Kiln smoke turns the afternoon light the color of old brass. The kiln quarter hums—carts groan under clay urns and glazed tiles, boys run bells between guildhouses, and every chimney writes its own crooked scripture against the sky. The air tastes like heat and ash and something sweet burning just past done.
Cas moves easy at my side, the way a knife rides a sleeve. "Sera holds court in the back lane behind the fourth kiln," he says. "If you apologize to her brazier, she'll like you better."
"Does she like anyone?" I ask.
"Only heat," he says, and grins.
We find her where the quarter kinks into a triangle of shadow. Sera is a mountain in an apron, hair coiled, arms dusted with sugar and soot. She tends a brazier that could shame a temple. The air around her crackles with cinnamon and menace.
"You're late," she says without looking up. "And your shadow is loud."
"It has opinions," I say.
"Teach it to whisper." She props a hand on her hip and studies me the way a hawk studies distance. "What do you want, girl?"
"Red thread," I answer. "Three wagons at dawn. Mint road fork."
The name for what moves behind her eyes is respect, but she hides it well. "You pay in truth or coin?"
"Both."
Sera flicks sugar from her fingers. "Tollhouse two keeps double books. Upper shows clay and resin. Lower shows 'escorts' paid in silk and hush. The night those bells braided red left the city, lower ledger vanished." She jerks her chin toward a chimney where pigeons argue with smoke. "Keeper drinks at the Brass Finch three nights out of five. If a story makes him cry, he talks. If it makes him laugh, he sings."
Cas whistles. "Useful songbird."
Sera snorts. "Break his nose if he asks for yours." Then, softer to me: "Be careful where you put your hope. The kiln eats what it's fed without asking names."
I nod. "Thank you."
"Thank me by not getting dead in my lane. It would sour the tea."
We turn toward the Finch, and that's when the lane changes. Sound slips; footsteps behind us mis-time with the street's breath. Cas's smile dies an easy death. "Four," he murmurs, like a prayer and an arithmetic.
They come quick: cloaks the color of coal, red cloth tied tight at the wrists. Morvain cuff-men. One from the mouth of the alley, two off the kiln roof, one rising out of a stack of broken pallets like a bad idea.
"Lady," the closest says, polite as a closed door, "the quarter's no place for—"
My shadow hits him mid-sentence. He folds without finishing the lie. The roof pair drop together, knives low and mean. Cas meets one with a blade he didn't have a heartbeat ago, their steel kissing and arguing, sparks bright as fireflies. The second slips past him—fast, good—and makes for my ribs in a thrust designed to be forgettable because it leaves nothing to remember.
I meet him with a sleeve of night, thin and slick. His knife slows as if moving through syrup. My elbow answers his jaw. He drops, the knife skittering. My shadow pins it to brick like a beetle.
"Go," Cas says, not to me but to the last: the pallet-ghost who hesitates a fatal second too long. "Run, tell your ledger."
The man bolts. Sera raises a brow at the bodies strewn in her lane, then reaches over and slides a kettle to a cooler ring. "I said don't get dead in my lane," she says, which I take as permission to leave them breathing.
Cas wipes his blade on a sleeve that already had stains to keep it company. "The Finch?"
"Wait," I say, because the street has grown a second spine.
He feels it when I do: a pull in the air that has nothing to do with wind. Watchers know it as a change in weather; gamblers know it as the way a dice cup gets heavy before it spills.
"Go," says a voice I could find blindfolded now. "I'll borrow her."
Darius Kael steps out of the kiln's shadow like a promise kept late. No retinue. No cloak with declarations. Just golden eyes and the kind of stillness that makes a corridor out of any crowd.
Cas's mouth does a quick, unsmiling thing. "You're losing the habit of knocking," he says.
"I never had it," Darius answers. He doesn't look away from me. "Walk with me."
Cas looks to me, not him. The shared beat says more than speeches ever could. He tips two fingers at his temple. "I'll make the Finch sing," he says, then to Darius, soft and feral: "Bring her back not bleeding."
Darius's jaw ticks. "That depends on her."
"I'm not an object to pass between you," I say, and start walking—past Darius, into the mouth of an alley strung with laundry like flags of surrender. He falls in at my shoulder without asking.
He leads without seeming to, angling through stairwells and up cracked steps, across a carpenter's catwalk and onto a roof garden that remembers better days: iron trellis, dead vines, a stone bench warmed by sun and dust. Bastion sprawls below us, all smoke and roofs and rumor.
"Private enough?" he asks.
"For what?"
"Honesty," he says, and the word holds.
Wind threads my hair across the cut on my lip. He watches the line of red, then the pulse at my throat, and looks away like that was effort. "Morvain owns the kiln quarter by debt," he says. "You'll find your tollhouse and your missing ledger. You may even learn which clerk cried when he took the coin. But beneath ledger and clerk there's something worse. Permission."
"For what happened to my family."
"For what's happening to you," he says. "You think you're chasing a single night. You're not. You're chasing a habit this city has: cutting its own meat and calling it medicine."
I step closer because I don't like distance when knives are out. "Did Kael blades cut it?"
He holds my gaze. "Not on my order."
"Which is not no."
"It's the truth you can use," he says.
Anger rises, hot and old. My shadows answer, a dark tide at my boots. He doesn't fall back. He reaches, slow enough to be refused, and touches the bandage hidden under my sleeve with two fingers. Heat runs from his skin to mine like a dare.
"I watched you in the arena," he says, voice lower. "You didn't lose yourself. Today in the kilns, you didn't either. Restraint is rarer than fury. I don't praise it often."
"Save your praise," I say. "Give me names."
He smiles, humorless. "Trade, Empress."
I let the title stand; we both know how it tastes in his mouth. "What do you want?"
He studies the city for a heartbeat. When he answers, the honesty he promised is there. "I want to win. Against Morvain, against the Council's cowards, against every foreign house that will come with banners when they hear a goddess is walking our streets. I want Bastion strong." He looks back, and the part he didn't plan to say comes out anyway. "And I want to see what you do when you're not being watched."
Wind lifts his hair across his brow. He doesn't move to fix it. I feel the world get small the way it does when you stand on a roof at night and someone decides whether to step closer or step off.
"You think desire is harder to command," I say, echoing him from the corridor. "Maybe you just don't know the right commands."
"For you?" he asks, closer now, not quite smiling. "Tell me one."
"Tell me you didn't order it," I say. "Tell me you'll help me cut the rope Morvain tied around my family's neck."
"I didn't," he says, no flinch, no flourish. "And I will—if you stop pretending I'm the only danger you like."
The air between us is small and hot, a bell's throat. He brushes a thumb across my split lip. The touch is careful, offendable. Heat answers it with precision up my spine. My shadows rise, not to strike but to watch, greedy as cats at a window. He leans in as if temptation is a thing measured in inches, and for a heartbeat Bastion goes quiet enough to hear a gull change its mind.
I let the distance hold. I let it sting. "If you lie," I say, "I'll end you before you learn how I did it."
His breath ghosts my mouth when he laughs—one low note, not unkind. "If you don't, I'll help you end them."
We don't kiss. The not of it burns more than a bad fire.
Names, then: he gives them because he's decided to, not because I made him. "Toll Captain Vexin at House Mint takes Morvain's coin. Scribe-master Ellis keeps a second seal. And the Veiled Lady owns their eyes in Scribe's Lane. Don't go to her alone."
"I never am," I say.
"That is what frightens me," he answers, and steps back before the moment can decide us.
On the climb down he doesn't touch me again. He doesn't need to. His presence is a hand on the back of my neck, not cruel, not kind—directing weight, asking balance.
At the last stair he stops. "You'll meet me again," he says. Not a question.
"When the ledger sings," I answer.
"Make it sing in a key I like."
"Maybe I'll make you learn a new one."
He smiles with teeth this time, king-bright and boy-weak for one naked instant. Then he's gone into sun and soot.
Cas is waiting at the Brass Finch with three empty cups and a ledger-keeper too drunk to stand. He takes one look at my face and very carefully does not make a joke.
"Well?" he says.
"Vexin. Ellis. Veiled Lady," I say. "And a rooftop garden that pretends to be private."
Cas's brows lift. "So he does appear out of smoke."
"Out of habit," I say. The cut on my lip sings where a thumb was. I ignore it. The names in my mouth taste better.
"Good," Cas says, and shoves a folded paper across the table with his knuckle. Toll tallies. The fork taken. The same day the bells wore red. "I made the Finch sing. Consider me a choir director."
I tuck the paper inside my coat. Outside, the kiln quarter exhales heat. Somewhere, the Veiled Lady counts truths like coins. Somewhere, a captain pockets Morvain's silk. Somewhere, a scribe-master keeps two seals and sleeps like a man who has forgotten he will die.
"Next?" Cas asks.
"Next," I say, and the shadows at my heels lean forward as one, "we cut the rope."