Killing them both takes fourteen point seven seconds, start to finish. Inefficient.

Boots pound in the hallway. I look up as three guards burst into the room, pulling up short at the sight of me standing among the carnage, splashed in gore and coldly furious. Their faces pale as recognition sets in—they know exactly who I am.

“Walk away,” I tell them softly.

Their hands flex on their sword hilts as if they’re actually entertaining the foolish notion of pulling steel on me.

My shadows twist around me. “You have three seconds.”

They look at each other in the universal language of “fuck this, I’m not dying tonight”, then back out of the room. Wise of them.

A desperate animal sound drags my attention back to Theodora. She’s on her knees, hunched over, and scrabbling at the collar. Blood wells under her nails where they scratch at the metal.

“Stop that,” I tell her flatly. “You’ll tear out your throat.”

Those green eyes snap to mine, and there it is—that spark I saw in Aldgate. That core of steel running through her. For a moment, I’m drowning in sense-memory, standing among the corpses in the village and watching this woman curl her lip in contempt as she surveyed my handiwork. A spike of pain stabs behind my right eye at the memory.

She’d shoved me out of her mind then like a psychic slap.

A shudder rolls through her, the muscles of her neck straining against the metal. “Get it off.” The words scrape out of her. “Please.”

Please. Such a soft, broken word from lips better suited to commands. I should savor this—Theodora Devaliant brought low, forced to beg the monster she despises. Sentiment is a destructive thing. Sticky fingers in all your tender places, scooping out handfuls until you’re just a raw nerve. I should let her sit in the consequences of it, stew in the impotence for a bit.

But I’m not here to indulge petty whims, and the Shroud’s more important than perverse pleasures.

So I drop into an easy crouch and reach for her. “Be still, and I’ll remove it.”

I’m not wearing gloves. I’m going to have to touch her bare skin.

“I bet you’re getting off on this,” she says. “After Aldgate.”

Not an accusation. She states it plainly, almost curiously, like she’s genuinely wondering what makes a monster tick.

I don’t dignify it with a response. Just skate my fingers under the collar’s edge to grope for a latch, a hinge, a join—anything I can persuade to pop open so I can be done with this. I’ll never go anywhere without my gloves again.

The backs of my knuckles brush her skin—burning hot, pulse jumping erratically—and every muscle in my body locks up, rejecting the contact. Touching other people makes me want to flay myself raw. It brings up too much I’d rather stayed buried—the slap of flesh on flesh, all those tugging hands a prelude to a different kind of dying.

Rough palms sliding over my skin. The bite of restraints. The way they laughed as they—

No. Focus on the present. On the task. Break it down into parts: find the mechanism, disable the lock, remove the collar. Simple. Clinical. Safe.

“You’re shaking,” Theodora says quietly.

“Shut up.”

My shadows seep into the mechanism, and the lock crumbles. The collar hits the floor with a dull clank.

I snatch my hands back the instant it’s done, resisting the urge to scrub them against my pants. Later, there will be scalding water and soap. For now, I settle for flexing my fingers until the sensation of touch fades.

“An asset dying would be inconvenient,” I say. “Don’t let it happen again.”

Theodora rubs at the marks on her throat. “I’m not your asset.”

“You’re the last Anchor holding the Shroud together. That makes you one.” I reach for the collar and examine it.

It’s Turpori steel with magic embedded in the metal.

I swallow back my low curse. Even now, my stolen feathers put my realm at risk. Whenever a human consumes those parts of me, they temporarily have the ability to create my steel. Three hundred years ago, that gave humans a flood of new weapons to use against us. And now, here it is again. Still plaguing me.

“What is it?” she asks, watching me. “Do you recognize it?”

Too observant, this one.

“No.” Technically true. I don’t know the meaning behind this particular configuration of runes and wards. But I will soon. I shove the remains of the collar into my coat. “Their names?”

“I skipped introductions while they were putting me in the collar.” She staggers upright. Her copper hair is loose, curling around her delicate features. “What do you care?”

Her hand keeps rubbing at her abused throat. I track the movement with a predatory focus, staring at the map of veins close to the surface, starkly visible under bruise-mottled skin. Her nightgown is torn, and her shoulder is bare—easy access. I could put my mouth there, I think. Drag my tongue over that fluttering pulse, sink my teeth in, and bite—

I eviscerate the thought before it can fully form, and shove it into whatever septic mental sewer it crawled out of, where it can rot with the rest of my unwanted urges. I can acknowledge attraction, lust, baser impulses. Catalog the symptoms. File them away as quantifiable variables in an equation I’ll never actually solve. Immaterial, in the grand scheme.

Theodora Devaliant is beautiful in the way natural disasters are beautiful—all that eye-catching destruction a trap for the unwary or the arrogant. But a Devaliant’s loveliness is just a trick of the light. A misdirect drawing attention away from where the knife is about to slide in.

I pull my dagger from the stiffening corpse at my feet and clean the blade on my coat. “Alexios will want details about your incompetent security. Their response time was three minutes and twenty seconds after you screamed.” I glance at her. “Unacceptable.”

Her eyes narrow. “Your lunatic brother gutted every half-competent guard when he went on his murder spree through my palace. So apologies if my current security detail doesn’t meet the exacting standards of Alexios’ favorite butcher.”

Fucking Evander. There are times I’m convinced the stars wove idiocy into the fabric of his soul. My brother’s self-control has the structural integrity of wet paper. Leaving the empress unprotected because he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants around her sister? Even for him, that’s impressively stupid.

Tension gathers behind my eyes. I’m going to develop an aneurysm at this rate. Several of them.

“Hire new guards.” I sheath my weapons. “More of them, better trained. Or Alexios will exploit an Accord loophole to assign someone to nanny you.”

Theodora glares at me. “Alexios doesn’t need to exploit anything. The Accords state he can’t meddle in my life or rule through force, so I’ll allow his guards until I replace mine. Now”—her hand drops from her throat—“tell me why you’re creeping around my palace in the middle of the night.”

“Reclaiming my property. Your sister had my knives, and I want them back.”

The color drains from her face. “Tell me she’s okay.”

I don’t bother to confirm or deny. Bryony Devaliant’s fate depends entirely on the whims of a half-mad god-king and a brother whose self-control has always been more decorative than functional. The girl did not look well when I last saw her. Assurances would be premature at best.

“Irrelevant,” I say. “I want my weapons.”

A muscle in her jaw jumps. For a moment, I’m convinced she’ll launch herself at me in a doomed blaze of defiance. I almost want her to.

“That’s it? You broke in for some knives?” Her voice climbs with each word. “Who cares which realm they’re in?”

I’m tempted to reach into the lockbox of her mind and squeeze until something ruptures. In one hundred and ten thousand years, I’ve never met a human who could keep me out. The fact that she can is starting to piss me off. I’m not above challenging anything that defies me by digging my teeth in until it stops squirming.