Page 94 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“I know better than you.”

His hand goes to his blade.

Renn shifts, uneasy. Rosalind lifts the sphere, and its copper surface dulls as if the room stole its light.

Kessa’s voice snaps through all of it.

“Enough. Nobody cuts anybody unless I say the floor can have blood.”

The hook surges toward her voice. There. This is the moment.

The enemy is not waiting for the next route. It is waiting for her to keep choosing restraint. It has built its pattern around her mercy. So I have to remove mercy from the room.

I look at Rosalind. She sees it first. Arena-born. Arena-scarred. One prisoner recognizing the breath before another prisoner does something unforgivable. She narrows her eyes. I move.

I twist into Syin’s reach before his blade clears leather, slam my shoulder into his chest hard enough to drive air from him, then catch his wrist before he can reverse the grip. Renn lunges. I hook my foot behind his knee and send him into the table instead of the wall. Slates scatter. Clay markers crack. The copper sphere rolls toward Rosalind’s boot. One of Kessa’s chipped clay route tokens skitters under the table and stops against my boot.

Kessa shouts my name.

I do not look.

If I look, I fail.

The guard at the door opens it from the outside because that is what guards do when the room sounds like violence and someone they trust might be dying. I use his loyalty against him. Krix would approve.

That is nearly enough to make me vomit. I have worked for so long to break free of their lessons. The invisible chains that bind without visibility. But there is no easy escape.

I strike the guard under the ribs with two fingers and catch him as he folds so his skull does not hit stone. He will breathe. He will hate me. Both are acceptable.

“Rhazek!” Kessa’s voice cracks this time.

The hook lunges toward the crack in it. I seize the receiver sliver from the table and the route token from beside my boot.

The pulse comes from the black receiver sliver Renn wrapped in salt cloth after the fight at the dead drop. Not alive. Not calling. A broken piece of a machine with one last pattern burned into it. When the relay drags my blood into range, heat cuts through the cloth into my palm.

The room inhales. The blood relay catches the sliver’s residual pattern. Green light crawls under my skin, sharp and familiar.

“Do not follow,” I say.

Kessa’s face is white with fury and fear. “Don’t you dare make this choice alone.”

I finally look at her.

That is my mistake and it is the worst one of all.

Her eyes hold mine, and for one impossible heartbeat, the hook falls silent under the weight of what lives between us. No command. No listener. No City. Just Kessa, who looks at me as if she could drag me back into myself by anger alone.

And I want to let her. My pulse hammers, and the pull surges beneath the hook. Not Krix’s command. Recognition. The old, brutal truth of my blood choosing hers. The mate pull.

Instead, I throw the salt cloth into the nearest lamp.

The lamp flares. Smoke blooms. Bodies move. Syin curses. Rosalind shouts an order I do not hear clearly. I am already through the door, down the narrow service throat, left at the first crack, right where the old waterline breathes cold, up three steps, down one broken slope.

The City opens around me. I understand how to read it because Kessa taught me without meaning to. I hate that too.

I take the route no guard would choose for a fleeing prisoner because it scrapes my bad wing and narrows around my shoulders until old arena panic claws at the back of my teeth. Perfect. Fear makes the blood relay flare. Pain sharpens the signal. Blood in my palm gives it something to carry.

Let it carry.