now, I let her lead.
Because if I don’t trust her to guide us through this viper’s nest, we’re already dead.
We rent a room in a place that smells like everything that’s ever died in it never left.
The walls are stained a greasy yellow, sagging under years of smoke and sweat. Floorboards groan under each step like they want to confess something. The innkeep doesn’t ask for names, just coin. River slaps it on the counter without a word. She doesn’t look at me, but I can feel her jaw’s tight.
Third door on the left. The key’s rusted, the handle looser than it ought to be.
She pushes it open with the edge of her boot, and we step into a space that barely qualifies as shelter.
One sagging bed, a hearth, and a cracked window that wheezes with every gust of wind.
Something scuttles under the floorboards. I don’t check what.
She tosses her bag down and starts unfastening the buckles of her armor without so much as a glance my way.
Her fingers work with a soldier’s precision—swift, practiced.
Leather straps unhook. Steel plates fall to the floor with dull clinks.
Her shirt sticks to her in places, sweat-damp, outlining her spine before she yanks it off with a huff.
She peels herself bare with no pretense, no modesty, like I’m a piece of furniture—something too stupid or too respectful to look.
I keep my gaze pinned on the far wall, on a mildew-stained patch that looks like a face if I squint.
My hands stay clenched at my sides, tension thrumming down my spine.
I can feel her moving, the shifting of fabric, the creak of the mattress as she sits and pulls a blanket up.
Her skin had caught the light—shoulders dusted in salt, the long line of her neck glistening faintly from the heat of the day. I saw it. I looked.
Not for long.
Just long enough to feel a crack open somewhere behind my ribs.
“You gonna keep pretending I’m not here?” she says.
Her voice is low, dry, like she’s already laughing at me.
I grunt. “Wouldn’t want to intrude.”
She shifts again on the bed. The sheet rustles.
“You already did.”
The words aren’t sharp, but they cut anyway. They’re true, and we both know it.
I sit on the edge of the rickety chair by the door, the one piece of furniture not nailed to the floor.
My boots are caked with road filth, and I kick them off without finesse.
The air in here is too still, too thick.
I can smell her over the rot—the salt of her skin, the leather of her armor, the faint metallic tang of old blood from a scrape on her thigh.
The cot shifts again. I hear her lie back, her breath going slow, deliberate. Not sleep. Just stillness.
I start to strip down. Slowly. Tunic first, then undershirt.
The air chills my skin, but it’s not the cold that has gooseflesh rising.
I fold my clothes, set them aside like it matters.
The bed creaks again. She hasn’t said anything else, but I feel the weight of her eyes on the back of my neck even though I don’t look.
I don’t ask if I can lie beside her. There's only one bed. We both knew this was coming when we took the room. I ease onto the mattress like it might explode under me, but it’s already dipping under her weight. We lie back-to-back, not touching, not speaking.
The silence is a living thing.
I can feel the warmth of her just inches away. The way the blanket pulls taut between us like a boundary neither of us wants to be the first to breach. My fingers twitch against the thin pillow. Her breathing stays even, steady—but I know she’s not asleep. Not yet.
She changed in front of me like it was a challenge. Like she wanted me to look and hated me for doing it at the same time. And I looked—just enough. Not enough. I don’t know anymore.
We’re both liars, even when we’re quiet.
My muscles ache, not from the day’s travel but from holding so much in.
Not just desire—something heavier. She’s a storm bottled up beside me, and I keep waiting for the thunder.
The last time we were this close, her lips were on mine.
Her hands gripping me like she didn’t know if she wanted to hit or hold.
It hadn’t ended. Just paused. Fractured and unfinished.
I shift, just a little, and her breath stutters. Only for a second, but I hear it. She’s awake. And she’s aware.
There’s no space between us that isn’t screaming.
My body is wired, tense. Her scent curls under my nose, not perfume or anything flowery—just River. Dust and steel and sweat and a strange sweetness that sticks in the back of my throat like honey gone sharp.
I close my eyes, but sleep’s a lie tonight.
All I can think about is what she’d do if I touched her.
Not grabbed. Not pulled.
Just... reached.
My hand, on her hip. My breath, at her neck.
Would she lean into it?
Would she slap me away?
Would she break again—open and wild like she had when our mouths met in that inn room two nights back, all anger and ache?
Or would she push me off and leave?
I don’t know. And that’s the cruelest part.
I’m not afraid of her fury. I’ve seen that. I’ve faced it and matched it and wanted it like breath in my lungs. But this—
This not-knowing, this knife-edge walk beside her in silence—it cuts deeper.
Because part of me wants more than just her skin.
I want her to want me when she’s not on fire. When the world isn’t ending. When she’s not trying to claw her way through memory just to stay upright.
But maybe that’s too much to ask.
So I lie there, fists closed, breath shallow, heart pounding like I just took a spear to the chest.
And I don’t touch her.
But I don’t look away either.
The vampire meets us in the shadow of a half-collapsed clocktower, where the gears still creak like ghosts turning in their sleep.
He leans against a weathered pillar, arms crossed, one boot kicked up on a broken stone. There’s something lazy about him, like a cat sunning itself right before it pounces. His dark hair’s a mess—deliberate, I think—and his grin cuts clean through the morning fog. Too many teeth. Too sharp.
He wears silk like he mugged a noble and rolled in the clothes afterward.
His coat hangs open, wrinkled and stained, a splash of wine—or blood—on the cuff.
Boots scuffed. Fingers ringed in tarnished silver and greenish gold, a different story etched into each.
He smells like rosewater gone bitter and something metallic under it. Old blood and older sins.
“Darling,” he says, eyes flicking over River with obvious interest. “You brought a chaperone.”
River doesn't flinch. “We brought coin.”
“Even better.”
His voice is smooth—too smooth—and it slips between words like oil, clinging and cloying. Every syllable says I know something you don’t. Every smile says and I’ll charge you for it.
He pushes off the wall and stalks toward us, slow and easy like he’s not in any hurry to live. Or die.
Kragna doesn’t move. I let him get close enough to count the freckles on his throat. He stops short, smirk never slipping, gaze flicking to my tusks like he’s sizing up furniture.
“You’re a big one,” he says.
I grunt. “You’re talkative.”
He laughs, a bright sound that doesn't match the dead look in his eyes.
“Fair,” he says. “You want rumors or leads? Coin buys both. Chaos buys better.”
River folds her arms. “We’ll pay in whatever currency works. Long as it gets us close to Laertiez.”
Cervantes arches a brow. “Careful. You say things like that too loud in Kyrdonis, and you’ll wake up shorter.”
“Let them try,” she says.
He whistles low, then looks to me. “She’s got bite.”
“She’s got more than that,” I mutter.
The vampire chuckles, fingers tapping against his jaw as he walks a lazy circle around us.
The city moves on around the square, wagons creaking by, hawkers shouting about bruised fruit and boiled rat, but none of it touches this moment.
Just the three of us in a cocoon of sharpened words and old hunger.
“There’s chatter,” he says finally. “One of the highborn. Elven, of course. Pale and perfect, like they poured her from moonlight. Word is, she’s looking to cut ties with her current benefactor. Quietly.”
River’s eyes narrow. “She close to him?”
“Close enough to know where he sleeps. Where he bleeds.”
She nods once. “Set the meeting.”
He lifts his hand in mock salute. “You got it, blade-baby.”
“And none of your games,” she snaps.
His grin returns. “But games are the only thing that makes this pit worth crawling through.”
I step in close. He tenses just enough for me to notice, but not enough for anyone else.
“No games,” I growl, voice low enough to shiver in his bones.
He looks up at me, mouth still curled in a smile, but there’s steel under it now. Good. Means he’s listening.
“Message received,” he says.
As we turn to leave, he shifts closer—shoulders brushing mine. His breath is cool and cloying, like mint and blood and secrets.
“She’ll eat you alive,” he whispers.
I grin, wide and toothy.
“I hope so.”