They jumped into the safety of the corridor at the last second, Aina letting the grappling hook fall along with the walkway.

As they sped down the corridor, they heard the walkway crash against the diamond floor of the courtyard. The sound reverberated so loudly, Aina failed to hear Ryuu shout something. He gestured for them to follow him.

They raced down the hall and reached the vent in the floor. Aina went last, her hands flying over the holds in the wall until she landed in the hallway below. They ran for it, back toward the main tunnel of the subway, and slammed shut the door to the corridor.

Since it was only midmorning, construction was still underway with workers gathered around the platform. A few glanced over at their sudden appearance.

Ryuu took a deep breath and called over, “Just doing a quick site inspection. Continue working.”

They nodded and turned back to their work, while Aina, Teo, Ryuu, and Raurie walked as casually as they could manage, as if they hadn’t just collapsed multiple floors of the prison.

“You can go home after this,” Aina whispered to Teo as they walked. “I don’t want you getting hurt any more because of me.”

He kept walking as if he hadn’t heard her. Fear hit her, almost as strongly as her fear of Kohl coming to kill her if she messed up the Kouta job again.

But unlike with Kohl, she couldn’t simply kill Kouta and make things better.

She didn’t know how to fix this, how not to lose Teo, and the idea that she might fail at this hurt more than any punch or threat Kohl had sent her way.

29

While a nurse took care of Teo’s injuries, Aina waited in a first-floor study room of Ryuu’s mansion, so that the nurse wouldn’t see her and recognize her from the posters around the city. She held a pack of ice to the back of her neck, which ached after the guard had twisted it.

Teo’s face loomed in her thoughts, in the cell when he’d told her to get away from him, and on the balcony when for a moment, she was terrified he would let her fall to her death. He’d come back for her, but he also hadn’t said a word to her on the entire way back to Ryuu’s mansion.

A steadily falling rain painted the Hirai gardens a nearly black color and pattered against the floor-to-ceiling window she stood in front of. In her parents’ home growing up, there was no glass on the windows, and rain only meant floods. The Dom grew chilly when it rained, as there was barely any insulation in its old walls. The cold usually kept her senses sharp, but right now, she preferred the warmth.

An hour after escaping the prisons, they reached Ryuu’s house just as the rain began to fall. He snuck them inside a basement entrance and told Aina to pull up her hood and cover her face with her scarf. It was still a risk that one of his guards or servants would recognize her or Teo, but they now had nowhere else to go. They managed to reach a room on the first floor with no one raising an alarm. Ryuu had a nurse called in from the city to tend to Teo and had two servants sent to retrieve Teo’s mother’s body. But when they returned, they reported that the body had already been removed.