CHAPTER 1034: EXTERNAL THREATS.

"Roselle," he said softly, tasting the name like smoke.

She didn’t flinch, but he saw it—the flicker in the storm. Old things. Fragile things that had no place in this war, yet lingered like the scent of blood after rain.

"Don’t," she warned.

He let the corner of his mouth twitch—half a smile, half a scar. "Then stop looking at me like you remember who I was."

Her jaw tightened, but she said nothing.

Cain moved first, stepping past her toward the door. She didn’t follow immediately, and for an instant he felt the gravity between them—an old orbit, trying to pull him back into a sun that had burned out long ago. He severed it with motion, with the weight of his boots on the stone, with the door swinging wide to let in the cold night air.

"Come," he said without looking back.

And she did.

***

The streets had changed.

It wasn’t the buildings—they still leaned like drunks whispering secrets, their crooked bones rising into the eternal dusk of a city that had long forgotten daylight. It wasn’t the smell—smoke and rot, spice and steel, the scent of survival baked into every stone. No, the change was subtler. Quieter. Like a breath held too long.

Cain felt it in the hush behind closed shutters, in the rhythm of footfalls that were there and then not, in the weight of a thousand unseen eyes peering from cracks where shadows bled thickest.

The city knew something was coming.

Good, Cain thought. Fear was useful. It made men stupid.

They walked in silence, their steps eating distance as the alleys narrowed, walls pressing close until the sky was nothing but a ragged strip overhead. Roselle’s presence was a blade at his side—quiet, sharp, and not entirely predictable. He liked that. Predictable things broke too easily.

"Where?" she asked at last, voice low.

"North," he said. "Old quarter. There’s a cellar beneath the ruin of the ironworks. Our ghost thinks it’s theirs. Tonight we remind them who owns the dark."

Roselle’s lips curved—not a smile, something leaner. "And if they’ve laid a trap?"

"Then we spring it," Cain said simply. "And make them choke on their own teeth."

No bravado in his tone, no heat. Just fact. That was worse than rage. Rage burned out. This—this was cold iron, forged to purpose.

They crossed a bridge slick with moss and rain, the water below black as an executioner’s hood. Somewhere in the distance, a bell tolled midnight, though the sound was warped, hollow, as if the metal were rotting from the inside. Cain listened, counting the beats. Not for the time. For the message. Bells spoke in this city, and not all ears could hear.

At the ninth toll, he stopped.

Roselle halted a step behind him, hand brushing the hilt of one of her twin blades. "What is it?"

Cain didn’t answer. Not yet. His eyes scanned the street ahead—the row of shuttered windows, the sag of a broken awning, the smear of something dark on the stones where rain hadn’t washed it clean. Blood, old enough to dull, but not old enough to forget warmth.

Then he heard it.

Not a sound, exactly. The absence of one.

The drip.

All night, the city had been bleeding water from its bones—gutters spitting, roofs weeping, puddles trembling to a rhythm older than time. But here... silence. No drip. No ripple. The air held too still.

A dead pocket.

Cain smiled without teeth. "They’re close."

"How close?" Roselle’s voice didn’t waver.

He let his head tilt, eyes cutting toward the alley yawning to their right. Narrow. Deep. Too deep for its own geometry. The kind of dark that didn’t just swallow light—it strangled it.

"Close enough to taste us," Cain murmured. Then he stepped forward.

---

The alley felt wrong from the first step.

Not because of what he saw—rot, brick, the skeletal remains of scaffolding that would never bear weight again—but because of what he didn’t. No rats. No hiss of pipes bleeding steam. Even the stink had thinned, leached out by something colder than rain.

Roselle followed without a sound. That was good. She remembered the old lessons.

Halfway down, Cain stopped again. His fingers brushed the wall. Rough stone, damp to the touch—but warm. Too warm. Heat bleeding from within like breath through clenched teeth.

He didn’t look back when he spoke. "Do you feel it?"

Roselle was still a moment, then: "Yes."

"Good." His hand fell to the knife at his belt—not the blade for open fights, but the small, ugly thing made for close whispers and quick deaths. He didn’t draw it. Not yet.

The alley ended in a wall. Or seemed to. Cain crouched, eyes tracing the ground—the way the water pooled wrong, circling an invisible drain. He pressed his palm flat. Felt the tremor. A pulse. Slow, steady.

"Door," he said softly. "Hidden."

Roselle’s breath stirred the air behind him. "And beyond it?"

Cain smiled. "The first thread."

He rose. Knocked once—knuckles rapping stone in a pattern no bricklayer had ever learned. Silence answered.

Then, a sound like bones unlocking.

The wall shifted.

Not much. Just enough for the dark to breathe.

Cain stepped back, drawing the knife now, steel drinking what little light crawled down the alley. Roselle’s blades whispered free beside him. The wall yawned wider, spilling black like blood from a fresh wound.

And then—

A voice.

Not from the dark ahead. From behind.

"Cain."

He pivoted smooth, knife angled low, ready to drink a throat dry.

But the figure in the alley mouth wasn’t an enemy.

It was Hunter.

Or what was left of him.

---

The man was upright, but only barely. His coat was a ruin, black with blood, torn in ribbons that clung like dying vines. His face—what showed of it beneath the mask—was pale as paper, slick with rain and something darker. One arm hung wrong, bone jutting white through meat.

But his eyes. His eyes burned steady.

"Hunter." Roselle’s voice was flint on steel.

Cain didn’t speak. Not yet. He closed the distance in three strides, catching the man by the shoulder before gravity could claim him.

Hunter’s breath hitched, thick with iron. "They... knew."

Cain felt the words like nails driven under skin. Cold, deliberate. Not panic. Not warning.

Truth.

His grip tightened. "How many?"

Hunter’s lips peeled back—not in pain. In something uglier. "Enough."

Then his knees gave.