The knife dropped.
Before the man could recover, Magnus slammed him face-first into the railing. Stone rang under the impact. The assassin rebounded, dazed, and Magnus seized the front of his jacket with one hand and the ruined wrist with the other, owning the man completely.
Through the open balcony doors Elia heard the first startled gasps from inside the ballroom. Crystal chimed somewhere as a guest jerked backward too quickly. Music still played for half a heartbeat more, absurdly elegant beneath the raw brutality exploding just outside.
Magnus never once looked away from the man in his grip. The assassin tried to wrench free. Magnus tightenedhishold.
The man drove an elbow backward. Magnus shifted, absorbed it, and forced him down harder against stone. Elia saw the muscles in Magnus’s shoulders flex beneath torn fabric and skin, saw the contained savagery in the movement, the total absence of panic. He wasn’t simply fighting. He was ending the threat.
And he was terrifying.
She had known he was dangerous. Everyone knew that. Magnus Severin moved through rooms with power clinging to him like a second skin. Men stepped carefully around him. Women watched him with caution and hunger and the kind of curiosity that came from seeing something beautiful and realizing too late it had teeth.
But this was something else.This was what happened when danger reached for what washis.
The assassin bucked again.
Magnus leaned close.
Close enough that the man had no choice but to look directly into his eyes. Close enough that Elia knew, with a certainty that made her stomach drop, that the assassin understood in that instant he had not merely failed.
He had made a fatal miscalculation.
Magnus’s voice was calm. Almost conversational. “You should’ve brought a gun.”Then he hauled the man upright, pivoted with brutal efficiency, and threw him over the balcony.
Elia saw the body disappear beyond the rail.She didn’t see the fall.For one endless heartbeatthere was nothing.Then a dull, sickening impact rose from the courtyard below.
The music inside the ballroom cut off at last and someone screamed.Another voice shouted for security. Chairs scraped. Glass shattered. The spell of the gala broke all at once, glamour collapsing into fear in a wave of noise that washed through the open doors.
Magnus turned immediately.
Blood sheeted down his arm now. It streaked his hand, ran over his knuckles, fell in a bright stream to the balcony floor. His face had hardened into something cold and pitiless, all taut rage and ruthless purpose. He crossed to her in two strides and gripped her jaw lightly, forcing her eyes tohis.
“Are you hurt?”
The question hit with almost as much force as the attack itself.She shook her head too fast. “No.”
His gaze moved over her anyway. Throat. Shoulders. Hands. Dress. The fast, merciless inventory of a man who would not tolerate missing a wound because panic obscured it.Only when he was satisfied did he releaseher.
“You’re bleeding,” she gasped.
“Later.”
He caught her wrist and pulled her toward the ballroom.
Inside, chaos had already begun to spread in widening circles. Guests clustered away from the balcony doors, pale and disordered,trying to understand what they had just heard and what they thought they might have seen. Security men were converging from opposite sides of the room, radios crackling, jackets shifting as hands moved toward concealed weapons. The chandeliers still blazed. The flowers still gleamed in silver bowls. The entire room looked grotesquely unchanged except for the human panic running throughit.
Magnus ignored every bit ofit.
He moved through the center of the ballroom with blood on his arm and fury in every line of his body, and the crowd opened before him as if compulsion had finally overpowered confusion. Men stepped aside. Women flinched back. No one blocked his path. No one asked a question.
Elia stumbled once on the hem of her gown. He steadied her without slowing.
“Magnus.” Her voice came thin and shaken. “The cut.”
He looked down only long enough to pin her with that pale, dangerous stare. “Stay with me.”
There was no comfort in the words. It was a command, ademand, arefusal to let the shock take her under.
