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“You have several faces, and I’ve catalogued all of them, and this is a new one.” Marco abandoned the invoice, delighted by the change of subject. “Is it the dragon? Please let it be the dragon. I have theories.”

“Goodnight, Marco.”

“That’s not a no!” he called after her, as the door swung shut behind her, already laughing.

Romily had made the walk to her car alone a hundred times without once needing to think about it — lock the studio, cut through the loading dock, cross at the corner where the streetlight had been dying for a month, three more blocks to where she always parked because the meter there never worked and nobody had fixed it in six years. She knew this route the way she knew her own workbench, without needing to look at it directly.

Tonight the block sounded wrong.

Same cars. Same dumpster smell drifting off the service road. Same distant traffic hum that never fully quit in this city no matter the hour. But the pitch underneath all of it had changed — a weight settling low in her stomach that had nothing to do with the ordinary noise of a city minding its own business. She’d been looked at before — construction workers, drunk guys outside bars, the occasional weirdo who thought eye contact was a conversation starter. This wasn’t that. This was patient. This had been waiting.

They came out of the alley as she passed it, and there wasn’t a single thing amateur about the way they did it.

Two men. Coordinated. One cut left to block the route back toward the studio before she’d fully clocked the one on her right, and that alone told her how much thought had gone into this — this wasn’t opportunity, this was a plan that had been waiting for her to walk into it, timed and rehearsed. No shouting. No demands. Two men closing a gap with the calm efficiency of people who had done this before and expected to do it again, dressed like they wanted to disappear into any city block in the world, faces she was never going to be able to describe accurately to a police sketch artist even if she got the chance to try.

She dropped her bag and went for the nearest one’s eyes.

Fantastic. Two of them. Very professional. Ten out of ten for effort, gentlemen, terrible timing. I have a commission due Thursday and no time in my schedule for this.

Two years of Tuesday-night classes in a strip-mall studio that smelled like old carpet paid for themselves in the first half-second — she got her fingers close enough to his eyes that he flinched back on instinct, and used the flinch to drive the heel of her palm up into his nose. Cartilage gave under the strike, a wet crack that traveled straight up through her wrist, and he staggered back with both hands flying to his face, swearing in a language she didn’t recognize and didn’t have time to place.

One down, temporarily. One more closing fast.

She pivoted on her back foot, put her shoulder into the second man’s chest before he could get both arms around her, and drove a knee up toward anything soft. He twisted at the last second — enough training of his own to protect the obvious target — and took it on the thigh, hard enough that his leg buckled for exactly one step. She used that step. She grabbed a fistful of his jacket, hauled him off balance, and threw an elbow into his jaw with everything her shoulder had left to give.

He went sideways into the brick wall. She didn’t wait to see how he landed.

She was running, calculating the six feet of open ground she still needed to clear, when the first man came back — nose bleeding, eyes furious, far less careful this time. A hand closed around her wrist hard enough to promise a bruise. She twisted into it instead of away, the way she’d been taught, and drove her elbow backward into his ribs when he grabbed for her a second time, catching enough of him squarely to buy herself another half-second of precious room. It wasn’t enough. She knew that with the same clean, unemotional certainty she used to know a piece of glass was about to crack — a fact arriving ahead of the fear, cold and factual, no time to be afraid of it yet.

The second man peeled himself off the wall faster than she liked, spat blood, and came back in from her blind side. She heard him more than saw him — a scrape of boot on concrete, a shift in the air behind her shoulder — and turned half a second too late to get her arm up in time.

He got it around her from behind, forearm locking hard across her collarbone, and hauled her back against his chest hard enough to drive the breath out of her. She stamped down on his instep, threw her head back into the nearest part of his face she could reach, connected hard enough to earn a grunt — but the first man had recovered enough to grab her other wrist, and between the two of them the math she’d been managing, barely, on pure adrenaline and a retired cop’s screaming lessons, stopped being anything close to even.

She was still working out her next move, still fighting the arm locked across her chest, when the alley changed completely.

Norden wasn’t moving at a speed that belonged to the man she’d spent two weeks trading barbs with over structural drawings.

She caught pieces of it, disconnected, the way you catch pieces of anything moving too fast for a human eye to track cleanly — a shape crossing the mouth of the alley that hadn’t been there a breath ago, the arm around her collarbone simply gone, the man who’d been holding her no longer anywhere near her at all. The first man’s grip on her wrist vanished a half-second later, and with it came a crack of impact against brick loud enough to travel through the soles of her boots. The second man got maybe half a syllable of a sound out before that stopped too. It took perhaps ten seconds, start to finish. She counted, later, trying to reconstruct it, and kept arriving at ten seconds for a job that could not have finished that fast.

Then the alley was quiet, and the two men who’d been trying to put her in a van were not part of the scene anymore, and Norden was standing three feet away from her with his hands loose at his sides, not even breathing hard.

He looked like a man who’d walked briskly to catch a train. He didn’t look like a man who’d dismantled two grown men in under a minute. His shirt wasn’t even wrinkled, which struck her, in the delirium of adrenaline crashing out of a body all at once, as the single most unfair detail of the entire night.

“You have security watching me.”

It wasn’t a question. She heard herself say it the way you hear yourself say things in dreams — accurate, but arriving from somewhere she hadn’t consciously decided to speak from. Her hands were shaking hard enough to rattle her own keys.

“Yes.”

“How long.” She already knew the security existed. What she didn’t know was how long it had been there before she’d noticed.

“Since the second day.”

No apology. No hedging, no softening it for her benefit, no attempt whatsoever to make it smaller than it was. His voice stayed flat, inflectionless, and he closed the last three feet between them without her fully registering the movement until he was there, and held her gaze like a man reading a number off a receipt he had zero intention of disputing.

She stood there a second, absorbing it, the adrenaline still hot enough in her blood that the information landed strangely — not as a shock exactly, more like a puzzle piece sliding into a slot she hadn’t known was empty until right now.

The fury arrived seconds behind the relief, which turned out to be the most annoying part of the entire night.