“Then your body begins to shut itself down one organ at a time. Starting with the kidneys, and everything else housed in your gut.” John lurched toward me, fists clenched, and I danced away from him on the balls of my feet. Before he could follow, I twisted into a midlevel kick, and my boot slammed into his right kidney.

John moaned, an inarticulate sound of pain, then fell to his knees.

“And in the case of conflicting orders, if one of them isn’t withdrawn, the breakdown of your body continues until you die in a pool of your own evacuated fluids.”

“Kori,” Ian said, with a glance at the man curled up on the ground. “That’s enough.”

“Is it?” I grabbed a handful of John’s hair and pulled his head back, one knee pressed into his spine. “What were you gonna do after you took me down?” I demanded. “How were you going to stop me from coming after you? Knife to the chest?”

John shook his head, and several of his hairs popped loose in my hand. “Across the throat,” he gasped. “Then I was gonna throw your corpse facedown in the river and cash in on my bet.”

Ian scowled, but didn’t press his position.

I shoved John facedown on the concrete and put one foot on the back of his neck. “Tell Cavazos I consider this a personal insult. If he doesn’t make a serious effort next time, I’m shipping his men back in a series of small boxes.”

Then I stomped on John’s good hand, and his screams followed us as I knelt to pick up the knife I’d taken from them, then followed Ian onto the sidewalk.

The first of the resistance pain hit me as I folded the knife closed and slid it into my pocket—a flash of agony behind my eyes, accompanied by the glare of white light in the center of my field of vision. An instant migraine. And that was only the beginning.

“You okay?” Ian asked, when I staggered on the sidewalk, one hand pressed to my forehead, as if that could stop the pain.

“No.” I stopped to lean against the wall of a dry cleaner’s storefront and Ian stood in front of me, blocking me from view without being asked. If I hadn’t been in so much pain, I would have questioned that kind of instinct, coming from a systems analyst.

I slid my hand back into my pocket and felt the smooth edges of the pocketknife, amazed by how calm the feel of the weapon made me, even as pain threatened to split my skull in two.

I’d been forbidden to arm myself, a fact I’d forgotten in the afterglow of the scuffle in the alley—even that little bit of expended energy had helped release some of my bottled-up rage. Carrying John’s knife was an ongoing breach of the oath of obedience I’d sworn to Jake Tower, and I would hurt for the length of the breach—until I got rid of the knife, or my body shut itself down in protest.

Yet even knowing my life could end right there on the street, my undignified death witnessed by an endless parade of strangers—not to mention Ian Holt—I didn’t want to give up the knife. I’d won it in a fair fight. The knife was mine, and so were the skills needed to use it better than its original owner could ever have managed. Weapons were freedom. Power. Autonomy. And by denying me the right to arm myself, Jake had denied me all of those things, too. Intentionally.

I was still being punished.

While my head threatened to crack open like a pistachio seed, my hands began to tremble and my stomach started to cramp, and the pain was too severe to be hidden.

“Kori? What’s wrong?” Ian’s voice was tense with concern, and he glanced back and forth between me and the people passing us on the sidewalk, to see if anyone had noticed my weakened state. And that was all I could take, not physically, but logically.

Resistance pain weakened me and made me vulnerable, which made him vulnerable by extension. There were people—even my fellow syndicate members—who wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of that weakness, for any of a dozen reasons. And if I let Holt get hurt, Jake would kill me.

“Here. Take this.” I pulled the knife from my pocket, my grip shaky, and Ian only hesitated for a moment before taking it from me. The instant the metal left my hand, the shaking stopped. The stomach cramps eased, and slowly, the pain in my head began to recede.

Ian glanced at the knife, then slid it into his own pocket. Then he met my gaze, silently demanding an explanation. When that produced no results, he tried again, verbally. “What’s going on, Kori? Why can’t you hold the knife?”

I exhaled slowly, not surprised that he recognized resistance pain for what it was. Then I braced myself for more. “I’m not allowed to carry a weapon. At the moment.”

Another bolt of pain shot through my skull and into my brain—I wasn’t allowed to tell him that, either.

I squeezed my eyes shut as my hands curled into fists at my sides, like I could actually fight the agony. But I couldn’t. This pain was much stronger than the previous bout—literally blinding, for a moment—but shorter in duration, because telling Ian something I wasn’t supposed to tell him was a terminal breach of my oath to Jake. Over and done with quickly, as opposed to an ongoing breach, like carrying a weapon would have been.

Ian’s frown deepened. “Why not? What moment? This moment? Saturday morning specifically?”

“It’s less a Saturday-morning thing than an until-further-notice thing.” That one came with no additional pain—the breach was in the admission, not the details.

“How are you supposed to defend yourself?” he demanded, and I noticed that he didn’t ask how I was supposed to defend him, which underlined for me the fact that he didn’t need to be defended.