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"Sign it, or bleed on it. Either way, the ink's going down tonight."
Corbin Hale said it like he was ordering another round at the tavern, easy, bored, already thinking about the next thing. He had the parchment pressed flat under Ryan's nose and a blade resting against the side of his throat, close enough that every swallow dragged skin against the edge.
Two men had Ryan's arms wrenched back behind him, knees grinding into his shoulder blades. The study floor was cold enough to bite straight through his shirt. Somewhere behind him a third man was going through Matthias's desk, dumping account books onto the rug like they were kindling.
"Wrong deed," Ryan said. His voice came out steadier than his ribs felt. "You want my thumb on that, you're going to need a deed that actually says what it's supposed to say."
Corbin crouched down to his eye level. Leather and cheap wine, that close. "You've got a mouth for a man about to lose a finger."
"Everyone told Lord Lane you were slow." Corbin's mouth twisted. "Should've known the family joke would still be flapping his gums two seconds from a slit throat."
"Family joke balanced Frosthollow's books well enough that your boss needed three men and a forged deed instead of just walking in and taking it for free." Ryan smiled, and it cost him blood in his mouth. "That tells you something, doesn't it."
One of the thugs pressed a forearm harder against Ryan's throat instead of just kneeling on his shoulder. "Want us to open a vein first, just to be sure he holds still?"
"Not yet." Corbin didn't look away from Ryan. "Ledger boy's got more mouth in him."
"I've got numbers for a man who forged his own paperwork."
The moment his eyes landed on the parchment, something in his skull clicked into place, quiet and fast, the way it always did when figures were in front of him. Sums stacked themselves behind his eyes without asking. Two thousand crowns, dated three nights back, signed against a hold that hadn't cleared a debt of even two hundred in six years. The exchange rate stamped on the seal was wrong for the season. The paper stock was too new for a deed supposedly drawn a week ago.
"Two thousand crowns," Ryan said, "signed three days ago. Except Frosthollow's been bleeding debt since before your boss's father wore short pants, and nobody in this hold has had two thousand spare crowns to lend anyone in six years. Where'd that number come from, Corbin? You pull it out of your ass, or did Lord Lane hand it to you already stamped?"
Corbin's jaw ticked.
"Hold him."
Both thugs leaned their weight down at once. Corbin's boot came into Ryan's chest and pinned him flat, and the air went out of him in one wet, ugly wheeze. Something in his ribs lit up sharp, a crack or the promise of one.
"You don't talk your way off this floor," Corbin said, grinding his heel in. "You put your thumb on the paper. That useless gift of yours is only good for one trick tonight."
Ryan couldn't pull a full breath. The edges of the room went soft, grey creeping in from both sides like curtains being drawn. He heard a sound come out of his own throat he didn't much like the sound of. His right hand, the one not dead under a knee, twitched, then crawled, inch by inch, toward the little ink pad sitting beside the deed.
"Get his hand," Corbin snapped, and one of the thugs grabbed Ryan's wrist and forced it down toward the pad anyway. That was the whole point. His thumbprint, his blood if it came to that, anything that would make a forged deed look signed and real once he wasn't around to argue.
"Wait—" Ryan choked it out. "Wait. You want this to hold up in front of a magistrate, or you want a clerk to throw it out in ten minutes because the date's wrong?"
"Nobody's calling a clerk on a dead man's deed."
"I'm not dead yet. And Matthias keeps every transaction this hold's ever logged, nine years back, in a book that never leaves this house." His chest heaved, and each breath cost him something sharp behind the ribs. "Call your clerk. Call anybody. Three days ago there wasn't two thousand crowns within a hundred miles of this hold, and every ledger your man's currently trashing on that rug will say so. Stamp my print on that deed, and you've handed Lord Lane a forgery signed with a dying man's thumb. That's not a land grab, Corbin. That's a rope, and it's got his name on it."
For one second, Corbin's face didn't move at all.
Then it went flat and mean, and he leaned his whole weight down onto his boot. Ryan's vision snapped fully grey, no more edges left to creep, just grey, and somewhere very far off he felt the thug drag his hand the last few inches toward the pad.
"Cute," Corbin said. "Doesn't matter if it's a good forgery. Just needs your print on it, and you in the ground quiet enough that nobody asks questions before Lord Lane's men are already sitting at your table."
He looked at the thug holding Ryan's wrist. "Move his hand. Get the thumb down."
Ryan's arm shook under the grip. He didn't have the strength left to fight it, and some small, ugly, stubborn part of his brain kept doing math anyway, out of pure habit—how many seconds of air he had left, how many inches his thumb still had to travel, how much a human ribcage could take before something gave for good. Numbers, right up to the end, apparently. Funny, since numbers were exactly what had gotten him exiled to this frozen dump in the first place.
His thumb hovered a hair above the ink pad. Corbin's knife came up off his throat and rose overhead instead, point down, already positioned to drop the instant that print landed.
"Stamp it," Corbin said, soft now, almost gentle, the way a man talks to a horse he's about to put down. "Go on."
The window behind the desk blew in.
Glass sprayed across the desk in a hard bright scatter, raking ledgers and loose paper off the surface, and something came through the broken frame low and fast, already moving before it hit the floor. Ryan caught it only in pieces—a shape in dark leather, boots first, dropping dead center onto Corbin's back and driving him face-first into the boards with a crunch that didn't sound like it came from the wood.
Corbin's knife hand didn't stop.
It was already coming down—