You were a fever dream for twelve years. I conjured you from the mud and the blood and the endless gray of the London fog, a fever dream to cling to when the madness wanted to take me completely. When the ghosts of the Influence and the whispers of a bloody past screamed my name, I held on to you. You, a promise that London had not always been a place for burying things. You, a soft thing to hold in the blackness, proof that my soul wasn’t a barren wasteland.

Then, I came home. To a father's grave and a sister's lies. She is dead, James, Zilpha said, her eyes hollow and dark. She had a fever. The words hit me like a cudgel, but a greater sickness had rooted itself inside her, and I saw it. A sickness of jealousy and madness. She fed me the lie to hurt me, to tear out the last piece of light she thought I had, a light that wasn't for her. And when she found her own peace at the bottom of the Thames, she told me the truth, not to grant me absolution, but to torture me further. To leave me with a wound that would never scab over. She thought, perhaps, that knowing you weren't dead would hurt me more than believing you were.

For a time, it did. A rage, cold and hard as the diamonds I hid in the mud, settled in my gut. The black of London became darker, the air thicker with a mourning that was mine alone. I buried you every day and then resurrected you every night. The pain was a living thing, a shadow that moved with me through the muck of the city. It was a torment that had a use, giving me purpose and focus, fuelling the fire to take what was mine. But, a small, stubborn part of me refused to let you go. It whispered that Zilpha's ghost was a liar.

My feet, accustomed to the rhythm of broken bones and whispers of the damned, froze on the muddy riverbank. I watched the boy, so small and quick, as he skimmed flat stones across the river's glassy surface. He moved with a grace that was all yours, a quick, darting energy, but there was a stillness in him, too. A patience as he sought the perfect stone, a focus that reminded me of myself. And there you were, standing beside him, a figure sculpted from shadow and the last vestige of the sun's fading light. Black, head to toe, the color of a grave, a decade's worth of mourning. You still wore it, even with the false news of my death and the real loss of my father. Still, you mourned me. The ache of it was a sharp knife to the gut, an intimacy I had no right to feel. I have taken lives without remorse, carved out futures with blood and fire, but this—this was a debt I could never repay.

I walk toward you, a presence as dark and unsettling as the rumors that precede me. The boy stops, sensing a change in the air. Hesitantly, he threw one last stone, a perfect skipping-stone dance across the water. It was a brutal act of beauty, a testament to a life lived in defiance of the world's gravity.

He looks at me then, his eyes wide and curious, and I see in his expression, the same defiance I have spent a lifetime perfecting. "He’s mine, isn’t he?" You turn, your eyes meet mine. A flicker of recognition. I looked at you, then back the boy. A terrible certainty, and a cold dread settled deep in my chest.

I am not a good man. I never was. My hands are stained with the dirt of many places and the blood of many men. I have seen and done things that would send a sane man into an asylum. But I had resigned myself to living out my life with the knowledge that you were just another ghost that I heard singing in the walls. But you're no ghost. You're real, and you're here. The boy, my son, is here. And all the rot and grime and anger that have become my companions suddenly seem like a fragile covering.

I've learned to have a use for everything and everyone. For the Crown, the Company, for my enemies. But I never found a use for the emptiness where you and our child should have been. Now I see you. Now I have a use for everything I have left.

"What's his name?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper. "Tell me."