Page 35

I N THE CHAOS AND CLAMOR OF THE DOCKS, LYRIAN WAS A QUIET , coiled serpent.

Standing between stacked wooden cargo crates, the kingpin was flanked by Segal and Vogolan, an expression of anticipation, of hunger, on his pale face.

His scarlet cloak was pinned high in the hollow of his throat, his white widow’s peak pronounced in the warm autumn sun.

A swirling roulette ball hung around his neck on a chain—his eye into the gamehouse.

Levan and Saff both towered over Lyrian, and yet his modest stature did not make him any less threatening.

A dagger could be wielded far more precisely than a broadsword.

As they approached, Levan muttered something fast and low under his breath.

“I say this because I have no particular desire to see you slaughtered. Do not fuck with my father. Don’t crack your little jokes, don’t argue for the sake of gaining control, don’t put a single foot wrong.

And for the love of hells, if he tells you to kill someone—do it. ”

Saff clenched her jaw so hard her teeth hurt.

Lyrian’s gaze narrowed as she and Levan approached.

“We’ve been waiting.” The kingpin’s words were soft, but not kind.

“We’re right on time,” Levan responded coolly, without glancing at his watch.

The kingpin fixed his son with a look of such sudden and potent loathing that Saffron physically recoiled. The expression was gone almost as soon as it appeared, leaving behind only a pale vestige of displeasure, but it had been there nonetheless: an obliterating and unfiltered hatred.

Levan simply stared back, blandly, unmoved.

Every single interaction between father and son seemed to be a power struggle.

“Very well,” Lyrian said, after several taut beats, and Saffron had the strange sense he was fighting some fierce internal battle. “Let us proceed.”

The docks clanged with the bustle of trade, the calls of workers, the tinkling of bells, the snapping of banderoles. Over their heads, a crate hovered of its own accord, then floated away in the direction of a magnificent purple riverboat.

While the sun was high in the sky, the air was cool in the shadows between freight stacks.

Following Lyrian, the Bloodmoons snaked silently through the maze of crates until they arrived at an old shipping container repurposed into an office, the name Kasan Melian etched neatly onto a wooden sign nailed to the door.

Lyrian entered without knocking, bracketed by Segal and Vogolan. Levan and Saff followed.

“Good day, Kasan.” Lyrian’s tone was pleasant, and somehow more unsettling than overt hostility.

Behind a squat wooden desk, Kasan Melian leapt to his feet. The merchant had deep olive skin, gold-rimmed glasses, and a densely lined forehead. He wore a royal-blue cloak, a gold cuff etched with thirteen dragons around his wrist—a follower of Draecism, then—and a petrified expression.

“S-sir?” he stuttered. “Sir. A pleasure, of course, but … I usually deal with Vogolan.”

Lyrian strolled casually around the office, studying the dates and transactions pinned to the noticeboard, slowly leafing through a ledger on Kasan’s desk. Subtle yet invasive shows of power, almost daring Kasan to protest. The noises of the dock were dulled, leaving only taut, threatening silence.

“There was a crate missing from our latest shipment,” Lyrian eventually said. Every word was calm, precise, as though it had been measured on a set of scales. “I would like to know which of your workers pilfered it.”

Kasan blanched, gripping the edge of his desk so hard that his dry, cracked knuckles turned bone white. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lyrian pinched the bridge of his nose, his serenity fissuring somewhat. Saffron recognized the tic of impatience; Levan did the same.

“Nobody ever makes it simple, do they?” he said, then sighed. “Nobody answers my questions, nobody tells the truth. It’s exhausting. Because you know I always win, and so why put off the inevitable? Fighting the inevitable is not bravery, but idiocy.”

Kasan steeled his jaw. “I truly didn’t know there was a missing—”

“When you took the contract, you assured us that you ran the tightest of ships.” Lyrian had yet to draw his wand—another subtle show of strength. To wield fear is to wield the greatest power of all . “That your boat would never spring a leak.”

“Sir, I can only apologize if supply went astray,” said Kasan, banging a fist on the desk as though he was as incensed as the kingpin. “Whoever’s responsible will be let go immediately.”

Lyrian rubbed at his temples, as though this was giving him a headache. “Lox addiction is hardly difficult to spot. The sweats, the night terrors, the black tinge to the veins. You must know exactly who stole from the stash.”

“I don’t, I swear it, I—”

“Honesty is so hard to come by these days.” Lyrian withdrew his wand at last. Segal and Vogolan raised theirs in unison.

“And you know, I don’t want to do these gruesome things to people.

I have no innate bloodlust, believe it or not.

But I will stop at nothing to protect my own.

” A thin curl of a smile. “Perhaps we aren’t so different, after all. ”

“Sir, please—”

“Clear the desk,” Lyrian said coldly.

With a swoosh of his wand and an inaudible mutter, Segal cleared the desk.

Kasan took a step backward, hand floating to the gold cuff at his wrist as though his faith might protect him, somehow, but every one in the room knew he was long past saving.

He was outnumbered, and overpowered, and nothing short of dragon intervention would save him now.

Lyrian raised his wand, which Saff now knew to be his late wife’s weaverwick. The garnet wood tremored slightly, as though it contained too much power for Lyrian to command.

“Sen ascevolo.”

Kasan’s body arched hideously as it was dropped onto the desk, all the wind slamming out of his lungs with an audible ooft.

A curl of a smile on Lyrian’s face. “ Sen debilitan, nis cerebran .”

Every inch of the merchant’s body was paralyzed—except for his head, which shook frantically.

“Here’s your first lesson, Filthcloak,” Lyrian drawled to Saff.

“Nothing gets you what you want faster than pain. Of course, fear is a more powerful tool long term, and in time you will learn to manipulate those threads. But for a quick fix, pain is king. Levan here is known for his, ah, handiwork. Segal has a penchant for kneecaps, while Vogolan likes teeth. In my youth, I used to enjoy removing minor organs. Appendixes, gallbladders. A kidney, if someone badly misbehaved. A painful procedure, without whiteroot or poppymist, as I’m sure you can imagine. I wonder what your signature will be?”

Saff’s ribs felt like they were about to cave in.

You have to earn your place over and over again, like watering a plant. You can’t feed it once and expect it to thrive forever.

“You seemed particularly compelled by the plight of Neatras’s daughter. A cruel fate, indeed.” Lyrian paused, and Saffron waited for an indication that the kingpin knew what she and Levan had done to free Tenea, but none came. “Perhaps eyes … yes. Eyes could work.”

With the toe of his boot, Lyrian rustled through the detritus that had flown from Kasan’s desk.

“I could teach you the spell, of course, for removing an eye. But there’s something so visceral, so satisfying about doing it the old-fashioned way.

” The glint of something sharp and silver caught his eye.

He stabbed his wand at it. “ Sen convoqan .”

The instrument leapt from the floor into his palm, and he held it out to Saffron.

A letteropener. Long, pointed, with two parallel grooves on the narrow handle.

“Carve out the eye, and I’ll show you how to bind a person’s consciousness to it. Then we’ll end the body and leave the mind entombed.”

Saffron’s stomach roiled. She couldn’t carve out a person’s eye with a Saints-damned letteropener.

She had to think her way out of this.

As it had in the final assessment over a year ago, her mind skirted around the reality in front of her and went straight for the why.

Lyrian claimed that he didn’t want to commit such heinous deeds—he just wanted to reach the desired outcome as quickly as possible, to know who had pilfered the lox from the shipment.

In theory, anyway.

“Why can’t we just use truth elixir?” Saff suggested blandly, as though her heart was not skittering like a snare drum inside her chest.

To her surprise, it was Kasan who answered her question.

“Because truth elixir does not spread panic the same way torture does.” His voice quivered but did not break.

“Because their empire does not run on information, but on fear. They don’t just need loose lips, they need willing bodies.

My mutilated corpse will keep my workers in line for years to come. Is that about right?”

Levan gave a flat nod, and Saffron knew then that it was a lost cause.

For several long, terrible moments, she stood rooted to the ground. Levan’s eyes were fixed upon hers, burning with the same warning he’d leveled at her earlier: And for the love of hells, if he tells you to kill someone—do it.

She had to do this. She could not appear weak, uncompliant. She had to make it seem as though the brand had unyielding power over her.

She approached Kasan, her stomach a stone fist as she pressed the pointed metal to Kasan’s face. He flinched away from it, a tear beading on his lower lashes, his whole body shaking.

Just get through this, Saffron told herself. Get through this, and you can tell Aspar all about the loxlure, all about the Rezaran bloodline. Get through this, and you’ll be one step closer to tearing the whole rotten empire down.

Unless the Bloodmoons’ unfaltering faith in the brand was justified, and she’d die horribly before she could ever open her mouth.

Kasan jutted his jaw high. Resolute, as though picturing the worker he was protecting.

The letteropener dug into the outer corner of his socket with a grotesque squelch, and he let out a scream so visceral Saffron felt it reverberate in her ribs, in the hollow chambers of her heart.

She kept waiting for her mind to detach itself from reality, the way it always did during moments of horrific violence, kept waiting to float out of her own body and watch the scene from afar, but she remained agonizingly rooted inside herself.

She drove the instrument in farther, working around the socket, trying very hard not to retch at the wet snap of tendons, the pop of fluid, the scream so raw it sawed through her torso. Finally, with a roar of world-ending hurt, the eyeball was severed at the root.

Trembling, she picked it up with her bare hand and passed it to Lyrian. Kasan’s wails echoed around the deepest recesses of her psyche.

If she breathed, she would unravel, and so she did not breathe.

The kingpin pulled an empty roulette ball casing from his cloak pocket, placing the ruined eyeball inside and uttering a seething incantation.

Kasan’s soul drew from his body in a misty whorl of ocean blue—the color his gemstone would’ve been, if he’d been properly mourned—and seeped into the roulette ball.

Lyrian swiftly issued a killing curse. The wailing stopped abruptly, leaving the air ringing with its absence.

Lyrian held the eye up to the light.

“Shoddy execution, Filthcloak. Nowhere close to a clean cut. And all those burst blood vessels.” He tsk ed, then shook it like a snowglobe. “Levan, Segal, parade the corpse through the docks, then take it to the incinerator. Oh, and Vogolan?”

“Yes?”

In a flash, Lyrian raised his ring-decked palm and slapped Vogolan backhandedly across the cheek. The gold rings around his knuckles peeled Vogolan’s skin open like ripe fruit, drawing streaks of poppy-red blood. “I’ll handle all lox shipments going forward.”

“Yes, sir.” Vogolan’s voice betrayed no shock or pain, but he had to be stung by it. Non-magical violence was considered highly derogatory. It said, without words, You are not worth draining my well for.

And then they were gone, Lyrian’s cloak flapping behind him like a flag.