Chapter 22 · The Ledger of the Dead

The black-glass key struck her chest.

Eve felt the point touch skin before pain arrived. Cold spread through her shirt, colder than the rain outside the dead station, colder than the river wind clawing through the carriage seams. The key did not cut. It waited.

Kieran’s arm locked between them. His face had gone empty in the way it always did before violence—not calm, not controlled, but hollowed out, as if someone had reached behind his eyes and extinguished a lamp.

“Don’t,” Eve whispered.

His fingers tightened around the key.

The thing wearing her face knocked again from the other side of the carriage door.

Three knocks.

Glass moth.

No shadow.

The sound traveled through Eve’s ribs. Her pulse answered it. Somewhere beneath her sternum, the midnight line pulled tight, a silver filament buried in her heart.

“Kieran.”

His eyes flickered.

For one breath, he was back—the bruised, bleeding man who had dragged her through the flooded alleys, the man who had let her sleep with a knife in his hand and his back against the door. Then the emptiness returned.

“She told me to,” he said.

“Who?”

“The woman in the carriage.”

“That’s my face.”

“I know.