She stopped resisting. “I...wasn’t going...to...kill...you,” Onora gasped.

“Oh? You sure...looked like you...wanted to kill me,” he puffed. The pain and effort of the fight had caught up to him.

“I wanted...to...see if I..uld beat...you.” She relaxed. “I can’t.”

Valek eased up on the pressure but didn’t let her go. “You came closer...than anyone. Only the Commander...has beaten me one-on-one.” He considered her earlier comment. “If you weren’t going to kill me...then what did you plan to do...when you had your knife at my throat?”

“Make you promise to come back to Ixia with me.”

Not what he was expecting. At all. He thought about it as his breath steadied. “The Commander is getting worse.”

“Yes. Obviously it’s due to Owen Moon, but I can’t do anything. Your corps won’t acknowledge me as their boss, so I’ve no help except Gerik. I swore to protect the Commander, so I thought if I let you live, you’d return with Ari and Janco and help me free the Commander.”

“You’d have to tell him you assassinated me.” He wondered if the Commander would be upset by the news. Probably not while under Owen’s influence.

“Yeah. Otherwise all Owen would have to do is use one of those shields, and you’d be skewered.”

He huffed in amusement at her use of another Janco term. The motion hurt like hell. “Like I am now.” Valek released his hold on her.

She extricated herself and sat up. “Sorry. I really didn’t expect that last move.”

He waved away her apology. “Desperate times...”

“Do you want me to...” She made a yanking motion.

“No.” Valek tried to sit up. Pain forced him back down. “Yes. I’ll need some bandages.” He could heal his wounds with magic, but not on top of a roof without Yelena nearby to give him instructions.

Onora picked up one of Valek’s knives. He tensed, but she crossed to The Mosquito’s goons and cut strips of cloth off their tunics. It would take a while for Valek to trust her. He’d won, but it had cost him. If they’d fought again, she’d win. Of that he had no doubt.

Returning with the bandages, Onora set the knife aside. “Which one first?”

“Hip.” He braced for the pain as she wrapped a hand around the hilt. Even so, a gasp hissed between his clenched teeth as she yanked it free. Blood poured out.

She helped him staunch and bandage the wound. Then she moved to his shoulder, and he experienced a whole new kind of agony. He was too old for this shit. When she finished securing the bandage, Onora let him lean on her as he stood. A moment of dizziness spun the Citadel around him. When the world steadied, he realized the sun balanced on the edge of oblivion. They must have fought for half an hour, at least. No wonder he felt as if he’d been run over by a herd of horses.

Onora picked up his daggers with exaggerated slowness and handed them to him hilt first. Smart. He met her gaze as he tucked them away. Then she cleaned hers and slid them back into their hidden sheaths.

“Can you climb down?” she asked.

He walked to the edge and peered into the dark alley below. The descent was doable, but it was going to be torture. “Yes.”

“What about the bug and his people?”

“Leave them. His people will eventually wake and need to decide what to do with his body.” Speaking of deciding, Valek glanced at Onora. “What are you going to do now?”

“Go with you, if your offer is still good.”

“And if it isn’t?”

She didn’t blink. “I don’t know. I can’t go back to Ixia. Guess I’d have to find a job here.”

And he was sure Bruns would be happy to employ her. “My offer stands, but it’s going to take me a while to trust you again.”

Onora looked up in surprise. “Again? I thought you never trusted me.”

“That’s what you were supposed to think.”

Crossing her arms, she studied him. “So, to me, nothing’s changed.”

“Yup. Except when I do trust you, we’ll go rescue the Commander.”

She smiled, and it reached her eyes. It was that smile that convinced him she’d been telling the truth. However, he wasn’t going to let her know. No. He’d let her sweat it out for a while.

* * *

As expected, the climb to the alley was a test of his pain tolerance. Twice he clung to the wall and fought off unconsciousness as fire burned along his shoulders and ringed his waist. Thank fate the trip down didn’t take long. Onora waited for him below.

Once he recovered, he asked, “Do you know where we’ve been staying?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been in town?”

“A couple days.”

He cursed. “Fisk will need to relocate his headquarters.”

She agreed. “There are a number of assassins in town. I don’t know if that’s normal, but it’s a good thing they’re not the brightest.”

Small comfort. Valek told her about the bounty.

“Yelena needs to leave the Citadel,” Onora said, alarmed. “The city is contained by an unclimbable wall and has only so many hiding places. Even those idiots will find her eventually.”

He barked a laugh that turned into a hiss. “I tried logic.”

“Try again.”

He admired her optimism. She followed him as he crossed the Citadel, staying in the shadows. Her passage was soundless, and when he glanced back at her, her skin and clothing appeared darker, as if she was turning into a shadow. Valek remembered Janco commenting on how well Little Miss Assassin blended in with her surroundings. Janco hadn’t detected magic, but he didn’t always pick up on the more subtle users, like Reema. It was a bad time to open his magical senses so Valek added it to the list of things he still needed to discover about Onora.