Chapter 42
Symond
"Hello again," Symond said pleasantly, as if they'd merely bumped into each other at a market. "Leaving so soon? The party upstairs just got interesting."
Rylok spun around, his face draining of color. He drew a slender blade from his belt. Not a dagger—something longer and more elegant, with a curved tip that gleamed in the lamplight.
"Symond, stop!" Violette emerged from the shadows, her own weapon drawn but held low.
Symond glanced at her, vaguely curious about the distress in her voice.
She looked genuinely upset, which seemed an overreaction to simply doing their job.
Weren't they here to catch this man? To kill him, maybe?
The details were a bit fuzzy, lost in the pleasant haze that had settled over everything since the big erasure.
"Sorry," he said, though he wasn't sure if he was apologizing to Violette or to Rylok or maybe to no one in particular. "But he's right there. Seems efficient."
Violette had little conviction in her stance, her eyes darting between Rylok and the tunnel. "The Hive wants what you stole. Give us the formula and the Courtier contacts, and we can end this without bloodshed."
"And then what?" Rylok laughed. "You let me walk away? The Hive doesn't leave loose ends, especially ones who know their secrets."
"I can arrange safe passage," Violette said, taking a careful step forward.
Symond watched the exchange with mild interest, like observing two strangers haggle over the price of fruit. Rylok kept shifting his weight, preparing to move.
"Seems like you two have a lot to discuss," Symond remarked, casually adjusting his grip on his dagger. "But I'm getting the sense that we're supposed to stop him from leaving, not negotiate his travel plans."
Violette shot him a warning glance. "Symond, please. Let me handle this."
Rylok lunged at Violette while she was distracted, his blade slicing through the air where she'd been standing a heartbeat before. She twisted away, countering with a strike of her own that he parried.
Symond watched them dance for a moment, oddly detached from the violence unfolding before him. They moved well together, like they'd practiced this, each anticipating the other's movements. Maybe they had trained together once.
Rylok and Violette were locked in combat, her speed matched against his strength, neither gaining the advantage. They'd forgotten him entirely, it seemed. How strange, to be forgotten in the middle of a mission. How freeing.
He crossed the cellar in long strides that carried him behind Rylok. The man sensed him too late, starting to turn just as Symond's dagger slid between his ribs. A textbook strike—angled upward, finding the space between bones, puncturing the heart with minimal resistance.
Rylok made a soft sound, more surprise than pain, his eyes widening as he looked down at the blade protruding from his side. His own weapon clattered to the floor, suddenly too heavy for fingers that no longer remembered how to grip.
"Sorry about that," Symond said, and meant it in his way. "Nothing personal. Just seemed like what I was supposed to do."
"NO!" A boy's scream cut through the cellar, high and terrible. "PAPA!"
Rylok crumpled, his body folding in on itself as Symond withdrew the blade. Blood spread across the front of his fine waistcoat, transforming the emerald fabric to a muddy brown. His lips moved, trying to form words that wouldn't come, eyes fixed on the young boy’s face with a desperate intensity.
Violette stood frozen, her expression a mixture of horror and resignation. "Symond," she whispered. "What have you done?"
The boy, who must have been hiding in the tunnel, ran to his father's side and threw himself across the dying man's chest. A wooden bird lay forgotten on the floor, one wing snapped off by the fall. The boy's sobs echoed off the stone walls, raw and primal.
"My job, I think," Symond replied, wiping his blade clean on his trousers. "We came to stop him, and now he's stopped."
He felt nothing as he watched the boy cling to his father's cooling body, nothing as Rylok's eyes dulled and fixed on the ceiling, nothing as Violette stared at him like he'd transformed into something unrecognizable before her eyes.
Funny, that. He felt nothing at all as he stood in a cellar with a dead man and a weeping child, and wasn't that better than feeling too much? Wasn't that why he'd sought out to erase everything in the first place?
Symond smiled, because smiling seemed like the thing to do when you'd accomplished a mission, even if the mission had ended with a small boy wailing over his father's corpse.
The sound echoed oddly in the cellar, bouncing off the stone walls like it was trying to escape but couldn't find the way out.
"Should we check his pockets?" Symond asked Violette, gesturing toward Rylok's body. "For the formula thing you mentioned?"
Violette's face hardened into something that might have been disgust if he'd cared enough to interpret it properly. "I'll handle it," she said, her voice flat. "You've done enough."
"Great," he said, sheathing his dagger. "I'll just wait over here, then."
He leaned against the wall, watching as Violette gently moved the sobbing child aside and began searching Rylok's body. The boy fought her at first, small fists pounding against her arms, but eventually collapsed into a heap of exhausted grief beside his father.
Symond observed it all with mild interest, like watching rain slide down a window. A pattern that meant something, probably, but not to him. Not anymore.
"I think there used to be a me that would have cared about this," he remarked to no one in particular.
Neither Violette nor the boy answered him. The only sound in the cellar was the soft rustling of fabric as Violette searched the dead man's pockets and the muffled sobbing of a child whose world had just collapsed around him.
Symond thought about the wooden bird with its broken wing and wondered idly if anyone would bother to fix it.
Violette finally found what she was looking for—a small leather journal and a folded parchment sealed with wax the color of dried blood.
She tucked them into her vest without examining them, her attention already shifting to the boy who had curled himself against his father's side, small fingers clutching the fabric of the dead man's coat.
She knelt beside the child, her movements suddenly gentle in a way Symond hadn't seen before. Interesting how people could contain such different versions of themselves, all those contradictions packed into a single skin.
"My name is Violette. What’s your name?"
The boy flinched away from her outstretched hand, pressing himself more firmly against his father's cooling body. His sobs had quieted to hiccupping breaths that sounded painful.
"I want my papa," he whispered, eyes squeezed shut.
"I know you do," Violette said, her hand hovering uncertainly before withdrawing. "I'm so sorry. So very sorry. This wasn’t supposed to happen. But you can't stay here. It isn't safe."
"Why did you hurt him?" The question came out broken.
Violette glanced back at Symond, her eyes hard with something that looked suspiciously like blame. He shrugged in response. Not his fault the kid was asking questions with complicated answers.
"We need to go," she said, turning back to the boy. "You can come with us. I'll keep you safe, I promise."
"Come with you?" His eyes flew open, red-rimmed and filled with a hatred that seemed too big for his small face. "You killed my papa!"
"We can find you somewhere nice to stay," Violette continued, ignoring the accusation. "Somewhere with other children, with people who will take care of you. You don't have to be alone."
Symond leaned against the wall, watching this strange performance unfold.
Violette was using a voice he'd never heard before, softer around the edges, almost musical.
Like she was trying to coax a wild animal into accepting food from her hand.
Motherly, maybe, though he had only the vaguest memory of what that might sound like.
"This is taking forever," he observed, checking his nails for blood. Finding some, he wiped them absently on his shirt. "We should probably go before more of his friends show up."
Violette ignored him, still focused on the boy. "I know you're angry and scared. But I won't force you to come with us. That's your choice. I just want you to be safe."
"Just leave him," Symond said with a yawn. "He's old enough to find his way. Or someone will find him, eventually. Either way, not really our problem, is it?"
"Not our problem?" Violette's head snapped around, her eyes narrowing to dangerous slits. "Not our problem?" she repeated.
"Well, no," Symond replied, genuinely confused by her reaction. "We came for him—" he nodded toward Rylok's body, "—and now we have him. Mission accomplished. The kid wasn't part of the deal."
Violette rose slowly to her feet, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. "You just made this boy an orphan, Symond. You killed his father right in front of him. And now you're suggesting we just... what? Leave him here with the corpse?"
Symond blinked at her, trying to parse the intensity of her response. "I mean, yes? Unless you have a better idea. It's not like we can take him with us to the Hive."
"What is wrong with you?" Violette's voice had risen to something just below a shout. "What is he supposed to do now? Where is he supposed to go? He's a child!"
Symond considered this question with mild interest, tapping his finger against his chin. The boy had stopped crying to watch, his eyes moving back and forth between them.