The white light stayed on him, as if reluctant to let go. Then a shadow cut it—the guard's hand, no harder than before, indicating the stairs. Nyx stepped back the way he had entered. The cool returned to his skin like a friend who remembered your name.
She was already moving. Not toward him, not at first—toward the woman in the high collar, the two of them speaking the way people spoke when they owned the outcome. A small exchange of tokens and wax and something more abstract than both. A nod. A pause that might have been respect, or simply habit.
The masked audience above murmured in low ripples—an unspoken commentary on the fall of a Noctari noble to the block. A few heads turned to follow him, some with interest, others with a satisfaction too polite to be called smug. The anonymity of their masks made it worse. Disdain without a face was harder to punch.
"Collar,"
one guard murmured.
"No,"
the woman in the high collar answered without inflection.
"He goes clean."
Nyx didn't move. It wasn't a trick. It was obedience disguised as stillness.
A clerk brought a slate for signature. The buyer's hand made a mark that wasn't a name; the clerk tried not to look like he'd just grown an extra year of life from standing this close. A runner disappeared into a side door and came back with a wrapped parcel that clinked like small, disciplined metal. The high-collar woman did something with a seal. Doors opened you didn't see until they did.
"Step,"
the guard behind Nyx said softly, as if volume could bruise a sale. He stepped.
They did not leash him. Two ahead, two behind, the same geometry—less for control now than for ceremony. He passed under the arch and into a side passage where the stone sweated and the air forgot it had been trained for guests.
She waited there.
No dais. No witness. Just the narrow light of a single lamp and the kind of silence money buys.
Up close, the black of her coat revealed its secrets—threadwork so fine it blurred into shadow until the light caught on a single curve. The gold was subtler here, almost hidden, meant for the one standing close enough to see it. Her mask kept her features in shadow, but it couldn't hide the sense that beauty had shaped them.
For a heartbeat neither of them spoke. The guards pretended to become walls. The woman in the high collar pretended to become air.
Then the buyer's mouth shaped a small, almost-cordial line beneath the mask.
"Face me."
He did. The lamp put a cut of light across his cheekbone and left the rest to shadow. He met her gaze, steady without challenge. If she wanted to see fear, she would have to bring her own.
She looked him over the way appraisers look at art—checking corners for damage and the signature for forgery. Not long. Not lascivious. Simply thorough.
"How long in the pens?"
The question was quiet, unhurried, more calibration than conversation.
"Long enough to hate the chain."
His voice came out even. Good. He'd take even.
One corner of her mouth ticked as if at a private joke.
"And not long enough to get used to the smell,"
she supplied, as though she'd been in enough dark rooms to know exactly which sentence came next.
He didn't ask how she knew. People like this made a habit of knowing.
"Name?"
she asked.
"N—"
He caught himself and narrowed his eyes.
"Were you too busy counting your coins, or so rich you don't care what you buy?"
A flicker of amusement ghosted behind the mask.
"Did you not listen to your own description?"
"Guess I missed the part where anyone asked my name."
"Then tell me."
He tilted his head, weighing whether the word was worth giving away.
"Nyx."
"Nyx,"
she repeated, tasting it for sharp edges. The lamp caught on the edge of her mask as she tilted her head.
"You'll keep it."
He wasn't sure if that counted as kindness or branding—or if there was even a difference in her world. The air between them shifted, like the conversation had just been stamped and filed.
She moved her hand, and the woman in the high collar placed a small, sealed token in her palm.
"Walk,"
the buyer said—not to him, but to the guards. They set off down a side corridor, its narrow stone walls stretching on as if to keep them walking longer than needed. Nyx fell into step beside her, the sound of their boots swallowed by the stone.
The side passage had fewer torches and more decisions. At each junction the buyer kept to the routes that smelled less of people and more of old stone. Guards peeled off by twos as the architecture told them to; eventually it was just Nyx, the buyer, one shadow that might have been a bodyguard, and the quiet. Boots on stone. Cloth against cloth. A far bell that might have meant midnight or money.
"Do you always buy last?"
"Only when the last is the best,"
He studied her mask for a beat, trying to see if she'd flinch.
"Then you might've made a very expensive mistake."
"Or,"
she countered,
"I just bought the only thing in this pit worth more than its price. Tell me—are you always this ungrateful to your saviors?"
"Ungrateful?"
He let the word sit bitter on his tongue.
"Oh, I'm grateful, which is why I felt it was my civic duty to warn you before the buyer's remorse sets in."
Her lips curved—just enough to make him wonder if it was amusement or calculation. She held his gaze a heartbeat longer than comfort allowed, as if weighing whether his mouth was going to be more trouble than it was worth.
They took a stair that cut down and then up again,running through the quiet inner corridors of the Exchange. The air cooled. Somewhere above, a door thudded in a way that made dust fall politely from a crossbar.
"You were quiet in the pit,"
she said, as if discussing the weather.
"Most youths posture. Some weep. You did neither."
"Wasn't sure which was on sale tonight."
"That,"
looking right into his eyes,
"is why you fetched six."
He didn't know if she meant six hundred or something else. He didn't ask. The number sounded like a wall he'd just been set behind.
A final bend. A door that didn't look like a door until the guard rapped twice and the seam appeared. Beyond, a small room—bench, water, a folded black cloak. The buyer stepped inside, and the space seemed to straighten, its silence tightening around them.
She picked up the cloak from the bench, shook it out once, and held it toward him—no ceremony, no weight in her posture—waiting.
He didn't take it. Not out of pride—out of habit. Things given in rooms like this weren't always gifts.
For a few seconds, neither moved. Then he glanced at the cloak, then at her.
"Aren't you worried you'll freeze without it?"
One pale brow arched behind the mask.
"I'm not the one who looks like he owes death a rematch."
That earned her the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth. He took the cloak then, settling its weight across his shoulders.
Her gaze lingered, measuring but not unkind.
"You're mine now,"
No threat in it—just a fact, like saying the sky was above them.
"And I keep what I claim in one piece."
Her gaze held his.
"You'll walk out of here with me. You'll listen when I speak. And you'll stay alive. That's all I'm asking."
"And if I don't?"
Nyx asked, because biting his tongue had never been a talent he cared to learn.
"Then—"
the corner of her mouth curved
"—I'll find a way to make you wish you had."
Silence settled. The bodyguard's shadow adjusted itself by half an inch.
She stepped to the door and pressed the wax token to a dull plate set in the stone. Something on the other side yielded. She didn't look back.
"Come, Nyx,"
The buyer made it sound like his name belonged to her alone.
He followed.
The door opened at night and a courtyard that smelled of rain that hadn't fallen yet. Somewhere beyond the wall, the Exchange exhaled the last heat of the day. Somewhere below their feet, people counted coins and called that living.
He glanced once at the sky and found no stars he knew.
The buyer raised a hand. A carriage eased forward from the shadow—a dark-polished box with wheels that didn't dare squeak, drawn by something that wasn't quite a horse and hauled like one anyway.
She placed a foot on the step and paused, just long enough that he understood it was a permission, not an order.
Nyx looked at the open door, at the seat opposite the place she would sit, at the little square of lamplight that would frame him once he went inside. He felt the pull of everything he didn't know, and the stronger pull of being allowed to learn it.
He stepped up.
The door swung shut behind him, sealing away the noise, the torchlight, and the smell of too many people in too little space.
In the sudden quiet, the only sound left was the low, steady rhythm of the wheels.