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We throw for hours.

The afternoon dissolves into the steady, satisfying thunk of steel biting wood, the two of us trading lanes and trading barbs, and it becomes immediately, deliciously clear that we approach the blade as entirely different creatures.

Vex throws like a predator. There is nothing decorative about it—her stance economical, her release sudden and brutal, every dagger a sentence ending in a period buried to the hilt.

She doesn’t aim so much as decide, and the blade obeys, and her grin after each strike is all teeth. It is the throw of a woman who learned the weapon as survival, who has put steel into things softer than a target and felt no regret about it.

I, by contrast, throw like an artist.

I was never taught to kill with a blade so much as to commune with it. Each weapon in my hand is a conversation—I feel its balance, its history, the intention forged into it by hands long turned to dust, and I let the throw be the final line of a poem the smith began centuries ago.

It surprises her, my skill. I watch her recalibrate when my first dagger lands dead center, then the second splitting the first, and the flicker of startled respect in her mismatched eyes is its own reward.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” she accuses, delighted, retrieving her blades. “Here I thought you only played with the dead.”

“The dead and the sharp,” I correct, “are my two great loves. You’ve recently become a third, which makes for a rather morbid trinity of hobbies, but I’ve made my peace with it.”

“So I’m a hobby now.” She arches a brow, retrieving a blade with a flourish. “I’ve been demoted from favorite obsession to arts and crafts.”

“You’re a vocation, Darling. There’s a difference, and it’s flattering, and you’d know it if you weren’t about to lose this round.”

“Bold words from a man who throws like he’s apologizing to the knife.” She sinks a dagger dead center to punctuate the insult, then blows me a kiss. “Technique’s pretty, Crowe. But pretty doesn’t win knife fights.”

“Pretty,” I inform her, sending my own blade to split a sliver of wood from the edge of her mark with insolent ease, “wins precisely the fights it intends to. Do try to keep up.” The bickering flows between us like a current, effortless and electric, and beneath it hums something warmer—the rare, intoxicating pleasure of being met. Of trading with someone quick enough to volley, sharp enough to wound and kind enough not to. I have spent my life as the most peculiar creature in every room. With her, I am simply one of two.

Between throws, I show her the collection proper, and this is where Silas comes truly alive—because every blade has a story, and I know them all.

I lift an antique rondel from the medieval display and explain how it was made for a knight’s mercy and his murder both; show her the wicked elegance of a Renaissance cinquedea, broad as a man’s hand and engraved like a prayer; a Persian piece with a watered-steel blade that ripples like trapped smoke, its hilt set with stones the color of old blood; a ceremonial dagger from a culture that believed the weapon carried the soul of its bearer into the next world. She drinks every word.

She asks questions sharper than the blades, traces the engravings with a fingertip, presses me for the metallurgy and the meaning and the lineage, and for once—for once—she is not a patient being managed or a problem being solved or a queen being guarded.

She is simply a woman, indulging without shame in a thing she genuinely, fiercely loves, and I would burn down the collector’s entire estate before I let anyone interrupt it.

We are mirror images at the wall, she and I—her cataloguing each blade for what it could do, me for what it has meant, the predator and the historian leaning shoulder to shoulder over the same beautiful steel.

Somewhere in the trading of it, the two halves braid together into something neither of us could reach alone. She teaches me to feel the murderous joy in a perfect throw. I teach her to hear the centuries singing in a hilt.

By the time the light goes golden through the high windows, we have stopped competing entirely and started simply marveling, two strange devotees in a cathedral of edges, and I cannot remember the last time I felt this purely, uncomplicatedly understood.

“This is too civil,” Vex declares eventually, hefting a fresh dagger with a dangerous glint. “We need stakes. Loser of the next round does a dare. Winner’s choice.”

“How wonderfully ominous,” I purr. “You’re certain you want to wager against a man who arranges consequences for a living?”

“Scared, Crowe?”

“Terrified,” I lie, and we throw.

It comes down to the final throw, the score knotted, and I line up my shot with every appearance of lethal concentration—and then I let it drift.

A hair wide, a deliberate flaw no one watching could detect as anything but a rare human miss, the blade thudding into the target a clean inch off her mark. She crows in triumph, leaping and pointing and gloating with the unselfconscious glee of a child, and she does not realize—not for one second—that I threw it on purpose.

That I would lose to her a thousand times over to be the cause of a sound that joyful. The mastermind who reads every man’s tells missed mine entirely, because she was too busy being happy to be suspicious, and that, I think, is the loveliest victory I have ever engineered.

“Name your terms, winner,” I say, spreading my hands in surrender.

Her grin turns wicked. She glances out the open door to where wildflowers grow thick along the manor’s sun-warmed wall—and her terms, when she delivers them, are so gloriously ridiculous that I nearly laugh aloud. I am to sit. Still. And submit, without complaint, to having tiny wildflowers braided throughout my hair.

So I sit.