Cain didn’t bother knocking.
The bell above the door to Cassian’s Curiosities gave its usual soft chime as he stepped inside, but the atmosphere on the other side of it felt different from what he remembered. The front of the shop was still warm, polished, and offensively tasteful, with its velvet-lined display cases and carefully arranged antiques that all looked expensive enough to justify murder. The air carried a faint scent of old paper, polished wood, and whatever absurdly expensive tea Cassian had made.
It should’ve felt comfortable.
Instead, the place had the tense stillness of a room that already knew why he was here.
Cassian looked up from behind the counter where he was sorting through a stack of ledgers, his expression brightening the moment he saw Cain.
“Oh. My. Gods,” he said, one hand rising to his chest in mock scandal. “What a beautiful man.”
Cain stopped just inside the threshold and stared at him.
There was a beat of silence.
Then, from somewhere deeper in the shop, Lila’s voice called, “No, he’s right. That’s the first accurate thing he’s said all day.”
Cain’s brow creased. “What the fuck?”
Cassian smiled pleasantly and set down his pen. “I’m confident enough in my sexuality to admit it.”
“That’s very… brave of you?”
“Thank you.”
Cain let the door swing shut behind him and stepped farther inside. “I see spending time with her has somehow made you worse.”
“You sound like a jealous ex-wife.”
Cain opened his mouth, then closed it again, not sure how to respond.
Cassian leaned one elbow on the counter, clearly delighted with himself. “So. To what do I owe the pleasure? Another pile of liberated goods? A body to fence?”
Before Cain could answer, a side door opened and Lila strode into view.
She was already glaring at him.
It was the sort of glare usually reserved for cockroaches and people who forgot to take off their shoes in certain households. She crossed the space between them with quick, angry steps and stopped just short of arm’s reach.
Then she pointed at him.
“You,” she said. “Outside.”
“That’s how you greet people now?”
“That’s how I greet disasters.”
Cassian sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Should I be worried?”
Lila didn’t look at him. “You should always be worried.”
“Comforting.”
She jerked her chin toward the back. “Move.”
Cain studied her for half a second, then shrugged and followed.
The back door opened onto a narrow yard hemmed by stone walls and a warped little fence that was more decorative than useful. A few crates had been stacked near the rear wall. One of them had been converted into a makeshift table. A laundry line sagged across the left side of the space, and a battered chair sat near the steps like someone had once meant to relax there and then thought better of it.
Cain had barely cleared the doorway before Lila turned on him.
“What,” she asked with deadly calm, “the fuck is wrong with you?”
He looked around the yard, then back at her. “We’re outdoors now. Does that make you feel more dramatic?”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “You looking to get stabbed?”
“You say that like it would be unusual.”
Lila took a step closer.
“You brought fucking Twin Sword Aria, the Sky Ranger, and The. Fucking. Commander. down on my head.”
Cassian, who had followed them outside with a resigned expression, stopped at the door and blinked in shock. “He did what?”
Lila whirled on him. “He dropped half the city’s favorite champions into my lap while blowing apart one of the filthiest operations in Cairel. He left a trail of corpses and smoke behind him, and somehow walked away with more people looking in our direction than before.”
Cassian looked back at Cain.
Cain offered a small, helpless tilt of the hand. “When you say it like that, it sounds bad.”
“It is bad.”
“I’m starting to pick up on that.”
Lila laughed once. There wasn’t a hint of humor in it. Then she pointed toward the far side of the yard.
“Shovel all the dog shit over there.”
Cassian frowned. “I don’t have a dog.”
“Oh, by the way. We have a dog now.”
Cassian stared at her. “We?”
“I know.”
“This is my house.”
“I’m aware.”
He opened his mouth, thought better of it, and quietly looked up at the sky as if asking a higher power where he had gone wrong.
Cain folded his arms. “You dragged me outside to tell me about your dog?”
Lila rounded on him again. “I dragged you outside because if I start this conversation in front of customers, I’m going to end up using the expensive knives.”
“So I haven’t reached ‘kill on sight status’ yet.”
“I’m still deciding whether you’re worth the trouble.”
Cassian cleared his throat. “As the wonder of the house you’ve both decided belongs to you emotionally, I’d like to point out that he’s probably here for a reason.”
Lila’s gaze turned sharp.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what worries me.”
Cain let the silence sit for a moment.
Then he said, “I need somewhere to put people.”
Cassian and Lila both went still.
Cassian recovered first. “That’s a terrible sentence.”
Lila nodded in agreement. “How many?”
Cain deliberately paused, making it look like he wasn’t sure how to tell them the number.
That was answer enough.
Her mouth flattened. “Oh, you are absolutely not bringing an army into my life.”
“It isn’t an army.”
“How many?”
“Five. Four and a half, really, depending on how useful one of them is being at any given moment.”
Cassian looked between them. “Should I ask what that means?”
“No,” Lila and Cain said at the same time.
Cassian nodded. “Great. Love that for me.”
Lila paced across the yard, dragging one hand through her hair. When she turned back, the anger had cooled into something more focused.
“What kind of people?”
Cain watched her carefully.
“People who can’t stay where they are.”
“That’s cute,” she said. “Try again.”
He sighed. “A troll, a goblin, two beastkin, and a little fox obsessed with stories.”
“You really do collect strays,” Cassian observed.
Cain ignored him.
Lila’s eyes hadn’t left his face. “And why,” she asked, “would you think bringing them anywhere near me is a good idea?”
“Because you have a network.”
“I do.”
“And you want to keep working with me.”
She smiled.
“No,” she said. “You keep making the mistake of thinking we’re in some kind of balance. We are not balanced, Cain. You are a recurring problem I’ve chosen not to solve yet.”
Cain didn’t answer right away.
The yard had gone quiet again, the kind of quiet that settled when a conversation stopped being about what was said.
Cassian shifted in the doorway, his arms folded, watching the two of them with a look that suggested he understood exactly how much of this conversation wasn’t meant for him.
Lila let the silence sit for a moment longer, then continued.
“You don’t come here unless you’ve run out of better options,” she said. “So either you’re worse off than you look, or you’ve decided I’m the least dangerous solution available.”
“You’re the most predictable one.”
“That’s not a compliment.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
She accepted that with a small nod.
“What do you need?”
“I need space,” Cain said. “And time. I won’t keep them where I currently have them hidden, and I can’t keep them with me without drawing attention.”
Her expression didn’t change, but her shoulders shifted slightly, as if she had just adjusted to a heavier load.
“And you trust them?”
“I trust what they’ll do if they’re given something stable to hold onto.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” Cain agreed. “It’s not.”
She studied him for a few seconds, weighing that answer.
“Start with the one most likely to cause problems.”
“The fox,” he said. “She understands more than she should. She doesn’t behave consistently, and she notices things people don’t want noticed.”
Lila nodded once, filing that away.
“The rest?”
He gave them to her in turn—Takkar, Rikta, Bill, Lorian—without embellishment. He kept it practical, going over the little he knew of their strengths and limitations. Lila listened without interrupting, her attention narrowing as the list took shape.
When he finished, she took a step back, creating space to think.
“This isn’t a small request,” she said.
“I know.”
“You’re asking me to put my people between them and the rest of the city.”
“Yes.”
“And you somehow believe that can have a good outcome?”
“I’m expecting it to have a better outcome than the alternatives.”
That earned him a faint look of approval.
Cassian pushed off the doorway and wandered a few steps into the yard, glancing between them. “For what it’s worth, I’d prefer the version of events where none of this ends with my shop being used as a landmark in someone else’s investigation.”\
“You don’t get that version,” Lila said.
“Is that so?”
She turned back to Cain.
“I can place them,” she said. “You bring them in following the route I give you.”
“If it helps, I can unload them wherever by summoning my wardrobe.”
She paused.
“That’s the wardrobe you summoned when attacking the farms?”
“That’s right. It’s also how I moved all that equipment from that estate.”
“Care to explain?”
He weighed how much she actually needed to hear and how much she would infer on her own.
“It’s a way to move things. Think of it like teleportation with extra steps.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
“And the limits?”
“I haven’t found them yet.”
Cassian let out a low breath from somewhere behind them. “That’s a really good skill for a smuggler.”
Lila ignored him.
“And you can call it when you need it.”
“Yes.”
“Anywhere?”
“Pretty much. I assume the wardrobe needs to fit in the space.”
Her gaze lingered for a moment longer, then shifted inward, as if she were rearranging pieces in her head to account for something new.
“That changes the logistics,” she said. “If I place them, you’ll bring them in where I tell you, and you’ll do it cleanly.”
“That was already the plan.”
“Respectfully, I don’t give a shit what your plan was. You’re trying to hide monsters in a city run by Jantzen Rovar as if that’s even possible.”
Cassian pushed himself off the doorframe and stepped a little closer, curiosity getting the better of him.
“So let me get this straight,” he said. “You’ve got a portable hole that can swallow anything you point at it, and your solution is to ask her for help?”
Cain didn’t look at him. “This coming from the guy who doesn’t want to use his shop as the hideout.”
“You know, that might be the most reasonable thing you’ve ever said.”
“Lila’s kind of a bitch.”
“I think we’re going to be best friends.”
“You understand what you’re asking for,” Lila interrupted. “This doesn’t stay contained once it starts. People notice patterns even when you think you’ve hidden them well.”
“I know.”
“And if someone starts looking closely, it won’t be you that they find first.”
Cain met her gaze. “Then we make sure they don’t get that far.”
“That’s the kind of thinking that creates work for me.”
“And the kind that keeps them alive. They don’t get second chances.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Cassian glanced between them, then quietly stepped back again, deciding he preferred being adjacent to the conversation rather than inside it.
Lila exhaled slowly.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll place them.”
Cain nodded.
“And in return,” she said, “you stop treating this part of the city like something you can walk through and reshape whenever it suits you.”
“That wasn’t intentional.”
“I don’t care whether it was intentional,” she said. “It happened.”
He didn’t argue with that.
“You operate inside my network,” she went on. “That means you move when I say move, you wait when I say wait, and you don’t create problems I haven’t already accounted for.”
“That sounds like you want control.”
“It sounds like I don’t like cleaning up surprises,” she replied.
Cain considered it. Then nodded.
“Fine.”
Cassian made a small noise under his breath. “This is going to be expensive.”
Lila reached into her coat and pulled out a folded slip of paper, holding it between two fingers until Cain took it.
He unfolded it.
A location. A time. A note.
He read it once, then again to memorize it.
“A recovery.”
“Yes.”
“And ‘no witnesses’ is implied.”
“It usually is.”
He folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket.
“This is part of the arrangement.”
“It is the arrangement,” Lila corrected. “You want access to my network; you operate within it.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you don’t get what you came here for.”
Cain rubbed his temple. “For how long?”
“As long as it takes for me to decide you’re not going to make this worse,” she said.
“That’s vague.”
“So is burning down a mansion ‘just in case’.”
He nodded, accepting it for what it was.
Cassian shifted again, glancing toward the street. “By the way,” he said, almost as an afterthought, “someone took a shot at a beastkin yesterday in the inner district.”
Cain’s attention snapped to him immediately.
“Who?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t catch a name. Just that it didn’t go well for them.”
Cain’s gaze slid back to Lila.
Her expression hadn’t changed.
“That’s not surprising,” she said. “Anyone reckless enough to try something like that without preparation isn’t going to last long.”
“Reckless,” Cain repeated.
“Yes.”
He studied her for a moment.
“People don’t take shots like that without a reason,” he said.
“No,” she agreed. “But you’ll find no shortage of people with a reason to kill a beastkin in Cairel.”
“And if they try again?”
“They’ll learn faster the second time, I’m sure.”
Cain sighed.
Lexi didn’t become a target on her own.
Someone had decided she was worth removing.
That decision didn’t come from nowhere.
“If they come at her again,” he said, “they won’t get the chance to miss.”
Lila met his gaze.
“I’m sure whoever’s responsible will take that into account,” she said.
Cain held her eyes for a second longer.
“Good.”
He turned and stepped back inside.
The bell chimed softly as the door swung shut behind him.
Outside, the city was already in motion—voices overlapping, carts rolling, the steady pulse of something too large to notice the smaller shifts happening beneath it.
Cain walked without urgency.
The folded paper in his pocket carried more weight than it should have.
Not because of what it demanded.
But because of what it offered.
Another path. Another angle. Another way forward.
Cain let out a quiet breath as he stepped into the street.
The system wasn’t his.
But the outcome still could be.
Project Knightfall 