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I slot behind her and to the right. Three steps. That's all it takes. Three steps and every year of training rearranges itself around one thing.

Her left side.

I spotted it during the transfer between rooms — the way she leads with her right shoulder, compensates through positioning, favors one hip like a woman carrying an old wound she never got properly fixed. The kind of damage a body collects in cities where the work happens off the books and the stitching happens in basements.

She's been covering that blind spot alone for years. Operating across three continents with a vulnerability she never repaired because repairing it meant trusting someone. And trust is the one thing she never allowed herself.

She's not alone now.

I cover her open side. My right Sig tracking the angle her body leaves exposed.

She glances back. Half a second. Muscle memory from twenty years of formations where the person at her back was a contractor she'd never see again.

Her eyes find me covering the angle she didn't ask me to cover.

Something crosses her face. She expected competence. She didn't expect a partner who reads her weak side and fills it without being told.

"You see it," she says quietly. Not a question.

"I see everything about you."

Her jaw tightens. She faces forward.

We move and the rhythm is immediate. Her footsteps set the pace. Mine match. Two bodies filling positions that were always there — empty, waiting, built into whatever we are to each other.

Nobody built this for us.

We built it ourselves.

The junction opens and I see them before my eyes finish the sweep.

Five. Positioned where the corridor splits. They chose the decision point instead of the destination — deploy the ambush where choice creates hesitation. Smart.

Shadow Network. The King's dead hand reaching from the grave.

Five targets. Two of us. No cover.

Don't let them set.

Isadora doesn't let them set.

She moves and I see it at full speed for the first time. Corsetti's training. Unleashed.

She doesn't shoot first. She closes distance on the point man with three steps that eat the gap before his trigger finger adjusts. Her left hand catches his wrist — redirecting, using his own arm against him. His weapon fires into the ceiling. Concrete dust rains down. Her right hand drives into his throat — short, vicious, final.

He drops. Two seconds.

I fire.

The Sig barks twice. Recoil climbs through my wrist into the bad shoulder and the shoulder doesn't care. Left shoulder on the second. Right thigh on the third. Down. Alive. Dead men can't tell me where the other four nodes are.

Both hit concrete. One screaming. One silent — his body shutting down before the pain arrives.

Isadora takes the fourth. Faster. His weapon skids across the floor. Her knee folds him in half.

The fifth comes at my left. The bad side. The shoulder that won't rotate all the way.

So I don't rotate. I step into him. Close the distance to nothing. Turn his angle into mine.