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“Ten.”
I left him standing in the smoke and crossed to my car.
The trunk opened with a hiss. Inside, under the false panel, the real arsenal waited. A carbon fiber rifle case. Sigil-etched magazines. Suppressed pistols. Long knives. Flash charms. A black tactical jacket lined with old wards that had survived fire, salt, blades, and one very unfortunate exorcist.
I stripped out of the ruined suit in the alley, indifferent to the smoke, the heat, the men trying to pretend they were too busy to see their lord half dressed beside a burning building. The night air hit my skin, my scars. The mate mark on my neck pulsed beneath the grime. I shut the trunk harder than necessary.
Vale reached me as I clipped the last blade into place. “Coordinates are uploading to your car. Scarn has three confirmed dens, two suspected holdings, one private chapel, and a hunting lodge near the marsh.”
He held out a small black comm bead. “One day you will thank me for keeping you alive.”
“I doubt that.”
His eyes flicked to the mask in my hand. “Try to return with most of your organs.”
“Sentimental.”
“Exhausted,” he corrected.
“Send my apologies to legal.”
“For what?”
I pulled the mask over my face. The world narrowed into slits. “Whatever I do next.”
Then I drove south. The night tasted like rain mixed with gunpowder.
Scarn’s hunting lodge sat tucked against the Southpoint Marsh, all old stone and rich-man arrogance, I put one knee down on the opposite rooftop, settled the rifle against my shoulder, and watched a man in a suit laughing into his phone beneath the porch light.
Vale’s voice crackled in my ear. “That’s Marrick. Cousin to Scarn. Handles supply movement.”
“He provided the cinderbloom?”
“Yes.”
The rifle breathed with me.
Marrick lifted his glass, smiling like the night belonged to him.
My finger tightened.
The shot punched through the bottom of the glass, then his throat. His drink hit the porch first. He hit second.
Marrick’s guards moved fast, but I moved faster. By dawn the lodge burned behind me.
The second night I found the cinderbloom contractor in a den beneath an old fish market. He started begging before I even touched him.
“Please,” he whispered. “I did what they told me.”
“So did I.”
I pulled the trigger.
Point-blank shots sounded different when they hit bone. It was so much more satisfying.
By the third night the South knew I had come.
Roads emptied and streetlights and houses went dark as I passed. Wards flickered in windows and doors sealed with trembling magic.
