Page 71 of Orc’s Gallows

“Probably not.” I tilt my head up, catch his lips with mine in a kiss that tastes of exhaustion and hope and the beginning of what we’ll build from here. “But you’re stuck with me anyway.”

“Stuck.”

“Claimed. Chosen. Bound by magic older than either of us.” I trace the sigil on his neck with my fingertip. “However you want to describe it.”

“I’d describe it as…” He pauses, searching for words. The Gallows Warden, who has pronounced sentences in flawless formal diction for two decades, struggling to name what exists between us. “Mine. I’d describe you as mine.”

The possessiveness in his words should bother me. A week ago, it would have. A week ago, I would have bristled at being claimed, would have fought against the bond blazing on my collarbone, would have done anything to escape the trap I’d fallen into.

Now it only makes me smile.

“Yours.” I press my palm flat against his sternum, sensing the steady beat beneath my hand. “And you’re mine. That’s what the bond means, Brannok. It goes both ways.”

His hand covers mine. Holds it there, against that steady pulse that proves he survived the Judge’s noose.

“Both ways.”

We lie like that as the darkness begins to fade. The window in Brannok’s quarters—a narrow slit that lets in air and light but little else—faces east, and through it, I can see the sky shifting from black to gray to the first hints of rose.

Dawn is coming.

I push myself upright despite the protest of every muscle in my body. Brannok follows, one hand on the small of my back, steadying me as I swing my legs over the edge of the bed.

“Where are you going?”

“To watch.” I reach for what remains of my dress, then abandon the attempt. The fabric is beyond saving. “The sun is rising over a city without gallows. I want to see it.”

He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t try to convince me to rest, to stay in bed, to let the world wait while we recover from the night’s battles. He rises with me, pulls on his trousers, offers me his shirt—execution black, too large for my frame, but better than nakedness.

We walk to the window in silence.

SIXTEEN

ISMERIE

The execution square has become a memorial.

I stand at its edge, watching families lay flowers at the base of stone markers that didn’t exist three months ago. Children chase each other through pathways lined with names—hundreds of names, recovered from council records, carved into granite by artisans who understood that remembrance requires permanence.

The Grand Gallows are gone. Where three stories of iron and oak once loomed, a garden grows. Not a manicured garden—the soil here is too saturated with old blood for that—but a wild tangle of black roses and thornbush that the city’s groundskeepers have learned to leave alone. Life reclaiming death in its own stubborn way.

The smell has changed too. Three centuries of execution left this square reeking of iron and terror—the metallic tang of spilled blood, the sour stench of fear, the underlying rot of a system that had forgotten how to be anything but hungry. Now there’s growing things beneath the old horror. Flowers and earth and the tentative green smell of renewal.

It’s not peace. Blackhook City is too damaged for peace.

But it’s different. And different, I’ve learned, is enough to build on the ashes of what came before.

A hand finds the small of my back—large and scarred and known to me now as well as my own. The sigil on my collarbone answers, a flicker of awareness. I lean into the touch without looking, my body recognizing his presence before my mind catches up.

“You’re thinking too loud.” Brannok’s words rumble against my hair as he steps closer, his front pressing against my back. “I can practically hear the gears turning.”

“That’s not how the bond works and you know it.”

“No.” His arms wrap around me, pulling me against his bulk. “But I know you. And you’ve been staring at that memorial for twenty minutes without moving.”

He’s right. I have been standing here, watching the flowers pile up at the base of markers bearing names I recognize. The young witch who died—the one whose execution birthed a revenant. The merchant Brannok knew was innocent. The old scribe who cursed the Gallows Warden with his dying breath.

Their spirits are free now. Released when we destroyed the Judge. But their names remain, carved in stone that will outlast everyone who remembers why they died.