Jonas

Look, you know who you are. You are strong and dark and angry and matted fur and black silk and nothing but empty black holes. There is nothing about you that isn’t coiled tight like a spring.
You are a specter; untouchable. A knife in the shadows when it's called for, bright-flashing death from above when it's not.
Your sister has magic.
You have teeth.
You don't mean to wear the mask as much as you do. It's just, at some point you stopped caring if it identified you out in the open. At some point it turned into more safety net than disguise, into more skin than costume.
That's fine. You've got bigger things to worry about.
When Chalcedony (the big man, your sister had once cackled to you) calls on you, he does it because you are quiet, and careful, and you don't care what you have to do so long as it keeps you fed, keeps your sister fed. Your parents are good and upstanding but once you got older you stopped being able to leech off their ranks. Wisteria, who you keep calling big momma, mostly as a joke, but also because it makes her happy, would never let you starve, for certain. She wouldn't let any of her clan starve; so long as they were hers, they would eat. And you and your sister are hers.
So she says. So she says.
You keep food stockpiled and you cloak on hand. When the fight calls, you go. You defend, and you protect, and you kill so that Elwyn can keep to her herbs and her quiet ways, so that she will never look at you the way you sometimes see Artificia looking at the big man; like she's afraid he'll slip from her fingers if she isn't careful, like if her eyes drift too far, she will lose him for good. You are fast and you are smart and, above all, you are quiet. You must be careful, to return to your girl when she calls you.
Acacia thinks you're too stupid to be a spy. Too aggressive to be an assassin. She says it even as she knocks an arrow beside Rose, as she stands at your shoulder, ready to take the hit for you when the fight comes. You call her a spoil sport; she tells you that a fight is a game, is a playground, is something to relish in. You bare your teeth and sink into the shadow.
You cannot afford to take your life so lightly.
A knife in the dark. A support for your sister when she stumbles. You are no soldier, no guardian, nothing so noble, but you do the work that must be done. You do it when it seems right, you refuse it when you know it to be wrong. You tell your mother of your whereabouts, and she nods, and she never tells you to take it easy, so you fight.
You fight.