Page 17 of Shadowed

Brief. Three breaths. Then I move.

The Bramah re-engages. I walk back to my paper and I sit down and I do not let my hands shake until I'm certain his shadows aren't reading them.

They're shaking. They keep shaking. I write through it. The Tommy clause goes onto the page in cleaner lines than my hand should be capable of, and then a second clause, the smaller one I came back for:Caligo Umbrius is named, and is bound by his name to every term agreed.

The paper accepts this. The paper has accepted worse.

Marcus stirs at four.

I see him surface—the breathing changes, the face tightens, the boy begins to cross the bridge from sleep into knowing he's awake. He looks at me on the floor with one candle and four pages.

"Lil."

"Go back to sleep, Marcus."

"You're writing."

"Yes."

"Is it bad?"

I think about how to answer that. The truth has too many pieces. The lie has none I can deliver with a steady mouth.

"It's getting handled."

He looks at me longer than I want him to. Sees more than he's saying. Sixteen and old enough to know I'm telling him a quarter of the truth, young enough to know that's the offer, the only offer, and that taking it is what brothers do.

"Wake me if you need."

"I won't."

"Wake me anyway."

He turns over. The breathing evens. I keep writing.

Tommy mumbles around five.About a dragon. About a horse. About his teacher, whose name has two surnames that contradict each other.

Elena's hand reaches across him without her waking and pats his shoulder until he settles. Fourteen and her sleep is already maternal. The Grey family talent for raising children we shouldn't have to raise.

I look at them in the candlelight. The grey-soled feet. The book under Marcus's chest. The five-figure family Tommy still draws because he hasn't figured out yet that four is the correct number.

I love them so hard it lives in my ribs the way damage lives—present, constant, requiring no attention but demanding all of it.

That's why I'm signing.

That's the whole sentence. The body-betrayal and the father's debt and the Fae court and the prince in the hallway who has just sworn an oath under the laws of eight courts to a nineteen-year-old thief in a chemise—all of it is noise around the one signal, which is that three children are sleeping six feet behind me and the cost of saying no to him is paid in their blood.

Yes is the only word I have. I write it down anyway, on the back of the fourth page, in case I forget which side of the bargain I'm on.Yes.Underlined.

The sky goesgrey at the edges.

I fold the four pages—terms, swearings, the line I'm signing under—into a precise rectangle. Slide them inside my coat where the trafficking documents lived a week ago. The same pocket. The same fold. Different work.

I push up off the floor. My legs are numb from the knees down. I shake them out. The candle gutters. I blow it out beforeit can do me the favour, because saving the last quarter inch of wax is an old habit and old habits are the only inheritance I trust.

The Bramah clicks.

Levers seating themselves, one by one, the cascade of mechanical surrender I built with my own hands and that has stopped being mine since the night he proved he could open it without asking.