Kerlan had seized the most valuable asset between them, backing Ramson into a corner.
Through the broken windows, moonlight spilled onto the floor. Even in the empty house, Ramson thought he could feel his old master’s presence, like a cold shadow looming behind him.
This was all a game to Kerlan; it was Ramson’s turn to make a move.
He was tired of playing the pawn.
“Well?” he heard Olyusha say at last. “Do we have a Trade?”
“I’m inclined to say so,” he said. “Though don’t expect me to shake with you on it.” He’d witnessed the tricks she hid up her sleeves, how one drop of her poison could paralyze a man entirely.
Olyusha’s smile didn’t meet her eyes. “I knew from the start that you wouldn’t save Bogdan out of the goodness of your heart unless there was something in it for you. Seems I was right.”
“Am I really that predictable?”
Olyusha shrugged. “I’m not one to lay any claims as to how well I know you, Quicktongue,” she said, picking at one of her nails, “but Bogdan and I would not have survived for so long in Kerlan’s Order without someone watching over us. Of course, you might have done those things to buy yourself insurance…but I do think that, despite everything about you, you have the propensity to be good, in your own terrible ways.”
The words stirred an echo of a memory. A girl, standing beneath the softly falling snow of a new winter, her eyes brighter than the moon. You could be good. Make the right choice, Ramson.
Olyusha’s voice dragged him from the memory. “Before we part, I have one more gift for you,” she said. “I know someone in Goldwater Port. Kerlan hired her for a few shipping jobs before, specific to Bregon. She’ll have more information.”
Ramson listened carefully to the name Olyusha gave. It didn’t ring a bell, which surprised him. Perhaps there were still secrets that Goldwater Port carried, buried deep beneath its sands by the man who’d made Ramson the person he had been: the person he still was.
It was time for Ramson to carve his own path.
He turned, tipping his cap at Olyusha. “Well met, Olyusha,” he said. “You sit pretty and focus on murdering our ex-colleagues. By the time you’re done, I’ll be back with your idiot husband.”
He heard her give a throaty laugh, the sound echoing over the clip of his boots as he walked away. “I’m not giving up on you just yet, Quicktongue.” A pause, and then: “When you do find Kerlan, promise me you’ll send him my regards.”
“I don’t make promises,” Ramson replied. “That way, I can’t break them.”
Yet even as he spoke, he could feel the sharp edges of a vow burying deep into his heart.
Jonah had once told him to live for himself. Thing is, Ramson, he’d said, his raven-black eyes sharp with intelligence and uncanny wisdom for his twelve years of age, you can achieve everything in this world, but if it’s for someone else, it’s pointless.
Yet as Ramson walked through the snow, the Kerlan Estate hovering behind him with its empty-eyed windows and broken, gaping mouth of a door, he realized that the path in front of him was still far out of reach, blocked by a shadow that grew larger and clearer with every step he took.
Alaric Kerlan represented everything he despised about himself, his life, and this world. As long as Kerlan lived, he could never be free.
And right now, if Kerlan was establishing a new criminal empire in Goldwater Port, using the trade routes Ramson had built to get to Bregon, then he was the obstacle that stood in the way of the glimpse of the future Ramson had hoped for.
One that involved planting the roots of the resistance in the south with Ana, and then making some semblance of a life for himself after the war was won.
Ramson tilted his face to the starless sky, his breath unfurling before him in a cloud as he spoke. “I’ll find my own path, Jonah,” he said aloud. “But first, I’m going to hunt down Alaric Kerlan. And I’m going to kill him.”
Winter held its breath over the city of Novo Mynsk, the bladed silence of night shrouding Anastacya Mikhailov as she searched the streets for blood. Here and there, her Affinity picked up faint traces of it: a splash, soaking the ground like paint; a handprint on a broken streetlamp, faded to a smear.
She hadn’t imagined she would return to this place again,