Page 13

DOMNO

I ease away from Erisen once his breathing deepens into sleep.

Even in slumber, his small features hold an echo of tension—a child too accustomed to vigilance.

He looks fragile against the threadbare blanket, those tiny fingers still clutching the wooden bird I carved him.

Something pulls tight in my chest, an unfamiliar ache I have no right to feel.

When I look up, Esalyn's watching me. The ember-light catches in her dark hair, illuminating the tired lines around her eyes that somehow don't diminish her beauty.

She's all careful strength and wary grace, a woman who's learned to make herself smaller to survive.

Yet beneath that practiced invisibility burns something fierce—I've seen it flare when market merchants shortchange her, when strangers stand too close to her son.

The storm's fury has abated, leaving behind only the occasional grumble of distant thunder. Ash settles on the windowsill like gray snow.

Esalyn rises silently from her chair, moving with that deliberate quietness I've come to recognize as second nature to her. She reaches above the hearth and pulls down a small amber bottle, holding it up with a questioning tilt of her head.

"Outside?" she mouths, gesturing toward the door.

I nod, surprised. We've never been alone together—truly alone, without Erisen's presence creating a buffer between us. The thought sends an unexpected spike of something that isn't quite nervousness through my blood.

She checks on Erisen once more before we step into the night.

The air smells of ash and iron, the afterbirth of Velzaroth's volcanic tantrums. The small covered porch outside her door barely deserves the name—just a few rotting boards held together by stubborn nails—but it offers shelter from the drifting cinders still floating down from the crimson sky.

Esalyn settles on the single step, her shoulders pressed against the doorframe. She uncorks the bottle and takes a swig before offering it to me, her movements revealing a momentary tension. This gesture feels significant—trusting me enough to turn her back, to share her meager luxuries.

I accept the bottle, careful not to let our fingers touch. The mead is sweet but burns pleasantly, nothing like the potent amerinth I usually drink to drown memories. For a while, we sit in silence, passing the bottle back and forth while watching embers dance on the horizon.

"Erisen has never taken to someone like he does with you," she finally says, her voice low. Not accusatory, but wondering.

I roll the mead across my tongue before answering, buying time against the surge of emotion her words trigger. "I don't know why."

"I do." She takes the bottle back, studying it rather than me. "Children see what adults miss. Whatever you're running from, whatever you've done... he sees past it."

Her perceptiveness unnerves me. For six years I've existed as a shadow among shadows, barely speaking more than necessary to complete jobs. Now this human woman with exhausted eyes cuts straight through my carefully constructed emptiness.

"He's a very special boy," I say, the inadequacy of the statement burning my tongue. What I mean is: he reminds me of Zevan. He makes me want to be the man I failed to be.

Esalyn sighs, leaning her head back against the weathered wood. "He is." The bottle dangles loosely from her fingers, catching the crimson light. "I've done everything for him. Everything."

The raw honesty in her voice scrapes something loose inside me. She's never spoken like this before—has maintained careful distances, shared only what was necessary. Now, something has shifted between us, some invisible barrier thinning.

"I belonged to Vorrak Thren'Surath." She speaks the name like a curse, her voice steady despite the way her hands tremble around the bottle. "Not as a wife. As property. A human servant in a demon noble's household."

My blood runs cold at the name. Vorrak's reputation extends even to mercenaries like me—a collector of rare things, living and otherwise, with connections throughout Aerasak's underground. The bottle suddenly feels fragile in my grip.

"Erisen is his son," she continues, words tumbling out now as if she's held them back too long.

"Not by choice. Never by choice. For three years, I was his favorite plaything.

" Her voice doesn't break, but something in her eyes fractures.

"When I discovered I was pregnant, I knew what would happen to a half-demon child in that house.

Especially one born to a human servant."

The implications hang in the ash-laden air between us. My throat tightens with rage so intense it temporarily blinds me. I've seen what powerful demons do to those they consider beneath them. Have spent my life distancing myself from my own kind because of it.

"I escaped when Erisen was two weeks old," she says.

"A healer in the household—she took pity on us.

Helped us slip away when I was supposed to be recovering.

" Her hand unconsciously goes to her back, where scars I've never seen but can easily imagine must mark her skin. "We've been running ever since."

The bottle is empty now, but she still clutches it, fingers white against the amber glass. Her face remains composed, but the trembling in her hands betrays the cost of these confessions.

I don't reach for her, though something in me wants to.

Comfort has never been my language. The rage thrumming through my veins—familiar and clean—is easier to recognize than this other feeling spreading beneath my ribcage.

Instead, I stare out at Velzaroth's glowing horizon, where magma pulses beneath the city's blackened foundations.

"I think I took to Erisen because he reminds me of someone. I had a brother," I say, the words scraping my throat raw. "Zevan."

Esalyn goes still beside me, her fingers ceasing their restless movement against the empty bottle. She doesn't look at me, doesn't press—just waits in that patient way of hers, giving the silence room to breathe.

"He was younger. Softer." I roll the taste of his name around my mouth, unfamiliar after years of forced silence. "That's rare among demons. To be gentle."

The wind shifts, bringing with it the sulfurous scent of the city below. Ash drifts between us, settling on our shoulders like gray snow. My horns ache suddenly, a phantom pain that always accompanies thoughts of Zevan.

"I was supposed to protect him. That's what older brothers do." The bitterness in my voice surprises me. "But I failed."

Esalyn sets the bottle down, her movements deliberate and quiet. Her profile in the dim light shows no judgment, just attentiveness that somehow loosens something long-knotted inside me.

"We were working together, nothing too dangerous. Or so I thought." I avoid telling her we were tracking a bounty as I stare at my scarred hands, seeing instead Zevan's slender fingers, better suited to holding books than weapons. "It was a trap."

The wind picks up, rattling loose boards beneath us.

Memory floods back—the copper smell of blood, Zevan's gold eyes wide with shock.

He was much too young to be out with me like that, and sometimes in my memories, I don't picture him on the cusp of adulthood as he was.

I see him as the child I should have protected.

"Seven against two. We fought back to back.

He was... magnificent." Pride and pain twist together in my chest. "Until a blade caught him from behind.

Just below the ribs." My finger taps unconsciously against my own side, marking the spot.

"I was fighting and it wasn't until it was much too late that I realized he had collapsed in a room that was on fire. I couldn't reach him in time."

I don't tell her how I watched him die as my skin blistered, as I tried to rip through the burning walls as they collapsed, or how Zevan watched me, blood bubbling between lips that kept trying to reassure me . How his last act was to tell me it wasn't my fault. The cruelest mercy.

"I buried him in the red sands of Ikoth's northern shore," I say instead. "Where we used to swim as children. Then I hunted down everyone involved. One by one."

I feel Esalyn's gaze but don't meet it. Fear of what I might see—disgust, perhaps, at the cold violence in my voice. Or worse, pity.

"After that..." I shrug, a gesture meant to dismiss the weight still pressing against my chest. "I forgot how to live. I worked to survive, mostly to drink until I could forget. And every day doesn't feel right without him."

The confession hangs between us, stark and unadorned. I've offered no justifications, no softening of truths. She knows what I am now—a killer hollowed out by grief, a demon who couldn't save the one person who mattered.

She surprises me by shifting closer, not touching, but near enough that I can feel the warmth of her—a living counterpoint to the cold emptiness I've carried for years.

"Thank you," she says simply.

I finally look at her, confused by the sincerity in those two words. "For what?"

"For not saying it gets better." Her eyes, hazel flecked with gold, hold mine without flinching. "For not trying to fix me with pretty words."

Something shifts between us—understanding taking root in barren soil. We sit side by side, her scars invisible beneath worn clothing, mine etched into gray skin for anyone to see. Two broken things that recognize each other's jagged edges.

"Does Erisen know?" I ask finally. "About his father?"

She shakes her head. "He knows we're running. That his father is a demon but we don't trust demons. That people might want to hurt us. But not why." Her voice drops lower. "How do you tell a child something like that?"

I have no answer. The silence stretches between us, but it's different now—not filled with wariness but with something like recognition.

Neither of us tries to mend the other's wounds or offer hollow reassurances.

We simply exist together in this moment, two survivors carrying their respective ghosts.