Mariana
The woman moved faster than anything human fear should have allowed, closing on the nearest Vasquez fighter with a speed that spoke of desperation layered over whatever control Cassius had forced into her.
Mariana didn't reach for a blade. She reached for the bond instead, the artificial thread Cassius had built and reinforced, and threw everything she had left into finding its weakest point before the fighter in the woman's path paid for Cassius's cruelty with his life.
The thread felt wrong beneath her searching — raw, unhealed, stitched together with force rather than grown naturally the way even the newest Vasquez loyalty bonds had been. It gave easier than she expected, not because it was weak, but because it had never been allowed to properly take root at all.
She pulled.
