The city smells different behind a mask.
Stonefold's usual rot—wet stone, iron smoke, and spilled ale—blurs into something muted, almost ghostly. Sounds twist too: the clatter of boots, the bark of street vendors, even the wail of distant gulls all feel like echoes swallowed by cloth and leather.
I walk unseen through the veins of the city, my mask tight against my skin, my coat stitched with stolen truths.
Tonight, my orders are simple.
Deliver the message. Leave the mark. Let the wolves come sniffing.
Simple never means easy.
Lira had pressed a bundle into my hands before vanishing into the mist. Inside: a handful of blackened coins, a thin vial of something that looked like smoke trapped in glass, and a folded scrap of paper with three words:
>*"House of Genn. Midnight."*
The House of Genn—merchant princes fattened by old blood and older lies. Their hands signed the contracts I stole. Their voices wove the false promises that built a dozen broken kingdoms.
Now they would pay the price.
But not with blades. Not yet.
First: Fear.
Fear sharpens the knife. Fear loosens tongues. Fear leaves doors swinging wide open in the dead of night.
---
I reach the House just before midnight.
It's a squat fortress more than a home: stone walls bristling with iron spikes, guards pacing like bored sharks around the gates. Torches gutter in the damp wind. No way in through the front.
I slip around the side, into the waste channels. Rats flee at my boots. The water rises to my ankles, cold and greasy. I climb when I find the broken grating—hand over hand, silent as mist.
Above: a library window, cracked just enough to slide a blade through.
I don't use a blade.
I use the smoke.
The vial shatters against the frame, and the mist spills out like a living thing—curling, creeping, *whispering*.
Within seconds, the lock gives a soft click, and the window groans open on its own.
Threadless tricks. Old and dangerous.
Gifts I'm only beginning to understand.
---
Inside, the House of Genn is a mausoleum built of gold and blood.
Tapestries bigger than tavern walls. Fireplaces the size of ox-carts. Tables laid with silver cutlery no one touches.
And somewhere beyond all that—my target.
Not a person.
A symbol.
The Genn crest: a snarling wolf devouring a crown.
It hangs above the hearth in the main hall, carved in ivory, gleaming in the firelight.
I reach into my coat and pull free one of the blackened coins.
A message in the old tongue, stamped into its surface:
>*"The debt is called. The blood is owed."*
I lodge it into the wolf's carved mouth, where it gleams like a rotten tooth.
Then I vanish back into the walls.
---
By dawn, every merchant, lord, and gutter-thief in Stonefold will have heard the rumor:
The Threadless have named their first target.
The wolves will gather. They will howl and hunt.
And the boy in the mask?
He will be waiting.