Page 58 of Orc’s Bones

The sky above the basin was gray-and-pale-amber, a dawn not yet committed to anything. We came out of the Crypt entrance into the Cathedral quarter and I stopped on the steps.

The ghostfire was burning evenly.

Every lantern in sight was running clean — the pale bluish-white, no flicker, no dark patches. The hum under the stone was steady and low and honest. Not wrong. Not off-pitch. The city breathing in its right register for the first time since I’d come back to it.

I sat down on the top step.

Not from exhaustion — though I was — but because the step was there and the dawn was there and it was still standing and I wanted to hold that for a second before it became the next thing.

Thruk sat beside me. Shoulder against mine, his weight settled on the stone the way it settled everywhere — completely, without room for argument.

We didn’t speak.

Below us the Cathedral quarter was waking. A gatekeeper crossing the outer courtyard. The first sound of the city starting its day.

“When this is written into the record,” he said. The private register. “When Lyssa catalogs what happened in the Bone Vault — what do you want it to say about you.”

I thought about it. Not performing the thought — actually having it. “That I came back. That I identified what was wrong and fixed it.” I turned to him. “What do you want it to say about you.”

Something moved in his face — a thing that had nothing to do with authority or command. Private. A man who didn’t often let himself want things out loud. “That I trusted the right person.” He held my gaze. “And that I did it before the evidence was complete, which was the right call.”

That landed in my chest and stayed there.

His hand moved to the back of my neck. The same hold as the Vault, as the threshold, as the room below — unhurried, thumb at the base of my skull.

I turned toward him.

He pulled me in and kissed me.

Not the threshold kiss, not the Vault kiss. This one had everything in it — every dangerous room, every time he stepped between me and the threat before I asked, every After until the After ran out. His mouth was certain and he kissed me like a man with nothing left to defer.

I kissed him back with all of it.

His other hand came to my waist and pulled me closer — not gently, not a question. The possessive certainty that had been there since the authority chamber and hadn’t once apologized for what it was. I went. I’d made the decision somewhere between the Vault and these steps that I was done being careful about this.

The dawn held around us, pale and unhurried. The hum ran steady through the stone — the city doing what it was built to do.

When he pulled back he didn’t move far. Forehead to mine. Hand still at my neck.

“Still here.” Not a question.

“Still here.”

He looked at me. Direct.

“The Archive can wait. Lyssa’s findings. All of it — it waits until we’ve slept.”

“The Archive can wait,” I agreed.

He stood. Held out his hand.

I took it.

We walked off the steps and into the Dominion’s dawn, and behind us the Cathedral steps were empty in the gray-amber light.

His chambers held the fire.

Not ghostfire — a real one, in the hearth, the one I’d stood in front of weeks ago with bone dust on my palms and the investigation still open. The room held its heat the way old stone held everything it had absorbed — completely, without effort.