Three hated torture.

  But that didn’t mean she was bad at it.

  Flicking the blood off her knife, she wiped her cheek clean on the silken bedsheets, staining the embroidered swallows red. Her blue eyes flickered down. ‘Have you decided yet, General?’

  The woman lying before the shadow guard was as quiet as the scarred armour she wore. Matted bck hair and lean muscle y limp. The fifty-year-old was, she had to admit, tenacious; most would’ve begged for mercy by now.

  But now the esteemed general had broken.

  No longer able to speak, the woman lifted her hand and gently rapped on the floor, a hollowed, crisp sound ringing out.

  Three did not hesitate. She stabbed her bck-hilted knife into the pale wooden panels, prying up a good part of the pnks with a loud rip. A tiger tally rested in the pocket of air.

  Wonderful.

  No bigger than her forearm, the thing was the right half of a bck jade tiger, slender like a stray cat and wholly inaccurate. The only spot of colour was the tiger’s eye. It was a gorgeous, bold red, a strange gemstone that she couldn’t quite name. She lifted it from the hidden box — the smooth jade was a little sticky, some blood having seeped through the floorboards to drip on the little tiger’s split head and tail.

  The coldness of it was akin to that of ice. It chilled the tips of Three’s white fingers, the little bumps on the sawn side collecting tiny balls of congealed blood.

  She’d found it.

  Mission accomplished. Great. Perhaps she would be allowed a night of fun.

  Her eyes flickered back to the woman on the floor. Barely breathing, the woman was now less human and more thing, lying limp against the panels of the wall.

  Her legs were now mangled beyond compare, the damage clear even under only candlelight. Her bones had been snapped into lengths as long as a finger, but left the skin unbroken — now, they were as twisted as squid arms and covered in bruises of a simir hue.

  The general’s torso was no better. Bck hair, sticky with sweat and blood, crawled over her punctured chest and torn muscles. Those lines were like that of a spider’s web: fine, numerous, and an utter hassle to clean up.

  But her lips refused to contort, her brows refused to soften, her eyes stubbornly reaching for the jian sword on its stand.

  It would be too much of a shame for the illustrious general Jian Rongyi to die at her hands. At the hands of a shadow guard, no less, rather than the bde of the Khagan or the arrows of ocean wars.

  Three hesitated, nibbling on her lips. Surely, the emperor wouldn’t forbid her from a night of drunken revelry. Wasn’t it alright? To give this woman a more dignified death?

  She wouldn’t be punished for this. She wouldn’t die for this.

  This was okay. This was allowed.

  Walking over, her bck boots spshing into that pool of blood, she drew the jian from its rest and pced it in the general’s hand, softer than a dragonfly’s kiss on water. The woman jolted, but her fingers still curled around the hilt — gripping onto the bde more out of habit than conscious thought.

  ‘The emperor has ordered for me to ensure your death,’ Three said. ‘But she didn’t say how.’ She paused, then added, ‘Perhaps, you can tell your ancestors that you died to a general’s bde.’

  A bloodshot eye rolled up to fix on Three’s fme-blue irises. A low rumble, one that couldn’t quite leave the dying general’s lips, trembled in her chest. A few wet drops spttered onto the ground.

  Three helped the general lift the sword to her own neck. Shivering at the kiss of steel on skin, the general’s eyes swam shut with some strange anticipation. The anticipation didn’t disperse with the shutting of her eyelids; instead, it thickened, hardening into an unfamiliar determination. A fsh of cold candlelight on steel — and the woman’s head fell limp.

  Three pressed her fingers to the woman’s wet neck, feeling for a pulse.

  She found none.

  She had completed her task. She would not be punished for failure.

  Lightness rested on her shoulders. It was the relief of a burden moving from her neck to her hands.

  Perhaps the autumn chill was stronger than she had felt, for it had seeped its way into the wooden room, the woman’s blood cooling faster than a flower would fall. The sparks of life had been snuffed; a candle’s wick cut.

  She couldn’t help but wonder if this general regretted her refusal to fall. Her refusal to retire and give up the life in the army, the heritage that her family had held onto for so long, had now ended in a mangled sack of flesh. Was she happy that she got to die as a general?

  Three lifted the general up with one hand, the other still tightly gripping the tiger tally. She gently pced the body onto the silken bed. A thought, a somewhat perversive one, struck her; tucking the woman’s legs and body under the bnket, she tried to arrange the body to seem as though the woman’s death was a quiet sleep.

  But no matter how she tried, she could not, even for the life of her, stuff those broken legs into a straight line. They kept on flopping about, rolling here and there and folding in the weirdest of pces. It took her quite the while to make the corpse seem a little more human — by which time dawning winds had arrived and blown the gauzy white curtains open.

  Soft orange dawn’s light poured into the honey-red room as wine did into a jar. A warm glow, it fluttered past the shadows of Three’s eyeshes and fell into the pools of blood.

  But it was not the quiet dignity of the sunrise that caught her attention.

  It was the sound of footsteps in the hall.

  She spun, knife dancing in her hands.

  The sunlit door opened. Silence stole over her — the kind of stillness she had when a butterfly nded on the skin of her scarred hands.

  It was a beautiful young woman, in her early twenties. Not much older than Three herself. Her delicate face froze before the half-opened door.

  A paleness, whiter than bone.

  A red, trembling eye, its sister hidden behind bck locks.

  A terrible, wretched smile.

  Then the door gently slid closed.