The first male he actually cared about in his whole reincarnated lifetime.

He accepted that he did not want to watch the old man die.

Somewhere far away, in the world where his body lived, Naomi called another fold, and Aurora’s fingers tightened on his wrist as his pulse stumbled.

And he accepted the last one, the one underneath all the others. He wanted the badass geezer to keep his dignity.

To never choke down another man’s seed pill for the privilege of breathing, not while Quinlan had a drop of blood left to offer instead. To be standing, spine straight, when the Heavenly Restriction came down, and to be there beyond the edge of every map after it, that fossil of a status screen climbing again.

He wanted to see. A level 75 Alexios Valorian.

A level 100 Alexios Valorian.

An Alexios Valorian who fought demons and gods alike, whatever entity stood in his path. Quinlan knew the old fucker would make it possible, just like his girls would.

The essence stopped turning and aimed.

None of this would ever be said out loud, naturally, not even to Ayame.

And when the final reduction came, the class showed him the last requirement, and its price, in the same breath.

The lattice across his chest and back lit up through his shirt.

The Crimson Reservoir, the family’s shared vessel, stirred at the hollow above his heart and began to pour. It ran down the inside of his arm in a thread of deep red light and into the cauldron, and the brew drank it the way dry earth drinks rain.

He could have stopped it. He understood, with the same authored certainty as everything else tonight, that he could refuse, and that the batch would die like the other three, because this was the half no alchemist could supply. The blood was the body of the gift. The Reservoir was its life. And an oath, it turned out, was not made of words at all.

Quinlan let it pour.

The understanding kept unrolling as the vessel drained, and it was not gentle about its terms. This door opened for family, for oath, for a man its holder would bleed for.

The Reservoir would fill again at his women’s pace, not his, and until it did, the family would fight without the reserve their kills had built. And unlike the normal Bloodfather ritual, this was not a thing he could repeat whenever he felt like it.

"Reduction’s holding!" Gideon’s voice cracked on it. "The essence is binding to the... Naomi, the density, look at the density...!"

"I see it. Final fold." Naomi’s paddle moved in one long, unbroken figure-eight, her whole weight behind the calm of it. "Aurora. Cap the heat. Now."

"Capped."

The cauldron’s contents pulled inward from the copper walls, contracting like a closing hand, smaller, denser, brighter. The light in the workroom bent toward it with the same wrongness that had once made lantern flames lean away from Quinlan in a freezing cellar.

The thread from his chest thinned, thinned further, and finally parted, and the lattice under his shirt went dark and quiet, a spent hearth.

What remained above the empty copper did not fall.

A single bead of deep, impossible crimson floated where the brew had been, no larger than the pearl it was built to replace, and it sat in the air like it weighed more than the cauldron beneath it. It trembled, faintly and constantly, like a nocked arrow the instant before the loose.

Naomi set down her paddle, walked to the nearest bench, and sat, all at once, like her strings had been cut.

"Forty years of alchemy," she informed the ceiling.

Gideon approached with a crystal flask and the reverence of a man about to bottle a saint. The flask’s mouth rose under the bead, and the bead drifted aside without appearing to move at all. He tried again, slower. It drifted again, calm and effortless, three times in a row, until the scholar turned around wearing an expression of pure scientific heartbreak.

"It refuses containment. Why would it refuse containment?!"

"Because it isn’t finished." Quinlan was grinning at the little crimson star through a face gone paper-white. He could feel it at the edge of his will, familiar as his own hand, straining in one direction only, steady as a compass needle, and the night’s last piece of knowledge unrolled in him along with it, in the physique’s wordless handwriting.

A flask was an insult. A courier was an insult. A gift like this was given, palm to chest, by the man giving it, and his arm, tonight, was very long.

"Naomi. How attached are you to your roof?"

"...What does my roof have to do with anything?" Her gaze went from him, to the trembling bead, to the beams overhead, and she came up off the bench. "Young man. Don’t you dare-"

"Sorry. I can’t hold it any longer."

Quinlan gathered everything that was left in him.

The Abyssal Genesis Physique rose to meet the call, dark script flooding up his forearms and throat, every line of the lattice burning through his shirt at once, the whole failing engine of his body agreeing, one last time tonight, to be spent. He looked at the little red star he had paid for, and gave it the only instruction it had ever been waiting for.

’Go.’

The bead went through the roof.

It left a crack of parting air, a perfect circle of missing tiles raining splinters across the benches, and dawn pouring down through the hole into a workroom full of drifting dust.

Naomi’s shriek and Gideon’s awed, broken laugh arrived together, and Aurora got her shoulder under Quinlan just as his knees handed in their resignation.

Above Miri Town, the first morning light acquired a companion.

A seam of red light crossed the rooftops and was gone, out over Lumi Forest, still holding its night mist, over rivers and roads and border stones, streaking through the dawn faster than any bird had ever flown it.

A farmer dropped his pail and pointed. A watchman on a border wall opened his mouth to shout, and by the time sound came out, the sky was empty again. It flew straight and unwavering, because it knew where it was going the way blood knows its way home.

...

The King of Vraven had not slept either.

Dawn found Alexios Valorian at the great desk of the royal study, buried to the forearms in sealed orders, while across the room Iris sat with her boots up on a table worth a village, working through a stack of records she had refused to let anyone summarize for her.

The instincts arrived first.

Every battlefield sense the old king owned fired at once, the same full-body alarm that had once walked him backward across a freezing cellar, and he was on his feet with his hand on his sword before his mind caught up.

The tall windows flushed red, dawn drowned in a deeper color, and then it was through the glass without breaking it and into his chest before the blade cleared an inch.

Warmth.

Ferocious and total, flooding out from his sternum into every limb at once, and with it came the strangest sensation of Alexios Valorian’s very long life.

The slow falling in his marrow, the one he had carried so long he had stopped calling it falling, stopped. The ground arrived under a man who had forgotten he was still dropping, and his next breath went all the way down, and the one after that went deeper.

He knew the signature. Of course he knew it. He had hunted it across a continent, mapped its habits, cursed its owner’s name a million times, and now it had crossed a kingdom at dawn to hunt him back, and it had caught him.

Alexios gripped the edge of the desk and laughed once, rough and low, at nothing his dignity was prepared to explain.

"You just couldn’t have handed it over like a normal person, could you?" he managed, to the empty morning air. "You absolute showoff..."

Iris hadn’t moved from her chair. She watched the last of the red light soak out of the air around the king, then turned back to her records.

"Now you get to deal with him forever. Dying would’ve been mercy."

Alexios straightened, and his shoulders came back and down. Outside the tall windows, dawn was spreading over his capital, and for the first time in a very long while, its king was not counting his mornings.

...

With the morning sun’s arrival, and as the Ravenshade investigation began taking shape, it was time for Quinlan to visit the elven capital!