She unhooked her hand from his. “I’ll take it all.”

4

A loud boom shook Aina awake the next morning. She sat up immediately, all thoughts of sleep forgotten. The others were already on their feet.

“What the hell was that?” groaned Mazir, Kohl’s Shadow, before pulling the covers back over his head.

Mirran, Kohl’s Fox, crouched in front of the window with the distinctive bright blue hair and gold eyes of Kaiyanis people. “Looks like some idiot stepped on one of Kohl’s bombs.”

Shaking her head, Aina got out of bed. She’d squeezed in a shower the night before and worn her clothes to sleep, as usual, so all she had to do was throw on her jacket, boots, and scarf, then get started on this new job.

“Well, I’m not cleaning up the mess,” she said cheerfully. They grumbled in response, rolling back under their blankets as Aina closed the door behind her with a soft click.

She walked down the second-floor hall, plain white walls and cold, gray floor surrounding her, past the other bedroom for Kohl’s three young recruits. She’d spent a few years there, training until Kohl trusted her enough to take on real jobs. While they all knew the basics of combat and espionage, he usually preferred that each of them was more skilled in one area than the others—he’d decided Aina would best serve as a Blade. The recruits were already awake, challenging each other to a knife-throwing game that Kohl had surely put them up to. She paused outside the door of the training room and watched as one of them hit the center of the target and let out a triumphant whoop, then she went downstairs.

Kohl’s office was empty. She slipped inside, then entered a side door into the room where they kept ingredients for poisons. She restocked on the poison darts she used, then went to the armory to replace one of the small blades strapped to the knuckles of her left hand that had gotten bent. As she searched for one, her eyes scanned the two-story, circular armory lined with guns and blades of all sizes. Her first job here, before Kohl started training her to be a Blade, had been to pick up weapons from a warehouse in the east of the city. So many arms purchases went through that place, it was easy for Kohl to buy them in bulk with no one asking questions.

After the war, gangs had risen up to turn a profit in the midst of the city’s rebuilding, and Kohl had built the Dom—the first tradehouse. He kept it and all the other tradehouses in the city safe as long as they paid their commission to him on time. Hers, once she completed this job, would be the first that didn’t owe him a percentage of her earnings. The thought made her nerves flutter with excitement, but she refused to let it get to her head. First, she needed to become a weapon, kill Kouta Hirai, and collect her pay. Then Kohl would see her as someone he could respect and fear. And then, maybe he’d be able to look at her and see something more between them than their work.