The morning sun streamed into The Brown Bar, painting the polished wood in a light that felt like a lie. I'd scrubbed away every trace of last night—the phantom scent of Kestrel's ale, the memory of her words.
But the anxiety remained, a low hum in my blood, a tuning fork struck by a name I didn't know. CorvusSharpe. Every creak of the floorboards, every distant cart rumble, was a footstep. I was a spider waiting for the web to tremble.
The bell jingled.
He stood in the doorway, a tall, lean silhouette against the light. He wore a dark traveler's coat, and his eyes were the color of forgotten grave markers. The build, the posture, the absolute lethality in his stillness. It clicked.
Slade. I think that's his name. I'd seen his file once, a grainy photo attached to a list of "High-Threshold Extractors." It would make sense for this Corvus Sharpe to employ him. This wasn't a standard enforcer; this was the tip of the spear. But honestly, he looked better in his file.
"What can I get you?" I asked, not looking up from the glass I was polishing. The question was a formality, a last, desperate anchor to the persona of Arthur Glass.
"I'm not a customer." His voice was quiet, flat, and final. He stepped inside, letting the door swing shut. The ambient sounds of the street vanished, sealed out. "You are Penance. You will come with me."
"You have the wrong man. The name's Arthur Glass." The lie was ash in my mouth. We were both past pretending, but the script had to be followed.
He didn't even acknowledge it. His gaze swept the room, cataloging exits, assessing the few early regulars with the dispassionate efficiency of a butcher sizing up livestock, as he walked towards me. "The alternative to compliance is disassembly. Of this place. Everyone in it."
The words were a guillotine blade, cold and final. My options, the paths I had walked a thousand times in my mind, narrowed to one. Fight, and paint a target of blood on everyone here, ensuring Corvus would send ten more, each worse than the last.
Or go, and contain the destruction to myself. The math was brutal, but simple. ThePenance had always been good at math. The cost of a life, the price of peace. The numbers always lined up in the end.
The bell jingled again, a painfully cheerful sound that shattered the tension into a thousand deadly shards. Lily bustled in, a basket of fresh pastries in her arms, the scent of warm apples and cinnamon trailing in her wake.
"Arthur, wait until you try the apple... oh." She stopped, her smile dissolving as she felt the deathly stillness in the air, the void where sound went to die.
For one heartbreaking second, I could see the normal, sunny morning we were supposed to be having—her teasing me about the new pastries, me pretending to be annoyed, the simple, unremarkable joy of it. A future that was now irrevocably gone, murdered by the man in the traveler's coat.
The enforcer's eyes, Slade, flicked to her. "I advise you leave, barmaid."
"Lily," I said, my voice dangerously calm, a steel cable holding back a avalanche. "Go to the back. Now."
She hesitated, clutching the basket like a shield, her eyes wide with confusion and a dawning, primal fear. She was seeing a sliver of the world I lived in, and it was breaking her.
Slade sighed, as if bored by the entire interaction, the messy complication of an innocent. In one fluid motion, his hand went to his belt and came back with a hand-axe, a thick, dark chain welded to its haft. The links pooled at his feet like a dormant serpent.
The serrated edge gleamed with a sickly purple light, a Runescribed weapon, made to pierce magical defenses and sever the flow of qi. It was a can opener, and I was the tin.
"Last chance," he said, his voice still that infuriating monotone. "Come willingly."
"Arthur, what's happening?" Lily whispered, her voice trembling on the edge of a sob.
Slade's arm snapped forward. The axe shot straight forward like a piston, the chain whipping behind it with a sound like tearing silk. It wasn't aimed at me. It was a test, a statement of intent. It was aimed at the pastry basket in Lily's hands, at the simple, beautiful normalcy she represented.
I moved.
I didn't think. My body crossed the space before the chain had fully extended, a blur of motion that had nothing to do with the barkeep and everything to do with the weapon I used to be. My left hand, hardened by channelled qi I pretended not to possess, slapped the chain aside.
The force was immense, a jolt of necrotic energy that numbed my arm to the elbow, a cold fire that sought my core. The axe head veered, smashing into a shelf of bottles behind the bar. Glass exploded in a shower of sweet ale and shards, the sharp, sugary smell a grotesque counterpoint to the violence.
A cold, greasy feeling seeped up my veins, the runes on the axe hungrily trying to devour the qi in my body. I had to consciously force my circulation to purge the sensation, a subtle, internal battle he would never see.
It was like swallowing poison and forcing your own blood to neutralize it.
The patrons screamed and scrambled for the door, a stampede of panic that left a trail of overturned chairs in their wake.
I stood between Lily and Slade, my right hand still holding the pristine white polishing cloth. I hadn't even dropped it. The contrast was a message: You are not a threat I need my full attention for.
Slade's eyes showed their first flicker of emotion: not surprise, but a cold, clinical interest. He yanked on the chain, the axe dislodging from the wreckage and slithering back into his hand like a living thing, coiling itself back into readiness.
"I see the Ledger didn't exaggerate," he murmured, a connoisseur appreciating a fine wine.
"Get out of my bar," I said, the words a low growl that came from a place Arthur Glass had never visited.
He smiled his thin, cruel smile. And then he looked past me, at Lily, who was sobbing against the back bar, her whole world shattered. "No."
He lunged around me. The axe was a distraction, a feint. His other hand held a simple, unadorned dagger, and it was headed for her throat. It was the move of a man who understood efficiency. No grand displays, just a quick, quiet end to a loose end.
I could have broken his arm. I could have shattered his spine, torn the dagger from his grip and buried it in his eye socket. My body knew the ways, a dozen variations flashing through my mind in an instant.
But winning this fight, killing Corvus's enforcer, would paint a target on Lily's back that no power of mine could ever remove. They would never stop coming for her. She would become a lesson, a message to me, and her death would be on my hands as surely as if I'd held the blade myself.
The calculation was instant, the conclusion grim. The math, once again, was perfect.
So I made a choice. Not the choice of Arthur Glass, the barkeep who wanted to live. Not the choice of the Penance, the weapon that wanted to destroy. But the only choice that mattered: the one that saved the innocent.
The choice to lose.
I let the mask of Arthur Glass shatter, and the colder, older calculus of the Penance take over. I turned my back to his lunge, a deliberate, calculated act of submission.
The dagger bit deep into my shoulder, a spike of white-hot agony that stole my breath. I grunted, absorbing the fire, and used the momentum to pull Lily into a crushing embrace, shielding her with my body, my blood already soaking into my shirt, a warm, sticky secret between us.
Over her shoulder, I met her terrified, bewildered eyes. My voice was a low breath, a final confession meant for her alone. "Thank you, Lily. For the peace." It was the only truth I could give her.
I released her, my face hardening into the Penance's impassive mask as I turned and offered my wrists to Slade. The pain in my shoulder was a dull, manageable throb, a price I was willing to pay. "Alright. You win. I'll come. On one condition. This bar never existed. You never saw her and she forgets any of this happened."
Slade watched me, the dagger still dripping with my blood. He gave a slow, approving nod. We understood each other. This was clean. Professional. "A clean extraction. Acceptable."
He produced a pair of heavy, rune-etched manacles from his coat. As he clamped the cold iron around my wrists, the runes flared, and a profound numbness washed up my arms, a cage for the storm within.
I heard Lily's broken whimper behind me, a sound that would haunt me longer than any wound.
I didn't look back. To look would be to weaken. To look would be to give them a weapon.
As Slade led me out into the morning sun, the light that had felt like a lie now felt like an interrogation lamp. I turned my head slightly, the movement sending a fresh wave of pain from my shoulder.
"A word of advice," I said, my voice low, as the manacles leeched the warmth from my bones. "You're not putting a man in chains. You're bottling a storm. Be very, very careful not to crack the glass."