They came on the third night.
I was on the hill road when I heard the first scream from the village below. Then a second. Then the sound of wood breaking, and a voice that carried over the rooftops in a sing-song cadence that made my skin crawl.
Django. The hypnotist. Kuro's second in command, a man who fought with circular blades and controlled people with a pendulum and a voice like a lullaby written by someone who hated children. He was down in the village with the Black Cat crew, doing what Kuro had planned: chaos, destruction, a night of terror that would pull every eye away from the mansion on the hill.
Because the mansion was the target. It had always been the target.
I ran.
The gate was open. Not forced. Unlocked from inside. Klahadore's work, three years of patience ending with a key turned in a lock. The gardens were dark, the path between the hedges silver under moonlight, and I could hear him before I saw him.
The sound of Cat Claws. A metallic whisper, blades sliding past each other, ten curved razors singing in the night air. He was at the front door of the mansion, standing with his back to me, and his posture had changed. The butler was gone. The man underneath stood differently. Looser. Predatory. The controlled economy of motion replaced by something languid and vicious.
"Klahadore."
He turned. The moonlight caught his glasses. Behind them, his eyes were different. The cold courtesy stripped away, the flatness gone. What was underneath was bright and focused and hungry.
"The sailor." He tilted his head. The Cat Claws clicked. Ten blades, five on each hand, catching the light along their curved edges. "You chose a very bad night for a visit."
"I know who you are."
His posture tightened. The muscles in his forearms going taut under his sleeves.
"You know nothing."
"Captain Kuro. The Thousand Plans. You faked your execution three years ago. Marine Captain Morgan believed his men killed you, but the man they executed was a body double. You've been here since. Playing butler. Waiting for the inheritance."
The glasses caught the light again. His face didn't change. A man who'd spent three years hiding behind a mask didn't break it for a stranger who knew his name.
"And tonight," I said, "Django and the Black Cat Pirates attack the village as a diversion while you kill Kaya and make it look like a casualty of the raid. The will is already drawn. You inherit everything."
Silence. The screams from the village carried up the hill. The sound of a building collapsing.
"You've done your research," Kuro said. His voice was different now. Quieter. The butler's polish stripped to the bone underneath, and the bone was sharp. "It won't save you."
He moved.
Fast. Faster than the guards on the Duchess, faster than the pirates on the merchant ship. Kuro was a former pirate captain with a fifty-million-berry bounty and a fighting style built on speed. The Cat Claws came at my throat in a lateral sweep that would have opened me from ear to ear.
I ducked.
The blades passed over my head. I felt the wind of them. Felt the tips catch three hairs and sever them clean. My legs drove me forward, under his guard, my shoulder hitting his sternum.
He'd expected a civilian. He got a cultivator.
We went down. His back hit the garden path and the Cat Claws raked my side. Five lines of fire from my ribs to my hip. I felt the skin part, felt the blood start, and the cultivation energy flooded the cuts with something that wasn't healing but was close. The bleeding slowed. The pain dulled. My body held together through cuts that should have severed muscle.
I hit him. My fist into his jaw, and he rolled with it, the catlike reflexes turning a knockout blow into a glancing shot. His foot caught my chest and kicked me back and he was standing before I finished sliding.
"Cultivation." He adjusted his glasses. Blood on his lip. "How unexpected."
He came again. Both hands. The Cat Claws making an X-pattern that would have cut me into quarters. I knew the pattern. I'd read it a thousand times. Kuro's signature attack, the one that manga pages had frozen in ink, and knowing the pattern was the only reason I lived through it.
I went low. Under the X. His blades crossed above my back and I felt them graze my spine, three shallow cuts that burned like brands. My hand grabbed his ankle and I pulled and he went down again.
On the ground, the claws were less effective. Built for slashing, not grappling. I got on top of him and his blades raked my arms, my shoulders, cutting through my shirt, opening gashes that bled freely. I didn't stop. The cultivation energy burned through my reserves, not a controlled expenditure but a survival response, my body dumping yang to keep tendons connected and muscles firing through damage that would have disabled a normal man.
I hit him again. His glasses cracked. I hit him again. His head bounced off the stone path. I hit him a third time and the resistance went out of his arms and the Cat Claws scraped weakly against my chest and then went still.
He wasn't dead. His chest rose and fell. Blood on his face, his glasses shattered, his suit torn. The butler's disguise in ruins on the garden path, and underneath it just a man who'd spent three years playing house with a girl he'd planned to kill.
I stood up. My body was a wreck. Cuts on my arms, my sides, my back, my shoulders. My shirt was ribbons. Blood ran down my skin in sheets, black in the moonlight. The yang reserve had cratered. I could feel the degradation climbing, the cost of survival burning through what Nami's sessions had built.
The screams from the village were fading. Django's crew, scattered or fleeing without their captain's signal to press the attack. The plan had depended on Kuro finishing the job at the mansion while Django held the village's attention. With Kuro down, the plan collapsed.
I looked up at the mansion.
She was in the window.
Third floor, the sunroom, the glass wall that faced the gardens. Kaya stood behind the glass with a candle in her hand, her nightgown white against the dark room behind her, her face pressed close enough to the window that her breath fogged it. She'd seen everything. The blades and the blood and the man who told her sea stories beating her butler's face into the garden path.
Our eyes met through the glass. She didn't look away. She didn't look afraid.
She looked at the blood running down my arms and she set the candle down and disappeared from the window.
The front door opened. She stood in the doorway in her white nightgown, barefoot on the cold stone, and her face was something I hadn't seen before. Not the careful warmth of the sunroom. Not the leaning-forward curiosity. This was raw. Her eyes wide, her jaw tight, her hands gripping the door frame on both sides.
"Get inside," she said.
I went inside. Left blood on the threshold. She closed the door behind me and led me through a hallway I didn't see clearly because my vision was starting to blur at the edges, the yang depletion pulling focus from my peripheral sight.
A room. Hers, I think. A bed with white sheets. A wash basin. She pushed me toward a chair and I sat because my legs were about to choose for me.
She knelt in front of me. Her hands went to my shirt, or what was left of it, and she pulled the fabric apart. It came away in strips, some of them stuck to drying blood, and she peeled each one with fingers that were steady in a way that her breathing wasn't. The shirt fell to the floor in a pile of blood-soaked cotton.
She looked at my chest. At the cuts. At the body underneath the cuts, the muscle and the scars from weeks of fighting that she'd never seen before. Her breath caught. A small sound, involuntary, and her hands froze with her fingers on my collarbone.
"You're hurt," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You're bleeding on my floor." Her voice was shaking. Her hands weren't. She turned to the wash basin and wrung a cloth and came back and started cleaning the cuts on my chest. Methodical. The medical student underneath the sheltered girl, the part of her that had read anatomy textbooks and studied diagrams and never once applied the knowledge to a living body.
Her fingers moved over my skin. Along the cuts, around them, pressing the cloth against the wounds with a careful pressure. She was close. Kneeling between my legs, her face level with my chest, her breath hitting my skin in warm uneven bursts. The nightgown had slipped off one shoulder. The collarbone visible, the hollow of her throat, the pale skin that I'd noticed in the sunroom now inches from my face.
Her hand pressed the cloth against a cut on my left pectoral and held it there. The blood soaking through, reddening the white cloth. She looked at the wound. Looked at the muscle around it, the shape of my chest that the cultivation had rebuilt over weeks of recovery and training. Her fingertips at the edge of the cloth, resting on unmarked skin. Not cleaning. Feeling.
"You fought him," she said. "Klahadore. You knew he was going to… and you came here."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Because a signal in my gut had pulled me up this hill. Because a girl on a balcony had turned a page and the way her fingers moved had reached across a market square and grabbed me by the chest. Because I'd read her story in another world and the ending had made me angry.
"Because someone had to," I said.
She looked up at me. The amber eyes, wide, wet at the edges. Not crying. Just full. Her hand still on my chest, the cloth between us, the blood soaking through.
She leaned forward. Not a decision. A gravity. Her forehead touched my collarbone. Her hand pressed the cloth harder against the wound and her other hand came up and rested flat on my stomach, on the unmarked skin below the cuts, and she held it there.
The signal thrummed between us. Her yin, gentle and warm, flowing into me through the contact. Different from Nami's. Softer. A slow warmth that eased the cuts and settled the burning in my muscles and made the degradation quiet down by a single degree. She felt it. I saw her shoulders relax when the warmth passed into her.
She pulled back. Looked at her hand on my stomach. Looked at my face. The flush was climbing from her collarbones to her neck.
"Your shirt," she said. "The blood soaked through my nightgown."
She looked down. The stain was spreading on her chest where she'd leaned against me. A dark red bloom on white cotton, over her heart, the fabric sticking to her skin. She touched it. Pulled the fabric away from her body and let it fall back. The bloodstain didn't bother her. What bothered her was the heat still in her palm from where she'd touched my stomach.
She stood. Got more water. Came back and cleaned the rest of the cuts in silence, her hands steady, her breathing careful, her eyes avoiding mine.
When she finished, she sat back on her heels. Looked at her work. Looked at the blood on her nightgown, on her hands, on the floor, on the cloth.
"You can stay," she said. "The guest room is down the hall. In case they come back."
They weren't coming back. She knew that. I knew that.
"Thank you," I said.
She stood. Walked to the door. Paused with her hand on the frame. Didn't turn around.
"The green flash," she said. "You were going to tell me about it. Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
She left. The door closed. I sat in the chair with blood drying on my skin and her fingerprints still warm on my chest and the signal pulsing through the walls of her house, steady and close and no longer patient.
Running out of time was done. I was inside the gates.