“The merchant’s son was short on experience, but he had been raised on a steady diet of books. Not histories, or spell guides, though his tutors made him read those, too. No, his true education had come from novels. Epic tales of rakes and rogues, nobles and thieves, but most of all, of heroes.”

The unnamed merchant’s son is recruited to join the Hand because of his naivety and love of mythic stories. He believes that he will become a hero in doing so but only ends up dying a painful death. He represents the many citizens of Red London that the Hand manipulates into doing their dirty work. They may believe they are joining a noble cause and becoming heroes, but they are pawns.

“There was no easy way to translate Veskan. It was the kind of language where every word could mean a dozen things, depending on their order and their context. It’s why he’d never managed more than a frail grasp on a handful of phrases. But this one he’d held on to. This one Alucard understood. A head gets lost, but a heart knows home.”

This passage connects to the novel’s theme of The Importance of Chosen Family. Like several of the novel’s characters, Alucard is estranged from his family of origin. However, he is embraced by his chosen family and feels at home with them. Standing outside his ancestral manor, he contemplates the feeling of safety and love he receives from Rhy and contrasts it with the unease he felt as a child in the Emery estate.

“Lila tipped her head back, brown eyes squinting at the sky. A stranger would never know that one of those eyes was real and one was fake. Would never know that the one she’d lost hadn’t been brown at all, but black as pitch, carved out by a two-bit doctor back in London, England—the only London she’d known of, then—when she was just a child. As if it had been a poisoned thing, a spreading rot, and not a sign of strength, a marker of extraordinary power, once-in-a-generation magic.”

As an adult at home in Red London, Lila is still marked emotionally and physically by her past trauma in Grey London. There, her gifts (represented by the black eye of the Antari) were seen as “a spreading rot” rather than something to be embraced. Though she is an adult who has come into her own power, she still contends with the lingering effects of her upbringing.