Chapter 22. The Regent’s Shadow

The former Alpha Regent lived in a house that looked like a throat someone had forgotten to clear.

It sat on the cliff’s quieter side where Veilgrove’s wards hummed low and polite, where lanterns burned the sober colors of people who wrote the rules and expected you to thank them for the ink. The stone was old. The door was older. The iron knocker had been polished until it looked like it swallowed light.

Kael walked at my side, not a half-step ahead. He had dressed like a man visiting his own judge in plain dark wool and clean boots, hair tied back. No blades. He wore guilt the way some men wore rings: out of habit, out of stubbornness, too long to remember how to take it off.

The Ashfall pup trailed us at a distance, just far enough to pretend he didn’t. Syra waited at the foot of the steps with two guards. Mavienne had insisted on coming and then, with characteristic discipline, insisted on waiting outside to keep the house from thinking it could listen with few