In the moment he realized it, she looked at him. Briefly, her eyes came to rest on Gryff where he stood beside the road and somehow she did not kill him too. He had raised his hands without thinking, arms extended and palms open, as though he could halt her with a gesture – or at least show he was unarmed. She saw it, just a blink down to his hands and back up to his face again before she was turning away. It was fast. She was so fast, in a way that made him think of a snake striking at its prey. Even before she had finished turning away from him, she drew a fresh blade from somewhere and threw it at Cuddy. Impossibly, it found the half inch gap in his hard leather collar and sank into his throat.

Fitting, for Cuddy to die on his knees with naught but a look of surprise. Even more fitting, that it was the hand of a woman that did it. All that violent lust was ended at last with the almost leisurely flick of a woman’s wrist, and her barely looking at him as she did it.

Gryff watched him die, trying and failing to relish it. It was all too sudden. One minute he had been bracing himself to watch as Baudry and his men slaughtered yet another group of innocent people, and the next minute – this.

Cuddy was the last to fall. Now she stood with her back to Gryff as she looked over the scene, and he did the same. Baudry and all his men were in the road, lifeless. Among the travelers, one of the knights was injured and the other appeared dead. A woman clutched two children to her while one of the unarmed men of the traveling party stumbled over bodies to reach her. The last was a monk with a bloodied eye and a stunned look.

The beautiful woman took it all in at a glance and turned back to Gryff. Now he saw she was a young maid. She wore no veil, and she was slim and straight, few womanly curves on her slight frame. There was no distress in her. No fear, no sign of what she’d just done. Months he’d spent with these murderous men, and he had learned something about this kind of unceremonious violence, and the kind of person capable of it. Her brows drew together, a look of concern or curiosity or both as she met his eyes again. It made her seem entirely human for the first time.

He tried to tell her that he wasn’t one of the thieves, but it came out as a weak and wordless croak. She was coming toward him with a purpose. He was strangely calm about it, though he didn’t want to die. Not yet. Let him go home first, just once. He only wanted to see his home again in this life.