With a cheery wave, Aina leapt over the guards’ immobile bodies and opened the door ahead, expecting a bedroom. What she actually saw made her roll her eyes. A library. Of course Kouta would be in a library even in the middle of a lockdown on his own house.

It was one like she’d never seen before. The whole library was circular with bookshelves set upon rising concentric platforms, the room so wide that the farthest bookshelves disappeared into the room’s shadows. Cedar beams crisscrossed the ceiling in an umbrella-like design, meeting in the middle. A wide table sat in the sunken center of the room, but was unoccupied.

Kouta must be among the bookshelves. And what of his brother? All the guards must have been busy searching the halls to find her, not yet aware that she was already here.

A hand latched on to her shoulder.

“No one is supposed to be here. Intruder! Guards, help!”

She spun around, shooting the dart out of her mouth. It buried itself in the servant’s neck, and he collapsed on the floor with a dull thud.

Aina moved forward, searching every inch of the place for Kouta and placing another dart in her mouth as she went. She kept her footsteps light. The library was so quiet, the slightest sound would give away her location and the Hirai brothers could hide. But as she passed an aisle between bookshelves, her breath caught.

There he was, at a desk, scribbling in a notebook full of figures, probably something to do with their family’s mining business. Shadows encroached around the small bubble of golden light from the lamp on his desk. She withdrew a diamond-edged dagger.

For a moment, she hesitated, doubt gripping her. Success had never been so close before, never right at her fingertips and so easy to grasp.

Good things don’t happen to girls who come from nothing.

Another Blade should be in this mansion, a defenseless target the only thing standing between them and their future. It didn’t seem real that this could be her opportunity.

Yet she was the only one who could make it real.

Lunging forward, she grabbed Kouta around the neck and forced him to the floor in the span of a breath.

He tried to speak, but she swept the blade across his throat, blood coating her arms in a hot wave. All his money wouldn’t save him now.

She never felt joy from killing, but with this one, like the baker, she felt a small sense of justice. Kouta was a Steel, the same as all the others who kept people like her poor and Inosen like her parents at their mercy. But unlike the baker, she’d just earned twenty-five thousand kors for this kill.

Before letting Kouta drop to the floor, her eyes fell to a ring on his right hand: three large diamonds interspersed with two rubies on a silver band. That would fetch a nice amount of kors.

As she slid the ring off his finger and placed it in the pouch with her darts, a gunshot fired and a searing pain reached her side, making her drop the dagger. She let go of the dead man and rolled to the side to face his younger brother, Ryuu Hirai.