Rhen remained beside the bed in silence.
Mary smoothed the blanket and looked up at him. “Do you want me to stay with her, Master Rhen? She shouldn’t be alone if she wakes.”
He did not answer immediately. His gaze stayed fixed on the witch’s face and the tremor still moving through her limbs as though the storm had not finished feeding.
“No,” he said at last. “I’ll stay.”
Mary’s brows rose, but she did not argue. She only rested a hand briefly against his arm, as though he were still a boy pretending not to be afraid of something.
“You did the right thing bringing her here.”
“She saved Cole,” Rhen replied. “That bought her time.”
Mary’s expression softened with a knowledge he did not invite. “Whatever you need to call it.”
She left before he could answer, closing the door quietly behind her.
Silence settled across the room.
Rhen dragged a chair to the bedside and sat with his forearms braced against his knees, his stare unblinking.
“You’d better fucking survive this,” he muttered. “You owe me answers.”
Rhen looked beyond her flesh with the sight that belonged to Charon.
Fever, glamour, and fragile human flesh receded beneath the older sight. He expected to find the soul clean or corrupted, marked for his passage or left beyond his office.
Instead, a silver sigil encircled it.
The mark was not damnation. Judgment carried finality, its meaning absolute from the instant he recognised it. This was something else—a binding written in the same ancient language of law but left deliberately incomplete. Its final line reached outward from her soul and disappeared somewhere inside him.
Rhen recoiled hard enough to drive the chair across the floor.
The glamour closed over the mark, but he had already seen it.
Words spoken beneath the broken lights of Bar X returned with vicious clarity.
The marked one.
The Charon will kneel for her.
Rhen stared at the unconscious witch.
“I kneel for no one.”
She gave no answer beyond another fevered tremor.
He leaned back and crossed his arms, as though the position could hold every unwanted instinct in place.
Ruthlessness had never troubled him. It was not armor placed over a softer nature or a habit learned because the world had been unkind. It was the cleanest expression of what he was: Charon, Reaper, the one who dealt with the dead and carried judgment to its final consequence without flinching.
Discipline mattered because violence without discipline endangered the clan.
Loyalty mattered because Sule had earned it.
Leena had mattered because she was Leena.
Everything else was law, appetite, duty, or threat.
