Chapter 3

Wren's POV

The silence held for what felt like half an hour, thick enough to chew on, before Garrick finally set his pen down. He leaned back, chair creaking under him, fingers laced over his stomach, and studied me the way a man studies a stain he's already decided isn't coming out.

"What baffles me, Wren," he said, voice mild, almost thoughtful, "is your habit of making yourself known. You act like being seen is something you've earned."

I'd learned a long time ago that stillness was the only shield this office allowed. I kept my hands folded, my eyes fixed on the bookshelf behind his head, and breathed as quietly as I could manage.

"You ought to be grateful you're tolerated here at all. Grateful we let you keep a roof and a wage."

He rose without warning, and even braced for it, I flinched. He circled the room slowly, heels striking the floor in a rhythm that felt timed for effect, and stopped in front of me, hip against the desk, leaning in until there was no comfortable distance left between us.

"I spent last night standing in a human precinct, waiting on my daughter."

Something in me cracked despite my best effort to hold it shut. "I didn't ask anyone to call, Garrick. I told the officer I didn't want"

His hand moved before I finished the sentence. The crack of it against my cheek filled the whole room, and I staggered sideways, my face already flaring hot.

"Did I ask for your voice?" His tone hadn't changed at all still pleasant, still even, like we were discussing the weather instead of the print of his hand on my skin. "You embarrassed my daughter in front of humans. A nothing, a no-Ember nobody, and you managed to drag shame onto my house. Do you have any real understanding of what I'm capable of doing to you?"

My ears rang, a thin whine that made the walls seem to lean. Before I could steady myself, his fingers closed in my hair, wrenching my head back until I had no choice but to meet his eyes. His face stayed calm in that specific, practiced way a man who could sound, to anyone outside the door, like he was simply correcting a child.

"I told you when you were small enough to understand it you live in this Court like something in the walls. Quiet. Out of sight. Do you remember that lesson, or should we go over it again from the start?"

When I didn't answer fast enough, his grip tightened until pain sparked along my scalp and a gasp broke out of me anyway.

"I asked you something."

He didn't wait for it. He hauled me by the hair toward the wall and drove the back of my skull into the plaster once, then again while I raised both hands uselessly to guard my face and swallowed every sound I could keep down. I'd learned young that noise fed him. The louder I got, the longer it lasted.

The first real lesson came when I was eleven. I'd spent a whole autumn sweeping storefronts for tips to buy a set of good knives the same set Lysandra had wanted and hadn't gotten yet. He hadn't just confiscated them. He'd bent every blade in front of me before he was done with the rest of it.

Lysandra's cruelty was never an accident. It was inherited, deliberately, the way some families pass down a good recipe.

"I didn't make that call!" I finally got out, though the words came apart in my mouth.

His next hit landed across my jaw, and the room went red at the edges, my tongue suddenly too thick to speak around.

"Your nerve is astonishing." He said it like I'd tracked mud across something valuable. "I don't care who dialed. You should have stopped it before it started. I don't care that you refused to sign anything. My daughter sat in a holding room. My daughter. That is not a place she should have ever had to know existed."

Every instinct told me to go quiet, to nod, to apologize until he lost interest. But some small, stubborn coal in my chest hadn't gone out yet, no matter how many years he'd spent trying to smother it.

"She wasn't the one in cuffs!" I choked out, dropping to my knees as a blow to my stomach emptied my lungs completely. I dug my nails into the floorboards, fighting for enough air to finish. "Foster was the one arrested. She just rode along!"

Garrick crouched beside me, unhurried, almost gentle in his movements, and something metal caught the light in his hand.

"It doesn't matter, Wren. You're the reason she was there at all. You still haven't learned what you're actually worth, have you. Lysandra is my whole world. You're a stray this Court lets sweep its floors. She had to sit through human paperwork and human questions because you couldn't survive a little steam. If the work is too much for you, walk out and see how long the city outside these walls keeps you fed."

On the last word, his arm came down. The poker had been sitting cold on his desk a moment ago it wasn't cold now, warmed at the tip from some careless proximity to the room's little brazier, and he pressed the heated edge flat against the inside of my forearm before I understood what was happening. The scream that tore out of me didn't sound like my own voice.

The smell hit before the full weight of the pain did something sharp and wrong, skin where skin shouldn't smell like that and my stomach turned over hard enough that I thought I might be sick right there on his floor. I stared down at the mark blooming red and raw along my arm and felt the room tilt sideways.

Garrick straightened, smoothing an invisible wrinkle from his sleeve, looking at me with the flat disgust of a man clearing his shoe of something. He clicked his tongue once.

"Get up. You're staining the rug."

In that particular flavor of agony, I found myself wondering, not for the first time, whether it would've been kinder if whoever left me on the orphan house steps had simply not bothered. Had they hated me enough to want me alive just to survive this.

"I don't have all evening," Garrick said.

I pressed my sleeve hard against the burn, biting down until I tasted copper, using that smaller pain to drown the larger one, and forced myself upright on legs that didn't feel entirely mine. I made it as far as the door before he spoke again.

"And Wren that mark had better stay covered. I don't need the whole Court asking questions about how careless my staff can be."

Something colder than the office's air conditioning settled into my chest. I'd told myself for years that I was past feeling the weight of moments like this, that the insults had worn smooth from repetition. But standing there with one eye swelling shut and blood threading down my jaw, I felt exactly like what I'd started as an unclaimed infant on a doorstep, unwanted, and entirely alone in a world built to remind me of it.

I stepped out into the hallway with my sleeve pressed to my arm, my only clear thought being Odette. If she was at the healing house, she'd fix what she could. If not, I'd find a way into the human pharmacy three blocks over and manage the rest myself.

Outside, the July heat sat heavy and wet over the Quarter, sweat mixing into the blood at my collar and stinging every raw inch of skin it touched. I wanted a hood, a scarf, anything to hide behind on the walk back.

The Ember Court didn't believe in privacy. News like this traveled through the estate faster than any phone could carry it, and by the time I reached the courtyard gate, I could already feel the eyes a few soft with something like pity, most of them flat and satisfied, the kind of look people give a stray that finally got what it had coming. I wondered, walking past them, if they were waiting for the day I simply stopped showing up at all.

But with my arm throbbing against my chest and my jaw aching in time with my pulse, I understood one thing clearly enough to hold onto: I wasn't ready to give any of them that.

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