Evie stepped into the house still carrying the weight of joy from the gallery, though now softened, bruised faintly by the memory of Lucanis's uneasy expression. Her thoughts had been wrapped up in brushstrokes and canvas, the prospect of her name beneath framed work in a gallery window. But then there he'd been, and then Teia had come. And now...
She stopped cold in the doorway. Tai, Kieran, and Hirik were seated on the floor, cross-legged and very much caught. Across from them, seated comfortably - too comfortably - in one of their worn chairs, was a man with gold-threaded hair and a smile that suggested he'd already made himself perfectly at home.
"Well, if it isn't my favourite little shadow," Zevran purred, his Antivan lilt warm and teasing. "Come in, mi florecita. I believe we are all due for a talk."
She didn't move. Her gaze flicked to Tai. He met her eyes without needing to speak. The thought passed between them like breath - do you think we could take him?
Tai's brow furrowed just slightly, the corner of his mouth twitching. He was calculating. Weighing. Evie didn't need him to say anything aloud to know the answer: Maybe. If we got lucky. If he let us.
Zevran laughed, sharp and bright. "Even if all four of you were foolish enough to try - and I say this with love - you would not win. You would, however, amuse me greatly before you lost."
Evie scowled, trying to decide whether to be annoyed or impressed.
Zevran gestured grandly to the space beside the boys. "Sit. Let us pretend this is not an ambush. Humour your elders."
Evie sighed and dropped her satchel near the door, then folded herself down beside Tai, arms crossed, brow raised.
Zevran smiled, all mischief and knives. "You have been very busy, haven't you? My son leading a little rebellion, my niece dismantling a centuries-old institution. Ah, if only your enemies knew how adorable you all look like this."
Evie sat. Cross-legged like the others, knee brushing Tai's and feeling very much like a child in trouble.
Zevran surveyed them, arms draped over the back of the chair like he'd always owned it.
"I am taking you home," he said, almost gently. "Your father," his eyes flicked to Evie, "your mothers, Oghren, all of them are worried sick. Apparently, letters every few months scribbled in haste and stained with Maker-knows-what are not enough reassurance that our wayward children are safe."
Kieran opened his mouth, then closed it. Hirik looked away. Tai exhaled through his nose.
Zevran waited. He had infinite patience when it suited him, but his stillness was never soft. He didn't press. He didn't need to.
Evie swallowed. "You didn't tell us."
He cocked his head. "Didn't tell you what, mi florecita?"
"That there's a contract on you."
There was a long moment of silence. Then Zevran's smile faltered, not vanished, but softened.
"You were never meant to know," he said simply.
"We figured it out," Tai said. "Years ago. Overheard things. You were careful, but the others… weren't always. Thought we might as well put our newfound freedom to use."
Zevran looked at each of them, one by one, and Evie felt it in her chest, the quiet way he loved them, the way he hated what they were carrying. The ache of old danger, old secrets left to rot.
"You are not responsible for my sins," he said. "Or my enemies."
"No," Evie agreed. "But we love you anyway."
It landed, soft and sharp all at once. Zevran looked down, then away, as if he could ignore the way his throat moved around the words he didn't say.
"If we get rid of them," Tai said, quieter now, "you're free. You could come home more. You wouldn't have to..."
"Look over your shoulder," Evie finished for him.
Zevran scrubbed a hand down his face, muttering something in Antivan under his breath.
"We're good at this," Kieran offered, almost timidly for once. "We're not children anymore."
"Could have fooled me with the bucket," Zevran muttered, though there was no real heat behind it.
"That was Evie," Tai said proudly. "How did you hear about it?" He perked up, eyes wide. "Did it get someone?"
"It did, not just anyone either," Zevran replied, faintly amused. How was this what they were so proud of? "Viago de Riva."
Evie and Tai exchanged a look, laughs bubbling out of them, practically patting each other on the back.
"We've hurt them," Hirik said. "Not just inconvenienced. Not just annoyed. We've compromised their routes, their security, their accounts."
"They're shifting resources, getting desperate," Tai said, coming back to the conversation. "And they still don't know who we are. We can finish this. We just need time."
Zevran looked at them. Long and quiet and full of a thousand unspoken things. He hadn't lost his sharpness. But something inside him had stilled.
"Maker's breath," he said finally. "You really are doing well," he conceded.
Evie let out a breath she hadn't realised she'd been holding.
He stood slowly, his joints giving the smallest creak. "You'll need more allies than yourselves," he said. "And if we're going to do this… we'll do it properly."
Evie blinked. "Wait. Are you staying?"
"I'm not so old that I'll slow you down." His smirk returned, smug and warm. "And clearly someone needs to keep you four from staging your next attack with confetti and obscenities."
Tai grinned. "No promises."
Zevran only sighed. "Of course not."
The curtains were drawn with a soft swish, and then came the click of the hidden latches, one after the other. Evie flipped back the mattresses, and Kieran, meticulous as ever, opened the floorboards without so much as a creak. The secret stash revealed itself in layers - ledgers bound in cracked leather, sketched maps, coded documents, blades wrapped in cloth, sealed vials, and half-assembled gadgets. All of it laid out with the reverence of something sacred.
Zevran whistled low. "Well, well," he said, crossing his arms. "And here I thought this sad little hovel couldn't possibly surprise me."
It was sad, dim and cramped, with walls stained with the kind of wear that didn't wash out. The ceilings bowed ever so slightly in places. There was only one real table, and it was half-covered in oil stains, mismatched cups, and what he suspected was someone's failed attempt at drying herbs. But despite it all, the space breathed with purpose. They had made something here. Something dangerous, something effective.
They'd managed this with next to nothing, no formal network, no funding, no real backing besides their blood and grit. And the Crows had bled for it.
Zevran felt a tug in his chest. A strange mix of pride and dread. He'd taught them too well. Hopefully, well enough.
-
Kieran drifted toward the far corner, already opening a book with that absentminded tilt of his head. Hirik knelt near a half-dismantled gadget, muttering to himself about pressure triggers. Evie sat at the small desk by the window, already bent over her sketchbook, her fingers smudged in charcoal. And Tai, with that bone-deep steadiness of his, was at the little stove, sleeves rolled, humming tunelessly under his breath as he reached for seasoning.
Zevran crossed the room quietly, settling into the kitchen's edge, leaning against the wall. "So," he said, "I heard about your little scheme."
Tai didn't look up. "You're going to have to be more specific."
"Ah," Zevran drawled, "the one where you and Evie made a valiant effort to render her unsuitable for marriage."
Tai froze mid-chop. Slowly, he set the knife down. "How did you find out?"
"I am me, tesoro."
There was the faintest blush rising in Tai's cheeks, but it was the stiffness of his shoulders that betrayed him. "Evie asked."
"Of course she did," Zevran said lightly. "I hope you weren't a brute."
Tai gave him a look, bristling with indignation. "She's not some delicate flower."
"No," Zevran agreed. "She's wildfire."
They stood in silence for a beat, the soft bubbling of the pot behind Tai, the faint rustle of Evie turning a page in her sketchbook, the scribble of Kieran's quill, the hiss of metal from Hirik's corner.
Zevran smiled to himself. Perhaps, in a perfect world, Evie and Tai would have been soulmates. Zevran would never encourage Tai to ignore his bond and pursue Evie, but it would certainly make quite a few lives easier.
Tai glanced toward Evie, focused, back slightly hunched, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration, and then went back to stirring.
"I was gentle," he said at last, quieter. "And it wasn't just about being unsuitable. It was about her getting to choose."
Zevran's heart ached a little at that.
"And we both got to... learn. With someone safe."
As far as first times go, that wasn't a terrible idea.
"And when Evie learned of her soulmate, how was she?"
"Surprised. We all were," he shot his father a look.
"We decided the truth would only complicate her future and paint a target on her back if it ever got out. Better to give her a name that meant nothing, a soul she wouldn't stumble into by accident."
"Except she stumbled into her soulmate by accident," Tai told him. "And Lucanis figured it out."
Zevran's head snapped toward him, eyes wide. "Mierda. And he hasn't-?" He trailed off, then muttered, "Incredible."
Tai blinked. "What?"
"Most Antivans, real Antivans, those raised in the culture of the bond - they do not wait, Tai. Especially not once they know. When they feel that soulmark settle in their chest, it is as sacred as blood. As binding as any vow. They do not watch from a distance. When I met your mother... look what I did." He paused, looking baffled.
"What did you do?" He hadn't heard of his father doing anything... untoward with his mother upon meeting her.
"I abandoned my contract, and the Crows, sided with the very people I was supposed to be assassinating. She would not leave her friends or her homeland to fight a Blight without her. And she would have hated me if I killed her friends. The choice was... surprisingly easy. The fact that Lucanis has not simply... spirited her away? It speaks of restraint. Or confusion. Or both."
"You think he'd just take her?" He bristled.
"I think it would not be the first time an Antivan has stolen away the soul fate handed them," Zevran said, solemn now. "Some think that it's romantic. Others would call it a violation. Lucanis... is a complicated man."
"She stopped singing because of him," Tai said. "She stopped performing in the marketplace when she realised he was suspicious. She tried to lie to him about her name."
Zevran tsked his tongue. Lucanis had years of training on the girl. Even the most accomplished liar would struggle against him.
"Then he turned up at one of the taverns she played at. So she stopped doing that, private events only. Then he arranged to have her hired at one, and cornered her there."
Zevran chuckled. "Not as restrained as I thought, then, though still far more than I would have expected."
"When you said he would... take her, would he... rape... her?" Tai whispered.
Zevran's eyes widened. "No! That would count as hurting her. The bond is far too sacred for anyone to sully it that way. But... a gilded cage until she either wore down or he managed to seduce her..."
Tai shuddered. "She doesn't belong in a cage. Even a pretty one."
"No, she doesn't," he agreed. "I suppose I should go offer my apologies."
"For what?" Tai asked, baffled.
"For lying to her."
"She wasn't mad," he told him. "She understood. There's nothing to forgive for her."
"That does sound like her. Still, best to be sure."
He clapped Tai on the shoulder before heading over to his beloved niece.
He joined Evie at her desk, where she was sketching up her composition.
"I've been commissioned by a gallery," she told him, voice low but brimming with excitement.
"Truly? Impressive, Evie."
She looked up at him, her big green eyes positively dancing with her joy, like it was taking everything in her to contain it.
"I am... sorry, mi floricita," he told her softly.
She seemed genuinely confused. "For what?"
His eyes drifted down to her wrist, where her soulmark lay beneath her ever present cuff.
"Oh." She offered a warm smile then. "You don't have to be sorry about that, uncle Zev. I understand."
She said it with the ease of someone who had long ago given up on the idea of it in the first place. And he knew why: he had seen how they carved that sense of unworthiness into her, slow and insidious, by a court that wielded her name like a curse, like something foul. By a queen who taught Evie her tolerance was a gift to be earned. By the time they realised how deep the wounds were, the girl had already bled out, and there weren't enough stitches in the world...
That was what ached the most, he thought.
Then there were the more subtle ways in which he and Alistair tried to guide her away from the idea of the bond as well, an attempt to preserve her own happiness. It was good... that she had given up the idea of it, but he didn't like how she had been hurt into doing so.
He opened his arms, and she smiled, leaning into him from her seat, her arms wrapping around his middle.
"Why the bucket?" He asked, like it had only just occurred to him. "Out of curiosity."
Evie let him go and looked up at him. "It was there."
Zevran stared at her, incredulous. "That's it?"
"Tai drew a dick on a man's face," she told him.
"Why?" He asked, that same incredulity as for her bucket.
"He's very immature," Evie said in a long-suffering sort of way she really had no entitlement to.
He exhaled through a laugh and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Maker, your father was right."
"About what?"
"That when the four of you are together, you become a perfect storm of chaos and poor decisions."
"Harsh," she blurted, indignant.