Chapter One Hundred and Eight

Chapter One Hundred and Eight
Eron's Pov

“Were you hiding from us or what...?” I asked once, staring directly at him.

Jarren’s ribs rose too quickly from the shirt that hung on him. He lifted his chin a fraction, as if trying to shape a voice from a dry throat.

I couldn’t listen to whatever he had to say, whatever excuse he was about to form. “Drag him out.” I ordered as I turned, already heading outside. His voice rose behind me, screams and pleads, coupled with a few grunts of struggling, all reach for me but I didn’t pay attention to it.

As soon as we got out into the open place, I signaled the men and they immediately threw him to the ground. He stumbled for a bit, hands and knees kissing the ground.

“Where are they?” I asked, circling him like a predator. One of the soldiers grabbed a wooden box nearby and placed it a few meters away from Jarren.

“I have no idea—”

“Where have you hidden them?” I cut him off before sitting in front of him. When I sat, I gazed directly into his eyes as I kept pushing the question. “Did you smuggle them away before we came?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jarren said quietly, avoiding my gaze.

I wanted him to spill it, I wanted to hear the answer from his mouth. But when they choose to act this stubborn....

“Hold him.”

....it strangely excites me.

I ordered and in mere seconds, 3 men grabbed him. Two held either side of him, locking his hands in opposite directions, while another held him on a chokehold, second hand pulling back on the hair on his head.

I pulled out my sword and got up, watching him struggle against the men. His voice came out again, that same disgusting plea for mercy after playing dumb in my face. I didn’t mind it though, I just grabbed his head and rested my blade against his fingers.

“Maybe after losing a few of these you’ll remember?”

I was about to chop off his fingers when he blurted out, “Alright, I’ll tell you. Just stop, please.”

“Where are they? Where did you hide them?” I asked again, cutting into his skin with my blade.

“They were moved!”

“Where?”

“Somewhere not too far. I didn’t have time to move them far off because the message came early this morning.”

Message? Was he informed about us before we arrived?

“Who informed you?”

He kept quiet, his face starting to stain with wet lines of tears. He knew something, something too big to reveal so easily. But I wasn’t having the patience to wait with him.

I pulled on my sword and watched 4 of his fingers come off, his blood staining my blade as it sliced through. His voice tore through the air in a thick scream, pain and panic painting his face instantly.

“Who was it?” I asked again, already reaching for his other hand.

“Wait, wait— please!!” he begged, eyes wide and ready to fall out of their sockets.

“It was me,” a voice so calm, so steady, broke the chaos immediately.

I turned and saw the head, the man who had greeted us so warmly, the one whose handshake had been polished like the brass on his scales, standing behind me. “You?”

“Please come this way, young prince.” he added and turned immediately, leading me outside the warehouse. We came to a small shade that had already been prepared. Chairs and table sat in the middle of it. He sat down immediately, and so did I.

“What have you done?” I voiced out calmly, settling into the chair.

“Young Prince,”

“You think your laws protect you?” I asked him, though my words were not measured law. They were a thing between the blade and the bone.

The courtyard hummed with the low, uncomfortable noise of discovery, people averted eyes, or looked with the shameless curiosity of those who have never had to hide their hand.

“We are men of trade,” he said at first, voice slick. “We keep to contracts, to the roads. If—if some men—”

“If some men?” I cut in. The phrase landed heavy. “You feed the routes. You keep ledgers. You house people. Your work is not the rust of honest trade, it is the artery that feeds this market.”

He flinched as if struck.

One of my soldiers moved forward and struck the ledger on the table—Kael’s words had given us shape—and the book snapped open like a stage prop forcing truth into the light.

“Peace?” I said, though the word tasted thin. “Peace is an arrangement for those who can pay for it. Tonight, you will answer for that peace.”

His protests dissolved into parroted promises about law and order, about fines and inspections and reform. I heard it the way a man hears rain on a roof when a child is sick inside—the noise of bureaucracy that loves the sound of its own decent intention.

I was not listening to the pledges of men too used to paper absolution. Then one of my men, a steady fellow named Bren, leaned forward and said, not as a question but as a half-cry: “The vampires won’t sit idle. They move with the night. They’ll not let this go without blood.”

At the mention, something in the air changed. Conversation thinned like fog lifting. The word slid between us and carried a cold with it that had nothing to do with the river. I knew the stories of vampires—how they patrolled the darker trades, how their hunger could be bought and bartered with coin and secrecy. I’d always thought of them as a ghost story told to frighten children. But Bren’s words had an edge. They had the truth of someone who’d seen the pattern of how beasts answered greed.

Sunlight slid down toward the horizon, the day bleeding out the way it always did, pale and absolute. The market’s colors dimmed. A stray bell tolled in the distance, and with that sound came a hundred small shifts I hadn’t noticed before: a stall owner walking a tighter path, a cart being pulled back a degree, hands gripping knives with new intent.

We had brought light into a place that preferred its dark. Light is an honest thing; it reveals the seams. But when light leaves—when the last pale rim of sun thins and folds under the horizon—the world remembers another law. In the southern rings, the night is not empty; it is full of watchers who find sustenance in what men hide.

The first kill came like a hush and then a splintering shriek. It was sudden and intimate—a sound of bone saying it was done. A lantern went out. Men shouted, and in the confusion a shadow moved wrong and another man fell.

“They were here.”