Chapter 27
The High Priest steps forward.
His hands are shaking and his face is drained pale, but he steps forward because Koshin told him to and because the alternative is—
Koshin moves. Not a lunge, not a dramatic strike. Just movement, fast, and then there's a sound—wet, final—and the High Priest is on the ground with his throat opened and blood pooling under him, spreading across the stone in a dark mirror of his white robes.
I blink. That's—he just—
The crowd screams. Not all at once. It starts at the edges, ripples inward, and then everyone is moving, shoving, pressing against each other in that animal panic of get away get away get away.
Faith's guards scatter. Acolytes trip over their own feet trying to run.
The platform where the witness is still bound, still crying, still alive because we got here in time—it becomes an island in the chaos.
And Koshin laughs.
It starts quiet, conversational, and then it builds—rising, cracking open into something unhinged, his head thrown back and his silver eyes bright and his hands still dripping blood. He laughs and laughs and the body at his feet keeps leaking onto the stone.
My stomach drops. Then—no. Lower. Hotter.
Fuck.
He's covered in blood. Arterial spray on his coat, his hands, the edge of his jaw. The Mad God earning his title in viscera. And I'm standing here with my thighs pressed together because this—this unhinged, blood-soaked, genuinely fucking feral display—is what does it for me.
I should probably talk to someone about that. If I knew anyone who wouldn't have me committed.
Renan hasn't moved. He's watching the crowd with his head tilted, that little half-smile on his face, entirely unbothered by the corpse or the chaos or the god cackling in the middle of it. Of course he's unbothered. This is probably a slow Tuesday for Discord.
The laughter stops. Koshin's head snaps down, that too-wide smile still fixed on his face, silver eyes scanning the plaza. Blood on his hands. Blood on his sleeves. Blood soaking into the hem of his coat.
I want to lick it off him.
Stop. There's a body. We're in public. Politics first, then you can think about climbing the murder god.
The crowd is still running. Faith is still scattering. And someone needs to say something before this turns into a full riot.
I step forward. I just watched a man die. I just watched Koshin kill a man, open his throat in one motion and laugh about it, and I'm wet. Actually wet. Standing in a plaza that smells like copper and panic.
Add it to the list of things wrong with me.
"Faith is dissolved."
My voice carries. I don't know how. I don't know where I'm finding the air or the volume or the fucking audacity to stand here with blood pooling four feet away and declare a House dead, but the words come out and they sound steady.
That's new.
Usually my voice is the first thing to betray me.
"The crimes have been exposed." I raise my voice over the screaming, over the running, over the chaos. "Faith ordered the attack on Discord. Faith killed thirty-seven people. Faith tried to silence the survivors. And now Faith is done."
A guard—young, terrified, still holding a weapon he clearly doesn't know what to do with—stops running and stares at me.
"Anyone who wants to fight about it can take it up with Discord." I gesture at Koshin without looking at him. Don't look at the blood. Don't look at the body. Don't look at the way his chest is heaving or the way his eyes are completely silver or the way he's watching you with that hungry—
Focus.
"Anyone who wants to walk away—walk away. It's over."
The guard drops his weapon and runs.
Coin's delegation hasn't moved. They're still in their corner of the plaza, watching with those ledger-counting faces, figuring out how this changes their margins and their leverage and their carefully maintained neutrality.
One of them is taking notes. Actually taking notes, stylus moving on parchment while chaos swirls around him.
I'd be impressed if I didn't want to shove that stylus somewhere uncomfortable.
"The witness lives." I point at the platform where the crying man is still bound. "Someone cut him loose. Now."
No one argues. A woman—Discord, one of ours, I recognize her from the Hollow—pushes through the thinning crowd and starts working at the ropes.
The plaza is emptying. Faith's people are gone, fled, scattered, broken apart so fast it's almost impressive.
Centuries of divine authority dismantled in about ninety seconds.
The High Priest's blood is still spreading, still shining red against the grey stone, and his followers are already pretending they never knew him.
I should feel triumph. Vindication. Something heroic. Instead I'm wondering how long until I can get Koshin alone.
Priorities firmly in order, as always.
"Iowyn."
My father's voice cuts through the noise, and I turn to face him.
He's standing at the edge of the plaza near Coin's delegation, and his face is pure disgust.
Cold, familiar disgust.
The look he used to give me when I said something that embarrassed him in front of important people. The look that usually came before—
Don't flinch.
Don't flinch.
You're not that girl anymore.
"This is what you've become." He doesn't bother to lower his voice. The people still in the plaza—survivors, Coin observers, the woman cutting the witness free—they all hear him.
He wants them to hear.
"Standing with murderers. Covered in someone else's blood. Declaring yourself authority while bodies cool at your feet."
I'm not covered in blood. The blood is on Koshin, not me. But accuracy isn't the point. It never was with him.
"You are no daughter of mine."
Louder now.
Performing.
This is for the audience.
"House Solyne denounces you. Your name will be struck from our records. You are disgraced, disowned, finished—"
"Okay."
The word comes out flat. Bored.
His mouth snaps shut.
"You sold me to cover your gambling debts and now you're giving speeches about disgrace? I'm not crying over it. Find a different audience."
His face goes purple. The color that means he's about to—
Seris.
She's behind him, partly hidden by his body. She still won't look at me, her eyes fixed on the ground, her shoulders hunched inward, and—
Bruising. Fresh bruising on her jaw. On her neck. Visible even from here, even in the chaos, dark marks against her pale skin.
My ears go hollow. Everything else—the blood, the body, the crowd, my father's performance—it all goes grey and distant. There's only the bruises. Only the purple-green marks on my sister's face. Only the way she's standing, hunched and small, trying to disappear.
He hit her. I'm not there to take it anymore, so he hit her.
I'm going to kill him.
The thought lands clean and simple. No heat behind it. No rage. Just a fact, settling into my bones the way truth always does. The sky is blue. Water is wet. I am going to open my father's throat and watch him bleed out on the stones.
"We're leaving." My father grabs Seris's arm and she flinches—flinches, my sister flinches, she never used to flinch because I was the one who— "This family has been humiliated enough."
Movement behind me. Koshin. I feel him coming before I see him, that pressure in the air, that sense of something heavy and wrong shifting closer, and I know—I know—what he's about to do.
I turn and step in front of him. My hand lands on his chest.
He stops.
Heat. Immediate, under my palm. His heart slamming against my fingers, fast and uneven, the blood on his coat wet and warm through the fabric.
He was going to kill my father.
Right here.
Right now.
Open his throat and add another body to the stone.
And I stopped him. Me. One hand and he just—stopped.
My pulse is in my throat.
Between my legs.
Everywhere.
"Not here." My voice comes out rough. My hand is pressing harder against him than it needs to. I can feel every breath he takes. "Not now."
Koshin's eyes drop to me. He's still wound up from the kill, still riding the high of violence and chaos and a House collapsing under his hands. Still vibrating with the need to break something else.
He looks at me with my hand on his chest and I watch him come back into himself. Watch the frenzy settle. Watch his pupils shrink down to something almost normal.
He heard me.
The power of that. The sheer insane power of it—that I can put my palm on his chest and bring a god—no, a Titan, back from the edge.
That he lets me.
That he wants to let me.
I'm so wet it's uncomfortable.
"Tonight." I keep my hand where it is. I don't want to move it. "We take Seris tonight. He doesn't get to keep her."
Koshin's head tilts at that wrong angle. His smile shifts, losing the manic edge, finding something sharper. "He dies."
Not a question. Not asking permission. Just—he dies.
My stomach clenches. The good way.
"He dies." I match his certainty. "But not here. Not public. Not where it becomes a spectacle for Coin to leverage."
Behind us, my father is retreating, pulling Seris with him. Every instinct screams stop him, don't let him take her, she's not safe—
Tonight.
Koshin's hand comes up. His fingers wrap around my wrist—not pulling my hand away, just holding. Contact. His thumb presses against my pulse point and I know he can feel how fast my heart is going. I know he knows exactly what this is doing to me.
His smile curls wider.
Bastard.
"The kill is mine." The words come out before I've finished thinking them. "Not yours. Mine."
He goes still.
I've surprised him.
Good.
I've surprised myself.
But I mean it. He's my father. He sold me. He beat me. And now he's hitting Seris because I'm not there to absorb it anymore.
I left, and she paid for it. So this is mine.
Koshin studies me for a long moment—that tilted head, those silver eyes, blood drying on his hands. The Mad God of Discord covered in proof of what he is, standing in the wreckage of the House he just destroyed, listening to me claim a murder.
He should talk me out of it. Tell me I don't have it in me. Offer to do it himself because I'm fragile, breakable, mortal.
Instead, he reaches into his coat and pulls out a folded document. Old parchment, formal seal, writing I recognize even from here because I've seen it before. Because I've held it before.
The Solyne Compact. The contract that sold me to Discord. The debt, the terms, the signature that made me property. All of it, folded neat and clean, held out to me in a bloodstained hand.
"Yours." No ceremony. No explanation. Just the word. "To use as you want."
I take it. The parchment is warm from his body, light in my hand. It doesn't feel heavy enough for what it is—the piece of paper that started all of this, the signature that traded my life for debt relief.
Now it's mine.
I want to kiss him. Right here, in front of the corpse and the fleeing faithful and the Coin observers taking their little notes. I want to grab his bloody coat and pull him down and taste whatever madness is still on his tongue.
So I do.
I fist my hand in his coat and yank him down and his mouth meets mine and—
Oh.
He tastes like violence. Like chaos. Like the laugh that cracked open in this plaza while a body leaked at his feet.
His hands are in my hair, blood-wet and warm, tilting my head back so he can take more, and I let him.
I open for him and his tongue slides against mine and a sound comes out of me that I will absolutely deny later.
There's a body six feet away. There's blood soaking into the stone. There are Coin observers watching and Renan probably smirking and the entire fucking city in shambles around us—
I don't care.
I bite his lower lip and he growls into my mouth and his hands tighten in my hair and I'm pressed against him now, chest to chest, his blood smearing onto my clothes, onto my skin, copper and heat and him.
His hips pin me and I can feel how hard he is through his coat, through my dress, and my brain shorts out entirely.
More.
I want more.
He pulls back. Just enough to breathe. His forehead pressed to mine, his chest heaving, his eyes silver and blown and fixed on my mouth.
"We're leaving." His voice is wrecked.
"Seris—"
"Tonight." His thumb drags across my lower lip, smearing blood there. "Right now, I'm taking you somewhere I can finish this properly."
Oh.
"The plaza—"
"Renan." Koshin doesn't look away from me. "Handle it."
Somewhere behind us, Renan's voice: "Of course. Go fuck. I'll clean up your political massacre."
I should argue. There's work to do. There's a dead High Priest and a shattered House and a witness who needs protection and—
Koshin's hands drop to my hips, grip, and then I'm over his shoulder.
"What the—"
"You can walk or I can carry you." He's already moving, striding through the plaza with me slung over him like a prize. "I don't care which."
I should be furious. I should demand he put me down, make some sharp comment about being treated like luggage, assert my dignity in front of the remaining observers.
Instead I watch his ass as he walks and think about sinking my teeth into it.
My priorities are a disaster. I've made peace with that.