“Do you remember a few years ago,” Kohl’s voice broke into her thoughts, “we sat in the train station’s tower, and I told you what an assassin and an arms dealer have in common?”

“It was the middle of winter and my fingers were about to freeze off, but you wouldn’t let us leave.” She grimaced. “Assassins and arms dealers are nothing but the providers of a service, and therefore we have no reason to feel shame for the deaths we cause.” The words trailed off. Her years on the streets had wiped all sense of shame from her mind regardless, and she knew better than to question Kohl’s many lessons—he seemed to enjoy giving his employees cryptic advice and watching them work it out for themselves—but something about this particular bit of murderous wisdom still made her uneasy.

Then he turned and smiled, making her forget all her moral qualms. She was safer without them anyway. More deadly.

“I have a new job for you,” he said. “After my cut, you’ll get fifty thousand kors.”

Her breath caught. She clenched her fists to keep her hands from shaking. This job would earn her more than one hundred times what she’d gotten for killing the baker. It would be more money than her parents combined had ever earned and more than what anyone in the Stacks expected to see in a lifetime. She’d worked the past six years to keep herself off the streets, and a job like this would practically guarantee that she’d never return.

All she had to do was kill a person.

“That’s a lot of money.”

“It will be the biggest haul our tradehouse has ever seen.” His voice became smoother, in the controlled and calculated tone he always used when speaking of money. “Why do you think I chose you?”

“I don’t care. Where is the fish? I’ll gut him right now.” She spoke so fast, the words tripped over each other.

“That’s precisely why.” His whisper rose the hair on the back of her neck. “You don’t ask questions. You don’t miss. When you decide to kill someone, you don’t stand there dawdling and playing with your knives. You just do it.”

She shrugged. “Point me to him.”

“It doesn’t hurt that you’re almost as good as me.”

Shifting her weight to one foot, Aina tried to control her temper. Kohl placed his hands on the edge of the desk and said nothing, each passing second of silence putting her more on edge.

“Kouta Hirai.”

She raised her eyebrows. Few names held more weight in Sumerand, let alone the capital of Kosín. About a hundred years ago, the Hirai family had come from Natsuda and monopolized the trade of mining tools. Spades, shovels, wedges, pickaxes, pry bars, sifting implements, and anything else needed to mine were entirely manufactured and sold by them. Twenty years ago, they bought the mines as well and grew their fortune with diamond sales to magic practitioners and mining tool sales to Steels. After the war, once diamonds were prohibited for use in magic, the family’s two young sons, Kouta and Ryuu Hirai, led the country to become the leading exporter of diamonds worldwide. They were surrounded by bodyguards at all times and lived in the most protected part of the city, Amethyst Hill. They were untouchable.