The wooden doors thudded shut behind us, the noise rolling through the plaza like a dying heartbeat. The torches outside spat sparks against the cavern draft, their light carving harsh amber lines across the boards of the barn and the faces of the guards posted around it. They stood stiffly at their posts, pretending not to have heard a single word spoken inside, pretending none of their tails had twitched when Master had walked past them, pretending they were made of discipline instead of instinct.

  Master stepped a few paces into the open space, the murmur of the Maw Market drifting toward us like a half-drunk lullaby of danger and commerce. I watched the way his shoulders rose and fell, controlled, deliberate, the rhythm of a man who’d already put Kaelenna behind him the moment he crossed the doorway.

  Then he sighed.

  He leaned one hand against the barn wall, boots set wide on the packed cavern soil, head angled low in that noir way he slipped into like it was a second skin made of disappointment. The posted guard beside us stiffened, eyes darting to him, tail curling down as if she sensed the weight of whatever was about to come out of his mouth.

  Master spoke without looking at her. Without looking at me. Without needing to look at anything. “She knows nothing,” he muttered, voice low and dry as dust on a corpse. “Everyone in there is sniffing around in the dark, hoping the shadows answer back. But shadows don’t talk. They just swallow fools whole.” He exhaled once, slow, bitter. “Animals are useless in this sort of game. They react. They don’t think. They wait to be told where the danger is, and by the time they see it, it’s already got its teeth in their throat.”

  The guard swallowed hard.

  My tail slid instantly back around Master’s thigh, tightening like a living chain, muscles coiling with possessive electricity that hissed up my spine. I stepped closer, brushing my shoulder against his arm, claws scraping the barn wall behind him with a long, deliberate drag. I wanted the guard to hear it. To feel it in her bones. To understand the difference between what he meant and what I would allow.

  Master’s cynicism curled through the air like cold smoke, bitter and sharp, and it made something in my chest grow hot and hungry. I turned my gaze toward the guard, pupils narrowing to predatory slits. “Careful,” I purred, voice low, dripping with the kind of threat that sounded like affection only if you’d lost your mind the way I did. “He wasn’t talking about me.”

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  The guard’s ears flattened so quickly she nearly lost balance. Good. The cavern around us breathed with tension, distant Ren voices arguing, dwarfs haggling over metal scraps in Embercrack green, merchants shouting half-heartedly across the stalls, everyone pretending this was a marketplace instead of a battlefield waiting for the wrong whisper.

  I curled closer to Master, pressing my forehead briefly against his arm, tail tightening enough to make my muscles shiver. “She doesn’t know anything,” I said quietly, voice shifting into something darker, velvet-thin and razor-backed. “Kaelenna’s blind in her own den."

  I inhaled through my nose, scenting the market, the guards, the barn, the trails of stress and fear still clinging to the wood. “We’ll find who,” I whispered. “And then I’ll tear out their spine for making Master waste his time".

  The words then slipped from his mouth, “Good kitten.” Good Kitten ?

  It hit me harder than any spearpoint. My spine arched in a sharp pulse, ears flicking up before I could stop them, tail tightening round his thigh like instinct had hijacked muscle. A warm, electric shiver crawled beneath my skin as if every nerve had been waiting for that single scrap of praise. I leaned closer, chasing his scent, ready to coil myself entirely around him and never let him move again.

  But he didn’t stay still. He didn’t linger. He didn’t give me direction or explanation or even the grace of a backward glance. He just turned. And walked. Straight past the guard, past the market noise, past the torches spitting against cavern wind, his boots striking the stone with that cold, noir certainty that said he’d made up his mind three steps before anyone else even realised there was a choice to make. No inn. No discussion. No warning. Just motion.

  The guard beside us stiffened as he brushed past her, her ears shooting straight up, tail curling forward with startled instinct. She wasn’t looking at him anymore. She was watching me. She should. Because for half a heartbeat… I froze. Not out of fear. Not out of confusion. Out of something deeper. Something primal.

  The bond tugged hard as he crossed the plaza, dragging me with it like a hook lodged deep inside my ribs. Panic flickered at the edges of my vision. Not panic that he’d leave me. Never that. Panic that the distance grew, inch by inch, enough to light that instinct of abandonment that lived in my bones like a disease.

  He didn’t tell me where he was going. He didn’t have to. But he didn’t look at me. And that, that BURNED. My claws dragged a long line down the wooden wall, not even trying to hide the snarl curling up my throat. The guard jumped back so fast she nearly dropped her spear.

  “Move,” I hissed, stepping off the wall, tail already snapping behind me like a whip made of wire. “Unless you want to explain to your High Watcher why you were the last thing between me and him.”