Page 27 of The First Scar
Gone. Just like that. Torn open and picked through like carrion.
An Enforcer emerged from the building holding a limp figure. Small. Pale. Familiar.
The stuffed rabbit Serenya had kept since childhood. The one she thought I didn't know she still slept with.
He tossed it into the gutter.
Serenya's breath hiccuped, a tiny fracture in her composure. But I heard it. Felt it shatter my own.
Home.
We didn't have one anymore.
"Baker," I whispered. "We try the baker."
Serenya nodded once, her eyes fixed on that gutter where her rabbit lay in the muck.
We melted back into the shadows, two ghosts with nowhere left to haunt.
Morcam's bakery sat three blocks east, tucked behind a leatherworker's shop in a building so nondescript you'd walk past it twice without noticing. That was the point. Five years, his ovens had hidden more than bread—false-bottomed flour bins for smuggled medicine, a cellar that led to the old cisterns, a back room where the wounded could heal without Enforcer eyes. The male ran a resistance operation disguised as sourdough. I respected that.
He'd been the first contact to trust us when we arrived in Velmyra. Serenya had saved his daughter from fever. I'd pulled a knife from his brother's gut after a deal gone wrong. We weren't friends—Morcam didn't do friends—but we were owed. In this city, debts were the only currency that hadn't been devalued.
The shutters were closed.
That wasn't unusual. Morcam kept odd hours, worked through the night, slept when the ovens cooled. I raised my hand to knock—our knock, three short, two long—
The shutter twitched.
Just a sliver. Just enough for one eye to peer through the gap, catching the last dregs of daylight.
I saw recognition. I saw the moment it curdled into fear.
"Morcam." I kept my voice down. "We need—"
The shutter slammed.
Wood on wood. Final as a coffin lid.
I stood there, hand still raised, knuckles hovering over the door that had always opened before. Behind it, shuffling. The scrape of furniture being dragged. A barricade. Againstme.
"Morcam." Louder now. Desperate, and I hated how it sounded. "Please. We just need one night. A few hours. Anything—"
His voice came through the door, muffled by the wood between us. A voice I'd heard laugh over spilled ale, curse at burnt crusts, soften when he spoke his daughter's name.
Now it just sounded tired. And terrified.
"You're not Amaria anymore." The words landed like fists. "You're twenty million marks. You're a death sentence for anyone who stands too close." A pause. A shaky breath. "I have children."
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
What could I say? He was right. Every word of it.
"Go," he said. "And don't come back. I can't—" His voice snagged. "I'm sorry. I can't."
Serenya's hand found mine and I let her pull me away.
We were halfway down the alley before I realized a deep tremor was running through me again. Not from exhaustion but from the understanding that had been building since the square, since the mob, since my own power had cracked the street we ran on.
