Page 88 of No One’s Daughter

​Where he struck, I filled the gaps.

​We moved together, like we’d done this a hundred times before. Like we were built for it.

​A man lunged for me from the side—I felt him before I saw him, instinct and training kicked in as I ducked, pivoted and drove my elbow back into this throat hard enough to send him reeling.

​Davien was there a second later, finishing him.

​Another came at him from behind him and I reacted without thinking, my hand snapping out, that same strange energy from training surging through me as the air tightened around him, halting him just long enough for Davien to rip his head clean off his shoulders.

​“Good,” I muttered.

​We didn’t stop moving.

​Even as more of them poured in.

​But they weren’t ready for the way we fought, not as individuals, but as a team. A unit. An unstoppable force, perfectly in sync with each other.

​Blood painted the floor and walls and the air was thick with it.

​We fought until there was silence. I stood there, chest rising and falling, the echo of it all ringing in my ears as I looked around.

​There were none left standing.

​We’d done it.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Davien

I SHOULD HAVE been thinking about the breach and how the Ninth had managed to find us. About how I’d somehow led them to Niko’s door and the implications of that, the mistakes I must have made somewhere along the way. Maybe I hadn’t covered our trail as well as I thought I had. Maybe I’d become complacent after weeks of silence from them. How long had they been watching us? Had they been watching us?

I should have been dissecting every second of it, replaying everything over and over until I found the crack. I should have been worried for Niko, the Ninth didn’t just find people like him, which meant that the mistake must have come from me. I should have worried for his safety and whether he’d gotten away.

I knew all of that. Understood it.

Yet, every time I tried to follow that thread of logic, it snapped, dragging me violently off course to something far more inconvenient.

Her.

Ailsa.

Because, fuck me.

​The way she had moved, so effortlessly, like she’d been doing this all her life. No fear or hesitation. Just instinct and fire, something that fit so seamlessly with my own that it rattled me more than the attack itself. She’d anticipated my moves just as well as I had hers. We had moved as one. It felt like we were dancing more than killing. I’d never experienced anything as natural.

​She’d even used her magic. Not too much to tire her out or draw unwanted attention but enough to use it in lethal, precise bursts.

​I’d decided then that I needed to tell her everything. Tell her the whole truth of everything I knew about who she was and more importantly who she was to become.

​I’d been wrong to ever doubt her.

​She was made for this.

​She stood there, inches from me, chest heaving, flushed from the adrenaline and covered in the blood of her enemies. Her blue eyes were more alive than I’d ever seen. They were a storm of their own, daring the world to come at her, only for her to destroy it.

​She wasn’t fazed by death. Instead, it seemed to fuel her.

​And what we had almost done. The realisation that it wasn’t a game to me—it never had been.