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The boot caught the lieutenant square in the ribs and threw him off Ryan's chest like he weighed nothing.
"Move." A hand closed on Ryan's collar and hauled him up before he'd even finished coughing air back into his lungs.
He didn't argue. Arguing was for people who weren't currently being dragged across broken glass by someone he'd never seen before, boots first through a window, knife still wet from whatever she'd just done to the second thug.
"Who—"
"Run first. Talk later." She didn't look back. She had his sleeve wound around her fist and she was already moving, out the study door, down the servants' hall, boots skidding on old stone.
Behind them, the lieutenant was screaming for the others.
She hit the side door with her shoulder and it gave, and cold air slapped Ryan in the face, and then they were outside, sprinting across frozen mud toward the black shape of the old stable, the one Matthias always complained smelled like fifty years of neglect.
Ryan's boot caught a rut. He went down half a step, grabbed the nearest thing to stay upright, and the nearest thing was her wrist.
And his gift didn't ask permission.
Numbers unspooled behind his eyes, fast, ugly, precise. Two contracts, both hers, both live. One paid in installments by House Ashe — a name he knew too well, his own family, watching him through her. One older, deeper, a debt bond stitched to a ring on her right hand, collateral clause, default triggers ownership transfer to a lender he didn't recognize.
He yanked his hand back like it had burned him.
"You're bonded twice over," he said, breathless, staggering upright. "You so much as blink wrong and that ring stops being yours."
She stopped dead. Spun. "What did you just do."
"I read it. Both of them." He was still catching his breath, and he still made himself grin, because scared people who grin get underestimated less. "Touch me again and I'll burn one. Your pick which."
"Try it."
She closed the distance in three steps and the knife was at his throat before he saw her arm move, blade flat against his pulse, close enough he could feel the cold coming off the steel.
"You don't see morning without me," she said. Low. Even. Not a threat that needed volume. "So maybe don't threaten the only person keeping the hunters off your neck."
"Funny. From here it looks like you need me breathing just as bad."
Her eyes narrowed a fraction. That was answer enough.
Ryan's hand found the sickle at his belt — the short curved blade he used for cutting binding-cord off shipping crates, because a bankrupt noble's heir didn't rate a sword — and set the edge against her ribs.
"Blades out, then," he said. "Chips out too. What do you actually want, Ivy Crowe?"
Saying her name did something to her face. Small. Fast. Gone before he could name it.
Outside, boots hit the stable's side door. Once. A voice yelling for the girl and the heir, both, alive if possible, dead if not.
"We don't have time for this," she hissed.
"Then talk fast."
The door took a second hit. The old crossbar holding it shut cracked audibly.
"Break it!" someone shouted from the other side.
The bar snapped in two.
Her knife stayed at his throat. His sickle stayed at her ribs. Three seconds, maybe four, locked eyes, breath crossing breath, close enough that he could smell frost and steel and something underneath it that wasn't either.
"Give me the ring tonight," Ryan said, quiet now, fast, because the door wasn't going to hold much longer. "Hand it over, and I make sure that debt bond never triggers. You keep it — and by morning you've got five thousand crowns left to your name and one very motivated enemy standing where I'm standing."
"You don't have five thousand crowns."
"I don't need five thousand crowns. I need one ledger clerk and an hour. You know what my gift does. You read the reports before they sent you here."
Her jaw worked. She was doing the math, and she hated that she was doing it, and she hated more that the math came out his way.
The door boomed a third time. Wood split down the middle.
She dropped the knife first.
Then her hand closed around his arm harder than before, no argument left in her grip, all decision.
"Tunnel," she said. "Now."
The stable door blew inward in a spray of splinters and lantern light, and crossbow bolts swept the straw where they'd been standing a heartbeat earlier. She was already hauling him toward the back stall, toward the loose floorboard Matthias had shown him only once, and they dropped through it together, into dark and old brick and the smell of standing water.
She slammed the trapdoor above them shut, plunging them into black, and for one second — just one — her hand stayed flat against his chest, right over his heart, longer than it needed to.
Then she pulled it back like she hadn't meant to leave it there at all.
Somewhere ahead of them, deep in the tunnel, footsteps started echoing up out of the dark.
Ivy's hand clamped over Ryan's mouth before he could ask, and she shoved him hard into the wall, pinning him there with her whole body, breath held.
A torch flared around the bend ahead, throwing orange light up the wet brick.
A longsword was already swinging out of that dark, straight at the side of his head, and her other hand was coming down fast on the back of his neck—