Talos stared down at the Assassin, satisfaction surging through his body. He was going to savor this. He was going to enjoy cutting this monster apart for what she did to Rose.

  He shifted his weight to drive the blade home.

  His thigh brushed against her side—right where Rose’s fire spear had burned the assassin.

  Talos paused.

  The sword tip hovered against her skin, drawing a single bead of red blood.

  Nomi had the same scar.

  The same patch of rough skin on her left side. The Whisper’s skin was red, raw and inflamed. It didn’t wince when his knee brushed it, she just stared up at the sword in his hands. Nomi’s burn wasn’t fresh, it had healed poorly, badly taken care of after whatever had caused it.

  When they were in bed, in the quiet moments between the chaos, he’d seen it. A mark of angry, burned skin amidst her patchwork of scars, his fingers had traced it a hundred times.

  His mind flared, the tip of his blade still pressing into the soft skin of Whisper’s neck. This wasn't just a faceless killer. This was Nomi’s past. He knew that, she told him. He remembered her voice, trembling in the dark months ago. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."

  She stared up at him now. There was no fight in the Assassin’s eyes. No malice. No monster. Just a scared look of acceptance. A look that said she believed she deserved this.

  It doesn’t matter.

  The rage whispered that this was the same assassin who gutted his sister. Talos remembered being called to identify the body. He remembered the flayed arms, the empty eyes, the smell of iron.

  But he also remembered the first time he met Nomi. Before either of them knew anything about the other. How she joked and teased. How she didn’t leave after the first night.

  He looked down at the figure beneath him.

  He wasn't killing a monster. He was killing Nomi.

  He was killing his person before that first night could ever happen. He was erasing the woman who she would become, killing the two years they spent together before any of it could come to pass.

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  He didn't see the cold-blooded killer anymore. He saw what she had been back then.

  A small, drugged, broken child. Covered in blood that wasn't hers. Shivering in the dark because the Handlers hadn't given her a coat.

  Talos’s hand began to shake.

  He should kill her. He needed to save his sister.

  His sister who was already dead.

  His sister was dead. Talos had watched them bury her. He had attended her funeral, grieved, mourned.

  But Nomi wasn’t dead.

  His mind suddenly registered all the details.

  He had never been in the Choir’s building. He was a Null; they’d never let him in there. His eyes traced to where his sister was, but she was gone.

  This was an illusion.

  He dropped the sword with a shaky breath. It sank into the ground next to the Fox.

  The world shattered around him like a pane of glass.

  Nomi saw Talos’s eyes fade back into focus. She saw the look on his face turn from confusion to shock, then to growing revulsion as he looked down at his own hands.

  His eyes flicked to his sword. It was buried in the wood, inches from her ear. Inches from ending his world. She watched Talos trying to process the information in front of him, her own breath coming in short, adrenaline-filled bursts. He looked so lost, so uncertain, staring down at his hands like they were someone else’s.

  Nomi’s eyes widened, seeing the light go out of his colourless eyes, replaced by a thousand-yard stare of pure self-hatred.

  “...Tal?”

  He didn't answer. His breath hitched in a strangled sob. He scrambled backward, staggering away from her as if she were made of fire, his back hitting the base of a heavy oak table with a bone-jarring crash.

  He stared at his own hands, shaking violently. He looked at them like they were covered in blood.

  She watched Talos curl in on himself. The way his eyes turned to her, not with hatred, but with a terror that was far more damaging. He wasn't afraid of Nomi. He was afraid of himself.

  She crawled toward him across the floorboards. Her hands shifted up to his wrists, gripping them tight, trying to ground him. Trying to pull him out of the spiral.

  “Look at me, Talos. Look at me.”

  He wouldn't. He couldn't.

  Nomi reached out, her hands cupping his face to force his gaze up.

  “Tal. I’m right here. Tal, look—look at me.”

  Talos couldn’t even hear her. He was spiraling, his chest heaving with jagged, panicked gasps.

  She pressed herself against him. He tried to push her away at first, but she tightened her hug, refusing to let go. She leaned in close, whispering in his ear.

  “Listen… listen to my heart. Breathe, Tal. Please, just… breathe with me. Okay?”