Agastya did not rush. The three heavy knocks still echoed in the suffocating silence of the room.
With methodical calm, he closed the heavy leather cover of the diary. His unfamiliar fingers gripped the coarse jute ribbon, wrapping it tightly around the worn binding and pulling the knot secure. Whatever secrets House Esrala held, they were sealed away in the dark once more.
Only then did he turn his attention to the iron-banded door.
His right hand remained wrapped tightly around the wooden handle of the long, serrated bread knife. In the brutal underworld of the empire, you never answered a midnight summons unarmed. Keeping the blade angled downward and hidden flat against his forearm. He moved silently across the floorboards.
He reached the heavy door and rested his free hand against the cold iron bolt. With agonisingly slow precision, he slid the lock back. The metal gave a dull, muffled clack.
Agastya pulled the door open just a fraction, keeping the heavy, iron-banded wood between himself and the street. His right arm hung naturally at his side, the long, serrated blade of the bread knife hidden carefully in the shadows behind his thigh.
The cold, smog-laced night air immediately bled into the room, cutting through the warm scent of stale yeast and flour.
Two figures stood on the dark cobblestone threshold, their features partially illuminated by the jaundiced yellow glow of the streetlamp.
The first was a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties. She was draped in a heavy, tailored azure coat. The wool was visibly worn at the cuffs and hem—a garment that had seen years of harsh winters—but it was meticulously maintained.
Beside her stood a man wrapped entirely in a dark, sweeping black coat and matching trousers. He stood perfectly still, his posture rigid and calm, blending into the night like a natural extension of the shadows.
They were both smiling. It wasn't a strained or nervous expression; it was familiar, warm, and entirely out of place in the dead of the night.
The man, whose face was sharp and angular, tilted his head. "Hey, big brother," he said, his voice light and casual. "Aren't you coming home?"
Big brother.
Agastya’s blue eyes narrowed. His mind—an assassin’s mind inside a stolen brain—instantly dug into the fragmented memories of the baker. A sudden, sharp ache bloomed behind his forehead as flashes of a past that wasn't his own surfaced like photographs developing in a darkroom.
He saw a bleak, run-down orphanage. He saw a kind, working-class couple taking in a young Astragan. And he saw these two faces growing up alongside him. They were the couple's biological children. They shared no blood with Astragan, but the baker had loved them fiercely, claiming them as his true brother and sister.
Agastya’s grip on the wooden handle of the knife tightened until his knuckles turned white.
‘Which little brother did he mean in the diary?’ his analytical mind raced, rapidly processing the new variables. ‘If this adopted brother is alive and well, could Astragan have been writing to his real, blood-related brother?’
Whatever the truth was, Agastya was currently inhabiting the baker’s life, and he had to play the part not to become suspicious. Digging into the fading warmth of Astragan’s memories, Agastya forced the stolen muscles of his face to form a gentle smile.
He pulled the heavy door open the rest of the way. "Yes," he replied, his voice rough. "I am coming… home."
‘Home.’ It was the first time in Agastya's entire life that he had ever spoken the word with actual intent. It felt completely foreign on his tongue, a concept that belonged to a different universe entirely.
Taking a step back into the shop. He finally allowed his white-knuckled grip on the bread knife to loosen. He turned back to the teakwood counter, his movements suddenly fast and fluid. With the practiced, invisible sleight of hand of a master thief, he slid open the top left drawer.
He scooped the meagre paper notes of Elartraum into his pocket. He seamlessly dropped ‘The Last Book of House Esrala’ into the empty space, sliding the drawer shut just a fraction of a second before the young woman stepped fully into the light.
Thank the gods for assassin reflexes. By the time she approached the counter, the diary was entirely hidden from view.
She looked down, her eyes landing on the severed, rock-hard loaf of rye. She reached out, touching the stale crust with a frown. "Why were you eating this?" she asked, her voice laced with genuine concern. "You should have come home if you were hungry."
Agastya froze. He didn't say a word. His mind, trained to calculate the trajectory of a bullet or the layout of a heavily guarded compound, completely blanked on how to respond to simple familial affection.
He merely nodded, bending down to open the lower drawer and quietly stash the serrated knife back in its proper place.
"Why are you so silent today?" she pressed, tilting her head.
"Well—" Agastya began, desperately searching for a safe, neutral excuse.
Before he could stumble into a trap, the younger brother stepped through the doorway, his black coat sweeping behind him. He leaned against the edge of the counter and waved off his sister's concern. "Leave him be. It isn’t like he speaks a lot anyway."
Agastya suppressed a breath of relief. It was a lucky break; Astragan was naturally quiet. He stood up straight, letting the blue eyes of the baker sweep over his siblings.
"Well then," Agastya said, keeping his tone perfectly measured. "Let's go home."
The siblings nodded, their boots stepping out onto the cold, uneven cobblestones of the street. Agastya followed them out into the freezing smog, his hand resting on the heavy iron ring of the door to pull it shut.
Just before the thick wood met the frame, the younger brother paused and glanced over his shoulder. "Aren't you forgetting something?"
Agastya froze.
For a fraction of a second, the assassin's heart seized. His disciplined mind instantly raced through a dozen lethal scenarios. ‘Did I leave a smear of blood on the floorboards? Did he see that Diary? Does he know?’
But before his paranoia could command him to reach for a weapon. The baker’s stolen, fragmented memories surfaced, providing a painfully mundane answer.
Agastya let out a soft, controlled exhale, forcing the tension out of his shoulders. He offered a small, sheepish nod to play the part. "Oh. Right. I am."
He stepped back into the dim, jaundiced warmth of the shop one last time. Moving silently behind the teakwood counter, he opened the bottom drawer and retrieved a massive, heavy iron padlock and its accompanying brass key.
Stepping back out into the night, he pulled the heavy door flush against its frame. He threaded the iron lock through the thick metal brackets and squeezed it shut.
The mechanism engaged with a loud, resounding clank that echoed sharply down the empty alleyway, sealing the secrets of House Esrala inside.
Agastya pocketed the key. He turned up the heavy collar of his dark coat against the biting wind, looked at the two strangers waiting for him, and stepped off the curb.
The city streets were suffocatingly empty, swallowed by the same tomb-like silence that had haunted the alley where Agastya was executed. Thick, sulfurous smog coiled around the iron gas lamps, reducing the world to a narrow, claustrophobic tunnel of jaundiced light.
Ahead of him, the two siblings walked side-by-side. Their quiet, casual conversation drifted back to him—a warm, domestic murmur that felt completely alien against the freezing night. They moved with the relaxed, unguarded posture of civilians who believed the dark was safe.
Agastya, walking a few paces behind, moved like a ghost. His boots made absolutely no sound against the wet cobblestones.
As he watched their backs. Agastya forced his mind to dig deeper into the baker's residual memories. The mental files unspooled slowly, accompanied by a dull, throbbing ache behind his forehead.
Elara. That was the sister in the blue coat. Eowyn. The sharp-faced brother in black.
Then, his combat instincts flared.
It wasn't a sound, but a sudden, violent prickle at the base of his neck. It was the primal, unmistakable, and heavyweight of being watched.
Agastya didn't stop. He didn't break his stride or tense his shoulders to alert his stalker. Moving with a predator's casual grace, he merely shifted his gaze, using the sharp periphery of his vision to sweep the dense shadows bleeding out from the alleyway they had just passed.
Nothing.
There was only the flickering halo of a solitary street lamp, illuminating the scarred brickwork of the empty tenements. No displaced fog. No echoing footsteps. No shifting silhouettes.
Agastya turned his eyes forward again, his jaw clenching tight.
‘Am I hallucinating?’ he thought, his cold, analytical mind fighting against his gut instinct. ‘I woke up in a dead man's body, expelled a bullet from my chest, and watched time violently rewind itself. My nervous system is compromised.’
He forced himself to exhale, pushing the paranoia aside and focusing instead on mapping his new territory.
They walked for nearly a mile, leaving the towering, smog-choked factories of the commercial sector behind. Gradually, the oppressive, metallic stench of the city's heart thinned, replaced by the heavy, domestic scent of burning heating coal and damp brick.
Agastya’s sharp eyes scanned the shifting environment. They were entering a solidly average residential ward.
It was neither the wealthy, gas-lit avenues of the nobles, nor the chaotic, decaying slums. Instead, it was a district of pragmatic survival. The streets here were narrow but properly paved with flat cobblestones. The architecture consisted of dense, unbroken rows of uniform colonial townhouses, all built shoulder-to-shoulder to conserve space and warmth.
There was a monotonous, working-class rhythm to the neighborhood. The brick facades were sturdy but stained dark with years of city soot.
Faded paint clung stubbornly to wooden window shutters, and the faint, rhythmic ticking of brass water meters echoed from the alleyways. It was a place where ordinary people kept their heads down, worked their shifts, and locked their doors at night.
Finally, Elara and Eowyn slowed their pace.
They came to a halt in front of a weathered, three-story brick building that looked exactly like the dozen houses connected to it. It possessed no grand courtyard or ornate ironwork, only a short flight of worn stone steps leading up to a thick, heavy oak door. The wrought-iron railing beside the steps was rusted in patches but structurally sound.
It was the ultimate camouflage. To an assassin like Agastya, a house like this was a blind spot—too ordinary to warrant a second glance from the city's predators.
Elara stepped up to the door and pulled a brass key from her heavy blue coat. She slipped it into the lock with a familiar, metallic click, pushing the door open to reveal the dark, quiet hallway of Agastya’s new life.
The heavy oak door swung inward with a low, groaning creak, revealing the pitch-black corridor of the townhouse.
Elara paused in the doorway, her hand resting on the brass knob. She let out a tired sigh, her breath pluming in the freezing air, and glanced back over her shoulder. "Father sent a message while you were at the shop," she said, her voice dropping to a murmur to avoid waking the neighbours. "He took an extra shift at the rail yard. He won't be arriving until tomorrow morning."
Agastya kept his face perfectly neutral, offering only a slow, silent nod.