Just then, Kohl reached inside his jacket. Aina flinched, then realized he wasn’t withdrawing a gun.

It was a small, porcelain statue of a horse with a pink ribbon around its neck—one that had reflected the glow of burning coals, one that the spiders in her house had never seemed to touch, one that had been the last thing she’d seen before fleeing her parents’ murder. One that was all too familiar to her. One he could not possibly have.

Her whole body stiffened. The world collapsed in front of her, the cold night air and the reason she’d come here and the shadowed figures on the Dom’s roof all disappearing until nothing remained but her, him, and the small statue he held.

“It’s been a bit of a good luck charm to me over the years,” he said, turning it over in his hand. “If you came here to die, you should probably know the truth.”

“It was you,” she finally whispered, the words like crushed glass coming out of her mouth.

She’d thought she’d known the worst of what he could do, threatening her, abandoning her, shooting at her, convincing her she needed him her whole life.

But there was one thing worse he could have done, and he’d already done it ten years ago.

When she spoke next, uttering the truth that seemed so impossible she’d never imagined it before, her voice sounded like it came from someone else, far away.

“You killed my parents.”

She’d tried so hard to wipe away the memory of that night by inhaling glue over and over. It had worked to an extent, blurring out some things, like the gunman’s face.

The memory returned now, as clear as if it had happened yesterday, and suddenly she was a small child again watching her parents die the first time.

That night, she’d been playing with a cat that had wandered in from the streets, right next to the coal stove with the porcelain horse behind it.

A soft sound had come from outside. Aina hadn’t known what it was, but her parents sent a furtive glance at each other and then mouthed at her to hide.

Panicking, Aina shrunk into the shadows under the table, spiders crawling all over her sandals. She yearned to flick off the spiders, but forced herself to stay utterly still like her parents did whenever a Diamond Guard patrol passed near them in the tunnels under the city. She focused on the copy of the Nos Inoken that had fallen to the floor next to the table—the Mothers would help, wouldn’t they?

Her mother wore a blue robe, her hands wrinkled from washing other people’s clothes all day for meager pay. Her father, wearing the overalls prescribed by his factory job, stood to face a third person who shoved aside their scrap-metal door and walked in.

Her gaze fixed on the man with the gun.

Shadows hid most of him, beyond where the single candle’s light failed to reach.