Chapter 6
VIENNE's POV
The Iron Stag smelled like home.
Not the kind of home you'd brag about—the kind with peeling wallpaper, suspicious stains, and a bartender who cleaned glasses with the same rag he used to wipe the bar.
But it was my territory now. The back room had become our war room, the cellar our armory, and the regulars had learned to see nothing, hear nothing, and forget everything for the price of a free round.
I sat at the corner table, my back to the wall, a cup of something Torvald called coffee in front of me. It tasted like burnt tar and regret, but it kept my eyes open, which was all that mattered.
The report Cassian had given me was spread across the table, weighted down by a dagger, a pistol, and an empty shot glass. Jinx had gone to deliver messages to our network. Torvald was working the forge. For the first time in hours, I was alone with my thoughts.
Alone with her memories.
I ran my finger over the elegant script of the battle report.
The dates were wrong. I knew it instinctively, the way Vienne Delgado had known when a rival syndicate was lying about a shipment.
The report claimed the Voss Legion had been caught conspiring with enemy forces on the night of the seventeenth.
But Iraia's memories—the ones that surfaced in dreams and sudden, breathless flashes—showed something different.
The summons had come on the fifteenth. The Legion had ridden out on the sixteenth. They'd been ambushed at dawn on the seventeenth.
So how had General Thorne filed a report on the sixteenth predicting their treason?
Because he knew. He planned it. He wrote the ending before the battle began.
The door to the Iron Stag slammed open.
I didn't look up. My hand moved to the pistol beneath the table, my thumb brushing the safety. In my old life, doors slamming meant trouble. In this life, it meant the same thing, just with more swords and less submachine gun fire.
The footsteps were heavy. Angry. One person, male, wearing boots with steel plates—military issue, or stolen from someone who'd been. He moved through the common room like a storm, ignoring the bartender's protest, ignoring the stares of the regulars, making a straight line for my corner.
I counted his steps. Five. Four. Three.
"Seraphine."
Not Iraia. The voice was young, raw, cracked at the edges like glass under pressure. "Or whatever you're calling yourself now."
I looked up.
The boy standing over my table was nineteen, maybe twenty, dressed in rough-spun rebel grays with a military coat three sizes too big hanging off his shoulders.
He had Iraia's cheekbones, her sharp jaw, her storm-grey eyes.
But where hers had been tempered by discipline, his were wild.
Untamed. Burning with a grief so fresh it looked like madness.
Kael Voss.
Iraia's little brother. The child she'd left behind when she rode to war. The boy who'd become a man in the three months since her death, leading a ragged band of Voss loyalists from the shadows, attacking supply lines, burning royal banners, screaming his sister's name into the dark.
He looked like he'd been sleeping in ditches. Like he'd been eating rage and calling it sustenance. Like he'd died the same day she had, and just hadn't realized he was supposed to stop breathing yet.
And he had a sword pointed at my throat.
"You're not my sister," he said. The blade trembled. Not from fear—from the sheer force of will it took not to drive it forward. "My sister is dead. They buried her. They buried all of them."
The common room had gone silent. Chairs scraped back. Eyes darted toward exits. The bartender was already reaching for the club he kept beneath the counter.
"Kael," I said. My voice was calm. The same calm I'd used in New Carthage when a cornered dealer pulled a knife. The calm that came from knowing, absolutely, that I was faster. "Put the sword down before someone gets hurt."
"Someone's already hurt!" he shouted. The blade jerked forward, stopping an inch from my skin.
"I'm hurt! Every day, I'm hurt! And then I hear rumors—whispers about a silver-haired ghost in the eastern markets, a woman who fights like the Commander and moves like a demon. And I think, maybe. Maybe she's alive. Maybe they lied. Maybe my sister—" his voice broke, just slightly,
"—maybe she came back for me."
I saw it then. The hope beneath the rage. The little boy who'd lost everything and was clinging to a rumor like a lifeline.
It made my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with Vienne's mafia training and everything to do with Iraia's memories.
I remembered this boy. I remembered braiding his hair when he was small.
I remembered teaching him to hold a wooden sword.
I remembered promising—promising—that she'd always come home.
She didn't. But I did.
"I'm not your sister," I said.
The words landed like stones in still water.
Kael blinked. "What?"
"I'm not Iraia." I didn't move. Didn't reach for a weapon.
I just looked at him with eyes that were hers but weren't, with a soul that wore her skin like borrowed armor.
"I know what she knew. I remember what she remembered. I feel what she felt when that arrow took her in the back. The betrayal. The cold. The fury."
I leaned forward, letting the sword tip press against my collarbone.
"But I am not her. She died on the Blood Fields, Kael. She died believing that her kingdom loved her. She died whispering your name."
The sword wavered.
"Who are you?" he whispered.
"A ghost," I said. "A woman from another world, another life, who died the same night she did. Who made a choice in the dark to finish what she started."
I reached up—not fast, not threatening—and touched the flat of his blade with two fingers.
"I carry her debt. Her pain. Her love for you. And I will pay all of it in blood if I have to."
A tear tracked down Kael's cheek. He didn't wipe it away. He was too busy staring at me like I was a miracle and a nightmare woven into one.
"Prove it," he said, but the fight had gone out of his voice. "Prove you're... whatever you say you are. Prove you know her. Prove you were her."
I thought for a moment. Then I reached into my coat and pulled out the Delgado coin. No—not that. Something else. Something I'd found in the lining of Iraia's armor, tucked against her heart the day she died.
A locket. Silver, shaped like a wolf's head, small enough to hide in a palm.
Kael's breath caught.
"She carried this," I said, opening it. Inside was a miniature portrait, painted with exquisite skill—a woman with dark hair and gentle eyes, smiling at the viewer with infinite softness.
"Your mother. She told you it was lost in the fire that took the eastern wing of the Voss estate. But she didn't lose it. She kept it. She kept it because she couldn't bear to tell you that she'd taken it to remember you by. Because you looked so much like her."
Kael's sword clattered to the floor.
He didn't pick it up. He just stood there, shaking, his hands opening and closing at his sides like he didn't know what to do with them.
"She used to sing to you," I continued, my voice softer now. "When you couldn't sleep. An old lullaby about wolves and starlight. Sleep, my cub, beneath the moon, the pack will find you soon." I closed the locket, pressing it into his trembling palm.
"She loved you more than the legion. More than the crown. More than her own life. And her last thought—the very last thing in her mind before the dark took her—was that she was sorry. Sorry she wouldn't see you become the man she knew you could be."
Kael collapsed.
Not gracefully. Not dramatically. His legs just gave out, and he hit the floor of the Iron Stag like a marionette with cut strings. He pressed his forehead to the dirty wood, his shoulders shaking with sobs he'd been holding back for three months.
I knelt beside him. Awkward. Uncertain. Vienne Delgado had never comforted anyone in her life—she'd been the syndicate's ghost, the blade in the dark, the woman who left before the tears started. But Iraia... Iraia had been a sister. A daughter. A protector.
I put my hand on his shoulder. It felt inadequate. It felt necessary.
"I'm not her," I said again, quiet enough that only he could hear.
"But I'm what she left behind. Her memories. Her mission. Her debt to the people who betrayed her. And I need your help, Kael. I need the loyalists. I need the information you've gathered. I need a brother who wants justice as badly as I do."
He looked up at me. His face was wrecked—eyes swollen, nose running, the face of a boy who'd been fighting a war alone and had just found out he didn't have to.
"You're really not her," he said. It wasn't a question this time. It was acceptance.
"No."
"But you... you feel like her." He wiped his face with his sleeve, a gesture so painfully young it made my chest tighten.
"When you look at me. When you say my name. It's like... like she's standing just behind you. Like she sent you."
Maybe she did, I thought. Maybe that's exactly what happened.
"She sent me," I said. Because it was easier than explaining transmigration and alternate universes and mafia syndicates. Because some truths were too strange, and some lies were kinder.
"And she wants you to stop throwing your life away on petty raids. She wants you to fight with me. Properly. Strategically. Not like a rebel, Kael. Like a soldier."
He laughed. It was wet, broken, but real. "You sound like her when she's mad. She used to say that. 'Stop being a rebel and start being a soldier, Kael. There's a difference.'"
"Is there?"
"Yeah." He picked up his sword, sheathed it, and looked at me with something that wasn't quite trust, but was close enough to build on. "Rebels die for causes. Soldiers make the other bastards die for theirs."
I smiled. "She taught you well."
"She taught me everything." He stood, shaky but steadying, and offered me his hand. "Until three months ago. Then I had to teach myself."
I took his hand. It was calloused, cold, strong.
"Then let's teach each other," I said. "Starting with what you know about the Blood Fields. The names of the soldiers who fired those arrows. The routes the supply trains take. The weaknesses in the capital's defenses. Everything."
Kael nodded, some of the wildness draining from his eyes, replaced by a focused intensity that looked painfully familiar.
"I have maps. Names. A list of nobles who've been buying Voss land for pennies on the gold piece since the massacre. And I have..."
he hesitated, "...a name. Someone who was there. Who saw what happened. Who's been hiding ever since."
I went still. "Who?"
"One of the royal archers. A conscript from the northern villages. He didn't fire on the Legion—he froze, dropped his bow, and ran. He's been drinking his guilt away in a dockside tavern called The Drowned Rat."
Kael's jaw tightened. "His name is Elias. And he says the order came from someone wearing the general's colors. But the voice... the voice wasn't Thorne's."
My pulse kicked. "Then whose?"
"I don't know. But Elias is scared enough to talk. For the right price." Kael looked at me—really looked at me—and I saw the moment he decided. The moment the grieving boy stepped back and the soldier stepped forward.
"I'll take you to him. Tonight. But first—" he reached into his coat and pulled out a folded wanted poster, "—you need to see what your boyfriend did this morning."
I unfolded the paper.
It was a bounty notice. But not the same as before.
The sketch was different. More detailed. The artist had captured something in the eyes that the previous drawings missed—a hardness, a predatory glint that was pure Vienne. The reward had tripled.
But the words beneath had changed.
WANTED: THE SILVER WOLF
ALIVE. UNHARMED.
FOR QUESTIONING REGARDING MATTERS OF NATIONAL SECURITY.
And beneath that, in a bold, handwritten scrawl that I recognized from the battle report:
She is not to be harmed. Anyone bringing her in injured will answer to me personally. —C.T.
"C.T.," I said dryly. "How original."
Kael's expression was suspicious. "He changed the bounty. From dead or alive to just... alive. And he tripled the reward. Why would the Crown Prince want you captured alive, sister?"
"Don't call me that."
"Why would he—"
"Because," I cut him off, folding the poster and tucking it into my belt, "he thinks I have information he needs. Because he's not sure if I'm a threat or an asset. And because—" I thought of the riverbank, of his hand on my face, of the strange,
broken look in his eyes when he'd spoken of believing his uncle, "—because Cassian Thorne is a man who doesn't know which side he's on yet. And he thinks I can tell him."
Kael snorted. "He wants more than information. I saw the way he looked at you at the Victory Ball. Like you were a puzzle he wanted to solve. Personally. In private."
"You're nineteen. You don't know what you're seeing."
"I'm nineteen, not blind." But he let it go, picking up his sword and moving toward the door. "Come on, ghost. Let's go find a drunk archer before he drinks himself to death. And try not to get us killed by your prince's guards on the way."
"He's not my prince."
"Sure. And I'm not your brother." He paused at the door, looking back at me with a crooked smile that was so painfully Iraia's that it stopped my breath.
"Welcome to the family, Vienne. Try not to get us all executed."
I followed him into the night, the wanted poster burning against my hip, a dead woman's brother at my side, and the strange, uncomfortable warmth of belonging settling in my chest like a stone I hadn't known I was missing.
—————
A/N:
The Lady King wasn't crowned yet.
But she had her first knight.
And she was about to get her first witness.