Rylok spun around, his face draining of color. He drew a slender blade from his belt. Not a dagger—something longer and more elegant, with a curved tip that gleamed in the lamplight.
"Symond, stop!" Violette emerged from the shadows, her own weapon drawn but held low.
Symond glanced at her, vaguely curious about the distress in her voice. She looked genuinely upset, which seemed an overreaction to simply doing their job. Weren't they here to catch this man? To kill him, maybe? The details were a bit fuzzy, lost in the pleasant haze that had settled over everything sincethe big erasure.
"Sorry," he said, though he wasn't sure if he was apologizing to Violette or to Rylok or maybe to no one in particular. "But he's right there. Seems efficient."
Violette had little conviction in her stance, her eyes darting between Rylok and the tunnel. "The Hive wants what you stole. Give us the formula and the Courtier contacts, and we can end this without bloodshed."
"And then what?" Rylok laughed. "You let me walk away? The Hive doesn't leave loose ends, especially ones who know their secrets."
"I can arrange safe passage," Violette said, taking a careful step forward.
Symond watched the exchange with mild interest, like observing two strangers haggle over the price of fruit. Rylok kept shifting his weight, preparing to move.
"Seems like you two have a lot to discuss," Symond remarked, casually adjusting his grip on his dagger. "But I'm getting the sense that we're supposed to stop him from leaving, not negotiate his travel plans."
Violette shot him a warning glance. "Symond, please. Let me handle this."
Rylok lunged at Violette while she was distracted, his blade slicing through the air where she'd been standing a heartbeat before. She twisted away, countering with a strike of her own that he parried.
Symond watched them dance for a moment, oddly detached from the violence unfolding before him. They moved well together, like they'd practiced this, each anticipating the other's movements. Maybe they had trained together once.
Rylok and Violette were locked in combat, her speed matched against his strength, neither gaining the advantage. They'd forgotten him entirely, it seemed. How strange, to be forgotten in the middle of a mission. How freeing.
He crossed the cellar in long strides that carried him behind Rylok. The man sensed him too late, starting to turn just as Symond's dagger slid between his ribs. A textbook strike—angledupward, finding the space between bones, puncturing the heart with minimal resistance.
Rylok made a soft sound, more surprise than pain, his eyes widening as he looked down at the blade protruding from his side. His own weapon clattered to the floor, suddenly too heavy for fingers that no longer remembered how to grip.
"Sorry about that," Symond said, and meant it in his way. "Nothing personal. Just seemed like what I was supposed to do."
"NO!" A boy's scream cut through the cellar, high and terrible. "PAPA!"
Rylok crumpled, his body folding in on itself as Symond withdrew the blade. Blood spread across the front of his fine waistcoat, transforming the emerald fabric to a muddy brown. His lips moved, trying to form words that wouldn't come, eyes fixed on the young boy’s face with a desperate intensity.
Violette stood frozen, her expression a mixture of horror and resignation. "Symond," she whispered. "What have you done?"
The boy, who must have been hiding in the tunnel, ran to his father's side and threw himself across the dying man's chest. A wooden bird lay forgotten on the floor, one wing snapped off by the fall. The boy's sobs echoed off the stone walls, raw and primal.
"My job, I think," Symond replied, wiping his blade clean on his trousers. "We came to stop him, and now he's stopped."
He felt nothing as he watched the boy cling to his father's cooling body, nothing as Rylok's eyes dulled and fixed on the ceiling, nothing as Violette stared at him like he'd transformed into something unrecognizable before her eyes.
Funny, that. He felt nothing at all as he stood in a cellar with a dead man and a weeping child, and wasn't that better than feelingtoo much? Wasn't that why he'd sought out to erase everything in the first place?
Symond smiled, because smiling seemed like the thing to do when you'd accomplished a mission, even if the mission had ended with a small boy wailing over his father's corpse. The sound echoed oddly in the cellar, bouncing off the stone walls like it was trying to escape but couldn't find the way out.
"Should we check his pockets?" Symond asked Violette, gesturing toward Rylok's body. "For the formula thing you mentioned?"
Violette's face hardened into something that might have been disgust if he'd cared enough to interpret it properly. "I'll handle it," she said, her voice flat. "You've done enough."
"Great," he said, sheathing his dagger. "I'll just wait over here, then."
He leaned against the wall, watching as Violette gently moved the sobbing child aside and began searching Rylok's body. The boy fought her at first, small fists pounding against her arms, but eventually collapsed into a heap of exhausted grief beside his father.
Symond observed it all with mild interest, like watching rain slide down a window. A pattern that meant something, probably, but not to him. Not anymore.
"I think there used to be a me that would have cared about this," he remarked to no one in particular.
