“Come.” She placed a hand on his shoulder and steered him away from a gang of heavily tattooed men who would cut his eyes out and sell them to the nearest buyer if he looked too closely. “Walk at my pace. And get your damn hands out of your pockets unless you happen to have a knife or gun in them.”

After another block, Ryuu leaned toward her and said in a low voice, “The mere fact that you have to come up with reasons to kill her means you value human life in some way. Admit it.”

“You’ve known me for a few days, and you already think you know me well enough to judge whether I’m a good person or not,” she said, shaking her head. “Do you still have some childish fantasy that everyone is inherently good and just needs a fair chance? Or are you trying to make me into a decent person, so that you can take credit for saving me?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it and sighed as if to say she was hopeless.

The next few minutes passed in silence, but then, there came that feeling when someone was watching her, their eyes burning into her back so she knew exactly where they were and could defend herself. But over time, she’d felt a certain pair of eyes more so than any other, and they’d developed a distinctive feel. These were Kohl’s eyes.

She turned, both hands going to dagger handles. After a quick scan of the rooftops, she found him about two hundred feet away. In the tower of the train station’s second floor, where they’d spent more hours together than she could count, he stood partially hidden behind a pillar. His eyes fixed directly on her, as if he’d been watching her progress throughout the city and could draw a map of her footsteps. Had he watched her fight with Tannis? Would he have stepped in to stop it if either of them had tried to deal a fatal blow?

Even from far away, he could find her easily and predict her next moves. She wondered if he knew she was going to see an Inosen, if he would tell Tannis. But he wasn’t the only one who knew things.

In their years working together, he’d trusted her with far more of his past than he’d told most people. Apart from his crimes, his tactics, his secret passages throughout the city, she knew he couldn’t sleep at night and only closed his eyes at dawn; she knew he took his coffee black with one spoon of sugar like an old Milano man; she knew he was paranoid about being poisoned and so had made himself immune to most, drinking or injecting them in small doses to become accustomed to them; and she knew that when they fought together, they were nearly unstoppable.

Shortly before she’d met Teo, Kohl had gathered her and Mirran to rob a ship of visiting Kaiyanis diplomats. Mirran, an excellent actress and Kaiyanis herself, had donned a servant’s uniform—after Aina had knocked out the unsuspecting servant with the hilt of her knife—and slipped onto the ship within minutes while the diplomats had gone to a dinner at the Tower.