"Jon."
Savage's voice cut through it before I'd finished drawing the string back the last inch. I looked over at her instead of him, and found her watching my face rather than the man on the ground, something careful and searching in her expression that I hadn't seen turned on me by her before.
"What," I said.
"You didn't even blink," she said. "I've killed plenty of men who deserved worse than this one probably does, and I still feel it every single time, right here." She tapped two fingers against her own sternum. "You're not feeling it at all right now. I can see it on your face. That's not nothing, Jon."
The man on the ground actually laughed at that, a short wet sound that clearly cost him. "Touching," he said. "Truly. Can we get on with it either way."
"Shut up," Savage told him, without looking away from me.
I lowered the bow. Not far. Just enough.
"He'll bleed out slow if we leave him," I said, testing the words in my own mouth the way you'd test ice before trusting your full weight to it. "That's still a kill. Just a crueler, lazier version of one."
"That's not what I'm asking you to weigh," Savage said. "I'm asking whether you noticed what I just noticed, because from where I'm standing, you didn't, until I said something."
I had noticed. I'd noticed the exact instant it happened, the ease of it, the absence of whatever used to live behind my sternum when a pair of eyes found mine and stayed there while I decided their ending. I'd noticed it, and some newer, colder part of me had simply filed it away next to everything else I'd stopped letting myself feel properly since the crater, the way you'd file away a bruise you'd get around to caring about later, once there was time.
"I noticed," I said, finally, and it cost me more to admit that out loud than it had cost me to nearly finish the shot. "I don't know what to do with it yet."
"Then don't do this one on autopilot," Savage said. "Decide it. Actually decide it, eyes open, the way you did back on that ridge outside Daenia when the whole plan called for something safer and you chose the harder, closer shot instead because you couldn't stomach the alternative. That's the boy I'd follow into worse than this. Not whatever's starting to grow in behind it."
I looked back down at the man on the ground. He'd stopped watching either of us and had closed his eyes instead, breathing shallow and wet, clearly past the point of pretending indifference now that the conversation had run longer than his patience for it.
"Bind the wound," I said. "Leave him for whoever finds this alley. We're not killing him for money he took to protect a woman we haven't even properly heard yet."
Savage held my eyes a beat longer, then nodded once, sharp, and knelt to tear a strip from his own shirt to press against the arrow wound before pulling it free, which he took with a hiss and nothing worse.
"You've got maybe an hour before the bleeding gets past this," Savage told him, working fast and rough. "Use it telling us where she went, or use it praying somebody kinder than us finds you first. Your choice."
He was quiet for a while, breathing through the pain, and something in his face shifted, the professional mask sliding a half inch off whatever sat underneath it.
"Clothbinder's row," he said finally. "West side, past the dye vats. She's meeting a buyer there before sundown. Tall stall, red awning, sells mostly silk." He laughed again, weaker this time. "She paid me a full year's wage up front. I'd have died for that money an hour ago. Funny how fast a price stops feeling worth it once you're actually looking at the bill."
"Not funny," Savage said. "Just true." She stood, wiped her hands on her trousers, and looked at me. "Clothbinder's row. Let's move before sundown makes the decision for us."
Clothbinder's row ran along the western edge of the market, narrower than the main thoroughfare and quieter for it, the kind of street built for people who wanted their business conducted without an audience. The red awning was easy enough to spot once we knew to look for it, a tall stall stacked with bolts of silk in colors I didn't have names for, and behind the counter stood a woman with her dark hair cropped shorter than I remembered from the cave, a plain traveler's cloak thrown over gold and red that still peeked out at the collar where she hadn't quite managed to hide it.
She saw us before we reached her, and something in her whole body went rigid, the particular stillness of a hunted animal calculating whether the distance to the nearest exit was still worth the attempt.
"Please," Inari said, before either of us had said a word. "Please, just let me go. I paid that man everything I had left to keep you two from finding me. If you're here, it means he's dead, and I have nothing left to buy either of you off with."
"He's alive," Savage said. "Barely, and only because Jon here decided you didn't deserve a body count on top of everything else."
"You don't understand what you're doing," Inari said, her voice climbing fast toward something close to panic. "If you take me back to him, he'll kill me. Slowly. He's done it before, to other women who tried to leave, I've heard the stories, everyone in Corvane's heard the stories."
"What stories," I asked. "Names. Not rumors. Names."
That stopped her, just for a second, long enough for something honest to flicker across her face before she caught it and smoothed it back down.
"I don't know their names," she admitted, quieter. "I heard it from a girl at the tavern where I used to work, before Adachi's family arranged the marriage. She said her cousin knew someone who married a man like him once."