Page 19 of The City Of Fractured Memory

Stryx nods against my shoulder, trembling. Guilt gnaws at me. The first time I’ve let her come out on a case with me, and I’ve managed to get her locked in the cells. I should have been more careful.

I can feel Xavier’s eyes burning into my back, but I don’t look at him. Let him play the knight all he wants, I’m not waiting for permission to fight for the people I love. We are barely three steps from the cell when Xavier’s voice finally cuts through the dim corridor, low and edged like tempered steel.

“Brilliant,” he says. “Truly inspired. Assaulting a warden in front of a dozen witnesses. Nothing says innocence like leaving a trail of castrated guards behind you.”

I don’t break my stride. “He was tormenting her. And don’t be so dramatic, I only kicked him. I’m sure––to the benefit of no one––his balls survived.”

“That isn’t the point.” His boots click faster, closing the distance between us until he’s at my side, his dark eyes sparking with irritation. “You’re being reckless, Octavia. You’re already on the Chief’s watchlist. If it wasn’t for me, you would be down here in the cells yourself. What happens when this makes it back to him?”

I stop short, rounding on him, Stryx still trembling against my shoulder. “Do you think I care? He can add it to the long list of things he hates me for. At least I’ll sleep knowing I didn’t stand by while that bastard rattled her cage and laughed. How many other women has he done that to?”

His jaw tightens, words caught between his teeth. For a heartbeat, I think he might spit them, but instead he exhales sharply, tilting his head as if studying me.

“You’re reckless,” he repeats, his tone softer. “Reckless and stubborn.”

I step closer, fury and adrenaline knotting hot in my chest. “You want to talk your way through everything, smooth over every jagged edge until the world looks pretty and civilised. But the world isn’t civilised, Xavier. It’s rotten. And sometimes the rot needs to be cut out.”

For a moment, the silence burns between us, the flickering torchlight glinting off the iron bars. Then, to my irritation, his mouth quirks into that infuriating almost-smile. “One day,” he says softly, repeating the words he often said to me when we were children. “That temper is going to undo you.”

“Maybe,” I shoot back, pushing past him again. “But at least it means I can still feel something. Anyway, it’s not like it’s done me a disservice so far.”

He laughs. “I seem to recall you saying the same thing before you lost your shit with those boys ten years ago and they damn near beat you up for it.”

I grimace at the memory. That was yet another situation like the one today where Xavier had to come to my rescue, but despite my constant complaining about it, even I have to admit I need help from time to time. Maybe I’ve been too hard on him.

I feel his gaze linger as we walk on, but I don’t turn around when he doesn’t follow us. My hands start to shake, the adrenaline from the last hour finally giving way as I lead Stryx out beside me to our freedom. Though as my Shadow materialises once more, I’m quickly reminded that freedom isn’t always what it seems.

The Division’s doors loom ahead, the dim streetlight bleeding in around the frame like a promise, and I can taste the relief of leaving its suffocating halls behind. I try to usher Stryx quickly past the Chief’s office, but the door opens before we pass and two men stride out, blocking our exit.

Starling emerges first, his face thunderous as ever, but it’s the man who follows that stops me dead in my tracks. Tall, broad-shouldered, moving with the quiet weight of someone who owns the ground he walks on. That dark tousled hair swept back from a face too striking, too sharp to forget. And those eyes, green and piercing, the same ones that snared me in the alley that night.

The air seems to constrict in my lungs. For a heartbeat, I feel like I’m back there again, the strange, inexplicable pull I’d felt toward him now returning. He smiles, not wide or warm, just a curl at the corner of his mouth to remind me he knows exactly who I am, and that knowledge alone is enough to unsettle me.

“Wren,” the Chief barks, snapping me back. “Allow me to introduce Rivenéan Ashfell. You may know him better as the residing Governor of Aethermere.”

My stomach plummets to my feet. The name is enough to turn my blood to ice. The whispers in the morgue, the wardens’ low voices dripping with contempt. Murderer. Psychopath. A monster masquerading as a man…

I’d stumbled into his path in that alley, brushed shoulders with danger without realising it. And now here he is, in the light of day, sanctioned by the Chief himself despite the current rumours. Maybe Starling really is in his pocket like the wardens suspected.

Fear creeps in, cold and insidious. If even half the rumours I’ve heard are true, then every moment I’d spent in that alley with him had been on a razor’s edge. A single wrong word, a step too close, and I could’ve been another body on a slab. Had I stumbled into a predator and come out alive by sheer luck?

That strange pull I’d felt––that unbidden, impossible tug toward him––gutters out, drowned beneath the memory of whispered cruelties and a cell block painted red with blood.

“Please, call me Riven,” he says in that deep, soft voice of his as he holds out his hand to me. “What a delight it is to see you again, Miss Wren.”

In my shock I take his hand tentatively, but instead of shaking it, he pulls my hand to his mouth and gently kisses it, his lips unexpectedly soft against my skin and making goosebumps prickle up my arm from his touch. He releases me before doing the same to Stryx, her expression neutral, though her anxiety is betrayed by her other hand, still shaking as she holds it in mine.

The Chief turns to him with raised eyebrows. “You two know each other?”

“A passing encounter,” Riven smiles, oozing so much charm it’s hard to marry the rumours of his cruelty with the man in front of me. His tone lingers on the words, shading them with an intimacy that isn’t there, but heat crawls up the back of my neck despite myself.

I force my jaw tight, trying to keep my voice steady. “Briefly. I didn’t realise I would have the pleasure of his company again so soon.”

Something flickers in his eyes at that––amusement, maybe even challenge––but it vanishes as quickly as it came. He inclines his head, polite, measured, though the faintest ghost of that smile lingers like a threat.

Starling starts going on a tirade about Riven’s role as governor, oblivious to our staring match, but I can barely hear him over the thrum of my own pulse. I remind myself of the whispers, of the bloodstained stories that cling to this man’s name.

Whatever pull I’d felt that night was a trap. And I will not step into it again.