Seven Lives, One Enemy

Chapter Seven: A Held Blade

Three nights after the vault, I take the long way home because the short way runs past a courtyard I've started avoiding without ever quite admitting why, and that's how I end up on Coopers' Row after dark, which is a mistake I understand about four seconds too late to correct.

There are two of them ahead of me, unhurried, blocking the mouth of the alley the way people only block a space when they mean to use it. A third steps out from a doorway behind me, closing the only way back I had. I hear that one before I see him, the scrape of a boot deliberately not silenced, a small cruelty, letting me know I'm caught before I've had the chance to run.

"Just the bag," the nearest one says, almost bored, like this is a transaction and not a threat. "Nice and easy."

My bag has eleven copper coins in it and a half-eaten roll from lunch. It also has, folded at the very bottom under both of those things, a small square of cloth I still haven't been able to make myself throw away, and some ungovernable animal part of my brain decides, in that instant, that handing over the bag means handing over the cloth, and refuses.

I don't hand it over.

The one behind me closes the distance fast, faster than I expect from someone his size, and I get one arm up more out of instinct than skill, catch a forearm meant for my collar, and it still knocks me half off my feet into the wall hard enough that my teeth click together and the world goes bright and ringing at the edges.

I don't see him arrive. That's the truth of it, however it looks after the fact. One breath the alley has four people in it and my back is against cold brick with a stranger's hand twisted into my collar, and the next breath there are five, and the fourth one moves the way water moves, and none of the others are standing anymore.

It takes less time than it takes me to finish flinching.

The one who had my collar goes down first, folded at the middle with a sound like all the air leaving him at once. The second turns toward the movement and doesn't finish turning before a forearm catches him across the throat and the wall finishes what the forearm started. The third, smarter or just faster, is already running before it's his turn, boots slapping hard against the cobbles, gone around the corner and out of the story before anyone can stop him.

Silence, after. My own breathing, too loud. Somewhere close, his, controlled and even, like none of what just happened cost him anything at all, though I notice, because I notice everything even when I shouldn't, that his right hand is pressed briefly flat against his own ribs before it drops back to his side.

"You're hurt."

"No."

"You're lying."

"Occasionally." He says it without any humor in it at all, which somehow makes it funnier than if he'd meant it as a joke, and I have to bite down on something that isn't quite a laugh and isn't quite the beginning of tears, both of them sitting far too close together right now to trust either one.

I push off the wall and my legs hold, mostly, and I make myself look at the two men on the ground instead of at him, because looking at him means looking at what he just did, cleanly, wordlessly, in under four seconds, to three armed men, and I'm not ready yet to catalogue exactly how that makes me feel.

"They'll wake up," he says, following my eyes. "Bruised. Nothing worse."

"You could have killed them."

"I didn't." Flat again, that same reporting tone he used the first night, verbs doing all the work adjectives usually do. "Wasn't the job."

"What is the job?" The question comes out sharper than I mean it to, three nights of exhaustion and fear finding an edge to stand on.

"You're supposed to kill me. Twice now you've had every excuse in the world and instead I keep finding you standing over the wreckage of someone else's bad decisions instead."

Something shifts in his face, fast, gone before I can hold onto it, the same unguarded flicker from the vault.

"Sorin thinks I'm still working the assignment." His voice drops on the name like it costs him something to say it out loud, in the open, to me. "I told him I needed more time. Confirm the target's patterns before the strike."

"And instead you're following me home to fight off street thieves."

"Instead I'm following you home," he says, "because someone should, and it isn't going to be him."

I don't have an answer for that. I stand in the mouth of an alley with two unconscious men at my feet and a fugitive assassin three steps away who has now, twice, chosen me over the only version of himself his whole life trained him to be, and I understand, with the same unearned certainty that told me he's found you again on the first night, that whatever this is between us has already stopped being about an order someone gave him.

"That man who ran," I say. "He'll talk. To someone. Eventually."

"Probably." He says it like a fact he already accepted before it happened, no fear in it, only the flat weight of consequence. "Doesn't change what I did tonight."

"It might get back to your Covenant."

"It will." He looks at me then, really looks, the scar through his eyebrow catching the one working streetlamp at the alley's end, and for the first time since the vault door opened on that first impossible night, he doesn't look controlled at all. He looks like a man standing at the edge of something he already knows he can't walk back from. "Go home. Lock your door. I'll be nearby."

He's gone before I can answer, the way he's gone every other time, no sound, no warning, just an alley that has one fewer person standing in it than it did a second ago, and two strangers groaning awake at my feet, and the small folded cloth still sitting, ridiculous and precious, at the bottom of a bag I very nearly gave away to keep it safe.