Chapter 1 Not Yet!

  "There's nothing more despairing than knowing you're dancing on strings for someone else's satisfaction, with no agency whatsoever."

  Albert slammed his hands against his side and immediately regretted it as a fresh wave of pain tore through him. He squeezed his eyes shut and stayed perfectly still, teeth grinding, waiting for the worst of it to pass. It took a while. When it finally backed off enough for him to breathe normally he looked down at his hands and saw the blood soaking through his fingers and spreading across the cobblestones beneath him in a dark lazy puddle.

  That was a lot of blood.

  He pressed harder against the wound. A knife had done this, stuck in deep and pulled out messy, the kind of damage that did not just walk off. He knew that. He was not stupid. But knowing it and accepting it were two very different things and he was not quite ready to accept it yet.

  Outside the alley the streets of Marshboury were loud and alive. Vendors shouting. Carts rattling over stone. People laughing, arguing, going about their day. All of it happening maybe twenty feet from where he was sitting bleeding to death and not a single person out there had any idea. Why would they. An alley in the slums was not somewhere people looked into on purpose.

  He leaned his head back against the wall and let out a long slow breath.

  His brothers had run.

  He kept coming back to that. Could not stop coming back to it no matter how hard he tried to think about something else. All that big talk. All those nights sitting around fires swearing up and down that they had each other, that they were different from everyone else in the slums, that when things got serious they would stand together. He had believed it. Or at least he had wanted to believe it badly enough that he had stopped asking too many questions about whether it was actually true.

  Then the other gang showed up with real knives and real intentions and every single one of his brothers had turned and sprinted without looking back. Left him standing there. Left him to take what was coming so they could get away clean.

  He looked at the blood on his hands and shook his head slowly.

  A tired smile crept onto his face despite everything.

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  "Once a scum always a scum," he muttered. "And scum does what scum does best. Runs like a dog!"

  Two years. Two years since he had walked away from his father for the last time and hit the streets with nothing but the clothes on his back and the anger in his chest and the stubborn idea that he could make something of himself on his own terms. The streets had laughed at that idea pretty much immediately. A kid alone in the slums without connections or protection lasted about as long as you would expect, which was not long, and so he had found the gang and the gang had found him useful and he had told himself it was temporary, just until he got on his feet, just until he figured out something better.

  He never figured out something better.

  And now here he was.

  "So this is it?" His voice came out rougher than he meant it to. "All that struggling and it ends like this? In this alley?" He laughed once, short and humorless. "You have got to be kidding me."

  He tried pressing harder on the wound. Still bleeding. His hands were getting cold.

  "If I had just run with them." The thought sat there uncomfortable and honest. "If I had just been a coward like the rest of them, would I even be here right now?"

  Probably not. Yeah, probably not.

  That was almost funny.

  Almost.

  His expression shifted. The tired smile hardened into something with more teeth in it.

  "My grievances," he said quietly. Then louder. "My grievances just ends here? Everything I went through, everything she went through, it just means nothing?" He shook his head hard. "No. No way. I refuse. You hear me? I refuse!" His voice cracked on the last word but he kept going. "That man has to answer for what he did! To her. To me. To all of it! I have not survived two years alone on these streets just to die in an alley before I even get to look him in the eye. He has to pay. He has to pay for everything and I am not dying here until he does!"

  His voice echoed off the narrow walls and faded out and the alley went quiet again.

  He sat there breathing hard, hands shaking against his side, and slowly the fire in him guttered against the cold simple fact of what his body was doing. He could feel it. The edges of his vision are slowly fading away. The street noise outside getting quieter in a way that had nothing to do with the street. The heaviness spreading through his limbs like his body was already starting to pack things up without asking his permission.

  He had more to say about that. He had a lot more to say about that.

  But the darkness at the edge of things kept creeping inward and there was nothing his anger could do about it, because anger had never once changed what a knife wound actually meant and it was not going to start now.

  His eyes grew heavy.

  And just like that, like a candle burning down to its last inch, his mind stopped fighting the present and drifted somewhere else entirely. Back. Back to before the streets and before the gang and before any of this. Back when he was ten years old and the world had first sat him down and explained to him exactly how little it intended to give him.

  The memories came whether he wanted them or not.