And I saw myself reflected in a dozen eyes—not a person, not a protector, not a fae who'd spent years stitching the wounded back together. Just a monster. A rupture. A thing to be destroyed.
The rage came up like bile.
My marks flared—both of them—and I didn't stop it. Didn'twantto stop it. Silver fire tendrils lashed from my skin toward the nearest poster, whispers rising to a keening wail as they clawed at the falsehood, trying to unweave it thread by thread, to burn the lie off the wall and show them the truth—
The ward hit me like a hammer.
King's magic, old and vicious, had warded the posters against my marks. It slammed through my Unravel andreflected, turning my own power back on itself. Light fractured. Shadow surged. The cobblestones under my feet cracked, lifted, spun—
Behind me, glass shattered. The air hiccuped, that same sick ripple I'd seen in the merchant, and I felt it in my marrow: the Veil, screaming.
Because of me.
Because I'd just made it worse.Instead of revealing the lie in the posters…they had multiplied, there were now thousands of them, gleaming on every surface of the city.
I reeled back, blood trickling hot from my nose, my vision swimming. The crowd had scattered and taken cover, fleeing the glitch, the cracking streets, the wrongness bleeding out from where I stood.
Serenya caught me before I fell. Her face was pale. Grim.
"The loft," she said. "Now. Before they regroup."
I didn't argue, I couldn't. Because my throat was closing and my hands were trembling and somewhere behind us the fae with my face was sobbing in a pool of her own blood and I had just proven every lie the King had told about me.
The Rupture.
Maybe he wasn't lying after all.
We took the long way. Through the tanner's alley with its eye-watering stench, up the crumbling stairs that only locals knew existed, across the rooftop where the tiles had long since given up pretending to be watertight. My legs burned. My nose had stopped bleeding, but the taste of blood still coated my tongue.
Almost there. Almost home.
The thought was a lifeline. The loft wasn't much—a cramped space above a dying spice merchant, accessed through a trapdoor that stuck in humid weather and a ladder missing its third rung. But it wasours. The only place in Velmyra where I could sleep without one eye open. Where Serenya's herbs hung drying from the rafters and my spare blades and throwing stars waited oiled and ready under the floorboards.
Just a few more steps.
It was right there—the spice merchant's sagging roof, the crooked chimney pipe, the stain on the plaster where rain had been getting in all winter. Ordinary. Invisible. Ours.
Then Serenya stopped so suddenly I nearly crashed into her back.
I didn't have to ask why.
The street below our building was crawling with midnight-blue cloaks. Enforcers. A dozen at least, maybe more—spilling out of doorways, blocking the alley mouths, their silver-bandedhelms catching the fading light like beetles' shells. Two of them flanked our entrance. Oursecretentrance, the one no one was supposed to know about.
The trapdoor hung open. Splintered. Torn from its hinges.
An Enforcer descended our ladder carrying Serenya's medicine chest. Another followed with an armful of my clothes—the good ones, the ones I'd been saving for when we finally left this city behind.
At least someone would get use out of them. Maybe an Enforcer's wife would look fetching in my only decent tunic.
The joke died on my tongue.
"No." The word fell out of me, small and stupid.
Serenya's hand closed around my wrist in warning.
But I couldn't stop staring.
They'd found it. They'd foundus. The one place that was supposed to be safe, the one corner of this rotting city that belonged to no one but Serenya and me—
