He is not my first kill. And he will not be my last. No one survives long in this town without cracking a few eggs.

“Ana,” I say, “must you always make such a mess wherever you go?”

Ana shoots me a mischievous grin. With sweat beading on her brow and plastering her shirt to her skin, she has never looked more beautiful to me. Her hair began the day bound back in a green ribbon of the finest silk. Now it flows around her shoulders, as free and wild as she is. My hands twitch with the urge to run my fingers through those auburn tresses, to feel that silken softness against my skin. The kicker is that I don’t have to imagine the sensation. I know what it feels like. I’ve brushed and braided it more times than I can count. I know exactly what it looks like spread against crisp white sheets. I know these things, but I wish to know them even better and in very different ways. I clutch the hilt of my sword a little tighter, grateful to have something solid to hold.

“Oh, come now, Kiki.” Ana winks at me. My heart sputters in my chest, like a bird fighting against a too small cage. “Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy yourself.”

At my feet, the man I mistook for dead groans. Ana arches a thick eyebrow at me. I roll my eyes and flick the blood from my sword again. It’s a pointless gesture. It will need a thorough cleaning once we get home. “I would but…” I shoot her a grin. “We both know it would be a lie.”

I draw in a breath—through my mouth, not my nose, as the man’s stench is quite atrocious and will only worsen with death—and drive the finely sharpened steel through his heart. I make it look easy, but it’s not. There’s a certain trick to sliding a thin blade into the space between a man’s ribs. It took me quite a few tries to get it right, but now that I have it down to an art, it’s a mercy really. A direct blow to the heart kills a man quicker than anything else. It would have taken him an hour to bleed out from his stomach wound.

I may be ruthless, but I am not cruel. I think it’s one of the things Ana likes about me. I do bad things when I must, but I try to do good when I can.

Today, we have done a public service in more ways than one.