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I knew this move. My body knew it. The training hall at fourteen, the smell of sawdust and lamp oil, a man twice my weight twisting against my hold. She’d taught me that lesson so well she was counting on it now. The bones in my wrist strained.

This time, I didn’t hold on.

I let go.

She’d thrown everything into that twist, braced against a grip she was sure would never give. She pitched forward, off balance, her knife arm swinging wide past my hip.

Her eyes widened, the barest fraction. She’d never planned for me to let go.

I caught her knife arm as she stumbled past, and I turned with her, the way she’d taught me to turn an attacker’s weight against him. Her own momentum carried her around. And I guided her blade into her, where she’d meant it for me.

She folded down onto the frozen ground slowly, almost gracefully, the way she did everything. Her fingers loosened from the hilt. I kneeled beside her.

She looked up at me. Her pale eyes moved over my face, and then down to the torn hem of my cloak, to the dark stains of wolf’s blood on the red.

“You let go,” she said. Barely a breath.

“Yes.”

Her lips moved. I leaned closer to hear.

“The best I ever made,” she whispered.

“You didn’t make me,” I said.

But she was already gone.

I kneeled there beside her in the churned frost while the battle rang around us. A vast, aching quiet spread inside. It didn’t feel like a victory.

No, it felt hollow.

I’d been wrestling with what I’d learned since I saw her signature on my death warrant.

She was my family. My blood. My last connection to the Crimson Order.

And my parents’ murderer.

I reached for the clasp at my throat.

I’d worn a red cloak since I was six years old. It had been my uniform, my identity. It had marked me as a weapon of the Order. Her weapon.

It was time to say goodbye. To the Order. To my grandmother. To the one I thought I knew. The one I thought had loved me.

She loved something else more, and what that was I’d probably never understand.

I unfastened the clasp and drew the cloak from my shoulders.

The cold hit me at once, biting through my shirt, and I didn’t care. I shook the red wool out and laid it over my grandmother’s small, still body. Over the red cloak she’d taken out of its glass case to bring me back or watch me die. I drew it over her face and draped it down.

Red over red.

A warm, heavy body pressed against my side as the sounds of battle echoed around me. Conan stood beside me in wolf form, breathing hard, blood matted in his gray fur, the strip from my red cloak still bound around his ribs. He lifted his head to look at me through amber eyes, now burning with more gold.

I buried my fingers in the soft fur at his neck and let out a long sigh. He was alive.

And for the first time since I was six years old, I wasn’t wearing red.

CONAN