Chapter 3 - The Save

The tent glows orange from a brazier inside, and I already know what I'm walking into because the sounds bleeding through the canvas are not the sounds of sleep. Rhythmic, wet. A woman's voice climbing through her throat and breaking open at the top. Perla would laugh at me for hesitating here. She wouldn't hesitate. She'd be inside already, blade across someone's neck before the next moan.

I cut the panel and step through.

The man is on his knees behind a woman who is, and I say this with full professional detachment that lasts about half a second, fucking gorgeous. Dark hair spilling loose across a furred bedroll, lips parted, her whole body rocking forward with each thrust and pushing back to meet him like she's the one setting the pace. She is. Her palms are flat on the ground, fingers spread, and the muscles in her arms flex every time she drives herself back into him. The brazier throws copper light across the curve of her spine, the way her breasts swing with the motion. I notice all of it. I'm not going to stand here and pretend my eyes went straight to his sword belt, because they didn't. They went exactly where any honest man's eyes would go, and they stayed there for two full seconds before the job caught up with me.

The man grips her hips with both hands and grunts like he's doing the lord's work. For a moment, I wonder if I could replace him and if she'd notice. Joder, Almartín, focus. Fine sword belt thrown over a chest near the entrance. Two rings on his left hand. Better armor than the sentries wore. He counts.

Any other night I'd have watched longer. She is stunning, a woman who puts a crack in my focus, and my brain does what it always does when I see something beautiful in a place like this: it skips sideways, finds the one face it's been circling all night. Perla. Bare stomach, pearl belly ring catching firelight, those legs in those shorts. Mierda. I drag my eyes back to the man. Job.

A pity. A genuine, honest-to-god pity.

I step in behind him. My left hand seals his mouth and my right blade opens his throat in one clean pull, ear to ear, and I lower him down without letting him thrash. Blood pulses hot over my knuckles and runs down the inside of my wrist. The woman is still catching her breath with her eyes closed, her body settling, the rhythm dying in her muscles before her brain catches up.

She opens her eyes when the weight behind her disappears. Turns. Sees me standing over the body with blood dripping from both hands.

She screams.

I'm faster. My palm clamps over her mouth and I drive her back into the bedroll, knee across her hip, blade flat against the pulse in her throat. She writhes under me, fingers clawing at my wrist, and her eyes are huge and white-rimmed in the brazier light and I can feel the scream vibrating against my hand, trying to get out.

"Sleep," I tell her. Quiet. I mean it. Quick is all I can give anyone tonight.

I hold her there and I do what I came to do, and I do not look away while I do it.

Thirteen.

I wipe my blade on the canvas and move into the next lane.

The center of the camp is getting thick with bodies. I've learned the layout now: two rows of large tents running east-west, a narrower cluster of smaller ones along the spine, guy ropes crisscrossing at thigh height because they planned it for daylight and never considered that someone might need to navigate it in the dark with blood-slick boots. I haven't tripped once. The street kid from Torrel is doing a victory lap inside my skull.

The next tent gives me three. A guard sleeping across the entrance flap, two warriors inside on separate bedrolls. The guard goes first, fast and silent, because a body in the lane is a liability. The two warriors go in order of proximity: the closer one never opens his eyes, the far one opens his but that's all he gets to do. My arms are burning by the time I drag the second body clear of the entrance. Not cramped yet, but the night is long and deep cuts take more shoulder than people think. I feel it in the elbow by the third hour. Always the elbow.

Sixteen.

I'm cleaning my blades on a dead man's sleeve when I see it.

A gap between two tent panels. Three inches of orange light where canvas hasn't been staked properly, and through that gap I can see into the adjacent tent. Perla is inside. Bare legs, bare arms, that leather top strapped across her chest and doing absolutely nothing to hide the shape of what's underneath it, and she has a man by the collar and her arm is drawing back for the kill. Controlled. Economical. The blade already angled for the soft spot below the ear. Her ass is right there in those shorts, tight leather riding up against the curve of her thighs, and I'm watching it while she murders a man. Joder. That says everything about my priorities tonight.
Three years since Casarta and I still remember the sound of that arrow going past my ear.

It's a good kill. It would be a clean kill.

Except the second man in the tent is not on a bedroll. He's standing. He's been standing long enough that his hand is already on the haft of an axe, and she's committed to the first kill with her back to him, and he's raising that axe over his head with both hands and he has the angle and the weight and I have maybe two seconds before he splits her open from shoulder to spine.

My hand goes to the throwing knives at my hip. No thought. No calculation. The first one is in my fingers, balanced and warm from sitting against my body all night. The tent gap is three inches wide. Twelve feet of dark air. A moving target.

I throw.

The knife takes him between the eyes with a sound like a fist hitting wet wood. He drops straight down, legs folding, strings cut. No sound except the axe head thumping into the mud a half-second after his knees.

Perla turns.

She looks at the body on the ground. At the knife buried in his forehead. At the three-inch gap in the canvas where I'm standing with my arm still extended from the throw. Her expression goes still in the brazier light, and for one beat she is perfectly readable, which never happens, because Perla is never readable. Surprise. Then something warmer.

Then she grins at me. Slow. Wide. A grin that rewires your whole chest.

My heart goes absolutely stupid. Hammering, slamming against my ribs like it's trying to break out through the front, and my hands are tingling and my face is doing something I can't control and I think, I'm almost certain, that she winks. One quick drop of her left eye. Then she turns back, finishes whatever's left to finish, and vanishes from the gap.

I stand there for a second longer than I should, grinning like a fucking idiot at a slit in the canvas.

Joder, I think. That grin. That wink. I saved her life and she looked at me like I'd held a door open for her. Like I'd passed the salt. Like it was nothing, which means it was everything, because Perla does not waste grins on things that don't matter.

I roll my shoulders. Flex my grip. Move west.

Here's what happens next: I stop being efficient.

Not sloppy. I don't get sloppy. But I take the riskier entrance when the safer one is right there. I cross four feet of open, brazier-lit ground when there's a shadowed route six steps to the left. I pick the far tent that requires me to cross an open lane instead of the near one I could hit through the panel I already cut. I'm doing it because somewhere in the east lanes she might see me through a gap in the canvas, and if she can, I want her to see something worth watching.

The hunt was already in my blood before the grin. It always is. The danger, the soft give of a throat under a sharp edge, all of it sings through me the same way it always has, blood-warm and electric. But now it's in my blood and between my legs and spreading through my whole chest and I can feel both, the killing high and the want, running together, the same pulse now, and I can't separate them anymore. That's a problem I'm going to think about later. Much later. Specifically never.

I don't feel comfortable. I feel like my skin is too small for my body. My hands won't stop working against the blade handles, fingers flexing, re-gripping. I want her to see the next one.

The tent ahead has two guards posted at the entrance, which is new. Guards means whoever's sleeping inside is worth protecting, and worth protecting means someone important. I could go around, hit the two smaller tents flanking it. That's the smart play. That's the efficient play. Eight more bodies in the time it would take to deal with the guarded tent's complications.

I look at the guards. I look at the lane to my left, which runs east, which is where she is.

I go for the guarded tent.

The first guard goes down before he can turn. My left blade punches through the base of his skull from behind, and the weight of him sliding off the steel nearly pulls the handle from my grip. The second one hears the body drop and spins, hand finding his sword hilt, and I'm already inside his reach with my right forearm across his windpipe, driving him backward into the tent wall. My left blade comes up. He's bigger than me by forty pounds and his fingers are digging into the leather at my wrist, clawing for a grip, and he's strong and he's panicking, which is stronger. I press harder, lean my whole body into it, heels braced in the mud, and his sword scrapes halfway from the scabbard before his knees buckle. I hold him up while his hands loosen, then lower him down.

My whole body is humming. That vibration is the after-high of the kill, and I just took two guarded men in eight seconds and I'm still standing and my blood feels like it's on fire and I feel like a god. A small, blood-soaked, grinning god.

I check my grip. Solid. I check the lane.

Empty.

I step inside the tent.

Three men. A folding table with a map weighted by cups. Actual furniture. I stand there for a moment looking at the map and thinking that I should memorize it, that it's probably important, and also that I don't give a shit about the map. Not right now. Right now I care about the jaw cut and the throwing knife and the way she turned and grinned and did not say thank you, because she would never say thank you, because thank you is not what rivals say.

Not bad. That's what she would have said. I can hear her voice in my head, low and cutting. Not bad.

I kill all three efficiently and without showboating, because there's no gap in this tent and she can't see me, and there is no point in killing pretty for an empty room.

Twenty-one. More than enough for the Alcalde's threshold.

I clean my blades on the map and walk back out into the lane.

The night is still and hot and tastes like blood and woodsmoke. Somewhere in the east lanes she's moving through it without me, silent and lethal, and I'm standing here soaked in other people's blood, lit up from the inside, skin buzzing, cock half-hard, chest full of something that has her name on it.

I roll my neck until it cracks and go west again.

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