God Ash: Remnants of the fallen.

Cain looked at her, and for an instant, the weight of a hundred unspoken things pressed between them—the ghost of old trust, the echo of something softer now calcified to stone. Then it was gone, burned out in the furnace of his will.

"We turn the thread." He straightened, hands sliding from the table to clasp behind his back. "They've cast their line. Good. We'll bite—just enough to let them think they have us hooked."

Hunter's mouth curved, almost imperceptible. He understood.

Susan frowned, confusion etched deep. "You want to lead them on?"

"I want to lead them blind," Cain said. "Every step they think they're guiding, every door they think they're opening—those will be the doors we've already locked behind them."

Roselle tilted her head, voice low. "And if they're better at the game than you think?"

Cain's smile was a shadow, a thing with edges. "Then I stop thinking."

The silence that followed was heavy enough to crack bone.

Finally, Cain reached for a piece of chalk, dragging it across the map in swift, brutal strokes. Lines carved paths through districts like veins splitting from a heart. Intersections marked with sharp, predatory X's.

"These are the arteries," he said. "Control them, and the city bleeds on our terms."

His eyes flicked to Hunter. "You move first. No noise. No patterns. You'll hit the choke points, leave nothing but whispers behind."

Hunter nodded once, silent as the grave he promised to dig.

Cain turned to Susan. "You'll be seen. Everywhere. Loud enough to blind them to what matters. But you don't break. Not until I tell you."

Her teeth flashed—a grin carved from defiance and hunger.

And then, Roselle. Cain didn't speak immediately. Didn't need to. She met his gaze, unblinking, something dangerous flickering there like a knife catching firelight.

"You," Cain said softly, "stay with me."

A flicker in her eyes—surprise, then something else. Something older. She masked it quickly, but Cain had already seen. He filed it away, another blade for later.

When the orders were set, Cain drew a slow breath, tasting iron and smoke in the stale air. Beyond these walls, the city seethed, gears grinding toward a war no one yet named aloud.

The phantom had tested the waters tonight. Good. Let them think the currents were theirs to command. Let them believe the tide was pulling our way.

Cain would be the undertow. The one no one saw until it was too late to breathe.

He looked up, meeting each gaze in turn—Hunter's stone, Susan's fire, Roselle's storm.

"When dawn comes," he said, voice low, lethal, "we stop waiting."

And in the marrow of his bones, Cain knew the truth:

The game had begun. But only one hand would close the throat.

His.

***

The night did not end with his words. It stretched on, taut as wire, humming with a promise none of them could name aloud. Plans were blades, but blades only mattered when they cut. And Cain was done polishing steel in the dark.

They moved.

The headquarters emptied like blood draining from a wound—Hunter melting into alleys like a ghost that had never been human, Susan a flare of crimson cloak and restless energy vanishing down a wider street, all flame and noise where Cain wanted the blind to look. Each footfall they took was a thread drawn taut through the city's veins, weaving a pattern no one but Cain could read.

He stayed behind with Roselle.

The room was quieter without the others, though not empty—not with her standing there, weight settled on one hip, arms crossed, eyes fixed on him as though she could carve his secrets out with nothing but a stare.

"You've changed," she said.

Cain didn't look at her. He dragged the chalk hard across the table once more, marking a final X that cut through the map's spine like a blade through bone. "Everything changes."

"That's not what I meant."

He paused. Just enough to let the silence breathe before he answered. "I know."

He dropped the chalk. It rolled, pale against the black-streaked wood, coming to rest in the groove of a scar carved long before this war. Cain turned at last, meeting her eyes. They hadn't dulled. If anything, they burned sharper now, honed by months apart, by whatever ghosts had walked with her in the dark.

"Roselle," he said softly, tasting the name like smoke.

She didn't flinch, but he saw it—the flicker in the storm. Old things. Fragile things that had no place in this war, yet lingered like the scent of blood after rain.

"Don't," she warned.

He let the corner of his mouth twitch—half a smile, half a scar. "Then stop looking at me like you remember who I was."

Her jaw tightened, but she said nothing.

Good. Words were traps, and they both knew how easily you could hang yourself with the wrong one.

Cain moved first, stepping past her toward the door. She didn't follow immediately, and for an instant he felt the gravity between them—an old orbit, trying to pull him back into a sun that had burned out long ago. He severed it with motion, with the weight of his boots on the stone, with the door swinging wide to let in the cold night air.

"Come," he said without looking back.

And she did.

---

The streets had changed.

It wasn't the buildings—they still leaned like drunks whispering secrets, their crooked bones rising into the eternal dusk of a city that had long forgotten daylight. It wasn't the smell—smoke and rot, spice and steel, the scent of survival baked into every stone. No, the change was subtler. Quieter. Like a breath held too long.

Cain felt it in the hush behind closed shutters, in the rhythm of footfalls that were there and then not, in the weight of a thousand unseen eyes peering from cracks where shadows bled thickest.

The city knew something was coming.

Good, Cain thought. Fear was useful. It made men stupid.

They walked in silence, their steps eating distance as the alleys narrowed, walls pressing close until the sky was nothing but a ragged strip overhead. Roselle's presence was a blade at his side—quiet, sharp, and not entirely predictable. He liked that. Predictable things broke too easily.