Even the constant, heavy rains of Spindlegrad couldn’t quite wash away the smell of iron. It hung in the air whenever Nomi stepped outside the inn. It clung to her clothes, to her hair—an unwelcome, metallic reminder of her own weakness. She had sent a Healer to the frontlines because she couldn’t follow orders.

  For four days, she had tried to keep herself moving. She worked through the Middle City, running errands, digging up Agon’s armor, trying to finish the mapping work Agon and Lillik had started. But it just felt like busywork. A distraction for the child while the adults did the dirty work.

  The smell followed her everywhere.

  A dagger with no edge.

  Nomi stood up abruptly, the chair scraping loudly against the floorboards of her dark room. The silence was suffocating. She needed to find someone, Talos was probably downstairs, sharpening his sword in the main room for the hundredth time. Maybe Agon was there, drinking and...

  She paused. Her ears twitched, searching for a deep laugh that wasn't there.

  Right.

  Agon was dead.

  Nomi rubbed her face, her palms pressing into her eyelids.

  Hell, even Rinerva would be better than this silence.

  She pushed open the door, stepped down the stairs, and her whole body froze when they met the emerald eyes.

  The noise was gone.

  The smell of blood—the iron tang that had haunted her for days—was gone.

  It felt like a physical weight lifting from her skull. All thousand stimuli that usually barraged her brain—the dripping water, the creaking wood, the heartbeats of strangers—went quiet. She couldn’t hear every drop of rain. She couldn’t smell the rot of the city.

  Reflexively, she let out a sigh of pure, trembling relief.

  Her eyes drifted around the room. It wasn't the inn.

  It was a ballroom. An expansive chamber of gold and marble stretched out around her. A faint, lilting melody drifted through the air—a song her brain couldn’t quite recognize, but that her heart seemed to know. There were a hundred dancers gliding across the polished floor. They were beautiful. They were elegant. And they were silent. Her heightened senses weren't drowning in the noise of footfalls or the cloying smell of sweat and cheap perfume she would expect in a crowd. It was perfect. It was curated.

  Wait. Where am I?

  “Hey, Foxy.”

  Talos’s voice.

  No. Tal’s voice.

  The tone, the cadence—it all came through like he was before. Before the betrayal. Before he learned what she had done. Before the scars.

  Like she wasn’t Whisper. Like she was just Nomi.

  “Tal?”

  She turned.

  He looked good. He was dressed in the fine velvet doublet of a nobleman, fitting his lithe build perfectly. A small smile played on his lips—the soft, unguarded one he only ever had when it was just the two of them in the dark.

  His hair was cut short. He was clean-shaven. The grit of their work was washed away.

  He was perfect.

  “Care to dance, dear?”

  He held out his hand.

  Nomi didn't look for a weapon. She didn't check the exits. She didn't question the logic. She just reached for his hand.

  No.

  Her body buzzed the refusal through her senses, firing the warning through every fiber of her being. Her brain saw Talos. It looked like him. It smiled like him. It smelled like him.

  I don’t want him.

  “What is it, my love?” he asked, his voice dripping with infinite, saccharine patience.

  Patient.

  Talos wasn't patient. And neither was she.

  If this were real, she would already be pressed against him, her body wouldn't be firing warning signals off that her brain couldn't understand.

  It’s wrong.

  Her instincts flared, turning the relief into nausea. What had she been doing? Reality flooded in like ichor from a fetid wound. She had been in this ballroom before. In dreams? In memories of a life stolen? She had taken that hand and danced for what felt like hours, like lifetimes. She hadn't rejected this dream. And when she woke up, Talos wasn’t this… manicured doll.

  His heartbeat is wrong.

  He was gritty. He was rough. He was rude. He would be shifting uncomfortably in that stupid velvet doublet, looking at her with a mix of irritation and hidden fondness. He wouldn't have that loving, empty, dead look in his eyes. She took the hand. Her body slid against his. There was no warmth. No spark. No heartbeat thumping against her chest.

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  “...Have you fixed the taste sensations yet?” she whispered.

  She didn't wait for an answer.

  Her teeth sank into the false Talos’s throat.

  It was like biting into wet clay. Cold. Lifeless. No pulse. No salt.

  She tore away, spitting out the phantom matter. The fake Talos didn't bleed. He didn't scream. He just stared at her with sudden, boring loathing.

  The ballroom flickered. The music warped into a discordant screech.

  The dream shattered.

  Talos was a prisoner in his own skull.

  He felt like an outsider, trapped behind his own eyes, unable to twitch a muscle or draw a breath of his own accord. He was forced to watch, sixteen again, but seeing something the younger him had never witnessed.

  He watched Whisper dismantle the Mage Choir.

  She moved swiftly, her eyes dull and glazed, sliding past incoming spells like they were moving through molasses. The child moved with the grace of a ghost and the lethality of a viper. She was horrifyingly efficient. Her ears twitched and swiveled, tracking the incantations before they were even spoken, mapping the slaughter. She weaved perfectly toward a desperate Mage who had just scrambled out of the barracks, robes tangled, fingers glowing with panic. The rushed wind wall did not keep the Fox away.

  She didn't just kill him. She disassembled him.

  Whisper stepped inside his guard and opened his gut in one fluid motion. As the Mage gasped, trying to raise a hand to cast a final curse, she grabbed his wrist. With a flick of her blade, she flayed the skin from his forearm, peeling the magic circles from his flesh to silence him in his final agonizing moments. She didn't pause to watch him die. She didn't gloat. She just continued to the next target.

  Talos followed a few steps behind, an invisible ghost walking in the wake of the carnage the assassin was leaving behind.

  There were twelve Mages in the Choir. Talos knew them all by name. Most hated him. Most insulted him, looking in disgust at the null in their hallowed halls.

  But there was one who didn’t.

  Nomi worked through the bodies until she reached the heavy oak doors of the training room. One Mage was waiting there, turning sharply as she sensed a presence.

  Rose.

  His older sister. Not by blood, but by the bond of the gutter. She was the street rat who had pulled him out of the filth, out of the cold his family had left him in.

  Whisper moved immediately. Rose’s eyes widened at the bloodstained, small figure advancing on her. Rose manifested her flames. She fired controlled bursts to keep the wraith away, using the heat to control the space. Talos felt himself screaming. He roared her name, thrashing against the invisible chains in his mind, but his mouth didn’t move. He was a statue. He just watched Whisper slowly gain ground, shifting ever closer, her dull eyes learning the patterns of Rose’s fire.

  The red-haired woman didn’t go quietly, though. She wasn’t caught off guard like the rest of the Choir, she was a street rat like Talos, always ready for an ambush. She forced the assassin back with a wall of roaring flame. Then, she condensed her mana, throwing a spear of white-hot fire through the smoke screen.

  Whisper heard it. She twisted, but she moved just a hair too slow.

  The lance of fire slammed into the assassin’s side. It was a brutal burn, the smell of seared flesh filling the room instantly. It should have incapacitated her. It should have ended the fight.

  But Whisper stood almost immediately.

  She was too high on the Handlers' potions, too lost in the alchemical haze to register the hit as anything more than a momentary delay. Her face was blank. There was no pain, only calculation.

  And then, the Whisper was moving again.

  She had scouted all of Rose’s spell circles. She knew every incantation, every gesture now. Rose wasn’t wealthy enough to afford the same mana-infused tattoos that the nobles flaunted, just the shitty back alley jobs.

  Nomi closed the distance slowly, over agonizing seconds. She was draining Rose of mana, burning through the commoner’s reserves. Rose never broke. She never got desperate. She stayed focused and controlled in the doomed battle, conserving every spark. Every once in a while, her eyes flicked toward the door, checking for help that was never going to come.

  It happened all at once.

  One spell went wide—a sputter of sparks instead of a roar of flame as Rose ran dry. Whisper shifted immediately.

  She moved twice as fast, no longer pacing herself. She faded in, tripping the Mage and slamming her into the ground.

  The chains shattered.

  The paralysis broke. He wasn't just a ghost watching from the door anymore. The shortsword was heavy in his hand. The distance was closable.

  He could save his sister this time.

  Talos surged forward with a roar. Whisper’s face snapped up toward him at the sudden noise, her eyes blank and deadly.

  Nomi saw Talos frozen in the center of the room, his muscles locked rigid, his eyes staring in horror at something she couldn’t see. A moment she couldn’t know.

  "...Tal?"

  The enthralled Talos drew his blade, head turning Nomi with sightless eyes.

  He surged forward. Whisper shifted back, out-spacing his slash by a millimeter.

  “Tal! Please, wake up!”

  He moved forward, pressing his advantage. His sword wove through the air with more focus than he had mustered in months. The withdrawal tremors were gone. The doubt was gone. Each step was a calculated, enraged movement designed to corner her.

  Nomi stumbled back. Her weapons weren’t with her. She was defenseless. But even if she had them, it wouldn’t matter.

  She couldn’t kill Talos. She wouldn’t.

  So she just kept dodging, scrambling backwards through the common room of the inn.

  She miscalculated. Her back hit the rough stone of the fireplace. She ducked instinctively as Talos’s shortsword slammed into the masonry where her head had been a second ago, sending stone splinters flying.

  Nomi tried to slip away, but he was too fast. His hand shot out, thin fingers wrapping around her wrist like a manacle. He yanked her forward and slammed the heavy brass pommel of his sword into her gut.

  She gasped, the air leaving her lungs in a wheeze, but she managed to twist free and stumble away.

  “Tal—please,” she choked out, holding her stomach. “Please. It’s me—it’s your Fox. Please.”

  She looked up at him. There was none of the fondness in his muddy eyes. Only the cold, predatory glare of a wolf looking at a rabbit.

  She scrambled back to her feet, wincing as a follow-up slash nicked her shoulder.

  Talos grinned. He felt the sword bite into the Assassin's flesh. Just a quick cut, but enough to draw blood.

  Good.

  Whisper looked terrified. Her expression was full of raw, human horror as she staggered away from him. Where was her mask? Where were the efficient movements she needed to survive his wrath? She was acting like a victim. It just made him more furious.

  Nomi dodged a blow, but he followed it with his full body weight, tackling her. They hit the floor hard. He used his momentum to smash her into the wood, knocking the wind out of her again.

  He straddled her, pinning her to the floorboards. He reversed his grip on the sword, pressing the blade against the pulse of her neck.

  He stared down at her with all the hate and revulsion she was owed.

  Nomi stopped fighting. She looked up at the man she loved, seeing only death in his eyes.

  Maybe this was better

  Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, hot and fast.

  “Tal… I… please.”