THE GIRL WHO SEES

SERAPHINA

The knock on my door comes late, well past the hour any of the guards usually bother checking on me, and when I open it, I'm expecting Cato with another tray I won't finish.

Instead I find a woman I've never met, standing with her arms crossed and an expression that is doing its very best to look casual and failing completely.

"You're the debt girl," she says, like that settles something.

"I have a name."

"I know. Seraphina." She says it carefully, like she's testing the shape of it in her mouth. "I'm Vittoria. Dante's sister."

I study her for a long second. Same dark hair as her brother, though hers falls loose instead of cropped "Depends," she says, and steps past me into the room without waiting to be invited, which I decide, after a moment, that I don't actually mind. "Are you planning to murder my brother in his sleep?"

"I've thought about it," I say honestly. "I decided against it. For now."

That gets a startled laugh out of her—real, sudden, nothing careful about it at all. "I like you already. That's inconvenient, given the circumstances."

"What circumstances."

She sits on the edge of my bed like she owns it, which, I suppose, in a sense, she does. "My brother hasn't stopped talking about you since he brought you here.

 Which, for context, is a man who has said maybe four sentences to me in the last month that weren't about the Concordat or the Ferrum Blood eating his lungs."

My stomach tightens. "He told you about that."

"He didn't have to. I've watched him get sicker for two years and pretend he isn't." Something flickers across her face, quick and raw, gone before I can name it. "I've been documenting it. 

Everything. The rituals, the debts, what the elders won't say out loud. I have journals full of things that could burn this whole house down if they got into the wrong hands."

"Why are you telling me this."

"Because I think you might be the only person in this tower who isn't already choosing a side for the wrong reasons," Vittoria says, and her voice drops, quieter now, more careful. "My uncle Salvatore thinks Dante's heresy is going to get us all erased. He's been feeding information to House Vesperi—I don't have proof yet, but I will. 

Margaux Ashford is playing everyone for fools while she quietly buys up half the city's debts. And Cassia Vitale is planning something at the old textile factory that's going to make everything that's happened so far look small."

"The note," I say. "The one from the rooftop. Ten thousand throats."

Vittoria's face goes pale. "You saw that."

"I was there when it landed."

"Then you understand why I'm here." She leans forward, elbows on her knees, and for the first time since she walked in, all the careful humor drops out of her voice entirely. "I need someone I can trust who isn't already tangled up in this family's politics. Everyone else in this tower owes somebody something.

 You don't owe anyone anything except a grudge against my brother, and honestly, at this point, that might make you the most honest person here."

I think about Ruth, and Milo, and Yelena's shaking hands around a basket of chicory root. I think about ten thousand people who have never once done anything to deserve what Cassia Vitale is planning for them.

"What do you need from me," I say.

Vittoria smiles, slow and sharp, like she's just watched a door open that she wasn't sure would.

"I need eyes that see things other people can't," she says, and something cold slides down my spine, because for one horrible second I think she knows—about the chains, about the Keeper sight I've hidden my whole life—but she just keeps talking, oblivious. 

"You're new here. Nobody watches what they say around the girl nobody thinks matters. Listen. Watch. Tell me what you hear."

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. She doesn't know. Not yet.

"All right," I say. "I'll listen."

I don't tell her I've been listening my whole life. I don't tell her about the chains. Some secrets, I've learned, are safer carried alone, even when you're finally, for the first time in ten years, standing next to someone who might actually want to help you carry the rest.

Vittoria stays for another hour, asking questions, telling me stories about the tower and the people in it.

She talks about Salvatore with a careful neutrality that I recognize from my own conversations about people I'd rather not be related to. 

She talks about Julian with genuine fondness. She talks about Dante like she's still figuring out how to feel about him.

"He wasn't always like this," she says at one point, her voice softer. "Before the Ferrum Blood started taking pieces of him, he was different.

 He laughed. He smiled. He used to sneak me extra portions of dessert when our father wasn't looking."

"What happened?"

"The Concordat happened," she says. "The debts. The weight of carrying a family that expects you to be ruthless. He learned to be cold because it was the only way to survive."

 She looks at me, and her eyes are sad. "I think that's why he brought you here. You remind him of who he used to be."

I don't know what to say to that. I don't know if I believe it.

But something in her voice makes me want to.

DANTE

Salvatore finds me in the war room, hunched over maps of the Under-Tunnels with Julian, and the look on my uncle's face tells me before he opens his mouth that this conversation is going to cost me time I don't have.

"You're keeping her here," Salvatore says. Not a question.

"Her name is Seraphina."

"I don't care what her name is." He plants both hands on the table, leaning in, and I see the old anger there, the anger that's been simmering since my father died and left me a debt he should have carried to his own grave. 

"You brought a Luca into this tower. Her father's soul is the price you paid to save this family, and now you're what—courting his daughter? Do you have any idea what that looks like to the other Houses?"

"I don't particularly care what it looks like."

"You should," Salvatore snaps. "Cassia is circling. Margaux is buying debts faster than we can track. And you're standing in courtyards making eyes at the one girl in this city who has every reason to want you dead.

 That's not weakness, Dante. That's a door left wide open for someone to walk through and gut you."

"Noted," I say, and go back to the maps, because I don't have an argument that would satisfy him and I'm not interested in constructing one just to make him feel better about the choices I've already made.

He leaves, eventually, muttering something about heresy under his breath that I choose not to hear, and Julian waits until the door shuts behind him before he speaks.

"He's not wrong," Julian says. "About the optics."

"I know."

"You don't seem particularly bothered by that."

I think of her in the courtyard, chin lifted, refusing to look away from the Stone Garden even though it clearly unsettled her. I think of her hands fisted in my coat after the gunshot, not from fear of me, but from some instinct neither of us has bothered examining too closely.

"I stopped being bothered by optics a long time ago," I say. "It's the only thing that's kept this family alive this long."

I go to find her that evening, and I find Vittoria leaving her room instead, my sister wearing the particular satisfied look she gets when she's successfully recruited someone to a cause she hasn't fully explained to me yet.

"What are you two plotting," I ask.

"Sibling business," Vittoria says breezily. "You wouldn't understand. You've never once trusted anyone in your life without a signed contract attached."

"That's not entirely fair."

"It's entirely fair," she says, and pats my arm on her way past, the same gesture she used the night she caught me at the window, and disappears down the hall before I can argue further.

Seraphina is sitting by the window when I let myself in, knees drawn up, watching the city lights blur through the last of the evening fog, and she doesn't turn around right away when the door opens.

"Your sister thinks I don't know what she's doing," she says. "Building an army out of the people this tower has forgotten how to see."

"She's very good at it," I say. "It's the family talent nobody wanted her to have."

She finally looks at me, and there's something steadier in her eyes tonight, something that wasn't there three days ago. Less like a girl bracing for a blow. More like a woman deciding what she's willing to risk.

"I need to ask you something," I say, and sit across from her, close enough that our knees almost touch, far enough that I'm not crowding her the way I did in the study. "And I need you to actually consider it before you say no."

"That depends entirely on the question."

"The Ferrum Blood is going to kill me," I say, plain, no softening it, because I've decided she's earned the truth without decoration. "There's a ritual that can reverse it—old magic, older than the Concordat, tied to the same power that binds the contracts. I've been chasing pieces of it for two years. I'm close. I'm not close enough."

"What does that have to do with me?"

"I don't know yet," I admit. "But every piece of the ritual I've found says it requires someone who can see what the rest of us can't. Someone who can read the old language written into the debts themselves." I watch her carefully as I say it, and something in her face goes very still, very careful, the exact same stillness I saw the moment she told me about the black rot spreading through my chain. "I don't know what that means yet. But I have a feeling, Seraphina, that you might."

The silence that follows stretches long enough that I can hear the wind against the glass, and I watch her weigh something behind those brown eyes, some decision I can't see the shape of yet.

"If I help you," she says slowly, carefully, "what happens to my father's soul?"

"I'll free it," I say. "Whatever piece of the debt is still owed on your family's name—burned, gone, the moment the ritual is complete. That's not a bribe. That's a promise."

She looks at me a long moment, and for the first time since the rain barrel, since the fire, since ten years of building a wall brick by careful brick around every soft thing left in her, I watch Seraphina Luca decide to trust me with something.

She just doesn't tell me what it is yet.

"All right," she says. "I'll help you."

---

She doesn't say the rest of it—the part I'll only learn later, the part that would have changed everything if she'd said it that night instead of keeping it locked behind those steady brown eyes.

I can already see everything you're asking me to find. I've been able to see it my whole life.

I don't know that yet. I only know that something has shifted between us, something neither the debt nor the ten years of blood between our families can fully explain, and when she reaches out and shakes my hand to seal the agreement, her fingers cool against mine, I feel it settle into my chest like the first piece of a ritual I didn't know I'd already started.

---

SERAPHINA

He leaves after that, and I sit alone in the glass room, staring at the hand he shook.

I made a deal with the devil. I made a deal with the man who killed my father. And the worst part is, I don't feel sick about it the way I should.

I feel something else entirely.

"Ten years," I whisper to myself. "Ten years of waiting, and now I'm helping him."

But even as I say it, I know the truth. I'm not helping him for the ritual. I'm not helping him to free my father's soul.

I'm helping him because I see something in him that I don't want to see, and I can't look away.

I see the man behind the monster.

And that scares me more than anything.