Page 77 of Turncloak

He would have to kill her.

But Saints, he did not want to.

He should have done it the second she emerged from that window, should have slit her throat outside the Order and left her corpse for her former—current?—colleagues to find, but he couldn’t force his body to move the way he needed it to. Knowing that his faltering magic meant he’d have to do it by hand, by blade and blood, made the act seem altogether more horrifying.

Segal’s cutting assessment drifted back to him.

Your fool’s instincts almost cost us everything with Alucia Martou, and you have learned nothing since. Saffron Killoran is proof of that.

There was a wound at the very heart of him, a wound borne from his mother’s death, from his brother’s departure and his father’s years of torture: the desire to be loved. Cared for, made human. And this wound had festered for so long that it might never heal, might always represent weakness, might always offer his enemies a place into which to drive a dagger.

Time to cauterize it.

There was barely another soul on the streets as they entered the apothecary district, where an entrance to the Bloodmoon compound was concealed in an abandoned shop on Beakpeck Place. The Temple of Augur Amuilly towered pale and purple to their right, a neat row of old shops notched to their left. A trickier place to leave a dead body, more suspicious than the debauched Broad Row or Jewel Boulevard.

They were approaching Beakpeck Place too quickly. Levan had to pounce on Saffron now—he couldn’t kill her too close to Zamollan’s. The Silvercloaks were staking it out around the clock.

He sped up suddenly enough, loudly enough, that Saffron spun on her heel at the sound of his footsteps, wand outstretched, confusion painted on her beautiful, infuriating face.

Levan grabbed her by the outstretched wrist, yanking it behind her back and shoving her into an alley just off Velclaw Street. He slammed her against a rough creamstone wall and pressed a dagger against her pale, vulnerable throat, thinking of their very beginnings in an alley just like this one.

“It’s over, Silver,” he said, pinning her in place. “This ends here.”

To her credit, she swallowed hard against the nip of the blade but held her nerve. “What are you talking about?”

His teeth were grinding together so hard he felt it in his temples. “You told Naszi I’d found out about your assignment—that I wanted you to slip her false intel. You would not have done that were you truly loyal to me.”

Fear flashed in her eyes. “You were listening.”

“And I was right to do so.” Levan pushed the knife more deeply into her throat, the flesh almost but not quite parting.

“Sen vertigloran,” she hissed, her wand pressed against his hip bone.

He staggered back, dizzied, grabbing for a wall and failing to find it, knee slamming into the cobbles.

And he couldn’t use his magic to fight back.

If he was going to kill her, the knife would have to find her throat, her temple, her heart. All that work saving her in Aredan just to cut the same fate into her a week later.

Kicking out a boot in search of her shin, he found plain air as she incanted, “Et esilan.”

Her boots sprung up like jack-in-the-boxes, and she sailed over his head, landing behind him and jabbing her wand against the back of his skull.

“Sen debilitan.”

The spell landed true, and his body froze, paralyzed, rooted to the spot.

Levan focused all the intention in his magical well on breaking free, the way Miret taught him. It was deeply costly to do so, everything in him straining against the magical bonds holding him in place, but soon they dropped. At least he could still do that.

He spun on one foot faster than Saffron could parry, jabbing his dagger upward in search of flesh. She spun away from the attack, throwing up a shimmering spellshield. Her arm trembled, as though holding up armor too heavy for her frame.

Clambering to his feet, Levan’s mind whirred with the effort of deciding his next move.

Saffron studied him like a curiosity in a museum.

He flung his dagger at her face. She dodged it in a split second, and the blade found the alley wall behind her.

“Why aren’t you casting back?” she demanded. “You could just compel me to stop. If you really wanted me dead, I already would be.”