“Prince or princess,” she muttered as a blush climbed up her cheeks. To avoid looking at him, she tilted her head up and stared at the walls of weapons circling them, each glimmering silver under the weak winter sun shining through a window near the ceiling.

“Right,” Kohl continued, “so, your charming prince or princess starts sleeping with someone else who doesn’t even know that your sweetheart is in a relationship. Which of them do you think deserves your scorn?”

After a short pause, she said, “The person who cheated on me.”

“Exactly. So why would you blame the hired gun? Blame the person who bought the bullets and told the gun where to point. If there’s any lesson of mine that you remember, Aina, remember this: You are not a person behind your weapon. You are simply the blade itself. Do not make the mistake of thinking you’re anything more important.”

Her eyes snapped to him, but he’d already turned back to his cleaning.

“Is that how you live with it?” she whispered, wondering how much it weighed on his shoulders to give his employees these jobs—if at all. “The guilt?”

“It’s not how I live with it.” He placed his gun down with a clink of metal on wood. “That’s simply the way it is.”

She nodded slowly, tapping her fingers against the wall as she tried to embody his words. Maybe he’d taken her to the armory on purpose, to be among all the scythes, axes, daggers. Blades, like her. The image of the man bleeding out in front of her had faded a little. Distraction was good—from glue, from the lives she’d take. Distraction was what she needed.

“So, who was the first person you killed?” she asked. When he frowned at her, she said, “What? That’s not a normal topic of conversation for people like us?”

“Do you mean my first kill on purpose,” he began, “or by accident?”

“Either. They both end the same.”

For a long moment, she thought he wasn’t going to reply. Then he’d stood from the bench and walked toward her. Her breath had caught as he approached and leaned on the wall next to her, still holding his gun and running a finger over the shiny barrel.

He stood so close, but his eyes were averted from her. Whenever he did look at her, she felt a sense of being examined, like she was one of his guns.

Was that all he would see her as? He was six years older than her, infinitely more accomplished, and she was just another grunt he’d picked up off the streets. What else could he ever want with someone like her?

Finally, as the silence grew suffocating, he spoke. “Remember what I told you the other day? How my old boss sold me out to the Vultures when he wanted to cut off his loose ends and get out of the city.”

When she nodded, her eyes flicking to his vulture tattoo, he said, “Before I went to meet him that night, I thought I’d better get some extra money so my parents and I could start a new life once we broke them out of prison. So, I got a few friends together and sent them to break into one of the Amethyst Hill mansions. They’d all get a cut, so of course they went. When I went to the Tower to meet my boss, and found out he double-crossed me, I thought maybe I could get out of it by telling the Diamond Guards about the robbery. Surely if they knew one of the Steels’ mansions was about to get robbed, they’d let a kid like me go?”