Chapter 11 River
RIVER
Lowtown smells like damp stone, offal, and old despair.
There’s no point sugarcoating it. The stench creeps up your nose and settles at the base of your skull, coating your tongue until everything tastes like mildew and rot. The air’s thicker here, heavy with smoke from gutter fires and the sharp tang of sweat—sour, desperate, human.
Kragna keeps close behind me, boots crunching on gravel and filth. His cloak’s pulled tight, hood low, but there’s no hiding what he is. Not really. He moves too smoothly. Too silently. His presence lingers in the air like smoke after a blaze—impossible to miss.
We wind through alleys that shouldn’t exist, between walls patched with scrap metal and prayer flags faded to gray.
People live in these crevices. You can hear them breathing.
Huddled behind crates, crouched under broken archways.
Mothers clutching thin-limbed babies. Old men with brands seared into their cheeks or necks, faces so hollow you could pour sorrow into them and still not fill the emptiness.
Every time I see those brands, my chest tightens.
Not because they shock me. Not anymore.
Because once, one of them was mine.
A little girl squats beside a collapsed stairwell, gnawing on what might’ve once been bread. Her ribs show through a threadbare tunic. Dirt cakes her hands, her knees. She looks up as we pass, eyes too big for her face. She doesn’t smile. Just watches.
Kragna slows.
I shoot him a warning look over my shoulder.
“Don’t,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. But I hear the way his breath shifts. Shorter. Rougher.
“This place…,” he murmurs.
“Isn’t yours to fix,” I finish for him.
He falls quiet again, but I can feel the tension rolling off him. He’s not made for ignoring things. Not made for watching and doing nothing. Especially not when a boy with a crooked leg limps past, clutching a sack of mushrooms and glancing up like he’s expecting to be kicked.
We turn a corner and nearly step over a man passed out in his own filth. The door beside him is missing its hinges. Inside, shadows shift. I don’t look too long.
“Every time you stare, you mark us,” I say. “They’ll notice.”
“I’m already noticed,” he growls.
He’s right. They’re watching us.
Whispers curl up from doorways. A flash of movement between crates. A rustle behind a tarp.
Not everyone here is a victim. Some of them eat the weak to stay alive.
Kragna’s big. Unmistakably not human. In Lowtown, that’s more than strange—it’s dangerous. And intriguing. The kind of thing that might draw out opportunists or guards with nothing better to do than crack skulls for fun.
I keep walking.
We pass a woman with a face like a ruin—one eye glazed white, a chunk of ear missing, a toothless mouth that opens just wide enough to murmur a blessing in a tongue I haven’t heard in years. I don’t reply. I just nod.
Behind me, Kragna’s breath catches. “How long?” he asks.
I know what he means.
“How long was I one of them?” I say, voice flat.
He doesn’t push. Smart.
Instead, he says, “You walk like you still belong here.”
“I never stopped.”
He’s quiet again. Not because he doesn’t care—but because he does. Too much. I hear it in the way his boots slow when a boy trips and scrapes his elbow on loose brick. In the way his shoulders square when he hears laughter that’s too cruel to be anything but someone getting hurt.
I stop short and whip around.
“You can’t react,” I say, voice low but sharp. “They’re looking for an excuse.”
“To do what?” His eyes burn beneath the shadow of his hood. “Bleed me in the street?”
“To bleed me.”
That shuts him up.
The look on his face twists something deep in my gut. Rage. Pain. Power he can’t use, not without hurting me, too.
He hates this place already.
I hated it years ago.
The alley bends again, narrowing so tight we have to turn sideways. The wall drips something slick that smells like rust. There’s a child crying somewhere close, muffled by walls too thin and hearts too tired to care.
I keep my eyes ahead.
I don’t look back.
Because if I do, I’ll see her.
The girl I used to be. Dirty. Branded. Starving for something I couldn’t name. Not food. Not even freedom.
Just... meaning.
Something to make the pain make sense.
Kragna brushes my hand as he follows me into another turn, and I flinch. Not from him. From the past clawing up through the cracks beneath our feet.
“I can’t stay here long,” I murmur.
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” he says.
But there’s something in his voice—quiet, steady—that tells me he’d stand in this filth forever if I needed him to.
He doesn’t understand what that does to me.
He doesn’t understand what it means to walk beside someone who sees the rot and still chooses to stay.
My old friend Elmira lives in the bones of a burnt-out tannery, tucked behind a butcher’s stall where the meat looks more like mystery than muscle.
The air’s rank with blood and salt-fat, and the flies hum loud enough to drown out thought.
I duck through a hanging flap of hide and lead Kragna into the shadows.
The smell doesn’t get better inside. Mold, char, old fire. But there’s warmth at least. A small brazier glows dim in the corner, and a ratty curtain blocks out the worst of the wind.
“Mira?” I call.
Something shifts behind the curtain. Footsteps drag. A creak of wood. Then she appears—thinner, grayer, hunched at the shoulders like life’s been chewing on her spine. Her eyes narrow the moment she sees me. Then widen. Then narrow again.
“Well I’ll be damned,” she mutters. “Or maybe I already am.”
Her voice is raspier than I remember. Smoked out and tired. She looks like someone scraped her out of a nightmare and left the rest behind.
“Hello, Mira,” I say.
She doesn’t smile. Just eyes me like I might be another ghost come back to collect.
“Didn’t think I’d ever see your face again,” she says. “Especially not with that behind you.”
She jerks her chin toward Kragna. He doesn’t move. Just watches, quiet as a mountain.
I step forward. “He’s with me.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“And I didn’t give a damn.”
That earns me the closest thing to a smirk I’ve seen from her in years.
“You always had mouth on you,” she says. “Even when it got you whipped.”
I wince. Not at the memory. At how easily it still slips from her mouth.
Elmira doesn’t invite us to sit. Doesn’t offer water or warmth. Just folds her arms across her chest and leans against the wall like she’s been waiting for this reckoning.
“You look older,” I say, regretting it the second it’s out.
She barks a laugh. “Time’s a bitch, River. And Kyrdonis ain't kind to survivors.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not.”
Dust swirls in the brazier light. Kragna doesn’t speak, but I can feel him bristling beside me. Watching Elmira like he’s trying to see through the crusted-over armor she’s wrapped around herself.
“You didn’t come back just to say hi,” she says at last. “So spit it.”
I glance around the room—walls patched with cloth and old wood, floor swept clean out of habit, not pride. No signs of listening ears, but paranoia’s a religion in Lowtown.
“I need information,” I say. “On Laertiez. On his movements. On anyone looking to move against him.”
Elmira snorts. “You planning a funeral?”
“Not yet.”
She pushes off the wall, limps toward a crate, and yanks up a false lid. From inside, she pulls a scrap of parchment and something sealed in wax.
“Your timing’s shit, but maybe that’s fate.”
She hands me the note.
It smells faintly of sage and oil. The seal bears a half-cracked emblem—two swords crossing over a broken chain.
I know that mark.
Skeela.
Mira’s eyes flick toward the door, then back to me. “That came three days ago. Said if you showed your face, she’d have something for you. Something big.”
“What is it?”
“Meeting. Tomorrow night. Quiet. She didn’t say more.”
I nod, turning the parchment over in my hands.
“She’s risking a lot,” I say.
“She always did,” Elmira replies. “But she’s smarter than you were.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
She sits down heavily on a crate, rubbing one knee like it aches worse with each breath.
“Your face is known,” she says quietly. “They’ve seen you.”
“Already?”
“Laertiez has eyes in every crack. Every shithole alley. You show up, and word spreads.”
Kragna shifts. His jaw tics.
“Then we move faster,” I say.
Elmira leans in, her eyes hard now. “You shouldn’t have come back.”
I nod. “I know.”
“I’m serious. You’re not a symbol anymore, River. You’re a target.”
I glance at Kragna.
“I’m both,” I say.
She sighs and sits back, shoulders sagging like the fire’s gone out in her bones.
“You always had a death wish.”
“No. Just a memory.”
That quiet hangs between us. Then Elmira reaches out, fingers cold and dry as paper, and squeezes my wrist once.
“Don’t let her see you bleed,” she whispers. “Skeela respects strength. And she knows how to use weakness.”
I nod, sliding the parchment into my coat.
“We’ll be gone before sunset.”
Elmira doesn’t ask me to stay. Doesn’t say goodbye.
But as we leave, I glance back and see her watching us through the crack in the curtain. Eyes sharp. Jaw set. Like she’s already waiting for the knock at the door that’ll never ask questions—only take.
And I know.
I just painted a target on her back.
We don’t talk much on the way back.
The streets curl in on themselves the closer we get to the inn, like even the stones know better than to listen. The sky hangs low and heavy, dusk smearing the alleys with bruised light. My shoulders ache from more than just walking.
Kragna’s quiet—but not the good kind. He’s coiled, jaw tight under that hood. I catch the edge of his glare in a puddle we pass, stormcloud eyes burning holes in the reflection like he could erase the whole damn city just by scowling hard enough.
By the time we hit the inn’s rotting steps, his silence feels like a scream.
He shuts the door behind us with more force than necessary. The latch clatters. Dust shivers from the rafters. I drop my satchel by the chair, unstrap the knives at my hips, and stretch my neck until something pops.
He still hasn’t said a word.
“You gonna explode or keep brooding like a moody cathedral statue?” I ask, peeling off my coat.
Kragna turns slowly. There’s a tightness in his eyes I’ve only seen once or twice—right before he kills something. But he’s not looking at a threat. He’s looking at me.
“You didn’t tell me,” he says.
I blink. “Didn’t tell you what?”
“Everything.” His voice is rough, low, like gravel soaked in old blood. “The danger. How bad it really is. You walked me through Lowtown like it was a tour, River. Like we were sightseeing while your ghost bled in the corners.”
I scoff. “And what? You want me to spell it all out for you? Would that make you feel better?”
“Yes.”
That stops me.
He steps forward, shrugging off his hood. His hair’s a mess, face shadowed from the dim lamplight. But those eyes—fuck, those eyes burn.
“Because every time you keep me in the dark, it means you’re planning to go down alone.”
I stare at him. “Maybe I am.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Is it?”
“You think I followed you here to watch you die?”
I bite the inside of my cheek, tasting copper. My fists ball at my sides. “You think this is about dying? This is about not dragging you down with me.”
He laughs—harsh and bitter. “Too late for that, love.”
The word shouldn’t hit the way it does.
I don’t move. Can’t.
He’s in front of me now, chest rising hard, breath warm where it hits my cheek. I smell the city on him—ash and sweat and something deep beneath, something that smells like the forests we slept under weeks ago. Freedom and war.
“You think I don’t see it?” he growls. “The way you flinch when someone looks too long. The way you freeze when a brand shows up. You live every second like a trap’s about to spring.”
“Because it is!” I snap.
He reels like I struck him, but I keep going.
“This city doesn’t forget. Doesn’t forgive.
It swallows girls like me and spits out bones.
You think your size protects you? That grin?
That snarl? They’ll come for you, Kragna.
Same way they came for me. And if they think we matter—if they think we could matter—they’ll tear out our throats and wear them like jewelry. ”
I’m breathing hard now, too close, too raw.
He doesn’t back down.
“Then let them try,” he says, voice ragged. “I’d burn this place to ash before I let it take you again.”
There’s a silence. A long, aching stillness between us.
And then he reaches for me.
Not rough. Not forceful.
Just... there.
His hand cups my jaw like it might break if he grips too hard, thumb brushing over the corner of my mouth. My breath stutters.
“You think I can’t see it,” he murmurs, “but I’ve seen you, River. The real you. The fire under the scar tissue. The way you keep walking even with ghosts on your heels.”
I should push him away.
I don’t.
His mouth finds mine—hot and fierce and aching.
It’s not gentle. It’s not sweet. It’s every unsaid word, every sharp-edged feeling we’ve buried under survival.
His lips crush into mine like we’re trying to erase the last year, the last ten years.
I press back with everything I’ve got, arms winding around his neck, fingers digging into his hair.
It’s heat and breath and teeth. It’s the sound he makes when I bite his lip and the growl that escapes when I tug him closer. It’s the way our bodies crash together, all hips and hands and desperation.
And then I stop.
Just for a second. Just enough.
“No,” I whisper against his mouth. “Not here.”
His breath stutters.
“Not yet,” I add, stepping back. “Not in this place. Not in this city full of chains and ghosts.”
He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t push.
Just stands there, breathing hard, staring at me like I’m the only light in a goddamn pit.
I lick my lips. They taste like him.
“We have a meeting tomorrow,” I say, voice hoarse. “And if we live through it... maybe then.”
His grin is slow. Sharp. But there’s warmth in it, too. Something I can’t name yet.
“Then I’ll wait.”