Straightening her shoulders, she shouted, “Kohl! We need to talk.”

A few more minutes passed. Her vision wavered, blurring momentarily and then clearing, over and over.

Finally, the door creaked open. Shadows spilled onto the sidewalk. Kohl Pavel stepped outside, his eyes and the sapphires on his watch brightening the dark street.

35

Silence fell as Aina and Kohl stared each other down. The glue helped dull her fear of his calculating expression and the shadows surrounding them. She tried to focus on him, but swayed slightly in place as a wave of dizziness hit her.

“I’d ask if you have Kouta Hirai’s head behind your back,” Kohl said after a few long minutes of silence had passed. “But we both know—”

“If you’re going to kill me, stop stalling,” she said, her lips numbing as she spoke. “Don’t hide behind your gun or your taunts. Fight me and we’ll see who’s left alive.”

His footsteps echoed down the quiet street as he approached her, the sudden movement making her take a few involuntary steps backward and curse herself for doing so. His eyes lit up as if he were amused by her state.

She gulped when the sliver of metal visible under Kohl’s jacket flashed under the moonlight. He probably had his new favorite Blade, Tannis, waiting in the shadows to take out Aina with a throwing star to the throat. Was that a shadow passing along the window of the manor or did she imagine it? Nausea swept through her, but she forced it down and tried to still her trembling hands.

“You never wanted me to win, did you?” she asked. “You never wanted me to open my own tradehouse.”

Another long silence passed before he said, “I wanted it very much, actually. We could have started a partnership, and none of the other fools in this city would have stood a chance against us. But then you failed.”

“And then you threatened and abandoned me. You left me open to be killed.”

“You know how the job works. You were a Blade. When a weapon can’t do its job anymore, it needs to be discarded.”

She swayed on the spot and stumbled, but caught herself before she could fall over. Then, she threw away all the rules of being a quiet Blade who didn’t question her boss.

“Who paid you for this job?” she asked through gritted teeth. “Whose money is so important to you that all the years I’ve done my job right don’t even matter anymore?”

“You knew the risks going in,” Kohl said in a slow voice, as if he were speaking to a child. “You knew this would be the biggest job you’d ever taken on, and you knew I trusted you to do it, but you still failed. Don’t you understand that the more you have and the higher you stand, the more someone will have to fight to knock you down? Everything I do is to raise our place on that pedestal. I got that job for you, for me, for everyone here, and your failure put us all in jeopardy. I won’t risk my life’s work for the sake of one disappointing Blade.”