The fire crackles louder all of a sudden. My hands shake, and the parchment trembles like it’s trying to escape.
Kragna’s beside me in seconds.
“What is it?”
I don’t answer. Not at first. My throat’s too tight.
He takes the note from my lap, reads fast. His expression darkens with every line.
“Shit,” he mutters.
The word lands like a blade in my chest.
Veeto leans in. “Tell me it ain’t Skeela.”
“She’s alive,” I say, voice flat. “But not for long.”
“What happened?”
“The ball was a setup,” I whisper. “Or maybe it just went bad. Doesn’t matter. Laertiez has her. And now he knows there’s a rebellion.”
“Of course he does,” Kragna growls. “No one stays secret from that prick for long.”
I close my eyes. Skeela’s face flashes behind my lids—sharp jaw, cold eyes, the way she’d looked when she saidI’m not here to save humans. I’m here to rule.
And now she might not even live long enough to try.
Toad Knight stands with a wheeze. “Then we ride to her defense! We lay siege to the gates! We paint the stones red with tyranny’s blood!”
“Sit down, wartface,” Veeto grunts. “Ain’t no siege with five freaks and a drunk spider.”
“Seven,” Charen slurs. “If you count Bruce. And me. And my webs.”
Kragna doesn’t say anything. He’s staring at the fire like he wants to punch it into submission.
I feel my heartbeat in my wound. A dull, hot throb that reminds me how close I came to dying. How easily everything could unravel again.
“She didn’t deserve this,” I say softly.
“You need to finish this,” Kragna says, as if realizing it for the first time himself.
I nod. My eyes burn.
“This ain’t your fight alone,” he adds. “We all go. Or none of us.”
I look around the fire—at the hydra tracks in the dirt, at Bruce’s slow blink, at Veeto sharpening a blade for no reason other than nerves.
They’re monsters. All of them. Misfits, killers, things that should’ve been put down by any decent army.
But they’re mine now.
And if Skeela’s dying in the city that broke us both?
Then I guess it’s time to break it back.
The guilt sits heavyin my gut, a stone I can’t cough up. Doesn’t matter that I’m alive, that my wound’s healing, that the monsters around me still laugh and drink and howl at stars. Skeela’s in chains. Or worse.
And I walked away.
