Boots answered the call the glossy woman put out.

Two more men and a woman in a denim vest moved into view, then fanned to either side of the entrance, their hands on weapons that had seen more posturing than use.

Behind them, two silhouettes lingered at the main court. More eyes. More bodies to kill if the glossy women and her people became even more stupid.

Zubair adjusted one foot, a half-inch of steel into the floor. He didn’t widen his stance. He didn’t have to telegraph. He just made himself heavier.

Elias let the duffel fall shut, slid the strap over his shoulder, and kept his hands free. He put his body angle between the glossy woman’s hip and Sera’s, because hips mean reaching and reaching means contact.

Sera plucked a small coil of snare wire from a hook and looped it around two fingers as if testing flimsy jewelry. "You’re still talking," she told the glossy woman. "It’s boring. You say all these big words, but you have yet to back it up with anything."

"You really think you’re untouchable," the woman hissed, that pretty voice finally showing its teeth. "Newsflash: the General doesn’t care how pretty you play at being strong. You break his rules, he breaks you."

"Get him a bat big enough then," Lachlan offered. "This one’s too small to do anything but scratch my back."

The pipe man took that moment to be brave in a way that never ends well. He stepped around Zubair’s flank, quick, thinking speed would get him in Sera’s space.

Zubair didn’t give him speed. He gave him gravity.

A forearm took the man across the chest and delivered him back into the entrance like a package that had been refused.

The pipe clanged on tile and Luci’s head snapped toward the sound and then back to Sera, waiting for permission that didn’t come.

"Stay," Sera told the wolf without looking. He did, tail thumping once against her boot.

The glossy woman flared her fingers. "Fine. You want a reckoning? You’ll get one. On my time."

"Add it to the list," Elias told her.

Sera moved to the back room door.

Zubair blocked and cleared it in one motion, opened it with a shoulder, then took position to fill it.

The room beyond had racks of duplicate stock and a cage where the expensive gear had been locked once. The lock was gone. The cage door hung open.

"Fast," he told Sera. "You have two minutes."

"I need only a few seconds," she replied, and went to work.

Elias ghosted her shoulder. Alexei, finally irritated in a way you could taste, lifted his palm and breathed out. The air went cold. A fine skin of frost crawled over the tile by the threshold and up the metal rail of the ruined gate.

The bat man put his weight wrong, skidded, and saved himself on the rack he’d been pretending to browse. He tried to play it off. No one bought the act.

The glossy woman recovered her poise fast. She lifted her chin, filled her lungs, and raised her voice for the gallery of her people outside.

"Witness it," she threw to them. "They steal. They refuse terms. By order of the General, they forfeit his protection and they forfeit their lives."

A murmur rolled the hall. Heads turned. The denim vest woman put her hand on her pistol like it would make her taller.

The quiet girl with the binder didn’t speak. She looked straight at Sera and didn’t blink. Her mouth pressed thin, not in anger. In resignation.

Sera tapped two hard cases with the back of her knuckles: camp stove, water bladder kit. Both vanished into her space.

She ran a shelf with her palm and took six packages without breaking the motion. A coil of climbing rope leaned in the corner, still banded. She set a finger on it and it was gone.

Elias kept his body between door and Sera. He didn’t hurry her. He just made it easy to pretend nothing was happening.

"Be careful," Zubair warned low.

"Always am," Sera answered, her eyes bright. She found a case of flares, a sealed bottle of iodine, a field sewing kit, and a bundle of wool blankets in plastic. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

"Done," she said, stepping back.

Zubair reversed them into the main floor. He didn’t give the glossy woman an opening to step in and make it a choke point. He didn’t cede an inch he had paid for.

The glossy woman held up a hand and snapped her fingers. The two extra men slid in to block the exit from the store into the hall.

The bat man found courage on the numbers and planted himself square on Sera’s lane with that bat horizontal across his thighs.

Pipe man picked his tool back up and took the other side. The denim vest woman squared to Alexei like she thought steel would ignore ice. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"Pay," the glossy woman said, sweet again. "Or crawl."

"No," Sera told her. "Get out of my way."

"You think you can walk through me?"

"Yes," Sera said. "Very easily."

The glossy woman smiled. "Prove it."

Lachlan rolled his neck. The blue climbed his throat and spilled into his cheeks. Lightning skated between two fingers and snapped to the metal shelf behind him with a mean little kiss.

The bat man flinched again and tried to hide it with a jaw clench.

Alexei flexed his right hand. Rime thickened on the gate. The metal whined as it tightened under a skin of cold.

Elias shifted the duffel higher on his shoulder and set his weight. He didn’t posture. He made a plan and held it ready.

Zubair drew the machete off the shelf and let the blade hang at his thigh. The line of his shoulders said every part of him was awake.

The glossy woman’s gaze flicked from blade to wolf to Sera’s mouth. She licked her lips once, small, mean satisfaction riding her eyes. "Boys," she told her crew without looking away from Sera. "Teach."

The bat man lunged.

Lachlan’s palm flashed white and the bat met a line of heat that traveled up the aluminum and bit the man in the shoulder.

He spun off-angle, lost his footing on Alexei’s ice, and crashed into the sunglasses rack that had no business still standing in a store like this.

It didn’t stand after that.

The pipe man swung low for Zubair’s knee.

Zubair stepped into it, took the blow on shin leather, and answered with the flat of the machete across the man’s wrist.

The pipe skittered. Luci snapped once at air, promise clear. He didn’t touch flesh. Yet.

The denim vest woman lifted her pistol and found the slide frozen in place.

Alexei’s gaze didn’t move as frost smoked off the metal.

She swore, dropped the gun, and reached for a blade she didn’t trust as much. Bad choice. She didn’t get it halfway out before Alexei was in front of her with that dead calm that made people reconsider their lives.

Zubair moved Sera with his free hand, a palm at her hip. She went with him, easy. He set her behind the line of his shoulder without covering her view. He knew better.

"Stop," the glossy woman snapped, high now, angry that the first beat had gone against her. "Enough play."

Sera looked at her, bored. "This is me being polite."

The glossy woman’s face finally showed what lived under the gloss. She bared her teeth. "You don’t walk out with that bag."

"Yes," Sera returned. "I do."

She stepped forward.

The bat man staggered back into the aisle, half-dazed from the hit, and tried to square again. Lachlan lifted two fingers.

"Don’t," Zubair warned, right before Lachlan did it anyway.

The strike that leapt from Lachlan’s hand wasn’t big, in fact, it was small enough that almost no one noticed... not even Lachlan himself.

But small or not, it popped across metal shelving and kissed the bat a second time, just enough to teach respect without stealing breath forever.

The bat man screamed like a child who had been promised candy and got medicine. He dropped the bat and hugged himself around the shoulders.

"Time to go," Sera told her men.

And they all turned around and left.

The glossy woman stepped left to block. Zubair cut her passing lane off with a shoulder that never touched her and still moved her whole body. She had to spin or go down. She spun. Her hair slapped her cheek.

Her hand came up again, empty.

Luci moved like a door with fur. He flowed into the hole they made and made it bigger.

Sera hit the threshold. Elias kept pace at her elbow. Alexei slid the ice line forward six inches, a thin strip across the tile, and the pipe man’s boot found it heel-first. He went down in a sound the human body shouldn’t make and lost the pipe again.

The denim vest woman got her knife out and then lost it when Zubair’s machete kissed it away. The blade clanged. She stood staring at her empty hand like it had betrayed her.

"Reckoning later," Elias reminded the glossy woman without pausing. "You promised that, remember?"

The glossy woman stared back at him, hate finally beating out salesmanship. "Count on it."

"Oh, we do," Lachlan told her, bright. "You’ll hate the bill. We charge interest"

They cleared the doorway.

Three more of the glossy woman’s crew hustled into view at the far end of the hall. One had a shotgun with a cracked stock. One had a length of chain. One had nothing but a face that liked to be part of a crowd. They spread to make a wall.

Zubair didn’t slow. "Right," he told Sera.

"Right," she agreed.

They cut right as a unit, duffel on Elias, steel on Zubair, ice on Alexei, lightning asleep for the next beat on Lachlan, and the wolf a wall of muscle that listened to one voice only.

"Stop them!" the glossy woman shouted, voice breaking.

The shotgun came up.

Zubair saw where it was pointed and knew who the man wanted to hit first.

He moved.