15. Brannok #3
“I go where you go.” I squeeze his fingers, hold his gaze. “That’s how this works. You claimed me before the city. I’m choosing to stay.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his thumb tracing slow circles on my palm.
I know the question behind his silence—the same one the Judge tried to weaponize, the same one we’ve both been circling since the platform.
Whether the yes I gave on that platform was real or simply the only answer available to a woman who was dying.
“I said yes the first time because I was about to die.” I hold his gaze steadily—no flinching from it, no softening the edges.
“I’m saying it now because I know exactly what I’m agreeing to.
I’ve seen what you are. What you’ve been.
What you’re trying to become. I’ve watched you destroy a system that made you, stand in a graveyard full of your mistakes, and choose differently.
” A pause. “That’s the man I’m choosing. Not the magic. Not the bond. You.”
“Even knowing what I am?” The words are rough with doubt I’ve never heard from him before. “What I’ve done? The innocents I’ve hanged, the system I maintained, the monster I helped create?”
“You know what I am.” I bring our joined hands to my lips, press a kiss to his scarred knuckles.
“What I’ve done. The innocents I watched die so I could survive.
The executions I attended because I needed the ending magic they released.
” A pause. “I’m not innocent, Brannok. Neither of us is. We’re killers.”
“Killers.”
“Killers who destroyed a worse evil.” I lower our hands to rest against his sternum—that steady beat that’s become as known to me as my own pulse. “Killers who tore down a system that was feeding on fear and calling it justice. Killers who have a chance to be different than what we were.”
“That has to count for a lot.”
The words are his, but I hear them as a question rather than a statement. A lifetime of certainty shattered in a single night, and now he’s looking for a new foundation to stand on.
I can be that foundation. For him. With him.
“It counts.” I lower myself back to his shoulder, press my lips to the sigil on his neck. “Everything we did tonight counts. The Judge is gone. The spirits are free. The gallows are rubble. That’s more change than this city has seen in three centuries.”
“Change isn’t always good.”
“No.” I think of the chaos that will come with dawn. The power vacuum left by the platform’s destruction. The citizens who will wake to find their world transformed and won’t know whether to celebrate or mourn. “But it’s necessary. And we’ll be here to guide it.”
“We.”
“We.” I curl closer, fitting my body against his. “You and me. The Gallows Warden and the death witch. Whatever comes next, we face it as a pair.”
His arm tightens around me. His lips press against my hair—not a kiss, exactly, but a gesture of affection that seems more intimate than any kiss could be.
“I don’t deserve you.”
“Probably not.” I tilt my head up, catch his lips with mine in a kiss that tastes of exhaustion and hope and the beginning of what we’ll build from here. “But you’re stuck with me anyway.”
“Stuck.”
“Claimed. Chosen. Bound by magic older than either of us.” I trace the sigil on his neck with my fingertip. “However you want to describe it.”
“I’d describe it as…” He pauses, searching for words. The Gallows Warden, who has pronounced sentences in flawless formal diction for two decades, struggling to name what exists between us. “Mine. I’d describe you as mine.”
The possessiveness in his words should bother me. A week ago, it would have. A week ago, I would have bristled at being claimed, would have fought against the bond blazing on my collarbone, would have done anything to escape the trap I’d fallen into.
Now it only makes me smile.
“Yours.” I press my palm flat against his sternum, sensing the steady beat beneath my hand. “And you’re mine. That’s what the bond means, Brannok. It goes both ways.”
His hand covers mine. Holds it there, against that steady pulse that proves he survived the Judge’s noose.
“Both ways.”
We lie like that as the darkness begins to fade. The window in Brannok’s quarters—a narrow slit that lets in air and light but little else—faces east, and through it, I can see the sky shifting from black to gray to the first hints of rose.
Dawn is coming.
I push myself upright despite the protest of every muscle in my body. Brannok follows, one hand on the small of my back, steadying me as I swing my legs over the edge of the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“To watch.” I reach for what remains of my dress, then abandon the attempt. The fabric is beyond saving. “The sun is rising over a city without gallows. I want to see it.”
He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t try to convince me to rest, to stay in bed, to let the world wait while we recover from the night’s battles. He rises with me, pulls on his trousers, offers me his shirt—execution black, too large for my frame, but better than nakedness.
We walk to the window in silence.