Novels by Ziri Ink

AthenaI knew something was wrong with Chase before he told me.It was the way he was standing outside the studio door when I came out, weight on the wrong foot, jaw doing that thing it did when he was working through something he didn’t want to say. I’d known him long enough to read the specific language of his silences and this one was loud.“Inside.” I said.He came in. Sat in the window chair. Didn’t say anything immediately which was its own kind of answer.I pulled up the stool and sat across from him and waited.“Rurik came to me last night.” He said.I kept my face still. “What did he want.”“To talk.” Chase looked at his hands. “Very friendly, very casual, wanted to know how I was settling in, whether I felt like my position here was secure given the circumstances.” He paused. “Whether I felt like Athena’s attention was still on the same things it used to be.”The last part landed like it was meant to.“He was asking if things had changed between us.” I said.“He was asking i

RowanAmara knocked on my study door on a Tuesday.Three fast, one slow. I’d learned that was her knock. I’d been learning her patterns the way you learn a language, slowly and then all at once, the particular vocabulary of a five year old who had her mother’s instincts and her own entirely separate logic.“Come in.” I said.She came in with the rabbit and the sketchbook and stood just inside the door looking around the study with the assessment she gave every room she entered. Then she walked to the chair across from my desk and climbed into it and settled.I waited.“Peri said you know things.” She said.“What kind of things.”“Wolf things.” She opened the sketchbook on her lap. “I have questions.”I set my pen down. “Okay.”She looked at her drawings, flipping through pages with the seriousness of someone consulting notes. The drawings were rough the way children’s drawings were rough but there was something in them, a quality of observation, she’d drawn the wolves from specific an

AthenaI made a mistake in the studio.Not with the tattoo, the tattoo was fine, the tattoo was good actually, one of those sessions where everything cooperates and you step back and the work is exactly what you wanted it to be. That wasn’t the mistake.The mistake was the conversation.I’d asked about his ink because it was genuinely useful information and because I’d been curious since the courtyard and I’d told myself both those things were purely professional. Then he’d talked about the map on his forearm, the unfinished one, the destination he hadn’t committed to yet, and I had felt something move in me that I hadn’t been prepared for.That was the mistake. Letting it move.I cleaned up the studio after he left, Amara having followed him out with some question about the wolves that he’d stopped to answer in the corridor, their voices carrying faintly through the open door. I lined up my inks in their order and wiped down the table and told myself I was fine.I was mostly fine.Ch

RowanI was in the studio at nine.She was already there, which I’d expected, setting up with the focused efficiency she brought to everything she did with her hands. The room smelled like ink and something else, cedar maybe, her scent underneath all of it.I sat in the chair she pointed at without being told twice.She pulled a stool close, sat, took my arm without ceremony, pushed the sleeve up to the elbow. Her hands were cool against my skin, steady, the grip of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and didn’t need to think about it.I looked at the ceiling.“Stay still.” She said.“I am still.”“You’re about to not be. People tense before they realize they’re tensing.” She was examining the wolf on my wrist, turning my arm slightly in the light. “How long ago.”“Twelve years.”“It’s held well.” She said it like a professional assessment, nothing personal in it. “The lines are clean, the ink hasn’t spread too badly.” She reached for something on the table behind her. “I’m

AthenaI found out about Chase from Rowan.Not directly. Nothing with Rowan was ever direct, it came sideways, the way most things in this palace did. He came to the studio the morning after Rurik’s visit, earlier than usual, and stood in the doorway with that still face of his and asked me one question.“The meeting Sael attended three months ago. The one about border schedules.” He said. “Did Chase know about it.”I looked at him. “Why.”“Answer the question first.”I set my pen down slowly. “Chase knows most things I know. We talked about the border situation when it came up in conversation, I don’t remember exactly what I said or when.” I kept my eyes on his face. “Why are you asking about Chase.”He was quiet for a moment. Not evasive, just measuring something.“His name came up in the report.” He said. “He was in a meeting where schedule information was present. I’m not drawing conclusions, I’m asking questions.”Something cold moved through me. “Chase has been with me for six y

RowanChase came to find me at midnight.Not Lake, Chase. Which told me Athena had sent him, which told me something had happened that she’d decided I needed to know about immediately rather than in the morning.He stood in my study doorway with the particular posture of a man who would rather be anywhere else but was going to do this correctly anyway.“Rurik visited the studio tonight.” He said. “Late. After the palace went quiet.”I set my pen down.“She said he was clocking the room. The window, the door, the layout.” Chase kept his voice even. “She wanted you to know tonight.”I looked at him for a moment. “Is she alright.”“She’s fine. Locked the studio, came to me.” A pause. “She handled it well.”“She handles everything well.” I said, not really to him.He was quiet for a second. Something in his face moved, complicated, there and gone. “Yeah.” He said. “She does.”I stood. “Thank you for coming.”He nodded once and left.I stood at my desk for a moment after he’d gone.Rurik vi

KATE’S POVI read it twice.Then I handed the phone back to Leon because holding it any longer felt like holding something that needed to be put down before it burned through the hand.Natalie’s message was not what I’d expected.Not a threat. Not another carefully timed strike designed to destabilise everything we’d been trying to hold together. It was something else entirely, and the something else was worse in a specific way that threats never quite managed to be.It was an apology.Not the calculated kind. Not the kind that came wrapped in conditions or designed to create leverage. Just words, direct and unpolished, from a woman who by all accounts had spent the last several months being the most calculating person in any room she occupied.I read it in my head again from memory.I know you have no reason to believe anything I say. I know what tonight looked like and what the past few months looked like and I’m not going to try to reframe any of it. What I did was what I did. But

LEON’S POVNobody moved for a moment.Oliver stood in the middle of the kitchen holding that envelope with both hands, not extending it toward anyone, just holding it, like he’d carried it so long that putting it down required more decision than he currently had available.Fiona was looking at it.Not at Oliver. At the envelope specifically. The worn edges. The handling it had absorbed over three years of someone picking it up and putting it down and picking it up again.She knew what was in it. She’d known the moment she saw it.I stayed where I was, near the doorway, and didn’t speak. This wasn’t mine to manage. I’d been managing things all night, all week, all year, and I was beginning to understand that some rooms needed to find their own shape without someone arranging the furniture.Kate was beside me. Still. Watching.Oliver looked at Fiona.“She wrote to you,” he said. “My mother. Right up until she got sick.” He paused. “I didn’t understand the letters at first. Some of them

KATE’S POVI was already moving toward the door.Leon caught my arm. Not stopping me, just slowing me down enough to think.“Bryan’s following him,” he said.“I know.”“We have people at the estate.”“I know that too.” I looked at him. “But Fiona is there alone and Oliver has been building toward something for weeks and whatever he thinks he’s going to get from her tonight, she’s not prepared for it. She’s never been prepared for Oliver when he’s like this.”Leon held my gaze for a second.Then he let go of my arm.We said brief things to Wakefield about the files, about not moving them, about independent counsel arriving in the morning. Stefena said she would stay. Justin said the same, which surprised me until I looked at him properly and understood that what he needed right now was to be in the same room as those folders, close to the truth about his mother in whatever form it currently existed, and that was a need I wasn’t going to argue with.Carter said nothing about staying or

LEON’S POVNobody moved for a moment.Wakefield stood on that step looking at our car with the expression of a man who had prepared for this specific moment and was now finding the reality of it slightly different from the preparation. Not frightened. Not confident either. Something between the two that hadn’t decided which direction to fall yet.I got out first.The night air was cold. The residential street was completely still around us, curtains drawn in every house, the ordinary world doing its ordinary thing, indifferent as always.Kate got out beside me. Carter came out of the back slowly, and I heard the moment Wakefield clocked him, a small shift in his posture, the recalculation of someone who hadn’t known Carter would be in that car.Good. Surprises ran both directions tonight.Stefena looked at me when I reached the step. Her composure was back, mostly, the familiar architecture of it reconstructed over whatever the past few hours had actually cost her. But it was thinner

KATE’S POVWe put Carter in the back seat.Not roughly. Not with any particular ceremony either. Leon just opened the rear door and Carter got in and that was the shape of it, a man who had run out of options sitting quietly while the people he’d been outmanoeuvring all night drove him somewhere he’d been hoping not to go.Leon took the wheel. I sat beside him. Nobody spoke for the first few minutes.The city at this hour was thin and unhurried, mostly empty roads and amber streetlights doing their patient work. I watched it move past the window and thought about nothing specific, which wasn’t accurate, I was thinking about several things simultaneously but none of them had resolved into anything I could hold properly yet.Carter’s letter in Leon’s pocket.Stefena’s voice on the phone, stripped of every layer she usually kept between herself and the world.Justin in a room somewhere with a borrowed phone and thirty seconds to say one name.The name he’d said.I glanced at Leon. His ey

LEON’S POVThe front door was unlocked.I’d locked it myself before we left for the marina. I knew exactly what that meant but I didn’t say it out loud. Just pushed the door open slowly and stepped inside.The entrance hall was dark.No sounds. No movement. Just the particular quality of a house that had someone in it trying very hard to seem empty.Kate was behind me. Close. I could feel her presence without looking back and I was glad for it in a way I hadn’t expected to be, the specific steadiness of having someone beside you whose instincts you’d learned to trust.I moved down the hallway.The study door was closed. Light had been coming from under it thirty seconds ago. Now nothing. Which meant either Carter had finished what he came for, or he’d heard the car and killed the light and was standing on the other side of that door right now doing exactly what I was doing.Waiting.I stopped outside it.Put my hand on the handle.Opened it.Carter was standing at the desk.Not rummag