Seven Lives, One Enemy

Chapter Four: A Job Half Finished

The blade never gets past his hip.

The lantern dies instead, pinched out between two fingers before I even register his hand moving, and the vault drops into a dark so total I lose him completely, no shape, no scar, nothing, one lurching heartbeat where I don't know if he's still in front of me or already behind me with a hand closing around my throat.

Then his palm finds my shoulder, hard, urgent, and hauls me bodily into the dead space behind the third shelving row. My spine hits stone. His other hand clamps over my mouth, and I make a muffled, furious sound against it, ready to bite down, until I hear what he's already heard, the warden's light sweeping toward the door, and understand, all at once, exactly what he's doing.

I go rigid and silent, chest heaving against his palm, my whole body one long, straining held breath.

The warden's lantern finds the doorway. "Door's open," he mutters, annoyed rather than suspicious, hinges creaking as he tests the latch. "Wind, probably. Half these old locks don't sit right."

Beside me, close enough now that I can feel the heat coming off him, the man doesn't so much as breathe. I can feel the effort of that stillness radiating off his whole body like a held note about to break, and it terrifies me more than the blade did, the sheer, practiced perfection of it, the years it must have taken to learn how to stand this close to someone and vanish completely.

The light sweeps once more. Retreats. The latch clicks. Footsteps recede, unhurried, already thinking of something else.

His hand stays over my mouth two full seconds longer than it needs to. Then it's gone, and so is the warmth of him, one sharp step back, and the space between us goes enormous and cold at once.

"You could have," I say, voice cracking loud in the dark, all my fear turning to fury now that there's air enough to spend it on. "Right then. In the dark. No one would ever have heard it."

"Wasn't clean." Too fast. The words arrive before the thought behind them's finished. "Warden would've found the body before I cleared the district."

"That is not why." My hands are fists at my sides, shaking with something that isn't only fear anymore. "You didn't freeze because of the warden. He was an excuse and you grabbed it because you needed one badly enough not to look at the real reason."

Silence, and in it his shoulders find their trained line again, the softness folding itself away right in front of me like a door slamming.

"Next time won't go the same way," he says.

"I don't believe you."

"You should."

"I don't." My voice breaks on it, raw. "I watched your hand shake around that hilt before the light went out. Whatever they trained you to be, you looked at me and you couldn't do it, and some part of you already knew that before you ever walked through that door."

He's moving toward the gap in the door, already turning away, and for one gutting second I think he's simply going to leave without another word.

He stops at the threshold instead. Doesn't turn around.

"Lock this vault properly when I'm gone," he says, quiet, almost gentle, which is so much worse than anything sharp he could have said instead. "You're not as careful as you think you are."

Then he's through the gap and gone, silent on hinges that shouldn't be silent, and I'm alone in the dark with a dead lantern, shaking hands, and the specific, furious ache of having just watched someone choose not to kill me and dress it up as strategy instead of what it actually was.

I relight the lantern twice before my hands stop trembling enough to hold the match steady. On the floor, exactly where he stood, one drop of blood, dark and fresh, that isn't mine at all.