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"Read it again."
Sona's knife hadn't moved off my collarbone since she found the ledger. Still pressed there. Still sharp.
"Out loud," she said. "So I know you're not lying to my face twice in one night."
"I already told you what it says."
"Tell me again." The blade went deeper. Not cutting. Not yet. "Names. Dates. Who dies and when. And you've had this since before you ever met me."
"Since before you were born, some of it."
Her jaw went tight. Eyes flat. The look she gets right before she puts a blade through something.
"You're gonna explain that," she said. "After tonight. Right now we've got a bigger problem."
That's when the bell rang wrong.
Not the hour bell. The short, ugly, three-strike pattern that means someone's inside the wall who shouldn't be. Sona's head snapped toward the sound, knife still at my throat, and for one second I watched her choose—kill me now, or go.
She went.
I ran after her. Staying still with that ledger in my coat was its own kind of dying.
"Move faster," Sona snapped over her shoulder, three steps ahead. "If you knew this was happening tonight—"
"I didn't know when. The ledger doesn't give me a clock, it gives me a name and a word."
"Then what good are you?"
"Better than nothing," I said. "Which is what you had eight loops ago."
She didn't answer. Just hit the door to Vittal's quarters with her shoulder, and it slammed open on a room already wrong—overturned chair, window cracked at the latch from the outside, and Vittal himself on his knees holding an empty blanket like it still had weight.
"They took him through the window." His voice didn't sound like a commander's. It sounded like a man breaking. "Tomas. They took Tomas."
I already knew where.
"The old grain cellar under the south wall," I said. "There's a door behind the flour sacks nobody's used since the siege."
Vittal looked up at me like I'd hit him. "How would you—"
"Because I've been here before."
Sona was already moving. Already out the door. I went after her because letting her get to that cellar alone with whoever was waiting down there—that was worse than anything she'd do to me later.
The grain cellar smelled like dust and old wheat and something sharper underneath. Iron.
Sona went down the stairs first, blade out. I went second because she'd have put that same blade in my ribs if I'd tried to go first.
Two of them. Hired, not soldiers—wrong grip on the knives, too much wrist. One had the boy pinned against a grain sack, hand over his mouth. The kid's eyes were huge and wet and locked on the stairs like he was praying.
"Let him go," Sona said, "and I'll only kill one of you."
The man holding the boy laughed. "Big talk for a girl with a—"
He didn't finish it.
Sona crossed the room faster than the sentence, and I went for the second man because someone had to, and for about four seconds the cellar was just noise—steel, a grunt, the boy's muffled scream cut short—and then it was over.
Quiet except for breathing.
Sona had her knife at the first man's throat, boot on his wrist, the boy already scrambling free and running for the stairs.
"Who sent you."
Not a question. A demand.
The man spat blood and said nothing, and I already knew the ledger's answer, had known it since three loops ago, and I said nothing either because saying it now, here, with Sona's blood still up and her knife an inch from opening a throat—that would break something I needed intact a little longer.
She looked at me. Just for a second. Like she felt me holding it back.
Then she cut a shallow line across the man's forearm instead of his throat—enough pain to make him talk later—and shoved him toward the stairs where two of Vittal's men were already coming down.
Upstairs, Vittal had his son wrapped up so tight the boy could barely breathe, face pressed into his father's shoulder.
Vittal looked at me over the kid's head. Gratitude with a knife under it.
"You knew," he said quietly, so the boy wouldn't hear. "You knew where, you knew when. What else do you know that you haven't told me, Kaldane?"
"More than you wanna hear tonight."
"Tonight was supposed to be the last easy night before winter." His hand tightened on his son's back. "Tell me it stays this way. Tell me nobody comes for him again."
I didn't answer.
Couldn't. The ledger doesn't let me lie about things like that, not even by staying quiet, and Vittal read the silence exactly the way he was supposed to. Something behind his eyes went cold. Careful. Filing it away.
A man starting to weigh what he'd do, what he'd trade, if it came down to his son or somebody else's daughter.
Sona pulled me out into the corridor before I could watch that thought finish forming.
She shoved me against the stone wall. Not hard. But with her whole body close enough that I could feel the leftover shake in her hands, the fast beat of her breathing that hadn't slowed down from the cellar. Close enough to smell iron and dust still on her sleeves. Close enough that her eyes weren't flat anymore—furious and something else under the fury that neither of us had a name for yet.
"You knew about the boy," she said. "You knew about tonight. What else is in that ledger with my name on it?"
"Sona—"
"Don't." Her knife came up again. Not to my throat this time—to the space between us, low, almost lazy, like she wasn't sure yet if she needed it. "I wanna trust one thing you've told me. One. And every time I turn around there's another page I didn't know about."
"I'm trying to keep people alive."
"You're trying to keep secrets and calling it that." Her hand shook around the hilt. Small and furious and not from fear. "You don't get to decide who finds out what they're worth to you. Not anymore."
She lowered the blade. Slow. Like it cost her something.
"Next time you hide something like this from me," she said, voice gone very quiet, very even, worse than shouting, "I kill you. I don't care what page you're on in that damn book."
She stepped back. The space between us went cold.
"I kill you myself."
She turned. Started walking.
"Sona—"
"Don't follow me tonight, Kaldane."
I didn't. But I also didn't go back to my quarters, because the ledger was still in my coat and there was one more name on tonight's page I hadn't told her about yet.
One more name, and the word next to it wasn't *Taken*.
It was