Chapter 29

Wild, restless rage swipes at my ribs.

The bell is still jingling from her dashed departure as I step into the aisle and stalk toward the store’s rear, cloak fluttering in my wake. Cracking my neck from side to side, I pass the empty counter doused in lantern light.

They love their lanterns here. Think the bright can protect them from everything. Most of them are too young or uneducated to know that worse monsters used to thrive in the light.

Some of them still do.

I follow a whistling tune and the distinct aroma of roasted duck—a delicacy sourced from Ocruth. All I can smell is greed as I step through the open doorway at the far corner of the room.

The office is such a contrast to the rest of the shop, padded with expensive furnishings from all over the continent: a chandelier dripping beads of amber; plush, velvet chairs studded with sterling; an almond-shaped shield hanging on the wall, carved from the impenetrable skull of an Ocean Drake; the tan pelt of a Rouste Dune Cat stretched across the ground, so big it leaves only glimpses of the blue stone beneath.

There’s even a Vruk talon mounted on his wall, long and curved and black.

The shopkeeper whistles away with his back to me, turning the dial on the tall, freestanding safe in the corner of the room.

My gaze is drawn to the glass statue of a broad male I recognize, his dreaded hair a transparent churn around his face, wrathful hunger consuming his lucid eyes, fangs bared as he hisses at nothing, lunges at nothing—the transparent Vruk talon he’s wielding paused mid-strike.

Must have cost him a lot of coin to procure that statue. To have it carved from the inhospitable heart of Arrin, dragged for days across the stark, windswept plains, then hauled on a barge down the River Norse without even a hairline fracture.

Nobody would go to such effort unless they were bribed or paid a handsome sum. Unless, of course, he did it himself.

But I somehow doubt that.

The safe clicks open.

“You know …” My words crack through the whistling tune, and the man whirls around so fast his spectacles slip off his face and clatter to the floor, Orlaith’s pickaxe clutched close to his chest. “The Shulák say the battlefield at Arastile is sacred. That mining from it will bring you eternal bad luck.”

“Wh-who are you?” he blurts, bending to retrieve his spectacles and thread them onto his scrunched face.

I turn to look straight at him from beneath my hood.

His mouth falls open, gaze flicking to the hilt of my sword that’s visible over my shoulder, then to the brooch at my nape—the Ocruth sigil. He drops into a low, sweeping bow. “High Master …”

Not tonight.

I gesture to the pickaxe. “That diamond right there? I mined it myself.” Body straightening, the man lifts his head, slowly glancing down his nose at the dainty tool in his white-knuckled fist. “A lump of it as big as your head,” I say, pretending to weigh it in the palm of my hand. “Carved it into three small tools and gifted them to someone special.”

Someone who needed to see that beautiful things don’t have to be breakable.

He looks up, frowning. “You must be mistaken. I purchased this tool off an urchin boy—”

“Tell me. Do you make a habit out of taking advantage of naïve people to satiate your greed?”

“No,” he blurts, puffing his chest, angling his body in such a way he shields the half-open safe at his back. “I’m an honest, hard-working man. I pay a yearly tithe and contribute to my territory in more ways than most.”

I wrap my hand around the door. “Step aside.”

The sharp, intoxicating scent of his fear slathers the back of my throat, all the color draining from his face. “H-High Master, I—”

“Step. Aside.”

His posture crumbles, and my gaze stalks him as he edges away, breaking his frantic stare to look into the gloomy guts of the safe.

My heart drops. Stomach twists.

Lining two of the three metal shelves are numerous jars packed full of Aeshlian ears steeped in brine, some no bigger than the pad of my thumb. All still wielding their delicate, crystal thorns, not yet ripped from the flesh and ground into the fine dust these fuckers have discovered feeds them long life if they drink it. Inhale it. Smoke it. The withering race is free rein to some sick, twisted individuals who hang too much weight on the prophet’s chisel.

The blood in my veins crackles and sparks, the silver script on my skin sinking its sharp teeth deeper into my flesh, wrapping me in a barbed-wire band.

I slowly turn, watch him stumble backward so fast he thuds against his desk, scattering his half-eaten meal and stacks of gold drabs I want to nail through his skull.

His large shop, his expensive taste in antiquities—it all makes so much horrible fucking sense. “You’re a dealer.”

“It’s not what it looks like—”

“You’re padding the streets with candescence. With the hacked off ears of men, women, children.”

“I’m holding it for someone else! I swear! I’m just the middleman!”

“You’re a greedy man,” I thunder, and he almost jumps out of his skin.

Orlaith’s pickaxe clatters across the floor.

I stalk forward, heavy boots thumping as I flip my hood and let him see my ravenous wrath in its full, unguarded glory—bled to the surface like a swelling sickness.

Squealing like a stuck pig, he scurries away, tripping over his chair and landing on the floor with a hefty thud. He crawls, spins, spine pressed flat against the richly colored tapestry lining the wall.

“I’m from a time when greed got your throat torn open, jaw ripped from your face.” I point at the Vruk talon mounted on the wall. “One of those punched through your chest.”

Heaving breath, his beady eyes bounce from the glass statue to me and back again, no doubt drawing the parallels.

Little does he know, I’m much worse than the monster he glorifies.

“Do you know who dished out those deadly sentences?”

A sob bursts from his trembling lips as he folds into a pathetic, snotty knot at the wall’s base.

I rip my dagger from the sheath at my hip.

Smell him piss himself.

“Me.”