Petra Pell was sent to kill the heir and take the throne, but tonight her own wrist betrayed her. The bond-mark burned there, a coil of light under her rust-red skin. Her masters had promised no outsider could ever touch the throne. She meant to prove them wrong. First she had to cut the thread that tied her to the one she must destroy. She crouched inside the broken tower where she slept, close enough to the palace to hear its bells. Vines choked the crumbled stairs. Her stolen court uniform hung loose on her shoulders, two sizes too big, still smelling of the guard she had taken it from. On the sill sat her raven, feathers glowing like live coals. He watched her the way he always did before a job. "Tomorrow," she told him. "The heir walks the garden alone. One knife. Then the throne is mine." But the mark pulsed when she said heir. It always did now. It pushed warmth up her arm and into her chest, feelings she had never asked for. When she pictured the heir's face, she did not feel a target. She felt a pull toward someone she almost wanted to protect. That softness would freeze her hand at the wrong moment. A frozen hand meant a caught spy, and a caught spy meant the block. So she reached into her coat and drew out the vial. Dark glass, cut like a jewel, a black lotus sealed inside. She had stolen it from a poisoner who swore it drowned all feeling. One swallow would numb the bond. One swallow would let her strike clean. The raven croaked and beat his wings. He hated the vial. He hopped along the sill, feathers flaring, blocking her light. "Move," Petra said. "You think I want this pull? It will get me killed." She pried the stopper loose. The lotus smell rose, sweet and cold. Her hand shook. The mark flared brighter, fighting her, as if it knew. She thought of the heir's voice, heard once through a door, and her throat tightened. Then she drank. The cold spread fast. It ran down her arm to her wrist. The bond-mark's light dimmed, then guttered out like a snuffed candle. The warmth left her chest. She waited for the heir's face to return. Nothing came. No pull. No softness. Only the job. Petra flexed her fingers. Steady now. She could kill without hesitation. But something else had gone with the pull. She could no longer feel the mark at all, and the mark had been her only sense of where the heir was. She had numbed the bond so well she had blinded herself. Tomorrow she would walk the garden hunting a target she could no longer find, while the poison already thinned in her blood, and the heir walked somewhere she could not feel.