Nie Jiuluo drove her knee into his groin and grabbed for the gun with her left hand in the same breath.
Yan Tuo was fast. He clamped down on her left hand and pinned her knee, then slid his fingers down to her calf and wrenched it outward. Her grip on the gun never closed. The moment her fingertips grazed the barrel, she already knew it was gone. He was too strong. She couldn't pry it loose.
She shifted.
Her eyes caught the belt at his waist. No thought, just motion. She hooked two fingers into his waistband and used the leverage to launch herself upward. One breath, and her arms were wrapped around his head and neck from behind, body pressed flush against his back.
She pressed her finger into the groove of his cervical vertebrae, found the right notch, and leaned close to his ear.
"Die."
She twisted.
Yan Tuo felt it the instant her weight shifted onto his back. He knew exactly what that position meant. A bad angle on the cervical spine meant dizziness at best, death at worst. Before she could finish the word, he seized her shoulders with both hands and ripped her down.
"Off."
The world flipped. Nie Jiuluo lost her leverage, her kill shot gone. But even falling, she refused to let him stand alone. Her arms snaked around his arm like vines. Her calf hooked around his neck.
"You come down too."
They crashed together. The sofa shifted. The reading lamp toppled. The small round coffee table spun away across the floor.
The landing was bad. She had no time to protect herself and no clean angle to fall. Pain detonated through her body on impact, stars flooding her vision. When the blur cleared, Yan Tuo's throat was right at her mouth.
Masters don't waste openings. She bit him.
He hadn't seen it coming, only caught a flicker of movement at the edge of his vision and jerked his head aside. Her teeth caught the side of his neck instead. Tender skin. Sharp pain. Blood surged to his head, and he drove his fist into her side and hurled her away.
Nie Jiuluo hit the bookshelf. Hundreds of books avalanched down onto her. That was nothing. It was her back that screamed. She nearly couldn't get up after the first attempt. The second try got her upright, gasping, one hand gripping the shelf.
Yan Tuo hauled himself to standing and staggered back until the workbench caught him. The dragon skeleton on its surface swayed and held.
They faced each other across several meters. Breathing hard. Still.
In the west wing downstairs, Sister Lu jolted awake and grabbed blindly for the bedside lamp.
Yan Tuo touched the bite mark. His fingers came back red.
Nie Jiuluo felt the torn corner of her mouth, tasted iron, and swallowed it without ceremony.
Round one. No winner.
She glanced down. Her belt was loose, her collar open. She pulled the belt back with one hand and held her collar closed with the other, eyes fixed on him.
"Can't beat me, Yan? Fight bare-handed. Put the gun away if you're a man."
He smiled. "You don't have a gun. You have teeth."
"You don't have teeth?"
He looked at her for a few seconds. Then he spun the gun once around his finger by the trigger guard and slid it back behind his waist.
"No gun. I'll pull your teeth out instead."
Round two.
Neither rushed. They read each other's angles, weight, and timing, measuring where a single strike could actually land.
Three days and three nights of battle made for good fiction. Nie Jiuluo had neither the stamina nor the time for it. Two, maybe three minutes of this intensity had already burned through her reserves. She was at her best in ambushes, ten-second kills, the kind of fight that ended before the other person understood it had started. The longer this dragged, the worse her odds.
Speed it up.
She moved. One foot caught the overturned coffee table for a launch point, and she used the momentum to hurl a sofa cushion at his face mid-leap.
A cushion. It didn't hurt. But Yan Tuo was careful and stepped back to let it pass, and her aerial pounce fell short.
That was the plan.
She caught herself with her left hand on the worktable surface and her right found the hand axe without looking. She brought it around backhand in one clean arc, shoulder as the axis.
He never saw it coming. A cool line of light opened across his sleeve and his shoulder went warm. Blood followed half a second later.
He had no time to register it. Nie Jiuluo spun and the second axe was already in motion.
Yan Tuo did not retreat. He stepped into her, body low and sideways, let the blade pass close, seized her waist with his left arm and pinned her left with it. His body folded behind hers, both arms now contained inside his. His right hand locked onto the wrist holding the axe and bore down.
A contest of raw strength. Nie Jiuluo was trapped inside an iron frame she could not break. She watched her own hands being pressed lower, inch by inch, until the axe hit the floor with a clang and her fingers spasmed open.
She snapped her head back and up as hard as she could.
Her skull caught him under the jaw. His teeth cracked together. His tongue took the blow. His eyes went dark and his hands dropped.
She staggered forward, half-blind herself. That move cost as much as it took. Her brain felt like it had been shaken loose. She turned just in time to see Yan Tuo spit blood onto the floor.
Tongue. The headbutt had split it.
Now. While he was hurt.
She screamed and charged. He raised his arm to block and she dove under it, cut his legs with a low sweep, got her arms around him, and they went to the floor together. The worktable dragged half a meter. Tools scattered everywhere. The dragon skeleton finally gave up and toppled toward them.
She scrambled on top of him, yanked the bracelet from her left wrist, and stretched the band into a taut silver wire. She looped it around his throat.
Yan Tuo stared at the bracelet. He had seen it. He had never thought it could kill.
That thin line across a throat.
He grabbed the falling dragon skeleton and shoved it up between them. The wire bit into the keel at the skull joint. The wood there was narrow and brittle. One hard pull and the head sheared clean off. Bone fragments scattered across the floor.
Nie Jiuluo was already moving. A wire is not a knife. A knife needs to be retracted before the next strike. A wire extended in the air is already the next strike. The second loop came seamlessly.
Yan Tuo's hand swept across her leg and found a sheath. He pulled the dagger free and reversed the blade against her chest, tip pressing inward, even as the wire tightened around his throat.
Nie Jiuluo stopped.
The point had already broken skin. A thin line of blood wicked into the fabric of her nightgown and ran down her side.
The wire had already cut into the outer ring of his neck. He looked up at her.
"Bare-handed?" A slow smile. "Miss Nie. You hide a lot."
Neither moved. The larynx and the heart. Neither one forgiving. Neither one negotiable.
Sister Lu's voice drifted up from the staircase. Thin and cautious.
"Miss Nie? Is everything alright?"
Nie Jiuluo's chest locked. She roared toward the door.
"Mind yourself. I knocked some things over. Come clean it up in the morning."
"Oh. Yes. Of course."
Footsteps retreated.
It was not entirely Sister Lu's naivety. The housekeeping company kept a special roster for clients in the arts. Writers, painters, designers. That world had its share of unusual behavior. One had used her own blood to paint a heart on the wall at 3 a.m. Sister Lu had nightmares for a week. Nie Jiuluo breaking things in the night was simply normal.
Yan Tuo waited until the steps faded. "Miss Nie. Are we doing this until dawn?"
She said nothing. The hand holding the bracelet trembled almost invisibly. A long held position. Inevitable.
"I came here to talk," he said. "You're not in the right place for it tonight. We try again another time."
"I'm alive," she replied. "You're alive. Instead of both of us dying here, why not step back and live."
She took the opening he handed her. "Fine. You first."
"You first. I'm not the one who just lied to my face twice."
She couldn't argue the point.
"Fine. Me first."
She held his eyes, released one end of the bracelet, let the tension retract it back onto her wrist, and raised both hands open and slow. Then she rose to her feet and stepped back.
He stared at her the entire time. Then he set the dagger down, pushed himself up, and kicked it away across the floor.
Round two. No winner.
"Again," she said.
"No. Come back another time."
He turned and walked toward the stairs, gun at his back pointed at her.
Another time. Nie Jiuluo knew what that meant. Long nights, bad odds, a slow wait for a blow that might never come. She wouldn't survive the anticipation.
"Come back."
She was already reaching for the gun at his waist when he spun sideways and leaped. His hand caught the high display shelf near the wall and shoved. A statue wrapped in transparent plastic film tipped forward and fell.
He had seen it earlier. A Water Moon Guanyin. Even through the plastic, the craftsmanship was visible. Long downward eyes, expression serene, sleeves rendered in layered, intricate folds.
He had bet his life on one thing: she wouldn't watch it break.
The word hit her skull like a physical blow. She dropped the pursuit without a thought and threw herself forward.
This was the piece Old Cai had called out three years ago, the one still unfinished. Not because she was slow. Because it required that kind of care. She knew exactly what hard contact would do to it. In the half-second before it hit the floor, she dropped and slid, put her body under it, and caught it with both hands in the last instant.
Guanyin's face looked down at her through the plastic. Serene. Merciful.
Nie Jiuluo lay there gasping. Her heart was slamming. Her back was soaked.
Above her, tiles shattered. Not the stairs. A window. Yan Tuo had gone out through the second-floor window and across the roof, stepping through the green tiles at the eave's edge, then down the courtyard wall.
Gone.
She lay still for a long moment. Then she sat up and carefully straightened the statue.
It hadn't survived clean. The fall had been controlled, not clean. Small fragments had slipped inside the plastic wrap. She could see them. The thumb of the hanging hand. A section of the bead-and-pearl necklace at the neck. A corner of the crown.
Repairable. All of it repairable.
It felt like losing pieces of herself.
She gritted her teeth, got up, and went to the open window.
The night air came in carrying faint floral scent. Below, tile shards were strewn across the courtyard. At least seven or eight broken pieces.
He wasn't coming back tonight. There was nothing left to hate into. She bolted the window.
She picked up the dagger where he had kicked it, walked through the debris and scattered nails covering the floor, and then stopped. She turned back to the sofa, lifted the cushion.
The trap she had set earlier. A stainless steel buckle, pressure-triggered.
Useless now.
She carried it into the bedroom, head still ringing from the collision. The headbutt had rearranged things inside her skull.
She closed her fist around the buckle.
Next time she saw him, she was going to get that thing into his mouth and make him swallow it.