Steel answered for her. Inezia did not weigh the scales or calculate the cost. The pit had stripped away hesitation years before the Order ever put boots on her feet. Her wrist flicked, the balance of her iron shortsword shifting in a blur, and the blade whistled through the mist. It struck Vasco squarely through his armored forearm, shearing through tendon and leather with a sickening crunch. The brute shrieked, dropping his dagger. Gaspar plunged into the muck on hands and knees, coughing violently. "Run, you idiot!" Inezia roared, vaulting over the rotting undergrowth to snatch her blade from the lieutenant's splintered bone. She delivered a savage kick to Vasco's temple that cracked his skull against a stone, leaving him twitching in the ferns. Navarro’s silhouette was already lost to the pitch-black canopy above the ridge. The trail went cold under the pouring mist. Her knuckles split against her hilt, but she dragged Gaspar to his feet by the scruff of his coat. "Left! Into the gorge!" Thiago's baritone cut through the fog. He sheared through two tracking mastiffs that tore after them, his greatsword humming a clean, brutal arc through sinew. "They have horns sounding from the southern perimeter. Move!" The ravine swallowed them whole. They stumbled through freezing creeks and jagged shale, pushing upward into the jagged teeth of the Montes Serradas until the hounds' baying thinned into distance. A slit in the limestone cliffs offered sanctuary—a narrow, icy cleft smelling of damp minerals and old rot. Gaspar collapsed against the stone, wheezing through purple bruises. "I’m dead. Officially. Put a marker over the mud: Here lies Gaspar, killed by social climbing and terrible company." Inezia ignored him, leaning against the damp granite. Her vision swam. The cold was different here; it seeped inward, dull and numbing, carrying echoes she had tried to drown in pit-sand. *"He looks at our veins like an alchemist looks at mercury, Ine."* Ignazio's face surfaced behind her eyelids, pale beneath the lantern light of their attic room three months ago, fingers trembling against a strip of linen. *"Navarro doesn't want hounds. He wants the marrow that keeps the rot away. The Vargas line doesn't just resist the taint—it absorbs it. If he catches me, he won't kill me quickly. He'll drain me until there’s nothing left to bury."* She had laughed then. She had told him to carry a heavier knife. "Sit down before you drop," a low voice commanded. Thiago was in front of her. The masquerade had ruined his fine doublet, leaving torn velvet plastered to broad shoulders. In the gloom of the cave, stripped of the Bastion's sneering hierarchy, his aristocratic poise seemed entirely hollowed out, replaced by something raw and frayed at the edges. He dropped a bundle of dried moss and struck a flint, coaxing a tiny, smoke-starved spark between them. Gaspar curled into a ball near the entrance, already snoring from pure terror-fueled exhaustion. "Give me your hand," Thiago said. "I'm fine, Murguia." "You're bleeding through your ribs, and your balance is tilted three inches to the left. Sit down." He didn't ask a second time. His hands caught her waist, firm and unyielding, guiding her down against the cavern wall. He knelt between her parted knees, unbuckling the shattered remnants of her corset with hands that weren't entirely steady. Her chest-binding was dark with swamp water and grime. As the cloth parted under his skinning knife, Inezia tensed, waiting for the disgust, the sneer, the arrogant condemnation of the nobleman tricked by a gutter-born girl. It never came. Thiago paused, his palms resting against her bare collarbones. His calloused thumbs brushed the curve where muscle met throat, his stare burning into hers with a feral, dizzying intensity. The arrogance was gone. In its place lived a terrible, ravenous bewilderment. "Do you have any idea," he muttered, his voice cracking against the damp air, "what you did to me in that barracks?" Inezia held his gaze, her chin lifting. "You tried to slit my neck the first night." "Because I was losing my mind!" The words tore out of him in a ragged hiss, pitched low so as not to wake Gaspar. He leaned closer, until his heat chased away the cavern's damp chill. "Every night. The sound of you shifting on the straw. The smell of your skin under the lye soap. I lay awake staring at the beams, convinced my own mind had rotted into some foul sickness. I hated you for it. I wanted to break your jaw just to make the wanting stop." Her mouth went dry. "Thiago—" "And then you walked down that staircase tonight," he whispered, his fingers curling into the tangled locks at the nape of her neck, tilting her head back against the stone. "Not a boy. Not a recruit. You. Fierce as an open wound. I thought I was damned, Inezia. I truly thought the Serrado had driven me insane." "I'm not delicate," she warned, her voice dropping into the rasp of the fight pits. "I don't break, Murguia." "Good," he growled. He dragged her mouth to his, hard and bruising, tasting of mountain salt and iron. It wasn't gentle. His palms bit into her hip bones through damp wool, pulling her off the gravel until her knees locked around his thighs. Inezia hooked her fingers into his thick hair, dragging him deeper into the collision, answering his arrogance with her own biting fervor. Her fingers knotted in the thick hair at his nape, pulling him down until their teeth clicked together. His chest rose and fell against her ribs, iron muscle pressing her flat against the granite. Then his hand shifted up her back to steady her, his palm sliding over the torn silk at her right shoulder. Thiago froze. The kiss broke abruptly. His breathing came hard, ragged, his pupils dilated in the dim firelight. His features hardened into rigid stone. "What is this?" he rasped. Inezia stiffened, reaching for the hilt at her hip. "What?" Thiago peeled back the shredded velvet from the curve of her shoulder blade. There, weeping a sluggish, tar-like fluid into her pale skin, was a jagged crescent of punctures—the black, festering bite of Navarro’s corpse-hounds, its veins spidering outward in pulsing, obsidian rot that crawled inexorably toward her heart.

The Cursed Woods