“No games,” I growl, voice low enough to shiver in his bones.
He looks up at me, mouth still curled in a smile, but there’s steel under it now. Good. Means he’s listening.
“Message received,” he says.
As we turn to leave, he shifts closer—shoulders brushing mine. His breath is cool and cloying, like mint and blood and secrets.
“She’ll eat you alive,” he whispers.
I grin, wide and toothy.
“I hope so.”
11
RIVER
Lowtown smells like damp stone, offal, and old despair.
There’s no point sugarcoating it. The stench creeps up your nose and settles at the base of your skull, coating your tongue until everything tastes like mildew and rot. The air’s thicker here, heavy with smoke from gutter fires and the sharp tang of sweat—sour, desperate, human.
Kragna keeps close behind me, boots crunching on gravel and filth. His cloak’s pulled tight, hood low, but there’s no hiding what he is. Not really. He moves too smoothly. Too silently. His presence lingers in the air like smoke after a blaze—impossible to miss.
We wind through alleys that shouldn’t exist, between walls patched with scrap metal and prayer flags faded to gray. People live in these crevices. You can hear them breathing. Huddled behind crates, crouched under broken archways. Mothers clutching thin-limbed babies. Old men with brands seared into their cheeks or necks, faces so hollow you could pour sorrow into them and still not fill the emptiness.
Every time I see those brands, my chest tightens.
Not because they shock me. Not anymore.
Because once, one of them was mine.
A little girl squats beside a collapsed stairwell, gnawing on what might’ve once been bread. Her ribs show through a threadbare tunic. Dirt cakes her hands, her knees. She looks up as we pass, eyes too big for her face. She doesn’t smile. Just watches.
Kragna slows.
I shoot him a warning look over my shoulder.
“Don’t,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. But I hear the way his breath shifts. Shorter. Rougher.
“This place…,” he murmurs.
“Isn’t yours to fix,” I finish for him.
He falls quiet again, but I can feel the tension rolling off him. He’s not made for ignoring things. Not made for watching and doing nothing. Especially not when a boy with a crooked leg limps past, clutching a sack of mushrooms and glancing up like he’s expecting to be kicked.
We turn a corner and nearly step over a man passed out in his own filth. The door beside him is missing its hinges. Inside, shadows shift. I don’t look too long.
“Every time you stare, you mark us,” I say. “They’ll notice.”
“I’m already noticed,” he growls.
He’s right. They’re watching us.
Whispers curl up from doorways. A flash of movement between crates. A rustle behind a tarp.
Not everyone here is a victim. Some of them eat the weak to stay alive.
