Chapter 1 1

The sign above my shop reads Kestrel and Okafy, Documents Restored, which is a very dignified way of saying I forge things and Nessa yells at customers who try to haggle over felony pricing.

"That's a hundred and twenty for the manifest," Nessa was telling a nervous looking man in an ill fitting coat when I came downstairs that morning, coffee in hand, hair not yet fully cooperating with gravity.

"It was a hundred yesterday. Prices go up when you show up sweating and glancing at the door every four seconds. It makes the workshop nervous."

"The workshop doesn't have feelings, Nessa."

"The workshop has excellent instincts, and right now they're telling me you're either being followed or you're about to be extremely dishonest about how you're going to pay me."

She smiled at him, entirely pleasant, entirely unmovable. "Which is it?"

He paid in full.

Nessa had that effect on people.

Forging a shipping manifest is, contrary to what most people assume, ninety percent patience and ten percent extremely small handwriting, and I was deep into the patience part an hour later, tongue between my teeth, replicating a customs seal with a level of focus that would have impressed absolutely nobody watching, when Nessa burst through the shop's back door looking like she'd personally outrun something.

"Jonas is dead," she blurted, no preamble, chest heaving. "Marlowe, Jonas is dead."

My pen kept moving for exactly one more word before my brain caught up with my ears, and then the manifest was ruined anyway, ink bleeding across the page in a long, ugly smear that mirrored roughly how the inside of my chest suddenly felt.

"That's not funny."

"Do I look like I'm joking?" She was still catching her breath, hands braced on her knees. "They found him in his workshop an hour ago. I only just heard because Old Tomas heard it from the harbor watch."

I set the pen down very carefully, the way you set anything down when your hands have started doing something you didn't authorize. "How."

"Nobody knows yet. Or nobody's saying." She straightened, and whatever she saw on my face made her voice drop gentler. "You should sit down."

"I don't want to sit down. I want you to tell me this is a very elaborate, very unfunny prank."

It was not a prank. Jonas Hale had been the only person in Duskhaven who knew my actual name, the mortician's assistant who'd forged my death certificate six years ago in exchange for a favor I'd never fully paid off, and the closest thing I had to family since I'd walked away from the one I was born into.

People like Jonas did not simply die conveniently the same week I happened to still owe him a favor. People like Jonas got made examples of.

"There's more," Nessa admitted, wincing like she already knew how badly this next part would land. "Tomas said there was a mark on his palm. Burned in. Some kind of symbol."

My stomach dropped somewhere below the floorboards. "What kind of symbol."

"He didn't say. But you've gone the color of old parchment, so I'm guessing you already know."

I did know. I'd spent twenty years of my life trying very hard not to know it, and six more years since pretending the knowledge had quietly expired somewhere along the way, but a scar doesn't forget its own shape just because you've stopped looking at it. The Hollow Mark. My family's mark. Burned into a dead man's palm like a signature.

"I need to see the body."

"Absolutely not."

"Nessa."

"You are not walking into a crime scene that might be connected to your extremely dead, extremely fake identity, Marlowe, that is possibly the single worst plan you have ever had, and you have had some genuinely terrible plans."

She wasn't wrong. I went anyway.

The workshop was cordoned off by the time I arrived, harbor watch milling around the door with the particular boredom of people who had already decided this case wasn't worth their overtime, and it took exactly one forged badge and a very convincing widow's veil to get me inside for ninety seconds before anyone noticed I didn't belong. Ninety seconds was enough. The mark on Jonas's palm was unmistakable, precise, deliberate, nothing accidental about the burn at all, and tucked half hidden beneath his workbench, a single customs stamp I recognized instantly because I'd forged dozens just like it over the years.

House Draven.

I stood there a moment too long, staring at the workbench where Jonas had taught me half of everything I knew about making paper lie convincingly, at the little jar of iron gall ink he'd never once let me touch without supervision, at the chair still pushed back at an angle that suggested he'd stood up fast, right before whatever happened to him happened. Grief has terrible timing. It waited exactly until I had a stolen badge and ninety seconds on the clock to show up in full.

"You're not supposed to be in here," a harbor watchman barked, finally noticing me, and I was already moving, badge and veil discarded in an alley two streets over, mind spinning through exactly how badly a Draven customs stamp at a murder scene could complicate a life I'd spent six years building specifically to avoid complications.

I should have gone home. I should have let Nessa talk sense into me over strong tea and stronger opinions.

Instead I found myself walking, an hour later, straight up to the old customs tower on the seventh bridge, House Draven's seat of power looming over the canal like it had personally never lost an argument in its life, and I told the guard at the gate I had business with whoever handled shipping discrepancies.

"Everyone has business with shipping discrepancies," the guard replied, unimpressed. "Name?"

I gave him a fake one. It didn't matter. I was escorted, with more courtesy than I expected and considerably more armed men than I would have liked, into a private office three floors up, where a man was waiting behind a desk with his boots up on the polished wood and an expression that suggested he already knew exactly why I'd come.

"Marlowe Kestrel," he announced, and my whole body went cold, because I had given the guard a different name entirely. "Or should I call you by whatever alias you gave downstairs? I'll be honest, I've lost track of how many you've used this decade."

"I don't know who that is."

"You forged this customs stamp." He held up the exact document I'd been chasing an hour ago, somehow already sitting on his desk. "Left edge curves point four degrees wrong. It's a very good forgery. It's also distinctly, recognizably yours, and I've been collecting your work for two years without knowing your face went with it."

"Flattering. Also concerning."

"I meant it as both." He tapped the document once, almost fondly, the way another man might admire a fine painting instead of evidence of a crime. "You've got a habit of curving your Ts a hair too far left when you're rushed. I noticed it on a permit eighteen months ago and I've been quietly impressed ever since."

My pulse was doing something violent and unhelpful. "I still don't know what you're talking about."

"You have a scar on your left wrist shaped like a hollow circle," he continued, entirely unbothered, "which you've been covering with a very convincing tattoo of a sparrow for exactly as long as I've had eyes in this city, and a dead man an hour ago had a version of that same mark burned into his palm. I'd say that's worth a conversation, wouldn't you, Miss Kestrel?"

I reached for the door. It was, unsurprisingly, locked.

"Very dramatic," he observed, not unkindly. "I half expected you to try climbing out the window instead. There's rather an impressive drop, for the record, in case you were weighing it as a backup plan."

"I was weighing several backup plans, none of which involved staying to chat."

"And yet here you are, chatting."

"I'm not going to hurt you," he offered, almost gently, which was somehow more unsettling than a threat would have been. "I'm going to offer you a deal instead. And given that you're currently standing in the one building in Duskhaven where your real name could get you killed within the hour, I'd suggest you hear me out before you decide how much you hate me."

"You have a very casual definition of comforting."

"I've been told." He gestured toward the chair across from his desk, patient in the way of a man who had never once needed to raise his voice to get exactly what he wanted.

"Sit down, Miss Kestrel. This conversation is going to take longer than either of us has patience for standing up."