We move through the city, streets narrowing as the fog thickens around us, morning creeping in quiet, cyan light. The houses are tall, packed close like conspirators, their rooftops meeting the sky in uneven silhouettes. The color isn’t quite right here—less vibrant than it would be somewhere else.
She shifts, trying to see something ahead, and I throw her a little higher to adjust my grip. That’s when I feel it. Something cold smacks against my head and begins to slide down my temple in a sticky, humiliating mess.
“I–sorry––” she mumbles, voice tiny. I hear the real meaning anyway. She’s not sorry for me. She’s sorry for the ice cream, now in ruins on the cobblestones.
“Your ice cream, huh?” I mutter. She’s still perched on my shoulders like she belongs there.
I’m wearing a different face again today. I always change my appearance. Now I look like them: one of the stoic blue-blooded. Long blond hair falling to my shoulders, a nobleman’s severe expression carved onto my face. My eyes match their cold-blooded heritage. I hate this mask. I hate how it lets them see me as one of their own while she, with her brand, is marked as mine. As property.
I see the way they look at us. The sneers half-hidden behind polite disgust. The glances that linger on her neck. I want to snarl at them all, but I can’t. Too many witnesses. I carefully lift her off my shoulders and set her down. She’s quiet, but I see the sulk in her eyes. Maybe it’s the lost ice cream.
She takes a few steps ahead of me and then stops. Waits. Turns around. Holds out her hand.
I don’t fight it anymore.
Let them see. Let them gossip in their parlors. Let them bring their enforcers, their orange-blooded hunters to track me down. If she can’t even walk these last few minutes without my hand in hers, then they’ll have to pry her from my corpse.
And I let myself smile without hiding it.
I feel my nervousness fall away like a discarded coat. The world sharpens. My thoughts clear. No suspicion clouds me now. I look up at the sky—a cold, vast blue. Birds wheel in the distance, black dots against the pale expanse.
Then my gaze drifts to her.
She’s so small. Half my height. Maybe less. I know I shouldn’t ask, but the words claw at my throat until they break free.
“What about family?” It comes out too fast. My chest tightens. I’m out of breath, like I’ve run miles. The words feel heavy enough to drag me under. I nearly choke on the last syllable, but I force myself to continue. “Father? Or a mother?”
She turns to me, those bright amber eyes catching the light like flame behind glass. Her hair is a burnt sienna curtain falling across her shoulder.
“I never had a father. And—” Her voice cracks, softer than usual. The voice of a child who’s too tired to lie. “—my mother is gone.”
I don’t ask for more. I shouldn’t have asked at all.
But then she does something that slices me open. She smiles. No tears fall, but I see the grief clinging to her gaze, clinging like mine once did to my own daughter.
But she isn’t my daughter.
She belongs to someone else.
I have no right to think otherwise. No right to that selfishness.
My hand tightens over hers, grounding me. I look away, watching the road transform beneath our feet. The rough, pitted asphalt evens out, becomes smoother, broader. We reach an intersection.
I hear carriages rattle, horses snorting and stamping, hooves striking sparks. She gawks at them, mouth open. She’s always around anything new.
But she’s not staring at the carriage. Or the well-dressed passers-by who look like they’ve stepped out of a different world than hers.
She’s looking across the street at the house in front of us.
It’s not large or tall, not compared to the grand facades of Monnem Street. But it stands apart.
Not true gold. The blue sunlight glints off the false sheen, revealing the cheap alchemy of its finish. Any real estate seller knows the trick.
But she doesn’t see the trick. She sees the glow.
“We’re here. My—and your—new home,” I tell her.