Chapter 2 Ivalys
TWO
IVALYS
Iforce myself to my feet. My legs shake but hold. My hand throbs but works. I lift my chin and meet the orc’s gaze with everything I have.
“Where is my brother?”
Something flickers in those heat-dark depths. Surprise, maybe. Or interest. Hard to tell with a face built for brutality.
“Gone.” He doesn’t soften it. Doesn’t try to make it easier. “Fled. That’s what debtors do when they know the collectors are coming.”
“And you’re the collector.”
He inclines his head. A fractional acknowledgment.
“Rathok Grimshaw. Enforcer for the Ledger Master.” His gaze drops to my hand, to the sigil still pulsing faintly on my palm. “And you’re tied to Gror Vane’s debt now. Blood calls to blood. The Ledger has marked you.”
My jaw clenches. “I didn’t sign anything.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He says it simply, factually. “You touched the contract. Skin to paper. Intent doesn’t factor. The magic has your scent now.”
“That’s—” I bite off the word unfair. What’s the point? The Ledger isn’t fair. Gravebind isn’t fair. Nothing in my entire life has been fair. “What happens now?”
Rathok studies me. Takes his time about it, tracking across my face, my posture, my clenched fists and shaking hands. Reading me the way I’ve been reading him—sorting threat from weakness, opportunity from obstacle.
I don’t look away.
Let him look. Let him see whatever he’s looking for. I’m not hiding from an orc in black leather, no matter how big his axes are.
“Protocol says I take you before the Ledger Master.” His voice drops half a register. “The debt transfers to next of kin when the original debtor can’t be found. That’s you.”
Ice floods my veins. “I don’t owe anything. I didn’t—”
“You touched the contract.” Flat. Final. “It doesn’t matter what you meant or what you knew. The magic bound you the moment your skin met that paper. Your brother’s debt is yours now. His failures. His consequences.”
His soul-claim.
I’ve heard stories about what happens to people dragged before the Ledger Master. The weighing. The judgment. The slow consumption of everything you are until nothing remains but a name scratched in the Ledger and a debt marked PAID.
My hand throbs. The sigil flares brighter for a heartbeat, responding to—what? My fear? My anger? Both?
“And if I refuse to go?”
Rathok’s expression doesn’t change. But something in the air does—a subtle shift, a pressure I feel against my skin. Threat. Warning. The promise of violence held in check by nothing but his choice to hold it.
“The Ledger doesn’t accept refusals.”
Every survival instinct I have—every lesson my mother drilled into me before she died—tells me to submit. Go quietly. Hope for mercy I won’t receive.
I laugh.
It’s not a nice sound. Sharp and brittle and edged with everything I’ve been holding back since I walked through that door. The orc’s brow furrows—actual expression, finally, confusion or irritation breaking through the stone mask.
“Something funny?”
“My brother is missing.” I hear my voice go cold, watch his reaction from somewhere outside myself.
“My brother signed his life away to something he didn’t understand, and now he’s running scared in tunnels full of dead things, and you—” I step forward, close the distance between us by half, refuse to flinch when his hand drifts toward one of those axes.
“You’re standing in his apartment telling me I don’t get to refuse. ”
Silence.
The orc doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Just watches me, weighing something I can’t see.
“You’re not afraid of me.”
“I’m terrified of you.” Truth. The kind I’ve learned not to hide because hiding it never helps.
“But fear doesn’t mean I’ll lie down and let you drag me off to have my soul weighed.
My brother needs help. I need to find him.
Whatever happens after that—” I spread my hands, the branded one and the unmarked one. “We’ll see.”
Rathok’s nostrils flare. His head tilts, barely perceptible, and something I can’t name crosses his brutalist features.
“You don’t smell like a debtor.”
The statement catches me off guard. “What?”
“Debtors’ families carry a particular scent.” He takes a step closer. Another. “Desperation. Complicity. The sour tang of shared guilt. You don’t have it.”
My heart hammers. “Because I didn’t know. I had nothing to do with—”
“I know.” Two words. Simple. Surprising. Something in his gaze shifts—not softening, not exactly, but… changing. “You smell like rage and grief and something cleaner. Righteousness, maybe. You genuinely didn’t know what your brother did.”
The idea staggers me. That this orc—this enforcer, this weapon of the Ledger Master—can smell my innocence. Can tell the difference between someone complicit in a crime and someone caught in its aftermath.
“Does that matter?”
A muscle jumps in his jaw. “It shouldn’t.”
But the way he says it—
The mark glows without warning.
Light erupts between us—blinding, burning, contract magic responding to something neither of us controlled. I cry out, stumbling backward, and feel Rathok’s hand close around my upper arm—steadying me, holding me upright when my legs try to buckle.
His grip is iron. Unyielding. Careful in a way that doesn’t match his size or his reputation.
The light fades. The magic settles. But when I look down at my arm—
Words.
Angular script climbs my forearm in livid lines, seared into my skin the same way the sigil was seared into my palm. Contract terms. Binding language. The Ledger rewriting itself in real time, changing its own rules, adapting to—
To what?
I read the words burned into my flesh:
COLLATERAL CLAIMED.
SEVEN DAYS TO SETTLEMENT.
I suck in a breath. “What is this?”
Rathok hasn’t released my arm. His massive hand still circles my bicep, and I realize I haven’t tried to shake him off.
I’m using his stability to anchor myself against the way the room spins.
His expression has gone strange. Closed off but intent. Staring at my marked arm with something that might be confusion, might be recognition, might be—
“I’ve never seen a contract shift like that.” The words come out rough. Uncertain. Not the voice of someone who knows exactly what he’s dealing with. “Never seen the Ledger change its own terms without the Ledger Master’s direct intervention.”
Cold washes through me. “And that means?”
His gaze lifts to mine. Holds. Something passes between us—not understanding, not yet, but the acknowledgment that we’re both standing in territory neither of us mapped.
“It means the Ledger Master is watching.” His grip on my arm tightens fractionally. “It means you matter more than a defaulted brother’s debt should warrant.”
I open my mouth to demand more—why, how, what is happening to me—and stop.
Because somewhere beneath the panic and the rage and the burning in my branded palm, I already know.
The dreams I’ve dismissed as imagination.
The way lies make my skin crawl. The instincts I’ve spent years tamping down because my mother told me to, because being ordinary was the only way to stay safe, because—
Because attention is dangerous.
Because being seen can kill you.
Because Mom died when I was nine years old, and I never asked why.
My hand goes to the chain at my throat. My mother’s ring hangs there—the one thing I refused to pawn, no matter how desperate things got. I curl my fingers around it and feel the metal warm against my palm.
Rathok follows the movement. His head cants slightly, and that strange expression deepens.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
The question lingers.
“Seven days.”
He nods. Once.
“Seven days to settlement. Or your soul is forfeit.”
The words terrify me. But they also do something else—light a spark in my chest that burns brighter than the fear.
Seven days.
Not immediate collection. Not a judgment already made. A window. A chance. Time to find Gror, to understand what happened, to figure out how to escape a trap I didn’t know existed until it closed around me.
“We need to talk.” The orc’s voice drops lower. “About your brother. About what you are. About—” He stops. Starts again. “Not here. The walls have ears in Gravebind, and these ears feed the wrong mouth.”
What I am.
The words echo in my skull. What does he know? What has he guessed? What did the Ledger see when it changed its own terms to claim me?
I look up at the orc who should be dragging me before the Ledger Master, but instead is standing in my brother’s empty apartment, suggesting we talk.
He still hasn’t let go of my arm.
I still haven’t pulled away.
The heat of his palm seeps through my sleeve, and I’m suddenly very aware of how close we’re standing. Of the way his chest rises and falls with each breath. Of his smoke-and-steel scent, and the way my pulse kicks harder when his fingers shift.
Stop it. I shove the awareness down. He’s an enforcer. A weapon. The enemy.
But he’s also the only one here. The only one offering answers. The only one who hasn’t tried to drag me off to die.
“Why?” The question comes out sharper than I intend. “Why not just take me? Why talk? Why give me anything that looks like a chance?”
Silence.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do with any of this.
But I know I’m not ready to die. I know Gror is out there somewhere, running scared, needing help only I can give. I know the sigil on my palm burns with a purpose I don’t understand, and the orc in front of me is either my best chance at survival or my final mistake.
“Fine.” I square my shoulders. Meet his gaze. Let him see the fire my mother spent years trying to hide. “Talk. Tell me what’s happening. Tell me about my brother’s debt, and what this—” I lift my marked arm, “—means, and why the Ledger Master cares about me at all.”
Something shifts in his expression. Almost a smile, though his face doesn’t seem built for the shape.
“You’re not ordinary.” He releases my arm finally, steps back, and the loss of his warmth leaves me colder than the room’s temperature can explain. “But you’re right. We need to move. Now. Before—”
He stops.
Goes utterly still in a way that isn’t human, isn’t natural, isn’t anything I can prepare for.
“What—”
“Quiet.”
One word. Command and warning both. I shut my mouth and watch his nostrils flare, his head tilt, his entire body orient toward the door—a predator catching a scent.
“We have company.” His hands drops to his axes. “Whatever happens—” His gaze finds mine, something fierce burning in its depths. “Don’t let anyone else touch your marked hand.”
I don’t have time to ask why.
The door explodes inward.