15. Brannok
FIFTEEN
brANNOK
The Execution Hall still stands.
The realization hits me as I guide Ismerie through streets that have become unfamiliar in their silence.
The Grand Gallows are gone. The platform that dominated Blackhook City’s skyline for three centuries has collapsed into rubble.
But the building beneath it—the stone chambers where I’ve lived and worked for two decades—survived the destruction.
Cracks web the walls. The lanterns have gone dark, their corpse-fat oil extinguished by the shockwave that destroyed the gallows above. But the structure itself remains intact, a monument to the builders who carved these chambers from bedrock centuries before I was born.
Ismerie leans heavily against my side. Her weight is a constant reminder of what she gave to destroy the Judge—every ounce of stolen power poured into anchoring the entity while I hanged it. The ending magic that sustained her has been spent, and without it, she’s barely able to walk.
My hand never leaves hers.
Halvard meets us at the lower corridor. His face is gray with exhaustion, but he straightens when he sees us.
“Varn and Thessa fled before dawn. Took what they could carry and left through the merchants’ gate.
” He pauses. “Most of the others went with them. Marsh stayed. Said he wanted to be part of whatever comes next.” He hesitates, then adds: “Era’s been at the gate twice asking after you both. I let her through the second time.”
I absorb this. The council—two decades of authority, of orders signed and carried out—gone before the sun has fully risen. It should feel like victory. It feels like the silence after an execution: necessary, and empty, and strange.
“Get some rest.” I nod to Halvard. “We’ll need everyone standing by midday.”
He salutes with the easy familiarity of a man who has decided which side he’s on, and leaves us to the dark.
I’ve touched rope for two decades. Tested its weight, measured its strength, calculated exactly how much force it would take to snap a human neck.
My hands are calloused in patterns that come from ending lives—scarred palms, thickened skin, the muscle memory of pulling levers seared into every fiber.
Now those same hands hold hers like she’s the only thing keeping me upright.
The corridors of the Execution Hall are dark, but I know them by touch.
I’ve walked these passages thousands of times—to the interrogation chambers, to the holding cells, to the private platform where sensitive executions took place away from public eyes.
I’ve navigated them drunk and exhausted and bleeding, always finding my way back to the spartan quarters that serve as both office and home.
Tonight, I navigate them carrying the woman I love.
Not physically—she’s walking, barely, her feet shuffling against stone worn smooth by centuries of condemned prisoners making their final journey.
But I’m holding her upright, my arm around her waist, her head against my shoulder.
The sigil on my neck thrums in answer to hers on her collarbone.
Two marks, two killers, one destination.
My quarters are exactly as I left them.
A bed. A weapons rack. A desk covered in execution orders that will never be carried out. The walls bear no decoration except the crimson sash of my office, hanging from a hook beside the door like a shed skin.
I’ve lived here for two decades, surrounded by the names of everyone I’ve killed, and until this moment, I never realized how empty it was.
Now Ismerie is here. And the emptiness retreats.
I lower her onto the bed—my bed, the narrow pallet where I’ve slept alone for two decades. Her body sinks into the thin mattress with a sigh of exhaustion, her ash-blonde hair spreading across the pillow, her dark eyes half-closed.
“Stay awake.” My words come out rougher than I intend. “I need to clean those wounds.”
“Bossy.” The word is barely a whisper, but there’s humor in it—the same irreverence she’s wielded since the day we met. “You’d think destroying an ancient evil would earn me a nap.”
“After.”
I turn to the basin in the corner, fill it with water from the pitcher that survived intact despite everything.
The liquid is cold—the pipes that usually heat it run through the gallows’ foundations, and those foundations are rubble now.
But cold water is better than nothing, and the cloth I dip into it comes away clean enough to use.
When I return to the bed, Ismerie has managed to sit up.
Her ruined clothes hang from her frame in tatters—the dark cloak shredded, the plain dress beneath torn and bloodstained.
She’s still marked by the battle—soot and dried blood on her skin, the last traces of ending magic fading from her scars—and she’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“Let me.” I reach for the ties of her cloak.
Her hand catches my wrist. “Brannok.”
“You need to be cleaned. Those wounds will fester if—”
“I know.” Her fingers tighten around my wrist—not stopping me, but holding me in place. “I’m not objecting. I’m…” A pause. Her eyes meet mine, dark and exhausted and full of things neither of us knows how to say. “Thank you.”
The words hit me harder than any blow the Judge landed.
I’ve spent two decades being thanked by councilors who appreciated my ability, by guards who admired my discipline, by citizens who felt safer knowing the Gallows Warden was maintaining order. Those thanks were hollow—coins traded for services rendered, acknowledgment of a job well done.
This is different. This is her thanking me for choosing her over everything else. For claiming her when I should have hanged her. For fighting beside her when I should have been her enemy.
“Don’t thank me yet.” I free my wrist from her grip, but gently. “I haven’t done anything worth gratitude.”
“You destroyed the Judge.”
“We destroyed the Judge.” I begin unfastening her cloak, working the ties with fingers that have stripped armor off dying men but now seem clumsy against the simple fabric of her clothes. “And I helped create it. Twenty years of executions feeding the thing that almost killed us both.”
“Twenty years of keeping order.” Her words are quiet. “Twenty years of doing what you thought was necessary.”
“Twenty years of being wrong.”
The cloak falls away. Beneath it, her dress is worse than I realized—not merely torn but shredded, the fabric hanging from her shoulders in strips that barely preserve her modesty.
Bruises mottle her skin, purple and black against her pale complexion.
Cuts seep blood that’s already beginning to dry.
I’ve seen wounds before. Caused more than my share. But seeing them on her makes my hands shake as they never have holding rope or blade.
“This will be cold.” I press the damp cloth against the worst of the cuts—a gash across her ribs where the Judge’s rope-tentacles caught her.
She hisses but doesn’t pull away. “Colder than your bedside manner?”
“Much.”
I work in silence after that, cleaning each wound with the care I’ve never given anyone. The water in the basin turns pink, then red. Ismerie’s breath catches when I reach a particularly deep cut, but she doesn’t complain, doesn’t make a sound beyond that initial sharp intake of air.
Strong. She’s so gods-damned strong, and she doesn’t even know it.
“The dress needs to come off.” I keep my tone clinical, professional—the tone I use when giving orders to guards or pronouncing sentences from the platform. “I can’t clean the wounds on your back through fabric.”
“Such a gentleman.” But she’s already reaching for the remaining ties, her fingers fumbling with exhaustion. “Asking permission to undress the woman you’ve already claimed.”
“I claimed you to save your life.” The words come out before I can stop them. “Not to own you.”
Her hands still on the ties. Her eyes find mine, and in them I see the question she’s been carrying since I pressed my palm to her collarbone and seared my sigil into her skin.
“Then what do you want from me, Brannok Redrope?”
The answer is so simple it terrifies me.
“Everything.” I set down the bloodied cloth.
Cup her face in my hands—scarred palms against unmarked cheeks, the executioner holding the witch he should have killed.
“I want everything. I want to wake up with you beside me. I want to face whatever comes next knowing you’re there.
I want—” My words break on the word, rough edges crumbling. “I want to stop being alone.”
She doesn’t answer with words.
Her hands find the collar of my armor, tugging me down until our foreheads touch. Her breath mingles with mine—ash and blood and the metallic tang of ending magic. The claiming sigils throb between us, awareness bleeding through the thin layer of air that separates our skin.
“Then take it.”
The words are permission and challenge and invitation all at once. And I’ve never been good at refusing her anything.
I strip her dress away with hands that have stopped shaking.
The fabric pools at her waist, leaving her bare from the ribs up except for the bruises and cuts that map the battle we survived.
She’s thin—too thin, the lines of her bones visible beneath pale skin—but there’s strength in her frame.
A survivor’s body, built for endurance rather than comfort.
My armor follows. Buckles unfastened with practiced efficiency, leather and iron discarded on the floor beside her ruined clothes. Beneath the execution black, my skin is mapped with scars—rope burns on my forearms, blade cuts across my ribs, the faded marks of a dozen fights I should have lost.
She traces them with her fingertips. Every one. Starting at my shoulder and working down to my hip, her touch leaving trails of fire across my skin.
“So many.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Do they hurt?”
“Not anymore.” I catch her hand, press my lips to her palm. “Not when you touch them.”