Chapter 9
Kairis is still warm on the floor behind me and I don't look back.
Iowyn's head rests against my shoulder, her body slack, her breathing too thin, and I adjust my grip so the arm under her knees takes more weight, so the pressure eases off her ribs.
She makes no sound. Her face is turned into my chest, dried blood on her lip, fresh bruises darkening across her cheekbone and throat where his fingers pressed.
I can see the marks. Four points on one side, thumb on the other.
I want to put my mouth there and bite until the shape of my teeth replaces his grip.
I want to taste the bruise and feel her pulse jump under my tongue.
I keep walking.
Renan fills the doorway ahead, pistol already holstered, eyes moving over Iowyn once before they find mine. He doesn't ask. He reads the situation the way he reads everything—fast, complete, already three steps ahead. His mouth curves at one corner..
"You look happy," he says.
"He screamed."
"I heard." Renan steps aside to let me through. "The gurgling at the end was a nice touch. Very theatrical."
"I wasn't trying to be theatrical."
"I know. That's what makes it art."
I step over broken wood and gold fragments and keep moving. Iowyn shifts in my arms, a small involuntary motion, and her forehead presses harder against my collarbone. Her breath catches. Even unconscious, her body knows it hurts to breathe.
The corridor is chaos behind us—smoke rolling through the lower hall, shouts cutting off into silence, the wet thud of bodies hitting stone.
My people work fast. Clean. Coin's guards didn't expect an assault from below, and by the time they understood what was happening, they were already bleeding out on their pristine marble floors.
A thread flickers in my peripheral vision.
Someone lying. Dying and lying at the same time, a guard thirty feet back choking on his own blood while he tries to pray to a god who won't answer.
The thread pulses gray-yellow, rot at the center, and I watch it without meaning to watch it.
His faith is a lie. He doesn't believe. He's just scared and saying the words he was taught to say.
Iowyn's hair brushes my jaw.
The thread disappears.
"You're bleeding," Renan says, falling into step beside me.
I look at my hand. Knuckles split. Bone visible through the skin on the middle finger. I don't remember it happening.
"Her throat is bruised," I say instead of answering.
"I see that."
"Four fingers. Thumb on the trachea. He held her for—" I calculate from the coloring, the spread, the depth of the marks. "Twelve seconds. Maybe fifteen. Long enough to cut off air completely."
"Koshin."
"Her ribs are damaged. Left side. She's breathing shallow to compensate. Every inhale costs her." My voice sounds wrong. Too flat. Too calm. "I want to find out if he had family. I want to send them pieces."
"He's already dead."
"I know. I want to dig him up."
Renan's hand touches my shoulder. Light. Brief. Grounding.
"She's breathing," he says. "Focus on that."
I blink. The corridor snaps back into focus.
Staff are flattened against the walls, maids and runners and a half-god in Coin livery who presses his back to the stone and stares at his own feet.
I don't remember the last twenty steps. I don't know when we passed the intersection.
My body carried her while my mind went somewhere else, and that's dangerous, that's the fracture showing, but I can't—
Her pulse flutters against my ribs where her chest presses to mine.
Alive. She's alive. Focus on that.
"West stair's clear," Renan says, steering me with his presence more than his touch. "We've got maybe four minutes before Coin figures out what happened. Five if they're as stupid as they look."
"They're stupider."
"Bold assumption."
"His guards tried to fight." I adjust Iowyn's weight, freeing one arm to gesture vaguely behind us.
"They saw me. They knew what I was. They tried anyway.
" A sound escapes me—not quite a laugh, too sharp at the edges.
"I saw eleven threads in that hallway. Eleven different lies.
One of them was telling himself I wasn't really there.
That's optimism. That's the kind of thinking that gets a man's spine removed through his stomach. "
Renan's eyebrow lifts. "Did you remove his spine through his stomach?"
"No. I was carrying her. Had to improvise."
"How'd he die?"
"Wall. Face. Repeatedly."
"Classic."
The service stairwell opens ahead—narrow, stone steps spiraling down into darkness.
I take the turn without slowing and Iowyn's weight shifts, her head rolling, and the scent hits me before I can brace for it.
Blood and sweat and fear and underneath all of it, underneath the violence and the terror, something that isn't a lie.
Something that makes the constant grinding noise in my skull go soft and still.
I want to bury my face in her hair and just breathe. Rub myself against her until her scent is the only thing left on my skin. My cock hardens against my thigh and I ignore it because there's nothing else to do.
She's unconscious and injured and my body wants her anyway.
That's the truth of it.
Crude.
Honest.
Mine.
"You're doing that thing," Renan says from behind me.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go quiet and I have to guess whether you're plotting murder or having a stroke."
"Murder."
"Good. Strokes are predictable."
"Renan."
"What."
"If anyone looks at her too long when we get back—"
"I'll handle it."
"I mean anyone. Staff. Guards. The fucking healer if their eyes linger—"
"Koshin." His voice shifts. Darker. Amused. "I know. You think I don't know? You've been holding her the same way you hold that bone-blade. Like someone might try to take her. Like you'd kill everyone in the room if they reached for her."
I stop walking.
The stairwell goes silent around us. Just her breathing. Just my heartbeat. Just the water dripping somewhere far below.
"I would," I say. Not a threat. A fact. "I would kill everyone in the room."
Renan moves past me, takes the next stairs, turns to look back. His expression is something I can't read—not concern, not judgment, something closer to satisfaction.
"Good," he says. "About time you gave a shit about something… Other than me of course."
I start walking again. The darkness swallows us as the stairwell bottoms out, and I hear Renan's low laugh echo off the walls, and it sounds right.
It sounds like we're both exactly where we should be—him finding this funny, me finding nothing funny at all, both of us moving through the dark toward the same violent future.
The hidden door is ahead. Stone that looks like stone until you know where to press. I adjust Iowyn's weight, freeing one hand, and my palm hits the release mechanism. Metal groans inside the wall. The seam splits.
Cold air pours through, and the thread-sight quiets. Fewer people down here. Fewer lies. The relief is physical—pressure behind my eyes easing, the constant scraping noise in my skull dimming to something I can ignore.
Her silence still holds. Even unconscious, she's the quietest thing I've ever touched.
"Ladies first," Renan says.
"Fuck off."
"Just trying to be chivalrous."
"You don't know what that word means."
"Neither do you."
I duck through the opening with Iowyn pressed to my chest, and the air turns damp and heavy, thick with mineral and old water and the particular stillness of a place no one has found for centuries.
The tunnels run deep under Arkenhold—older than the Concord, older than the Houses, cut into the stone by hands that stopped existing before my imprisonment.
I know every inch of them. I walked them blind during the years when the thread-sight was too loud and I needed somewhere without lies.
I walked them until my feet bled and the quiet became bearable.
She'd like it here. The thought surfaces and I don't push it away. She'd like the honesty of stone.
My boots hit wet rock and Iowyn's fingers curl against my coat. Small movement. Involuntary. But her hand tightens in the fabric and doesn't let go, and somewhere in my chest something responds to that grip.
"Koshin." Renan's voice. Sharp. "You're muttering."
I stop. Look at him. "Was I?"
"Numbers. You were counting something."
"I don't remember."
"Yeah." His eyes track over my face. "I know."
Three of my elites materialize from the shadows ahead—silent, armed, faces professionally blank.
They see me carrying her and they don't ask, but their threads shift.
Curiosity. Calculation. One of them is lying to himself about why he joined Discord, some pretty story about freedom and truth, and the lie grates against my awareness until I want to reach into his skull and rip it out.
I don't. I keep walking. Iowyn's weight is good in my arms.
"Path's clear to the second gate," the closest elite says. "Two Coin patrols came down from the service wing. They're dead."
"How?"
"Quick. Clean."
I adjust my grip on Iowyn. Her head falls more securely against my shoulder. "Next time, make it hurt. Leave a message."
"Move," Renan says behind me, and the elites scatter into formation—two ahead, one behind, flanking without needing instruction.
I keep walking. Iowyn's breath catches and releases, catches and releases, and I time my steps to the rhythm of her lungs without meaning to.
Her body is trying to stabilize. Her ribs are damaged but not broken.
Her throat will heal. The split lip will heal.
Everything will heal, and she'll wake up in my bed with my scent on her skin and she'll remember that she didn't break.
She stood in that room with blood on her mouth and looked at Kairis like he was nothing, like his hands on her throat were an inconvenience and not a threat, like she'd already decided he wasn't worth her fear.
I want to fuck that defiance out of her.