Veyra thought fear was a leash. She didn't understand fear could also be a knife.
Umbra would teach her.
---
We moved on the collectors again. Not in the plaza this time. Not under eyes. In alleys where shadows stretched long, where drunks staggered blind, where rats ran before the scent of blood.
Mara led first, her movements quiet as smoke. She slipped behind two collectors counting coin by lantern light. The blade of her knife kissed a throat before either man could blink. The sack dropped into her hand.
"From nowhere," she whispered. Then vanished into shadow.
Jonas struck the second team. Three men cornered a beggar, laughing as they took the last of his scraps. Jonas walked into the alley like a wall with legs. Their laughter cracked when their fists did nothing. One strike. Another. The beggar stared, mouth open, as Jonas lifted the sack of coin and placed it in his lap.
"Yours," Jonas said simply, then walked away.
I struck last. Not with fists. Not with blades. With whispers.
A pair of collectors stumbled into a dead-end alley chasing what they thought was a boy with stolen bread. Instead, they found a sack waiting. Their eyes widened, greed heavy. But when they lifted it, the weight was wrong—stones instead of coin. A candle flickered behind them. Shadows bent wrong. And in the moment they turned, Mara's blade pressed from behind.
The sack returned to me by dawn.
---
The market buzzed the next day.
Coin had appeared in doorways, left without name. Vendors paid debts they thought would strangle them. Healers bought herbs they'd been denied. Children chewed bread without fear of a hand striking it away.
And the whisper grew.
"Umbra."
No faces. No names. Only shadows moving where the corps and gangs refused to look.
---
Red Fang raged.
Veyra burned three more stalls, left ash in her wake. But no coin returned to her coffers. The more she struck, the less she held. Her men grew restless, watching alleys with wild eyes.
"She's bleeding," Mara said in the backroom, sharpening her blade. "Not enough yet, but bleeding."
Jonas nodded. "A wall cracks slow."
I wrote in the ledger, candlelight shaking over ink. "Then we keep cutting. Not to kill her yet. Not to face her head-on. But to make her choke on every breath she takes."
The Lexicon hummed, pages turning with weight.
Umbra's knife was in the dark now. And the city had begun to believe in shadows.