Fansilia's streets were packed with people, shoulder to shoulder for blocks in every direction leading toward the palace. It was the third day since the royal court had sentenced Youri to execution, and the announcement had finally gone out: the sentence would be carried out publicly, in front of the royal palace, for anyone who cared to watch. Crowds had gathered from every corner of Terria just to witness it in person, but the audience wasn't limited to those who could physically stand in the square — the execution was set to broadcast across the entirety of Terrian space, and by all accounts, nearly everyone with access to a screen intended to be watching when it happened, turning what should have been a single man's death into something closer to a planet-wide occasion.
A few hours before any of that, inside the chamber where Youri was being held, he had a visitor. He heard the footsteps first, echoing closer and closer down the corridor, until they finally stopped directly in front of him. He was stretched flat on the floor when he lifted his gaze toward the glass door — and found Leonora standing on the other side of it, her hands stained with blood, her expression dark and unreadable. She didn't look at him. She simply pressed an access key against the chamber's lock, and the door slid open in front of her.
She stepped inside and stood directly over him, looking down without a trace of warmth in her voice. "Get up."
Youri rose slowly at the command.
"Once you're out of here, you'll need to lie low for a few months somewhere in Batuzane," Leonora said. "Only after that can you leave Terria without drawing suspicion." Youri stared at her a moment, stunned, his eyes drawn to the blood still drying on her hands.
"What did you do?"
Leonora said nothing at first. She simply reached out, grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him close. Her eyes were rimmed red from crying, an ugly, uncharacteristic shade against the obsidian that had always made them so striking. "I did what needed doing. Something you were too afraid to do yourself. I made a choice — one I will never regret. I chose you over myself." Her grip tightened slightly. "And in exchange, I want exactly one thing from you. Once you're gone, stop calling yourself a pitiful man. Because from today onward, I'm the one who deserves that pity. Not you."
She released his collar, and Youri's gaze drifted past her, out into the corridor — and froze at what he saw there. All five guards assigned to his chamber lay sprawled across the floor in wide, dark pools of blood.
"What have you done?" he asked, his voice low.
"They're not dead," Leonora cut in immediately. "But they will be, if you don't move now."
"And go where?" Youri's voice rose, sharp with disbelief. "This is Terrian territory. There isn't a single place left in this empire I could actually hide."
Leonora stepped closer, steady. "I've already accounted for that. The moment you're clear of this building, Anna will be waiting in a black transport. She'll get you to a safehouse."
The words had barely left her mouth when a wave of soldiers poured into the corridor behind her, weapons raised and leveled at both of them. Youri's expression hardened at the sight of them. He glanced at Leonora just long enough to see her hand already moving toward her own sidearm — and let out a long, resigned breath before turning back toward the soldiers one last time.
Then he moved. In one motion he seized her wrist, wrenched the pistol from her grip, and pressed the barrel against the back of her skull, positioning himself behind her like a shield.
"I see you managed to sound the alarm after all," he said, smiling wide enough that it almost looked genuine. "Should've expected that. You didn't earn the rank of captain of the Royal Knights by accident."
Leonora's confusion lasted only a second before she understood exactly what he was doing. She tried to speak, but his grip closed around her throat before the words could form, cutting her off entirely, leaving her only able to manage a strangled murmur.
"I thought I'd already dealt with the guards," Youri continued, raising his voice for the benefit of the soldiers ahead of him, taking a slow step forward. "Looks like I was wrong about that." Another step. "So unless you'd like your precious General's brains decorating these walls, I'd suggest you clear a path."
He kept walking, turning the pistol toward the wounded guards on the floor and firing four quick shots, ending each of them where they lay — erasing, in that same cold motion, the only proof that Leonora had ever shown them mercy in the first place, burying her act of kindness beneath one of his own cruelty instead, deliberately, so that no one would ever think to look for it. One of the soldiers returned fire, the shot missing Youri and Leonora both by mere centimeters, and the lead guard shouted over the chaos, "Hold your fire! You could hit the General!"
It was already too late. A marksman positioned just behind the lead guard took the shot anyway, catching Youri square in the shoulder and knocking him backward off his feet. The moment he went down, every soldier in the corridor surged forward at once — pulling Leonora clear and safe, while the rest swarmed Youri and pinned him to the ground. Even with the fresh wound tearing through his shoulder, he could barely manage to fight back at all.
"We've regained control of the situation. Repeat, we've regained control," one of the soldiers reported over the comm. "Moving to escort the prisoner to the extraction point now."
Outside, a wall of vehicles closed in around the high court chamber, and somewhere beyond them, the execution of the criminal Youri Kronos began to move forward — sooner, now, than anyone had originally planned.