I nearly died a few days ago, and the worst part is it was for something that had nothing to do with a deal, a route, or a rival. It was a gift.

One of my partners wanted to celebrate how well things have been going for me. So he presented me with an Assault-Class girl. A trophy, he called her. A living marker of my success. I told him straight that it was the worst thing he could have done. If he wanted to do something for me, he could have simply paid one of them for me to have a good time and been done with it. Instead he went and repeated almost the exact mistake everyone on the planet has already heard about, the one that ends the same way every single time. You don't own one of them like a prize. There's a very well known story about what happens when you try, and he decided to reenact it in his own palace.

So I told him to kill her. Right then, before she came all the way out of the sedation, because that window could close at any moment and once it does there's no closing it again. He looked at me like I was the problem. Told me I was being unappreciative. Unappreciative. Like I'd turned my nose up at a nice bottle instead of begging him to put down a threat before it woke up in his house.

Two of my own security are Assault-Class, and they were the ones who ended it, though not the way I wanted. They told me there was no point. They said it from experience, plainly, that there's no chance she doesn't remember exactly who sedated her, and that she would be fighting the moment she understood she was awake. Nothing I could do about either. And then they simply picked me up and carried me to the airship whether I liked it or not. That was the end of my say in the matter.

I keep turning it over. Why does a man like that partner think he can do the very thing that has gotten so many others killed or captured, and somehow expect it to go differently for him. There's no different result. There never has been. And now, because of his idea of a favor, there's an Assault-Class out there who may have my face.

Because of course it didn't end in the palace. She got out. A few days later she came back with a group of her own kind and razed the place to the ground. The whole thing was all over the regional relay. And out there, in that stretch of the Inland, the law calls it justifiable revenge and dismisses it. Proof of what was done to her is all it takes. She walks. He doesn't, because he's dead, along with most of what he built.

So now I'm left hoping. Hoping her slow blinking eyes never really landed on my face in the first place. And if they did, hoping she has no idea who I was, or how to find me. And past even that, hoping that with all the attention and all the justification she has now, maybe she just assumes I died in the fire with the rest of them. What a fool I am. I know better than to lean on three hopes stacked one on top of the other. And Ash has already made it known he's after me. I didn't need one more set of eyes.

And now I have his work to redistribute on top of everything. I have to figure out who I can actually trust to handle what he handled, and the honest answer is I don't know. I'm more piled up than I've ever been. I'm starting to feel genuinely isolated by idiots, surrounded by people who repeat known mistakes and then act wounded when I point at the wreckage.

One more thing, since it's on my mind and won't leave. A few days before all of this, I met Yelidra over a private shipment of Emberbriar. That woman loves Emberbriar, and she loves it in quantities I wouldn't have guessed. And I sat across from her and found myself jealous. Not of the fortune itself. Of what her fortune is.

She can flaunt it, be as reckless as she wants, say whatever comes to mind, and none of it lands on her. Her buying from me doesn't make her anything like me, and I know that, which is the part that gets to me. People at her level buy poached furs and substances and mods and whatever else they aren't supposed to have. They buy it to make their own lives a little better. Not to build a fortune on other people's. They're not killers, they're not traffickers, and their varens were clean long before the vice got added on top. Mine are the vice. That's the only real difference between us, and it's the one that counts.

So I move her little forbidden luxuries to her, and she goes back to a life where none of it can hurt her, and I go back to being the guy who can't be seen. I'll admit it bothered me more than it should have. I try not to sit in it.