“Sixty seconds is a long time,” I whispered, my voice scraping against a throat tight with sheer, unadulterated homicide.
Vance frowned, his smug confidence sputtering as a shadow of unease crossed his ugly face. “What?”
“I said,” I lunged, ignoring the crushing pressure in my ribs and letting pure malice take the wheel, “an assassin doesn't need magic to kill!”
My cheat codes were locked, but my muscle memory was forged from decades of wet-work choreography, dirty street fighting, and unyielding violence. No spatial folding required—just pure, ugly physics.
I cleared the gap in a heartbeat, the floorboards groaning under my boots.
“Guards!” he shrieked, his voice cracking into a pathetic, high-pitched squeak as his bureaucratic composure completely shattered.
The side door exploded off its hinges. Two heavy enforcers rushed in with high-voltage stun batons.
Too slow.
The other Tiara dropped low, sweeping her leg in a bone-shattering arc that obliterated the first guard's knee with a sickening CRUNCH. As he dropped, screaming in sheer agony, she caught his tactical helmet and savagely slammed it face-first into the mahogany desk. Out cold.
The second guard pivoted toward her, his eyes bulging with sudden, sickening dread.
I didn't hesitate. I snatched a heavy crystal paperweight and hurled it upward, shattering the chandelier bulbs in a shower of razor-sharp glass and plunging the room into shadow.
The guard froze—paralyzed by the dark and the sudden, terrifying realization that he was violently out of his depth. Half a second was all I needed. I hooked my heel behind his ankle and drove my palm straight beneath his chin with teeth-rattling force.
He hit the floor like a sack of wet cement.
Silence fell, broken only by the whine of the dampening field and Vance’s ragged, utterly terrified breathing.
Vance backed away until his spine slammed into his leather chair, his face turning the exact color of curdled milk. The smug accountant who liked balancing books had officially left the building; in his place was a terrified bureaucrat realizing he’d locked himself in a dark room with two starved meat-grinders.
“This—this is treason!” he stammered, his hands shaking uncontrollably as he clawed frantically at his desk drawers for a backup rune, a sidearm, or literally anything to make the nightmare stop. “The Grand Arbiters will hunt you down! You’re errors! Systemic glitches!”
“Errors?” The original Tiara stepped over the groaning guard, twirling a bloody steel needle between her fingers, a dark, feral smirk curling her lips. Her ruby eyes gleamed in the dim emergency lighting like fresh crime scene tape. “Sweetheart, we’re not glitches. We’re the patch update.”
I leaned casually across his polished mahogany desk, resting my chin in my hands with a smile that was entirely too bright.
“Here’s the problem with void-stone dampening fields, Alistair,” I purred, watching with sadistic delight as his sweat dripped onto his useless terminal. “They suppress high-level magical signatures. But do you know what isn’t a magical signature?”
I reached out, snatched his expensive silk tie, and hauled his face down to my level until he could smell the faint scent of copper and ozone on my breath.
“Extremely basic leverage.”
I slammed his face straight into his keyboard.
CLACK-THUD.
The terminal let out a pathetic high-pitched beep, short-circuiting in a shower of sparks. The high-frequency hum sputtered. The void-stone lattice flickered and died.
Instantly, my skin tingled with a glorious, searing heat as hyper-regeneration flooded back into my veins. Silver light crackled across my fingertips like lightning. Beside me, the air around the original Tiara bent and warped with spatial static.
Vance lifted his bleeding nose off the keyboard, gasping like a landed fish, and looked up into the dual stares of two fully powered, deeply irritated apex predators.
“You wanted to balance the books, right?” I whispered, silver light dancing across my knuckles as I reached toward his chest, my voice dripping with dark, unhinged excitement. “Let’s start with a little audit.”