Chapter 5 #2
"You bleed chaos," he gritted, his eyes, chilled as winter rivers, locked on mine.
"You bleed obedience," I shot back, a breath away from his face.
For a split second, the air between us thrummed, a chord finally struck.
Then glass shattered to my left. Green fog erupted through the plaza—two phials, maybe three—and most of the crowd vanished behind it. A male ducked behind a column. Uncrowned symbol on his vest.
Rebels. Not my allies. But I'd take the cover.
The Crownforged's head turned toward the smoke. Half a second of broken focus. I shoved off him and dove into the mist.
The green fog swallowed me. I came out the other side behind the Enforcer line, boots sliding on wet stone. The Rhain family was still tied to the posts. The father's wrists were chafed from pulling.
I slid the extra knife from my sleeve and threw it low—it skidded across the cobblestones, hilt-first, into his bound hands.
His gaze met mine. I didn't need to say it.
Cut yourself out.
The father sawed at his bonds with desperate urgency. But the exchange gave away my position.
"Circle her—take the dual-marked alive!" an Enforcer captain barked.
I ran. Smoke and bodies and noise on every side. Three stars left my hand mid-stride. Two Enforcers guarding the Rhain family dropped, steel buried in the gaps of their pauldrons. They hit the ground cursing and clutching and out of the way.
A grey cloak stepped from the fog. He jerked his chin toward the alley and the Rhain father didn't need telling twice. Grabbed his son, grabbed his wife, and they were gone. Swallowed by the smoke and the dark. Faster than I'd managed. Cleaner than anything I'd pulled off today.
The Uncrowned rebel looked back at me. Two fingers flicked off his temple: part salute, part claim.
I didn't return it. Help was help. But nobody did anything for free in this city.
I turned to sprint—and the fog thinned. The smoke was clearing, the rebels' cover burning off faster than I'd counted on.
The plaza opened up around me like a trap losing its teeth, and I was standing in the gap with nowhere to fold into.
I cut left. A dead end—stacked crates and a bricked-up doorway.
Cut right. Enforcers already filled the mouth of that alley.
Behind me, boots on cobblestone. Steady.
Unhurried. Gaining without rushing, like he'd known exactly where I'd end up before I did.
The wall hit my back. Cornered. Stupid. I'd bled too much focus toward the Rhain family and now I was paying for it. Stone behind me. Crownforged in front.
He moved. Rune-rope snapped around my wrist, coiled tight and yanked. I crashed into his chestplate. I twisted to break his grip, but he already had me pinned, my back against brick, his armored forearm across my collarbone.
Close. Close enough to see past the shadow of his helm. My eyes flicked to a red thread on his wrist that brushed my collarbone where his arm pinned me. It didn't belong on him. Too small. Too fragile and frayed. Such a small thing to notice while a male had your throat pinned under his arm.
His eyes were burning.
"Yield," he repeated, lower this time.
Both my Marks surged—Light and Shadow punching forward at once, a concussion of raw power with nowhere to go but into him. Red light flared through his armor. The V-binding rune—the thing that kept every soldier obedient—screaming against my magic. The smell of burning flesh hit the air between us.
His jaw clenched. A muscle feathered under his eye.
He didn't pull back.
"That hurt?" I breathed.
"Yes." He didn't pull back. “Pain gives me clarity.”
We were close enough to share air. Close enough that I could smell steel and the electric charge of a thunderstorm breaking. A wildness that didn't belong on a male built to cage people like me.
His gaze dropped to my mouth and a wicked smile spread on his lips.
"You're coming with me, dual-marked."
"Just a command, then?" I smirked and pressed harder into him. "You'll have to work harder than that to keep me."
Another phial shattered—the rebels again, a second wave of green fog rolled through the plaza. His grip slipped for a breath and I ripped my wrist free of the rope.
He grabbed for me. Missed. And his eyes betrayed him—they flicked past my shoulder for a fraction of a second. Instinct, not choice. But I caught it.
I followed his gaze. The sewer grate. Ten feet behind me.
He realized the mistake the same moment I did. His hand shot out—
Too slow.
I dove.
My fingers latched onto the grate's edge and I wrenched it aside—the old iron screeching against stone. I swung my legs through the gap, caught the grate on the way down and slammed it shut above me.
I dropped into darkness, landed hard with a grunt and then the smell hit —rot and decaying tallow.
Serenya was already there. Pressed against the curved wall, dagger drawn, gasping for air.
"Remembered last time—" she managed between breaths. "Hid here. Ran as fast as I could."
Gods bless that girl.
We had maybe three seconds of stillness before the light above us disappeared.
A shadow filled the grate—broad, armored, blocking out the smoke and the sky.
Gauntleted fingers locked around the iron bars and pulled.
The metal screamed. The whole frame shifted in its cradle, bolts grinding loose as the Crownforged wrenched the iron from the stone with plate-heavy shoulders.
He was coming down. And nothing about the way he moved suggested he planned to stop.
A grey blur landed across the grate opening. A cloth-wrapped fist cracked across the Crownforged's jaw—the sound thick and solid, bone meeting bone—and his grip broke just long enough for the grate to slam back into its cradle. The clang echoed down through the tunnels and kept echoing.
A face at the bars. Grey hood, keen eyes, blood already splitting his knuckles. The rebel from the plaza.
"RUN!"
We ran. The tunnels twisted ahead of us, dark and reeking, and I gripped Serenya's arm and pulled her with me through the worst of it.
My lungs burned. My boots slipped on stone slick with gods-knew-what.
But the distance was growing between us and that grate, and for a handful of seconds I let myself think it was enough.
Then—metal shrieking behind us. And the heavy, final boom of the grate being ripped from its cradle and hurled aside.
He was in the tunnels.
I yanked Serenya through a partially collapsed archway, over a rusted pipe, down a ladder missing its bottom rungs. We fell the last few feet and kept going.
Behind us, his footsteps rang steady against stone. Not running. Walking.
Arrogant prick.
I sank into the muck of the lower level and let myself breathe.
The junction was ahead—I could smell it, the draft from multiple exits swirling together.
The tunnel widened into a round chamber where four passages split off into the dark.
Weak light leaked through a grate above, enough to catch the sheen on the standing water.
We'd scatter here, surface separately, and vanish.
I reached for the east passage out of habit—and stopped.
A pipe had burst somewhere above, sending a torrent of water hammering down across the tunnel mouth.
Not impassable, but loud. Too loud. I'd be deaf to his footsteps for thirty seconds, maybe more, and in the dark that was long enough to get a knife in my back.
"Left," I breathed, pulling Serenya down the second-best route.
Behind us, I strained for the sound of him at the junction—boots hesitating, splashing the wrong direction, getting lost like he should.
Nothing. Just the drip of water and the hammer of my own pulse.
But I felt him. That prickle at the back of my neck, the animal awareness of being watched, hunted—
I shoved it down and ran faster.
The next fork came quick. Right would take us toward the old market—more exits, more crowds to disappear into. I shifted my weight to veer right.
Plunk.
Faint. Somewhere down the passage ahead—the echo of a splash in the water. I froze with Serenya a step behind me, heart battering against my ribs. Someone or something was already down there.
I seized her wrist and hauled her left instead. We didn't speak, didn't breathe, didn't slow down until twenty paces of dark tunnel sat between us and whatever had made that sound.
Probably a rat. Debris falling from a rotting ceiling.
But I wasn't about to bet our lives on probably.