---
He needed her answers. But first he needed to finish this. Because Dickoff Iron had asked a question.
And instead of receiving an answer, he had started a war inside Dawn Auction House's hall.
And Sekhmet was not the boy who had been chained in darkness anymore.
He was a man who had learned that sometimes the fastest way to end questions was to make the questioner afraid to ask again.
The hall had already crossed the point where order couldn't be restored with words.
Now it could only be restored with outcomes.
Steel scraped stone. Halberds shifted. Contract clerks backed away with the instinct of people who had seen enough "accidents" to know what the word really meant in Slik City. The remaining spectators hovered at the edges, half terrified and half thrilled, because a rich city always contained two kinds of people: those who wanted to live, and those who wanted a story.
