I dry my hands on the black towel, checking under each nail. Clean. Check the cuffs—no spray. Another successful collection, another man who understands what happens when you skim from my operations. He'll count coins left-handed now. If he's smart, he'll count them honestly.
The shadow roads back to the compound burn. Copper floods my mouth and I spit black bile onto the tunnel floor, watch it smoke against stone. The tremor in my left hand has spread up my forearm. I make a fist, force it still. Two years left if I'm careful with the shadows. One if I keep using them for every message that needs sending.
I'm twenty feet from the compound's entrance when I smell it.
Food. Real food. Not the stale bread and dried meat my people survive on, but actual cooked food. Chicken. Herbs. Fresh herbs in my fortress of killers.
My hand goes to my blade. Poison? Trap? Someone cooking evidence?
I stop. Listen.
Voices carry through the walls—multiple voices engaged in actual conversation. Not planning kills or counting gold buttalking. Someone laughs. The sound echoes wrong in halls built to muffle screams.
Where the fuck are the door guards?
I enter through the main door, shadows already spreading to assess threats. The common room—usually empty except for people maintaining weapons in dark corners—is full. Twenty of my killers crowded around mismatched bowls, eating together at Sunday dinner instead of sharpening tools I aim at my enemies.
"Boss." Gray Streak shoots to his feet, almost drops his bowl. There's color in his face. Actual color instead of his usual corpse-gray. "You're back."
"Where are the door guards?"
"Shift change. They're..." He glances at the others. "They're eating."
"Eating." I test the word. "My security is eating dinner."
"There was enough for everyone. She made—" He stops. The temperature drops ten degrees. My shadows spread across the floor.
"She?"
"The artist. She brought Ridge back. He was dying." Gray Streak straightens, meets my eyes. Brave or stupid. "She fed us."
I don't speak. Let the silence grow teeth. Count the faces. Ridge sits wrapped in blankets I don't recognize, sipping broth from a bowl that shouldn't exist. His fever broke. He should be dead from pneumonia, not sitting up and breathing clear.
"Show me."
They part. I walk to the kitchen—we don't have a kitchen, we have a room with a cold fireplace—and stop in the doorway.
The transformation is obscene. Clean surfaces gleam where soot should cake. Actual firewood stacks by the hearth. A pot steams on the fire, and the smell of bay leaves and cookedmeat fills air that should taste like dust. Someone has scrubbed decades of evidence from these walls.
"She said we live like animals." Tooth appears at my shoulder, clutching his empty bowl. "Said the mold would kill us faster than any blade."
My hand moves without thought. His throat fits perfectly in my grip, soft tissue compressing under my fingers. "You let a civilian into our compound." Each word comes out precise against his gasping. "You showed her our location. Our defenses. Our weaknesses."
"Boss—" Gray Streak starts forward.
I squeeze harder. Tooth's eyes bulge. Good. "One woman. One woman and you all forget twenty years of training?"
"She saved Ridge." The words come from behind me. I turn, still holding Tooth. Silent Syl stands there, signing as she speaks—first words in four years. "He was dying. She saved him."
I release Tooth. He drops, gasping. My point made.
"Where is she now?"
"Gone." Gray Streak helps Tooth to his feet. "Left an hour ago. Said she's coming back tomorrow. With vegetables. And proper pots. And someone named Matthias to look at the mold."
The laugh that comes out of me is black bile. "Tomorrow. She's coming back tomorrow."
"We tried to tell her—" someone starts.
