One question ignited the moment I heard her voice:
Is the girl — Nino?
Then her exact words landed again: Tai.
You belong to me now.
And I will have you.
She was the one who planned it.
She arranged the kidnapping.
She stood there in that side street and spoke about Nino like a transaction she had already completed.
I made a decision in that moment, quiet and absolute:
She doesn't get to taste another day.
———
I waited until she left the building.
A black limousine was idling at the curb.
She got in without looking around — the confidence of someone who has never once been followed.
I followed her everywhere she went.
And I made myself a promise: don't leave her breathing.
———
They stopped at a palace — vast, walled, the kind of structure that announces its own importance.
Something mechanical opened in the ground near the entrance, like a gate rising from below the earth.
The limousine descended into it.
The ground closed behind them.
I went in through the house.
Guards at the entrance.
maids moving between rooms.
I counted what I could and moved through the gaps, taking each guard down quietly — no noise, no disruption, nothing that would reach the next room.
I found a window and climbed through.
A woman was on the other side.
Standing in the bathroom, directly in front of me.
She pulled in a breath to scream.
I broke the window glass before she could, pressed a shard against her throat, and walked her backward out of the room.
Controlled.
No mess.
Glass is a surprisingly useful weapon.
I left her where she was and moved on.
I was on the upper floor.
I needed to go down — below the ground floor, into whatever was underneath.
The descent through the house was slow.
The staff outnumbered what I'd expected — housekeepers everywhere, moving between rooms in groups.
Every hallway required patience.
Stay on the target.
Kill the woman with the glasses.
Don't let anything pull you off course.
Every time I encountered someone, I pressed into shadow and waited.
No unnecessary confrontations.
The plan had to survive contact.
———
Ground floor, finally.
Now the real question: where is the passage down?
I moved through the rooms searching, and kept catching my foot on something near the base of one wall — a small irritant I'd passed twice without investigating.
On the third pass I looked properly.
A handle, flush with the floor.
I pulled it.
A shaft dropped away beneath me — deep, wide, the kind of vertical distance that made the air feel different.
Stairs ran down the side of it.
I started descending.
The traps began almost immediately.
Fire rising from below.
Arrows from above. Gunfire from the front and rear.
Pit mechanisms that opened without warning underfoot.
I moved through them — dodging, reading, anticipating — until the effort of constant evasion wore into my focus and something clicked:
This is their testing ground.
They have cameras.
I stopped. Raised my voice into the corridor.
"I know you're watching.
I'm completely unarmed and I have nowhere to go.
Come face me properly."
Silence.
Then footsteps.
A man emerged from the far end of the corridor — built similarly to me, the same general frame. But the moment he moved I could read him: all muscle, no patience. The kind of fighter who wins by overwhelming and loses by rushing.
He came at me hard.
I let his punch pass over my shoulder — it was aimed at my head and thrown with his whole body behind it — and stepped into the space he'd vacated.
Left elbow into his jaw.
A follow-up straight into the stomach before he could recalibrate.
He went to his knees.
I put my hand behind his head, drove my knee into his nose, and didn't stop.
Again. Again. A palm strike to the throat.
His arm came up instinctively and I took it, rotated it past the point bones are meant to travel, and listened to the joint give way.
Pain registered in his eyes.
I ignored it.
I put both feet on his chest and landed on his skull.
He stopped moving.
I looked down at my shoe.
His blood had gotten across the toe.
I picked up his head by the hair and wiped it clean.
Then I turned and walked.
———
The corridor stretched ahead.
Every footstep in the silence felt like an announcement — something is coming, and it has already decided.
A door at the far end.
I pushed through it into a surveillance room — monitors covering every angle of the grounds, feeds running in silence.
Two men stood inside.
Both holding swords.
They came at me simultaneously.
The first moving straight, his blade catching the dim light of the screens.
The second circling wide, trying to close off the angle behind me.
No weapon on me.
That was simply a condition, not a disadvantage.
I dropped under the first swing — felt the displaced air across my scalp — and came up inside his reach.
One punch to the face, a second to the throat. He staggered.
I was already turning.
The second had his sword raised.
I didn't go for the blade.
I went for the grip — seized his hand around the hilt, torqued it sharply, and the sword dropped.
I stripped the scabbard from his belt in the same motion.
Scabbard across the face.
Then his throat.
Behind me, the first one had steadied himself and was moving again.
I swung the scabbard into his face — the impact jarred the sword free from his hand — then placed my palm flat against his face and drove him backward.
His skull hit the wall with a sound that resolved the question entirely.
I picked up the second man's sword.
Drove it into his stomach.
Drew it across.
Separated his head from the rest of him.
The room went quiet.
It was a short fight.
Most of them are, when the training has done what training is supposed to do.
I stood in the silence of the surveillance room, sword in hand, monitors still running their feeds — and somewhere below me, deeper in, was the reason I'd come.
End of Chapter 35