The ground was cold and damp beneath Leo's elbows as he y ft in the thick grass on the side of the road, his body pressed into the shallow depression where packed dirt met wild growth.

  Moisture had soaked through his shirt ten minutes ago and was now working into the skin beneath. The grass rose waist-high around them, dense enough to swallow a prone figure whole, and the crushed stems under his chest gave off a sharp green tang that mixed with the wet earth and something like old dung worked into the soil.

  Marsh was on his left, close enough that Leo could hear his brother breathing. For some one with such a loud personality, Marsh had gone remarkably still.

  And on Leo's right, where she absolutely was not supposed to be, was Sera.

  He'd told Marsh that morning. The full story about Vilko and Bram, the original beating, the threat against Sera, and the unknown man who wanted his nd. And when Leo told him what he was going to do, Marsh just asked when.

  Sera, however, was supposed to be asleep when Leo slipped out of the cottage after dark. But her hand caught his wrist before his feet touched the floor, and the argument that followed sted all of thirty seconds. She was coming, and that was the end of it.

  All three of them were hooded now. Cloth wrapped around the lower half of their faces, leaving only eyes exposed. They had to be careful, even if their targets were most likely going to be drunk. A jawline, or the shape of a nose, was enough in a vilge this small.

  Leo shifted his weight. His neck ached from holding his head at an angle to watch the road, a pale strip of dirt in the moonlight, rutted from cart wheels, empty in both directions. The tavern was close enough to carry the ughter muffled by distance and walls, and dull noises that told Leo the evening was still going.

  They drink until the barkeep throws them out. Same road every night.

  Marsh shifted beside him. A twig snapped under his knee, loud as a firecracker in the silence. Sera, on his other side, didn't move at all.

  "The night is getting cold..." Leo muttered under his breath, though he received no reply.

  His fingers were stiff. The cloth over his mouth grew damp from his own breath, warm against his lips, and the itch of grass against his jaw where the hood didn't cover was becoming its own small torment.

  Then he heard them.

  Two sets of boots on packed dirt, one heavier than the other, the difference was obvious even at distance. Vilko's steps were quick and uneven, the gait of a lean man whose bance had been loosened by hours of drinking. Bram's were slow and heavy, the ground absorbing each footfall with a dull thud.

  Their voices are loud - the sloppy, overpping cadence of men who'd stopped caring about volume.

  "...I'm tellin' ya, that girl had curves," Vilko slurred, stumbling slightly on a loose stone. "She smiled at me, and bought two rounds after just one look at my handsome face."

  "That wasn't smiling, idiot," Bram grunted. "That was pity. She was probably blind, too."

  The shapes became clearer on the pale road. Vilko walking slightly ahead, his lean frame tilted as though the ground had developed a slope only he could feel. Bram a half-step behind, wide as a barrel even in silhouette, his heavy boots grinding the dirt.

  The the smells hit - cheap ale, thick and sour. Vilko's tobacco, that same stale leaf-rot that everyone in Ashwick associated with him. Bram's clothes, unwashed for days, carrying the ripe tang of sweat and old food.

  Leo's fingers curled against the cold earth. What he was about to do, he had never done so before.

  But it has to be done. They're a threat to Sera and our family. And the presence of ws in this vilge might not be enough to protect us...

  The recognition and the acceptance arrived together. The Leo from a couple of week ago would have frozen here. The Leo of now, who'd fired a bolt past Vilko's ear, who'd watched Sera's blood soak through her armor on the second floor of the Pit, had made his peace with this days ago.

  He touched Marsh's arm and nodded at Sera. At once, they dashed out of the grass.

  Marsh hit Bram first. The bigger man hadn't even turned his head toward the sound of movement before Marsh's full weight smmed into him from the side.

  “Ughh!!?”

  Bram went down hard, the impact driving a grunt from his chest, his thick body hitting the packed dirt with a heavy, meaty thwack that scattered dust in the moonlight. Marsh was on him before he could roll, knee pinning the barrel chest, one massive hand cmping Bram's wrist to the ground.

  Leo and Sera took Vilko.

  "Wha...Who the fuck are you guys!!??"

  The ferret-faced man had a half-second of crity, his close-set eyes going wide in the dark.

  Sera closed the distance first, low and fast. Her shoulder drove into Vilko's midsection and folded him. The air left his lungs in a compressed huff, and before he could draw another breath, Leo was there, fist connecting with the side of Vilko's jaw. A short, sharp blow that snapped his head sideways and sent a spray of spit into the moonlight.

  Vilko hit the dirt on his side and rolled. His hand went to his belt with the desperate, scrambling speed of a man who'd always relied on the threat of violence rather than the practice of it.

  His knife, but both Leo and Sera had expected it.

  "Agh!!!"

  Sera's boot stamped on Vilko's wrist before the bde cleared the sheath. Bone ground against packed earth. The knife tumbled free, and Vilko made a strangled sound that was equal parts pain and disbelief.

  Thirty seconds, maybe less, and both men were on the ground. Bram pinned and dazed under Marsh. Vilko curled on his side, spitting blood into the dust, his breathing ragged and wet.

  Leo crouched beside Vilko, lowering himself until his knees pressed into the cold dirt, close enough to see the blood on Vilko's teeth and the capilry burst in the white of one eye.

  "The boss wants to know why it wasn't finished," his voice came out low, roughened, pushed through the cloth over his mouth until it was something unrecognizable.

  Vilko went still. His eyes, gssy from ale and pain, sharpened. Leo could see the calcution happening behind them, the ferret brain pivoting from I'm being robbed to something else which could be much worse.

  "The farmer," Vilko said. His tongue worked at a split in his lower lip. "Look, we did the job. We did exactly what he asked. Beat the bastard, left him on the cobblestones. He just didn't leave."

  "We tried to push him again. Approached him directly, figured we could scare him off without another beating," Vilko's voice came faster now, the words tumbling in a slurry of self-defense. "But he...changed. He put a crossbow bolt past my face. Nearly took my bloody ear off."

  "Did you tell anyone about the arrangement?" Leo pressed. Kept his tone ft and bored, the voice of a man hearing excuses he'd already expected.

  "No. No. What do you think I am? You don't talk about paid work."

  "Has anyone else come asking about the western plot?"

  "Nobody. Not a soul. If your man sent someone else, I haven't seen them."

  "Then why didn't you report back when it went sideways?"

  Vilko's jaw worked. He shifted on the ground, wincing, and when he spoke, the defensiveness had curdled into something closer to resentment.

  "Report back to who? Your man gave us one meeting at the Sow's Head. One! He said he'd come to us when it was done." Vilko spat blood. "We came back but he was never there."

  "What he said," beneath Marsh, Bram confirmed what little he could. A grunt, then a nod.

  Bram's eyes were dull with pain and drink, and Leo could tell that the big man genuinely knew nothing beyond what Vilko had already given up.

  The nd is the target. Someone with money and patience and the sense to keep hired muscle at arm's length wanted it.

  But why?

  No answer. Not tonight.

  Leo stood and threw a gnce at Marsh and Sera.

  The nods were barely visible under the hood - a dip of the chin that covered everything they'd agreed to on the walk here.

  Sera held Vilko's shoulders against the dirt. Her grip was precise and clinical, her weight distributed across his upper body to pin him ft without wasted effort. For a woman who'd braced herself against the dungeon floor and driven a spear through chitin thicker than boot leather, this much was nothing.

  Leo took Vilko's left leg and positioned his hands, one above the knee, one below. Killing them was out of the question. People dying in a small vilge was a big thing, but broken legs could be hand-waved away. People would bme it on gang dispute, or drunken fight, given those two's reputation.

  Leo would need to make it messy, the kind of break that vilge healers could set but never fully mend. Bone that would knit crooked, leaving a joint that worked but never worked right again. That should prevent them from being a threat without killing them.

  Vilko must have felt the positioning. His body went rigid. His mouth opened.

  "Wait! Don't! If it's money..."

  CRACK.

  The sound was wet and wrong, filling the air for a split second, mixing with Vilko's ear-splitting scream. A thin, strangled scream that climbed and then cut off as shock dragged him under, his body going limp beneath Sera's hands, his eyes rolling white.

  Across the road, Marsh's work overpped with his. Bram's scream was different - a sound ripped from deep in the barrel chest that carried across the open field and scattered in the grass nearby. A second CRACK followed, and Bram's scream pitched higher, cracking at the top into a hoarse, airless wheeze.

  Leo did the second leg. Vilko had gone somewhere past noise by then, his body jerking with the impact but producing only a choked, whimpering gurgle that leaked through clenched teeth.

  Four legs. The work of less than a minute, carried out with the grim efficiency of three people who had learned to deal with much worse enemies than this.

  It's done.

  Looking down at the two unconscious thugs, Leo suddenly became aware of his own breathing, fast and shallow, and the sweat cooling on his neck, and the ache in his hands where his grip had transferred the force of the breaks up through his wrists.

  Somewhere in the vilge, a dog started barking.

  "Let's go, before people start showing up," he jerked his head toward the tall grass. And the three of them moved off the road, into the dark. Behind them, a door opened somewhere, distant hinges creaking, a voice calling out to ask what the noise was.

  The three of them knew this nd. Leo and Marsh had grown up on these paths, and Sera's daily walks to the field had mapped every hedgerow and ditch. At the fork where the path split toward Marsh's cottage and Leo's, they stopped.

  The moonlight was thinner here, filtered through the canopy of an old oak that overhung the junction. Marsh's face was invisible behind his hood and cloth, but the set of his shoulders said enough. He reached out and gripped Leo's forearm once, hard, and then released.

  He turned toward his own path without looking back. The bulk of his shoulders shrank into the dark, and then the sound of his boots in the grass faded.

  Leo and Sera took the other path. They were walking fast. The wet grass whipped against their shins. The smell of crushed stems and cold air filled Leo's lungs with each breath.

  A while ter, the cottage door closed behind them. The tch settled with a quiet click.

  Leo pulled the hood off before unwinding the cloth from his face. The air hit his damp skin and he shivered once, hard. One of the burdens in his chest had been shaken loose, but his hands were trembling.

  He looked down at them. Knuckles aching, the skin split across one where it had connected with Vilko's jaw. A fine vibration ran through his fingers and up into his wrists, visible even in the near-dark, the kind of shaking that came from his body processing what the mind had already finished with.

  The waiting, the violence, the sound of bones giving way under his hands, all of it arriving at once now that there was nothing left to focus on.

  I did that. They aren't monsters, but they are a threat. I had to.

  Sera's hood and cloth came off. She crossed the small space between them without a word, and put her arms around him.

  Leo's hands hung at his sides for one short moment. Then they came up, settling against her back, fingers curling into the fabric of her shirt, and he held on.

  The shaking didn't stop immediately. It ebbed in stages, each wave weaker than the st, Sera's warmth bleeding through the thin yer of cloth between them, her heartbeat steady against his chest while his own stuttered and slowed to match it. Her familiar smell - the smell of grass and cold air and sweat - calmed Leo down.

  Outside, the vilge was stirring. Voices carried on the night air, drawn by screams that hopefully no one would trace to this door. A ntern bobbed somewhere down the ne. The dog was still barking.

  Leo's breathing slowed. His hands finally steadied. He leaned into the embrace until their foreheads rested together, then he found her lips.

  The kiss was not an awakening of desire, but a simple act of reassurance - a quiet acknowledgement that she was there, they were in this together, and he was grateful for that.