Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
IVALYS
Sunlight.
I stand at the window of the healer’s ward and watch it pour through the glass—actual sunlight, golden and warm, nothing like the gray half-light that’s blanketed Gravebind for as long as anyone can remember.
The perpetual twilight is lifting. The city is waking up to a dawn it hasn’t seen in three centuries.
Behind me, the ward hums with quiet activity.
Beds line the walls in neat rows, filled with the wounded and the exhausted—enforcers freed from their contracts, civilians caught in the Hall’s collapse, people who survived the chaos and are only now beginning to understand what that survival means.
Healers move between them, their hands gentle, their voices soft.
The smell of herbs and clean bandages has replaced the ever-present reek of ink.
It feels wrong. All of it. The sunlight, the quiet, the absence of dread that’s been my constant companion since I touched Gror’s contract.
I lift my hand. Study the sigil on my palm.
It still glows—softly now, a gentle pulse instead of the demanding burn that marked me as collateral.
The angular script that crawled up my forearm has faded to pale scars, barely visible unless you know to look.
My mother’s gift remains. The Ledger Master’s claim does not.
I’m free.
The thought should bring relief. Instead, it brings a hollow sort of wonder. I’ve spent so long being hunted, being claimed, being someone else’s obligation. I don’t know what to do with freedom.
I don’t remember the last time I felt safe enough to let my guard down, to trust that someone else would catch me if I fell.
“Ivy?”
Gror’s voice pulls me back. I turn from the window and cross to his bed—third from the door, positioned where I can see him from anywhere in the ward. Old habits. Protective instincts that will take longer to fade than the marks on my skin.
He looks better than he did yesterday. The contract-script that covered his body is gone, leaving behind raw pink skin where the words burned deepest. His eyes are clear. His color is returning. The healers say he’ll recover fully, given time.
They don’t mention the scars. The ones on his skin will fade. The ones underneath—I’m not sure about those.
“You’re awake.” I settle onto the edge of his bed. Take his hand. It’s warm in mine, solid and real. “How do you feel?”
“Like I got eaten by a contract and spat back out.” His mouth quirks. Almost a smile, but not quite. “Which I guess is accurate.”
“Gror—”
“I know.” He squeezes my hand. “It’s not my fault. The Ledger Master manipulated me. I was just a tool.” The words come out flat, rehearsed. “You’ve told me. The healers have told me. Everyone keeps telling me.”
“Because it’s true.”
“Yeah.” He stares at the ceiling. Sunlight paints gold across his features, catching the dampness at the corners of his eyes. “Doesn’t make it feel any less like my fault.”
I don’t have words for this. Don’t have comfort that will actually help. So I do what I’ve done since we were children—I lean down and press my forehead to his, the way our mother used to do when one of us was hurting.
“You’re alive,” I whisper. “You’re free. Everything else, we figure out later.”
He exhales. Shaky. “Later sounds good.”
I straighten. Smooth the hair back from his forehead. “Rest. I’ll come back this afternoon.”
“Where are you going?”
Good question. Where am I going? My apartment in the Inkwell District is still there, presumably—the Ledger Master had no reason to destroy it. I could go back. Pretend none of this happened. Return to the bookshop, to my quiet life, to the careful invisibility my mother trained me for.
The thought makes my skin crawl.
“To find Rathok.”
Gror’s eyebrows rise. A real smile this time, small but genuine. “The orc who almost killed you. Then saved you. Then—” He stops. Studies my face. “Oh.”
Heat climbs my cheeks. “It’s complicated.”
“Apparently.” His smile widens. “Go. I’m not going anywhere.”
I lean down to kiss his forehead. “I’ll be back.”
“I know.” He catches my hand before I can pull away. “Ivy? Thank you. For coming after me. For not giving up.” His voice breaks. “For saving me even after I tried to kill you.”
“That wasn’t you.”
“But you didn’t know that. Not for sure.” His grip tightens. “You came anyway.”
I hold his gaze. See the brother I raised, the boy I protected, the man who made stupid choices for good reasons. “You’re my family. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do.”
He releases me. Settles back against his pillows. “Go find your orc.”
My orc. The words land with unexpected force, spreading warmth through me.
? ? ?
I find him on a rooftop three blocks from the healer’s ward.
He’s silhouetted against the brightening sky, sitting on the edge with his legs dangling over the drop.
From behind, he looks enormous—shoulders wide enough to block out the sun, arms thick with muscle, the kind of frame that was built for violence and refined by centuries of it.
His wounds have been tended, bandages visible beneath the remnants of his armor, but he still looks like he went through a war.
He did. We both did.
I cross the rooftop. My footsteps are quiet, but he hears me anyway—his head turns, smoldering gaze finding me before I’m halfway across. Something shifts in his expression. Softens. The hard lines of his face rearranging themselves into something that makes my heart stutter.
He said he loved me. In the ruins of the Ledger Hall, with the city burning around us, he looked at me and said the words I’d been afraid to name. And then he kissed me—desperate and fierce, tasting of blood and ash and promises.
I settle beside him. Close enough that our shoulders brush. He’s warm despite the morning chill, radiating heat the way orcs do. I lean into it without thinking. Let myself take comfort from his presence.
And that’s when it hits me. Really hits me, in a way it hasn’t had time to before.
I’m leaning into him. Trusting him. Taking comfort from his presence without any part of me screaming that it’s dangerous, that I should be watching my own back, that depending on anyone is a weakness I can’t afford.
When was the last time I did that? Let myself rest against someone without calculating the cost?
Mom. The answer comes without thinking. The last time I felt this safe was curled up in my mother’s arms, before the Ledger Master took her from me. Before I learned that the world was hungry and I had to be hard enough to survive it.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years of carrying everything myself. Protecting Gror. Working myself to exhaustion. Lying awake at night, wondering if tomorrow would be the day everything fell apart. I’ve been so tired for so long that I forgot what it felt like to not be tired.
And this man—this scarred, violent, unexpectedly gentle man—threw himself in front of a contract-heart for me. Broke every oath he’d ever sworn. Told the Ledger Master he’d rather die protecting me than live without me.
No one has ever—
I stop the thought. Can’t finish it. The enormity of it sits in my chest, too big to examine directly.
“You should be resting.” His voice is strained. The gravel-deep rumble that I’ve come to associate with safety. “Your wounds—”
“Are fine. The healers cleared me.” I look out at the city—at Gravebind sprawled beneath us, adjusting to a world without its master. “Yours are worse.”
A grunt. Neither agreement nor denial. “I’ve had worse.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
Silence settles between us. Comfortable.
Easy in a way that should surprise me after everything we’ve been through.
Days ago, this man was sent to collect me.
Days ago, I was terrified of him. Now I’m sitting beside him on a rooftop, watching the sun rise, and all I can think about is how right it feels.
“What happens now?”
He takes his time answering. Studies the city below—the streets already filling with people, the market stalls opening, the ordinary rhythms of life resuming in the wake of catastrophe.
Some contracts have voided entirely; I can see the evidence in abandoned enforcement posts, in doors standing open that were locked for decades, in people walking freely who haven’t known freedom in years.
“Chaos, probably.” His voice is flat. Clinical. “The Ledger Master’s fall leaves a vacuum. Other contract lords will try to claim Gravebind. Powers from outside the city will smell weakness.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“Could be.”
“More dangerous than the last several days?”
His mouth twitches. Almost a smile. “Maybe not.”
I let the silence stretch again. Watch the sunlight creep across rooftops, painting the city gold.
It’s beautiful, in its way. Gravebind has never been beautiful before—it’s been oppressive, predatory, a machine designed to consume.
But in this light, with the Ledger Master’s shadow lifted, I can see what it might become.
“I should go.”
The words hit like a blow. I turn to look at him—at the hard line of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders, the way he won’t quite meet my eyes.
“What?”
“I have blood on my hands.” He stares at the city. Not at me. “Debts I collected that were real. People who died because I was the Ledger Master’s weapon. Families I destroyed. Souls I delivered.”
“Rathok—”
“Two centuries.” His voice is quiet. Hollow. “Two centuries of doing what I was told. Following orders. Telling myself it was justice, or at least necessary. I knew it was wrong. I did it anyway.”
“You didn’t have a choice.”
“I had a choice.” He turns to look at me.
Those dark eyes, holding something I can’t name.
“I could have died. Could have refused and let the contracts consume me. I chose to live. Chose to survive at any cost.” His jaw tightens.
“I’m not the hero of this story, Ivalys. I’m the monster who got lucky.”
“That’s not—”
“It would be easier for you.” He cuts me off. “If I left. You could rebuild without the former enforcer haunting your doorstep. Start fresh. Find someone who doesn’t have graveyards in his past.”
I stare at him. At this massive, scarred, infuriatingly stubborn orc who killed for the Ledger Master and then broke every oath he’d ever sworn because I looked at him without fear.
Something breaks open in my chest. Not pain—clarity. The kind of sudden, devastating understanding that changes everything.
I’ve been telling myself this was survival. Alliance. Mutual benefit in a desperate situation. I’ve been telling myself I couldn’t afford to feel anything more, because feeling meant exposure. Meant risk. Meant death.
But sitting here, watching him try to convince himself he should leave—watching him prepare to walk away because he thinks he’s not good enough for me—the truth I admitted in the Ledger Hall hits differently. Without the fear. Without the adrenaline. Without death breathing down our necks.
I love him.
Not the desperate, battlefield version I clung to when everything was falling apart.
This is the clear-eyed, morning-after version.
The one that looks at him in sunlight and still chooses this.
I love him. Not despite what he is—because of it.
Because he’s brutal and scarred and carries darkness in his past, and he still chose me.
Still broke himself apart to keep me safe.