The sky was still dark at the edges when Moto brought it up.
"We should check on your father," he said. "Just to let him know you're safe."
Sheu hadn't said anything about it. She hadn't needed to. They walked to her house in the early quiet, the streets not yet awake, and when they got there the door was shut and the windows were dark and nothing moved inside.
A note was pinned to the door, flapping gently.
Sheu pulled it down. Her fingers went still on the paper for a moment before she read it aloud.
Sorry, but the King has summoned me urgently for a mission. I know I usually see you in person before I go, but this was urgent. I should be back in two weeks. Stay with your cousin Drake's family until then.
Moto, keep those other little boys away from my daughter.
She lowered the note slowly and held it against her chest. "He's always going on missions," she said. "But I understand."
They turned to leave and Drake came around the corner.
He stopped when he saw Sheu. His eyes went over her quickly, checking, and then slid to Moto and Najo with a different expression entirely.
"Where have you been?" He looked back at Sheu. Then at the others again. "I don't trust these guys. So I'm coming with you."
"Fine by me," Moto said, already walking.
Najo's front door was open.
Not ajar. Open — wide, the way doors are when someone left in a hurry or didn't leave at all. Najo went still on the path and Moto stepped past him, reading the silence ahead.
Inside was worse. Chairs in pieces, wood spread across the floor. The walls were scored with dark burns, the kind lightning leaves when it isn't being careful — or when it is, and this is exactly what was intended.
Moto looked at the marks more closely. They weren't random. They formed something. A location.
Behind him, Najo's breath had gone very quiet.
"My mother," he said. "She's gone."
He was already moving before anyone could speak — out the door, down the path, gone. Moto and Sheu ran after him but Najo was faster than either of them had seen him move before, and within half a block he had left them entirely behind.
By the time they arrived, Najo was already there.
The land was flat and scorched, cracked earth and dust, nothing growing in it. Nawick stood near the centre with his men arranged around him, and Naomi was among them, bound, her posture still somehow upright.
Najo had stopped a short distance away, dust settling around his feet.
"Release my mother."
Nawick rose from where he'd been sitting, unhurried, with the smile of a man who had expected this exact moment and found it satisfying. "Now now. Is that how you greet your father?"
"You're no father," Naomi said, her voice sharp and flat. "Let us go. This has gone far enough."
Nawick made a soft sound, something between amusement and disappointment. "Still dramatic, Naomi. If you'd simply given me a weak little boy, we wouldn't be here. But no — you wanted to raise a fighter."
The sparks around Najo's fists had started small. They weren't small anymore.
"This isn't a game. Let her go. Or I'll make you."
"Bossing people around." Nawick tilted his head. "Just like your grandfather." Something shifted at the edge of his tone, something that might have been genuine feeling if it had anywhere left to go. "But you're in no position to make demands."
Naomi pulled against her captors' grip. "Don't listen to him, Najo. Manipulation and destruction — that's all he knows—"
"Careful," Nawick said pleasantly. "You're making me sound like a villain. I'm just a man with a vision."
"A vision that includes killing your own family?" Najo's voice cracked on the last word.
The smile left Nawick's face. What replaced it was quieter and more dangerous.
"It's not personal. It's business." He let the words settle. "You have two choices. Surrender yourself. Or watch her die beside you."
"You monster!" Naomi's voice broke open with fury. "You'd sacrifice your own son for wealth?!"
"You don't know what that man holds," Nawick said, something hungry moving briefly across his face before it went still again. "I've waited too long to grow a heart now." He looked at Najo. "So. What's it going to be?"
Najo stepped forward.
The henchmen moved in the same instant — lightning rods swinging to point at Naomi, crackling and ready.
Najo stopped.
The air held everything in place. The rods hummed. Nobody breathed.