Chapter 5: The Man in the Riding Coat

By dark the house was down to embers and one standing wall.

Dad sat on the chopping block with a blanket around his shoulders.

I stood in the yard with him and didn't sleep.

Min-jun sat at the tree line with his back against a trunk.

Ren was gone. He'd left before the riders came and hadn't come back.

Nobody said anything about that.

An hour before dawn I heard hooves on the north road.

One horse. Walking.

Dad got up off the block.

"Get inside," I said.

"There's no inside."

"Then get behind me."

The horse came into the yard and stopped.

The man on it was young, maybe twenty-eight, with brown hair worn loose and a dark riding coat cut close to the body.

He had rings on his right hand. Iron. Three of them.

He looked around the yard at the burned house like he was admiring a garden.

"Han Seo-jun," he said.

"That's me."

He swung off the horse. He didn't tie it. It stood where he left it.

Up close he was taller than Min-jun and broader through the shoulders.

He had a face that women would call handsome and I'd call expensive.

"I'm Luca Moretti," he said.

"I know who you are."

"Good. Saves time."

He walked toward me across the yard, stepping over a fallen beam like it was a puddle.

Min-jun came out of the tree line and stood between us.

Luca stopped.

"Eighth prince," he said.

"Luca."

"You look thin."

"You burned his house."

"I burned a woodcutter's house." Luca looked past him at me. "That's a message, not a crime. I wanted him to know I could find him anywhere."

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