The ten of them had come.

  Magnolia counted them from behind a stone wall, her fingers pressed flat against the cold surface, Skippy’s body heat against her ankle. Ten figures in the uniforms of the Peacekeepers. Nine of them took positions around the house. Two at the front door, two at the back, one at each window, the rest forming a loose perimeter that covered the road in both directions. They had been assuming this position ever since the tenth went inside.

  She heard Yi’s door open. Heard it close.

  No shouting. No crash of furniture. Just the quiet click of a latch, and then nothing.

  Skippy pressed harder against her leg, a low whine building in the dog’s throat. Magnolia dropped one hand to his head without looking down. Quiet. Stay quiet.

  Ten. She ran the number again, as if repetition might grind it down into something she could work with. Ten Peacekeepers, all armed, all positioned with the kind of spacing that said they’d done this before. One or two she might have managed. But ten was a sentence, and the body on the ground at the end of it would be hers.

  Run.

  The thought hit like cold water across her face. Run. Take Skippy. Put distance between herself and this house and these soldiers and find somewhere dark and quiet to sit and think. To plan. There would be time later, there was always time later, if you were alive to use it.

  She could figure out where they’d take him. She could learn their routes. Their weak points. She could find an opening.

  She had no idea what that opening would look like. Not yet. But it would come. It had to come, because the alternative was staying here and doing something profoundly, catastrophically stupid.

  Run.

  Skippy shifted again, his whole body taut, nose pointed toward Yi’s front door. If she charged in now, there was no version of events where Skippy stayed put. He’d follow her. He’d throw himself at the nearest uniform with all the tactical sense of a thrown brick, and they would cut him down, and that would be one more thing she’d failed to protect.

  So she would run. She’d already decided. Her legs would carry her backward, away, south, and she would be smart about this. She would be rational. She had convinced herself completely.

  Then the door opened.

  Yi came out first. His hands were behind his back, and she could see the cuffs even from this distance, the way they wrenched his shoulders into an angle that no joint was built for.

  She remembered the hill. How he’d carried her up it.

  She remembered what he’d told her, after. How he’d said he used to believe the world was built on loss. That anything good was just the brief pause before the next subtraction.

  The Peacekeepers formed up around Yi. They began walking him toward their vehicle.

  Every rational thought she’d assembled over the last five minutes screamed at her to stay down. To let them pass. To be smart. Be patient. Be alive.

  Her legs were already moving.

  Her tentacles came first, ripping from her back in a violent burst, three of them whipping forward with everything she had. The closest Peacekeeper had his back turned. The lead tentacle caught him across the shoulder and sent him staggering. The second lashed toward the man gripping Yi’s arm.

  “Let’s go home together!” The words tore out of her before she could shape them into anything coherent.

  The third Peacekeeper in line was faster than the others. His sword cleared its scabbard in a single motion, and the flat of the blade met her tentacle mid-strike with a crack that jolted through her body like biting down on a bad tooth. The tentacle recoiled. She was already pulling it back, already calculating the angle for a second pass—

  And then she saw his face.

  She knew him. She knew him because he’d cut her down before.

  He looked at her, and his mouth stretched wide and pleased.

  “There you are, Miss Murderer.” His voice was light, almost musical. “I was wondering when you’d show up~”

  Magnolia’s heel skidded on the ground. The tentacle snapped back with a wet sound. Her eyes, reinforced with mana, tracked him, every shift in his weight, every micro-adjustment in his stance.

  Down the street, the Peacekeepers had recaptured Yi and were dragging him toward the vehicle. He stumbled between two of them, wrists cuffed behind his back, bare feet scraping concrete as he fought to plant himself. Trying to stop.

  “Magnolia!” He twisted hard enough that his shoulders pulled at an ugly angle. “Tell them! Tell them this is a mistake! You didn’t kill Loric Jhael—”

  One of the Peacekeepers yanked his arm. The sound Yi made was small and awful.

  “Keep moving!”

  Yi dug his heels in, nearly buckling both of them. “Magnolia! Say something! Tell them—!”

  Her mouth opened.

  All she had to do was lie.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  But Loric’s body flashed behind her eyelids. The angle of the neck, the warmth still leaving the blood, the way her knife had gone straight through—

  Her jaw locked.

  She couldn’t.

  Magnolia swallowed. Looked at Yi instead of the Peacekeepers.

  “I’m going to free you,” she said. Her voice shook, but the words held. “We’ll go home together. Got it?”

  Yi stared at her like she was speaking another language.

  The Peacekeepers hauled him backward toward the ramp. Yi was still looking at her when one of them shoved his head down and forced him inside.

  “Tell them!” His voice cracked as they pushed him through. “Magnolia, answer me! Did you—”

  The entrance closed.

  His voice was gone.

  Only the sound of the engine and the faint click of locks.

  Kazane was applauding.

  The sound was lazy, almost polite, his eyes half-lidded and warm with amusement.

  “Touching,” he said. “Really. I might have cried, if I weren’t under strict orders to bring back your head.” He sighed, as though this were a scheduling conflict. “The Noble Houses are particular about that sort of thing. You know how they are.”

  Magnolia’s scowl cut across her face. “Make all the jokes you want,” she said. “I’m going to defeat you. And then I’m bringing Yi home.”

  Kazane glanced back at the Peacekeepers in formation behind him. He lifted one hand and flicked it, as if he was waving off a fly.

  “Right. Everyone out. Back to the rendezvous point, wait for my signal.”

  One of them shifted his weight. “Kazane, protocol requires—”

  “Protocol requires I don’t need nine men standing around watching me work.” The smile stayed exactly where it was. “She’s gotten stronger since last time. I can tell just by looking at her. It’s going to get messy.” He turned toward Varn, and something more honest entered his expression. “You know how it is.”

  Varn did. He’d known Kazane longest, and he recognized the look. He was already moving before Kazane finished speaking, clapping the hesitant Peacekeeper on the shoulder and steering him toward the vehicle. “You heard him,” he said. “And trust me, staying isn’t doing him a favor. We’d just be in his way.”

  The doors closed. The engine hummed off down the road.

  Kazane turned back to Magnolia and clasped his hands behind his back, rocking once on his heels.

  “Luckily for the neighborhood,” he said, in the tone of someone remarking on the weather, “we cleared everyone within a hundred-meter radius before sunrise. You slept right through it.” He tilted his head. “That probably sounds impossible. But that’s the thing about Miracles.” He spread his hands. “Impossible is just a word for things you haven’t seen yet.”

  Magnolia let more tentacles spool from her back and shoulders. Slick red cords stretched and coiled around her feet, anchoring her to the cracked asphalt like roots biting into earth.

  “How thoughtful of you.”

  “I have my moments.”

  Kazane exhaled. Tilted his head like the whole affair bored him already.

  Then he lifted his sword.

  “Cloak.”

  He said it under his breath. Almost reverent.

  Wind answered.

  It rolled off him in a soft rush, whipping his coat up, sending dust and loose paper into a tight cyclone around his body. The air along his skin bent and clung, a shifting veil of pressure that ate sound and warped light at its edges.

  The neighborhood street became their arena.

  A narrow two-lane road, parked cars lining both sides. Laundry on second-story balconies going stiff in the sudden wind. A convenience store sign flickering down the block. Someone’s bicycle chained to a leaning streetlamp. Trash bags piled near an overflowing bin. A stray cat vanishing under a car the instant the air changed.

  Magnolia’s pupils contracted.

  The reinforcement practice had paid off. The world slowed by a fraction, the flutter of laundry, the jitter of power lines, the twitch in Kazane’s calves as he shifted his weight, all of it landing a half-beat before it should have.

  He charged.

  She could see his path.

  There.

  Her tentacle slammed into the ground at an angle, and the recoil launched her sideways. A gust of compressed wind sliced through the space she’d just left, carving clean lines into the road and shearing the side-mirror off a parked car.

  The mirror spun past her ear like a flipped coin.

  She snatched it midair with a second tentacle. Whipped it back like a discus.

  Kazane appeared three meters away, deflecting the projectile with the flat of his blade. The mirror blew apart into glittering shards. The wind around him caught the glass and scattered it.

  Magnolia was already on top of him.

  Her bare foot struck the hood of a parked car and hurled herself forward, and her arm began to change mid-flight: bones narrowing, fingers melting together into a single wicked curve.

  The blade reached for his throat.

  Kazane slipped it. The edge passed close enough to lift the hairs on his neck. He stepped into her momentum, caught her arm at the elbow, and threw her.

  She let herself be thrown. Hit the street in a controlled tumble, was up before the slide finished—feet finding ground, body already low, already coiled.

  Her face showed nothing. There was no room in her for anything but this.

  She closed the distance in two strides. Tentacles burst from her back and went for his sword arm. He cut one. Dodged another. But the third found his wrist and held. For half a second, his blade was pinned.

  She took it.

  Her left hand had already reshaping, fingers gone, palm flattened and hardened into a bone-dense wedge. She drove it into his solar plexus like a spear thrust.

  The wind cloak absorbed some of the force. His feet still left the ground.

  Kazane hit a lamppost hard enough to bend the metal. Blood dripped from his lip to the street.

  He looked up at her.

  “You’ve improved,” he said. Conversational. Almost warm, the way you’d compliment a child’s drawing. “A little. Barely worth mentioning, really.” He pressed one hand against the bent lamppost and pushed himself upright, rolling his shoulder back into its socket. “But still. Almost charming. Like watching a kitten learn to scratch.”

  He meant it to sting.

  He meant none of the rest.

  The truth, the part he kept behind his teeth, was that the girl was doing something she had no business doing. He’d felt it from the first exchange. Her reinforcement had been rough at the start, uneven.

  And then it started climbing.

  She was adjusting. Mid-fight. To him. Watching how he reinforced his own body and pulling it apart in real time, reverse-engineering the method, reshaping it to fit herself. An effort that required prodigious talent.

  Kazane could admit, privately, that it scared him.

  Magnolia’s expression had not changed.

  “Keep talking,” she said. “I’m going to cut out your tongue and feed it to you. And when I’m done, I’m taking Yi home.”

  Kazane’s grin widened. Blood on his teeth.

  “You’re welcome to try.”