Chapter 12 Kragna
KRAGNA
Night coats the city like soot—thick, clinging, and restless. The kind of dark that smells like old secrets and rat piss. I hate cities.
Especially this one.
River leads us through a crooked lane hemmed in by crumbling brick and rusted gates. Her steps are silent, precise, like she’s counting each stone beneath her boots. I watch the tension in her shoulders—not fear, not exactly. Focus. The kind born of knowing too much about how cities bleed.
I keep close, but not too close. The air between us still hums with everything we didn’t say last night. Everything we did. My lips remember hers too well. So does the rest of me.
She stops at an old temple garden—if you can call it that. The stone arch is half-collapsed, choked with ivy and soot. Inside, statues of forgotten gods crouch beneath thorny vines. A fountain gurgles softly, its water green with time.
She steps through the arch first. I follow.
We’re not alone.
A woman stands in the moonlight like she owns it. Helmet tucked under one arm, sword gleaming at her hip. Tall. Straight-backed. Hair pulled into a braid so tight it could cut. Not a speck of rust on her armor.
She doesn’t move as we enter—just watches. And waits.
River halts a few feet away.
“Skeela,” she says.
“River.”
Their voices meet like two blades tested for sharpness.
I size her up while they measure each other. She’s not what I expected. I thought someone dirty. Rough. Someone who crawled out of the gutter with blood on her teeth and a dagger in her boot.
But this woman—Skeela—she’s sharp in a different way. Refined. Composed. The kind of predator that doesn’t need to growl to show her fangs.
Her eyes flick to me. Linger. Hard.
“Your kind don’t usually walk free in Kyrdonis,” she mutters.
I grin. Wide. Sharp.
“I don’t walk,” I say. “I hunt.”
That earns me a twitch at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile.
She looks back to River. “This him, then?”
River nods. “The one I told you about.”
“Taller than I pictured.”
“Louder, too.”
I chuckle. “You both flatter me.”
Skeela studies me again. This time slower. Like she’s checking for cracks. Weakness. I let her look. Let her see the scar on my jaw, the way my knuckles rest easy near the blade strapped to my thigh.
Let her wonder what I’d do if she drew steel.
She doesn’t. But her hand never strays far from her hilt.
“Why’d you bring him?” she asks.
“Because I don’t trust you,” River replies.
Skeela nods once. Like that was the right answer.
She steps closer to the fountain and rests her helmet on the rim. Moonlight hits the side of her face, catches a silver streak through her braid. She’s not young. But there’s not a flicker of softness in her—just discipline carved into flesh and bone.
“Laertiez’s men are stretched thin,” she says, voice crisp. “But not blind. You being here… it’s already stirred the pot.”
“Let it boil,” River says.
Skeela raises an eyebrow. “Careful. It’s not just your skin that’ll blister.”
She tosses a small pouch onto the moss-covered stone beside her. It jingles softly—metal against metal.
“Bribes,” she explains. “To keep certain guards from talking too fast.”
River steps forward, opens the pouch. Gold. Not much, but enough to make a coward think twice.
“Why?” she asks. “Why help us?”
Skeela lifts her chin. “Because I’m tired of licking the boots of men I could gut in my sleep.”
My brows lift. Well, damn.
River studies her. “So this is ambition.”
Skeela nods. “Call it what it is. I want Laertiez out. You want change. We’re not enemies—yet.”
She glances my way again. “But he’s a wild card. That worries me.”
“Good,” I say.
This time, she actually smiles.
“Fine. I can work with dangerous.”
River tucks the pouch into her coat. “Where and when?”
Skeela turns. Points to the far edge of the garden, where the wall crumbles into an alley.
“Tomorrow night. Same time. West gate of the barracks. I’ll have two guards with me. You’ll have one shot to hear what I have planned. After that…”
Her gaze hardens. “You’re either allies or ashes.”
River nods.
Skeela doesn’t say goodbye. Just picks up her helmet, slips it under her arm, and disappears into the shadows like she was never there.
We’re alone again.
“She’s colder than I expected,” River says.
I hum. “I like her.”
“Of course you do.”
“She’s got fire under the frost.”
“She’s dangerous.”
“So are you.”
She doesn’t argue.
I look down at her, watch the way moonlight slips over her cheekbones, catches in her lashes.
“She’s scared of me,” I murmur.
River looks up. “You unsettle people. It’s what you do.”
“Do I unsettle you?”
She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t need to.
River turns to me fully now. Arms crossed. Eyes narrowed.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Do we trust her?”
That word. Trust. It hangs in the air like a blade no one wants to claim.
I shift my weight, crack the stiffness out of my neck. “Trust is for poets and fools,” I say. “But ambition? That we can predict.”
River snorts. “You’re such a romantic.”
“I am. Just not the pretty kind.”
She doesn’t laugh, but her mouth quirks at the corner, and gods help me, I want to kiss that smirk off her face again. I want to pull her close in this forgotten garden, press her into the ivy, and devour every breath she hasn’t dared take around me.
But I don’t.
I just look at her.
She meets my gaze for a second too long, then turns away, pretending to study a vine-choked statue like it’s suddenly interesting.
“We should get back before the streets wake up,” she mutters.
I grunt in agreement, and we slip back into the winding bones of the city, silent as thieves.
The inn stinks of mildew and old soup. The floorboards wheeze with every step. I can hear a couple fighting upstairs—something about a missing ring and a broken promise. Down the hall, someone’s sobbing through the walls. The city never sleeps. It just suffers quieter after midnight.
River shrugs out of her coat and tosses it on the chair. She’s all angles and shadow in the low lantern light. Her back to me, her shoulders tight again. I can almost hear the gears grinding in her head.
She doesn’t speak. Just moves to the bed, sits on the edge, starts pulling off her boots.
I stay by the door a moment longer than necessary. Watching her. Wanting her. Afraid of what happens if I act on it.
Because she doesn’t flinch when I look at her like this. Doesn’t pretend she doesn’t notice. She lets me see. And that’s the worst part.
She gets under my skin without even trying.
I finally kick off my own boots and move to the other side of the bed. We lie like strangers with shared secrets—backs turned, breaths uneven, skin prickling with awareness.
I listen to her breathing slow. Not sleep yet, but close.
The room is dark, save for the sliver of lantern glow leaking under the door. I smell dust and oil and the faintest trace of her on the sheets—salt, steel, lilac.
And something warmer. Something I shouldn’t be able to name.
I don’t touch her. Not even an inch. But gods, I want to.
My fingers itch for her. My body remembers every stolen moment, every look that lasted too long. The taste of her mouth still clings to mine like sin.
I wonder what she’d do if I reached out now.
Would she turn to me? Pull me in? Let the dam break?
Or would she look at me with that same steel in her spine, that same fire she carries like a torch, and tell me no again?
Not here. Not yet.
I close my eyes, trying to banish the heat crawling through me. But sleep doesn’t come.
Only her breathing. Steady. Present. Alive beside me.
Already, I can’t imagine my life without hearing it.