POV: Auren Blackthorn
Smoke and cold air punch my lungs as I sprint the corridor, sword up, voice already ripping orders. “Fan out—two to each junction—check pulse, call out numbers!” Boots thunder behind me. A guard lies crumpled against a doorframe—eyes shut, not dead. I press two fingers to his neck. Thready beat. “Alive,” I bark. “Move.”
“Door’s blown,” Rowan calls from ahead.
Shattered hinges hang like broken teeth. Burn marks spider across the stone where a lock used to be. I step through first, shoulders caged tight with a feeling I can’t shake. Blood trails in uneven drops toward the west wing—dark, almost black in the torchlight, drying fast.
“Track it,” I say, already following. “No contamination. Watch your feet.”
Two more bodies at the bend. I kneel, flip one carefully. Unconscious, breathing shallow. “What hit them?”
“Pulse rune?” Rowan guesses, sniffing the scorched air.
“No residue.” I scan the walls. “Raw power. Someone blasted through without finesse.”
“Which means rush,” he mutters.
“Which means desperation,” I add.
A distant voice cracks my name. “Auren!”
Rena. I whirl. She’s flying down the hall with Kai at her shoulder, aura too bright for these sick hall lamps, hands shaking hard enough I want to catch them with mine. She stops short when she sees the blood, breathing ragged.
“Don’t,” I warn softly, stepping between her and the nearest stain. “You don’t need that image.”
“I already have it,” she whispers, eyes glassy. “In my head. In my chest.” She swallows, looks past me at the blasted doors, the fallen guards. “They took him to force me into surrender.”
Kai’s growl scrapes stone. “They want you choking on a choice.”
“Or running into a trap,” I finish. “So we don’t run. We hunt.”
Rena nods—quick, jerky—then presses a trembling hand to the wall as if the stone can steady her. I want to pull her into me. Kai already does—hand at her elbow, body angled to shield—but he leaves space for me to stand on her other side. We form a wedge without thinking.
“Spread left and right,” I order the squad. “Call if you hit a dead end or fresh sign. We keep eyes on exits, vents, service stairs. They won’t risk open courtyards with our archers oriented.”
Rowan gestures with his chin. “Blood turns again.”
We follow. Past a slashed tapestry. Past a toppled candelabrum still smoking. Rena’s breath hitches, then stutters; she’s holding it to keep from making a sound that would hurt her to hear.
“Slow,” I tell her, hearing my own voice gentler than my chest feels. “We’ll get him.”
“I promised I wouldn’t lose him,” she says, voice so thin I hate every god who ever wrote a prophecy. “I promised—”
“You didn’t break anything,” I say. “They did. So we break them back.”
Her hand fists in Kai’s jacket. His jaw flexes; he bows his head to speak only for her. “You don’t fold. Not now.”
We hit the infirmary wing corner. Three doors hang crooked, splintered at the latches. The trail thickens to a smear across the threshold where something—someone—was dragged too quickly to keep the blood neat.
“Check room by room,” I say. “Quietly.”
First bed: empty sheets, medical wraps unspooled, a bowl of water knocked and dried into a map. Second bed: a healer on the floor, pulse fluttering under my thumb. “She’ll wake,” I tell Rena. “Hit hard, not lethal.”
We enter the third room, and Rena stops like she’s been shot. On the floor near the far cot—just a scrap, threadbare at the corner, dark blue almost black in the dim—lies a strip of fabric.
Her father’s cloak.
She moves before I can, knees hitting stone, fingers shaking as she lifts the scrap. She presses it to her mouth like it might still carry warmth. Her shoulders fold. A sound works up her throat—small, terrible, the sound of the past cracking back open.
“I can’t lose him again,” she says, not loud, not quiet, just true. “I can’t—”
Kai is already there, sinking with her, arms gathering her without asking, face buried in her hair like a man bracing against a wave. “You won’t,” he says, savage and soft. “On my life, Rena. You won’t.”
I drop to a crouch at her back and lay my palm between her shoulder blades—steady pressure, steady heat. “We’re not burying him. Not tonight. We take him back or we burn the path trying.”
Her breath skids, then catches on that. She nods, a stuttered motion, presses the cloth to her chest, then looks up at both of us, eyes wet steel. “Together?”
“Together,” Kai says, no hesitation.
“Together,” I echo, because my bones would break before I’d make her do this alone.
Rowan clears his throat from the doorway, voice careful. “Trail continues. West service stairs. Looks like someone knew the blind spots.”
“Council plant,” I mutter. “Or someone they bought.”
Rena stands. It takes her two tries; we each take a side, pull her up smooth, don’t let go. She wipes her face with the back of her wrist, shoves the fabric into her pocket like a talisman. The aura around her steadies, brightens, changes flavor from grief to needled focus.
“This ends tonight,” she says, and the sentence lands like a command the palace itself hears.
“Then we move like it,” I say, already turning back into motion. “Rowan—two ahead. Riven—lock the north stairs and post silencers along the east hall. I want overlapping eyes on every exit, balcony, and garbage chute no one thinks about until a body disappears.”
“On it,” Riven fires, disappearing into the hall with two shadows attached.
We hit the west service stair. Narrow. Old. Stones worn from servant feet no one thinks are worth counting. Blood kisses the edge of the top step, another smear four steps down, a palm print low on the wall where someone tried to catch themselves and failed.
“Careful,” I warn, taking the first descent. “Trip runes, pressure plates—this is exactly where I’d lace them.”
Kai’s nostrils flare. “Sour magic,” he growls. “Weak.”
“Quick work,” I answer. “Means they were on a clock. Means they’ll make mistakes.”
Rena inhales, eyes narrowing like she’s listening to something I can’t hear. “Left at the landing,” she murmur-orders. “He’s—” Her throat works. “He was pressed against the wall there.”
“Copy,” I say, because trusting her is easier than breathing.
We turn left. Two steps, then three. A low groan upstairs from a waking guard. I keep count of everything—pillars, sconces, floor seams—and carve the route into memory in case we have to run it blind on the way back carrying weight.
At the second landing, a door hangs half open. I palm it with my sleeve, push. Cold air sneaks in—the kind that lives in back halls where the heart of a palace doesn’t reach. The passage beyond is empty. Silent. Wrong.
“Hold,” I whisper, raising a fist.
Everyone freezes. I listen.
Nothing but our own breaths. Too quiet for a snatch-and-run. Too clean.
“They transferred here,” Rowan says, crouching to point at the stone. “Blood thins. Heavy prints turn to nothing. Either picked him up or—” He glances at Rena, swallows. “Or reset the wound.”
Kai’s jaw goes granite. “They’re trying to make her chase blind.”
“She won’t,” I say, because I’ll cut my own throat before I let them dictate her rhythm. I turn to Rena. “We go smart. We go with a plan. We don’t let them bait you into the open.”
Her eyes are color and light and rage. “They already baited me,” she says, voice leveled to something colder. “I’m just not swallowing the hook.”
“Good,” Kai says, approval rolling off him like heat. “Choose the battlefield.”
“We already did,” I answer, pointing back toward the main halls. “Our walls. Our archers. Our wards. They won’t get him past the inner ring without flashing a signal.”
“So we find the signal,” Rena says.
“Exactly.”
We cut through a narrow linen passage and back into a staff corridor. A scuff mark, fresh. A strand of dark thread snagged on a rough stone. Another smear of blood, smaller now, like fingers dragged across briefly instead of a body hauled along.
“They’re slowing,” Rowan says.
“Or changing carriers,” I mutter. “Closer. Stay sharp.”
The corridor spits us into a storage atrium—wide, high, crates stacked like chess pieces. Torches gutter against a draft from somewhere.
“Split the room,” I order. “Quiet—”
Rowan stops short. “Auren.” He points at the far wall.
Something wet glints in the torchlight. My stomach drops before my feet move. I cross the floor fast, everything inside me roaring no while my head stays cold because she needs useful.
Rena reaches my side an instant after I do. Her palm finds mine without asking; we look together.
Blood, thick and tacky, smeared in letters as tall as my hand. Whoever wrote it took time they didn’t have and spent it anyway to make sure it couldn’t be missed. Iron stink crowds the air.
THRONE OR CORPSE. CHOOSE.