Chapter 29
The God of War is joining us on a murder run. Great. Mysterious divine tagalongs—very reassuring for my first patricide.
Caius doesn't explain. He just falls into step beside Koshin as we leave the compound, his bulk filling the corridor, and says, "I'm coming."
Koshin doesn't argue. Neither does Renan. So I guess that's happening now. Let's make patricide a group activity.
"Does he do this often?" I keep my voice low. "Insert himself into other people's family trauma?"
"He does what he wants." Koshin's hand brushes my lower back, light and brief. "Like everyone else in this city."
"Comforting."
We move through the tunnels, Discord's underground quiet tonight, cleared out ahead of us. Renan walks point, checking corners, and Caius strides behind us with the confidence of someone who assumes any threat will simply announce itself before dying.
My hand keeps drifting to the gun at my thigh. I can't see the green detailing in this light, but I know it's there anyway.
We surface three blocks from House Solyne. The night air hits my face, cool and damp, and my stomach clenches because I know these streets.
That alley—I hid there once, when I was twelve, after he threw a glass at my head.
Crouched behind the bins for an hour before I realized no one was coming to find me.
Not because they couldn't. Because they didn't bother.
The tavern on the corner was where I bribed a courier to send a letter to Seris that never arrived.
The fountain at the intersection is where my mother used to bring us, before she got too sick to walk.
Great. Memory lane. My favorite place to visit while armed.
"I'll take the east entrance." Koshin's voice pulls me back. "The father."
"I'll take Seris." Steady. Good. "Her room is on the second floor, northwest corner. Window faces the garden."
"I'll hold the perimeter." Caius sounds bored. "If anyone runs, they meet me."
I don't ask what meet me means.
"Once you have her," Koshin says, "meet me with your father."
"Fine."
We split.
The east wall of House Solyne has the same loose stone it did when I was sixteen and climbing out after curfew. My fingers find the crack without thinking, and I haul myself up.
Arms burning. Ribs protesting. I used to do this drunk at midnight and now my body wants to revolt. Getting sold to a god was supposed to come with some kind of upgrade, but apparently I just get the same shitty joints and a fancier wardrobe.
The garden below is empty—no guards at the servant entrance, no lights in the lower windows.
I drop into the garden, the grass soft under my boots, and crouch to listen. Silence. Nothing but my own breathing and the distant sound of the city beyond the walls. I move.
The servant door isn't locked. It's never locked—my father thinks his staff loves him, the fucking idiot—and I slip inside without a sound.
The kitchen is dark and smells the same as it always did: bread and ash and the sharp bite of lye soap. I used to steal pastries from the counter when the cook wasn't looking, back before I figured out that kindness in this house always came with a price tag. The doorway to the hall is ahead.
The back stairs. Third step creaks, seventh is loose, avoid both. My feet know this; they step wide before I think about it.
Second floor. The corridor stretches ahead, doors closed on both sides. Seris is in the northwest corner, and I move toward it with the floorboards silent under my weight. Thick rugs, expensive, bought with money my father didn't have. Everything in this house is a lie propped up by other lies.
Her door is closed with no light underneath. I press my ear to the wood and listen for breathing, for footsteps, for the soft exhale that means someone's awake and pretending not to be.
Quiet.
I turn the handle.
The room is dark, bed against the far wall, curtains drawn. In the middle of the mattress, a small shape curled tight—knees to chest, arms wrapped around herself. I know that position. I slept like that for years.
Seris.
I cross to the bed in three steps and shake her shoulder gently. "Seris. Wake up."
She startles. I feel it—the full-body flinch, the sharp inhale, hands come up to protect her face.
"It's me." My voice cracks.
"It's Iowyn. I'm here."
Her eyes find mine in the dark, wide and wet. "Iowyn?"
"Yeah." I'm already pulling her up, checking her face, her arms. Bruises under her nightgown, blooming across her collarbone—yellow at the edges, purple at the center. New. He's been busy since the plaza. Took out his fear on the only target he had left.
My hands are shaking with rage now.
I'm going to kill him.
Not a thought. A fact.
"We have to go." I keep my voice low. "Right now. Can you walk?"
"I—yes. What's—"
"Later. Come on."
She doesn't argue, doesn't ask questions. Just takes my hand and follows.
I left her here.
I left and he did this.
But there's no room for that right now, so I shove it down and keep moving.
We slip into the corridor with her bare feet silent on the rugs. I keep her behind me, between my body and the wall, my eyes tracking the doors as we pass—closed, closed, closed—my ears straining for footsteps, breathing, the creak of a floorboard.
Third floor. The main bedchamber. Koshin.
The stairs are wide here, grand, made for displays of wealth my father doesn't have anymore. I take them two at a time with Seris's hand tight in mine, and when we reach the top, the door to my father's room is already open.
Yellow light spills into the hallway. Candles. The smell of copper underneath.
I stop at the threshold.
My father.
His arms are stretched wide, wrists bound to the bedposts with what looks like curtain cord—strangled by his own décor.
His shirt is torn open and his face is a mess: one eye swollen shut, lip split, blood smeared across his chin and dripping onto the carpet he always yelled at us for staining.
He's breathing, ragged and wet, and one good eye is fixed on the figure crouched in front of him.
Koshin.
He looks up when I enter. His eyes have gone silver and there's blood on his knuckles.
"You found her."
"Yeah."
"Good." He rises and steps back, leaving space between himself and my father. Space for me.
My father's head turns. One eye lands on me and I watch him try to rearrange his face into something fatherly, something sympathetic. He never could do it right. The mask always slipped.
"Iowyn." His voice is wrong—thready, desperate. "Iowyn, please. You're my daughter. My blood. We're family, you can't—"
I step forward.
The gun is in my hand. I don't remember drawing it.
He used to hit me for less than this—for speaking out of turn, for looking at him wrong, for existing in a way that inconvenienced him. Now I'm standing in his bedroom with a gun pointed at his face and he wants to talk about family.
"The bruises on Seris." My voice doesn't shake. "Are they from tonight, or yesterday?"
He doesn't answer. His eye flicks to her, behind me, and back.
"Father."
"She—she needed discipline, you know how she gets—"
"I do." I raise the gun and the sight lines up with his face. "I know exactly how she gets. How we both got."
"Iowyn, please. I was trying to protect you, both of you. Everything I did—"
I pull the trigger.
The gun kicks against my palm. The sound fills the room, fills my skull, and his head snaps back. Blood on the carpet. Blood on the wall. His body slumps against the bedpost and stays there.
He's dead.
One shot.
That's all it took.
All those years of flinching and it only took one shot to make it stop.
My ears are ringing and the room smells like copper and smoke.
Seris screams.
The sound rips through the ringing, high and raw, and I spin toward her—but Caius is already there. When did he—it doesn't matter. He scoops Seris against his chest with one hand covering her mouth to muffle the sound. She thrashes and he holds her still, his eyes meeting mine over her head.
"Move." Calm. Command voice. "Now."
The scream alerted the house, if not the gun shot. I can hear it already—footsteps, shouting, doors slamming open below us.
Koshin's hand closes on my arm, his grip iron. "Iowyn. We go."
My father's blood is spreading across the carpet, staining it.
I smile.
The gun is still in my hand. My hands aren't shaking—they shook when I saw Seris's bruises, but they're steady now.
"Now."
We go.
Koshin pulls me toward the window—not the door, the window—and throws it open. Cold air rushes in. The roof slopes below us, tiles slick with dew.
"Can you climb?"
I'm already swinging my leg over the sill. "I got in, didn't I?"
The drop hits my knees. I roll, find my footing, and scramble across the tiles with Koshin landing in a crouch behind me. Ahead, Caius is already halfway down the drainpipe with Seris tucked against his chest. She's stopped screaming, which is either good or very bad.
Shouting below. Guards finally mobilizing.
Too late.
Too fucking late.
We hit the garden running. The wall is ahead—the same wall I climbed twenty minutes ago—and Caius goes over first with Seris still in his arms, then Koshin, then me. Palms scraping stone, arms screaming. I'm going to feel this tomorrow, assuming I live until tomorrow, assuming any of us do.
Up. Over. Down.
The alley on the other side is empty. Renan emerges from the shadows, already moving toward the tunnel entrance.
"Clean?"
"Clean enough." Koshin's voice is tight. "Go."
We run.
The city blurs around me—streets I used to know, passages I never mapped, Renan leading us through turns I can't track. Seris is crying against Caius's shoulder, muffled sobs that shake her whole body.
I killed him.
I killed my father. He begged and I killed him anyway—one shot, and the same hands that used to shake when he raised his voice just put a bullet through his skull.
It felt good.
He deserved worse. He deserved what Koshin did to him first and then the bullet and then whatever comes after. If there's a hell, I hope it's full of daughters he can't hit back.
The tunnel entrance opens ahead and we pour inside, into the dark, into Discord's underground. Renan pulls the grate closed behind us and the city disappears.
Lungs burning. Pulse hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
I'm alive.
Seris is alive.
My father is dead on his bedroom floor.
Best night I've had in years.
Caius stops and sets Seris on her feet, keeping one hand on her shoulder to steady her. She's still crying, quieter now, her face blotched and wet in the dim light.
She looks at me.
I look at her.
"He's dead." The words sound far away. "He can't hurt you anymore."
She doesn't answer.
That's fair.
I don't know what I'd say either.
Koshin's hand finds my hip, warm and steady. "We need to keep moving." His voice is low, just for me. "Can you?"
I look down at the gun still clutched in my hand. Blood on the barrel. His blood.
I feel tired.
Wrung out.
Empty in a way that might be relief or might be something else entirely.
"Yeah." I slide the gun back into the holster and my fingers are steady. "I can."
We keep moving. Seris stumbles after us with Caius keeping pace beside her, Koshin's hand on my hip guiding me through the dark, Renan leading the way. Behind us, House Solyne is waking up to a dead patriarch and a missing heir.
I keep walking.