The cleaver hung over Liv like Damocles’ blade, a hard glint catching the kitchen light as if fate had chosen its edge. Time thinned. The room tunneled to breath, steel, and those pale, unblinking eyes. So this is it, she thought—no rank, no case file—just a number folded into a killer’s neat ledger.
The worst part was that he was enjoying it. Bloodletter loomed over her, and the look in those cold blue eyes said everything: every drop of blood, every slice, every broken bone fed a need in him—an itch nothing else could scratch. That made it worse. She wasn’t just going to die; she was going to die feeding a monster.
She refused to close her eyes—wouldn’t gift him fear. If there was no way out, then she’d meet it on her feet, jaw clenched, eyes open. Let the last thing he saw be a woman who wouldn’t look away, not a meal that fed his need.
Glass blew inward with a low, concussive boom—then a rain of shards sang across the tile. Wind punched through the apartment. Bloodletter paused. Liv saw a flash of orange and black land in the glittering mess.
“Callum Campbell!”
Vulpes spat the name like a verdict. The word slapped the room. His head snapped toward her; the cleaver froze inches above Liv’s throat. The fox stood framed in the broken window, cape draped close, yellow lenses locked on him like lanterns.
Bloodletter’s hand trembled—a tiny, furious tic. She knew his name. Despite the precautions, the storage traps, the careful routines, the fox had found him. And she was here again, interrupting his work, his art.
He bared his teeth. The trench knife slid into his left hand; his right kept the cleaver. No escape now—not for her, not for him. Name and face exposed. Playtime was over.
There was only one path left, and it gleamed red—ruinous and absolutely satisfying.
He lunged—left hand driving the trench knife in a straight, killing line, the edge catching kitchen light like a promise.
Vulpes turned and snapped her cape wide. The weighted hem cracked the air and caught the thrust, dragging steel off-course. She rolled her shoulder and turned into the fabric, using an old duelist’s trick her grandfather had drilled into her—cloak as shield, cloak as snare. The knife didn’t meet flesh; it met canvas and lead-shot.
The hem whipped around his wrist with a sharp clap. She yanked hard, hips and shoulders in the pull, and felt the line bite. Left arm—good. That was the one she’d damaged. He could mute pain, but he couldn’t cheat physics.
She torqued again, wrenching the joint. The knife stalled; tendons jumped under her glove. He tried to power through, ambidextrous reflex kicking in, cleaver clawing up with his right to hack her loose—but the cape held, cinched tight on his knife-hand like a tourniquet, turning his strength into a bind he couldn’t simply bull through.
He was trapped—reach suddenly meaningless—and this was exactly where Vulpes wanted him. The cleaver came down and met a hard metallic clatter as Vulpes’s claws—her tekko-kagi homage—bit into the steel and pinned it. She rolled her wrists, prying the thick spine into the forked grooves and turned his heavy blade into a lock.
Bloodletter’s eyes flashed—surprise, then fury.
Her free hand pistoned: a machine-gun flurry of Defendu—edge-of-hand, short elbow, hammerfist—drilled into his left shoulder, the one she’d spiked days ago. She aimed the same square inch again and again, riding nerve and scar tissue. Armor dulled impact; pain did the rest. His fingers spasmed. The trench knife wobbled in the cape bind.
She kept the cleaver trapped, stepped inside the arc to deny him leverage, and drove a knee across his thigh to deaden the muscle. Glass crunched under their boots. With a twist of her clawed wrist she torqued the cleaver sideways, forcing his frame to follow or lose the hand; at the same time she snapped the weighted hem of her cape tighter around his knife wrist, cinching the snare like a winch.
He tried to bully through—farm-strong shoulders surging, killer instincts flickering as he fought to switch tasks—but the mechanics were against him: left shoulder shrieking, right hand locked, body turning where she wanted it. Vulpes shoved, angling his mass away from Liv and toward the fridge, steering the fight off the detective with deliberate, brutal economy.
He needed space—she was good, and she was relentless. His left arm screamed; he forced the fury down and focused. A heavy boot came up and hammered Vulpes in the midsection, driving her back just enough for him to wrench the cleaver free. His left hand was still snarled in that damned cape, so he hacked at the fabric—clean, certain chops with a well-honed blade—but the cloak was combat-built, weighted and resilient. It frayed; it didn’t yield.
Vulpes winced but felt her armor soak most of the kick. He wanted distance and a free hand. She let him think he had both. Her fingers dipped to her belt, palmed a small pouch, and snapped it into his bare face—the face he’d unmasked, the one without eye protection.
Her hand opened in a white bloom.
He flinched too late. The powder hit like sand and fire—pepper cut with chalk—burning eyes and sinuses, stealing vision in a wash of raw ache. Instinct slammed his lids shut; tears surged. He ground his teeth against the pain and groped for her through the sting, half-blind and furious.
Vulpes seized the advantage—brutal, direct—driving strikes at the only place his armor meant nothing: his head. Palm-heel, hammerfist, edge-of-hand—compact, surgical blows that snapped his jaw sideways and rattled bone. He reeled, half-blind, carving wild, desperate arcs that found only air and cabinet doors.
She kept inside the arc, head offline, feet quiet. Another shot to the temple. Another to the hinge of the jaw. A rake across the eyes to keep the powder working. Blows that would have dropped a softer man landed one after another; he absorbed them with stubborn, hateful endurance.
With a harsh wrench he twisted his left arm free of the cape—sacrificing the trench knife to the floor and tearing a fresh line of pain through the wounded shoulder. The blade clattered away. His breath hitched, vision still searing, fury sharpening to a point.
Even as shapes began to resolve, he knew he was going down. Vulpes tore her claws free from his calf and scissored the trapped leg, corkscrewing his hip. The joint folded; balance vanished. She angled his fall away from Liv and wrenched—hard.
He hit tile face-first, cheek ploughing into a glittering rake of glass. Shards skittered and bit; breath left him in a grunt. The cleaver clanged as his right hand slapped out to catch himself—too slow.
Vulpes rode him down. A knee pinned the meat between his shoulder blades; her clawed gauntlet crashed across his forearm, grinding the wrist to the floor. She twisted, prying at tendons until his grip faltered, then slammed the heel of her other hand into the pommel. The cleaver spun from his fingers and skated under the stove in a spray of glass.
His cleaver was gone—his most beloved tool skittered under the stove—and the sound that tore out of him wasn’t pain so much as a snarl. He never gave agony his voice: not the screaming shoulder, not the twisted, bleeding calf, not the glass now stippled into his cheek. But the loss of the cleaver made his focus hitch and flare with fury.
He was never far from a replacement. His hands found the flat profiles at his belt; click—chatter—snap. Twin butterfly knives bloomed in his palms, handles whipping open into steel. He stabbed backward and up from the floor like a scorpion, rapid jabs and scissoring slashes that forced Vulpes to shift off the torque before she could finish the leg-break.
She sprang back a half-step, cape tight to avoid a catch, claws flashing. One balisong kissed a groove down her vambrace with a bright metallic skreek; another skated across her cuirass and sparked. She yielded a sliver of space rather than trade tendons for pride.
He used the gap, rolling to a knee with a grinding grunt, dragging the ruined calf through a smear of blood and glass. Vision still burned, but shapes had edges again. He set the knives into a storm—short, piston-fast thrusts meant to cut himself free, to keep her off his leg and out of breaking range.
The room cracked open with a single, concussive shot.
Hot lead punched through his right shoulder—high in the meat—and spun him, knives faltering mid-flurry. He’d made a grave mistake: he’d written the detective off.
Liv stood across the room in the bedroom doorway, pale and bloody, a snub-nose revolver braced in her left hand. She swayed, looked ready to fold—but she’d crawled to the spare, hauled herself back, and waited for a lane. Vulpes had given it to her, turning his body just so.
Front sight. Press.
Cordite and drywall dust braided the air. Bloodletter snarled, the arm with the balisong sagging as fresh pain lit up his nerves.
His body told him the truth: blood loss would drop him before trauma did. The right arm was going dead, the left a live wire, the calf torn and leaking; vision still a salted smear. Adrenaline was the only string keeping him upright. He had to get out. Broken, outnumbered, a gun on him and the fox between him and anything like safety—and that shot would be drawing uniforms. If he wanted to keep breathing, he had seconds to vanish.
He bolted for the broken window—survival and gravity in a straight line—then a jag of pain punched a scream out of him as something hard and sharp buried itself in his foot. He knew it the instant it bit: caltrops. The fox had seeded them when she came through—anticipating the only exit he had left and turning it into a trap.
The boot flexed; a prong found the thin leather at the arch and went home. He lurched, half-hopped, knives flashing wild to keep her off him. Blood pattered across the glass-littered floor in a fresh, mean rhythm.
Vulpes didn’t chase the window line. She’d already owned it. She cut his angle instead, cape tight, claws low, her voice a flat command over the ringing in everyone’s ears:
“Down. Now.”
He answered with a feral snarl—refusing to end like this, refusing to let his “art” die on a kitchen floor. He snapped a balisong shut and whipped it at Vulpes. She flared her cape; the weighted hem caught and baffled the spinning steel with a papery thwack.
“She said down!” Detective Benoit barked across the room—and squeezed the trigger.
The snub-nose cracked. The round smashed through his kneecap; the leg folded like bad scaffolding. He went down hard, knives skittering, a ragged sound torn out of him as the joint refused to hold his weight. Smoke curled from the revolver’s muzzle. Vulpes was already closing, cape tight, claws low.
Bloodletter crumpled forward with a ragged, defiant whine—but his body was past even his will’s limits. Nothing answered the way he commanded: the right arm a dead wire, the left a lightning bolt of pain, the ruined knee buckling, the calf screaming, eyes streaming fire.
Vulpes was on him before he could crawl—heel pinning a wrist, claws knocking the last knife aside. Short, surgical violence: edge-of-hand to temple, hammerfist to jaw, an elbow raking the ear. His world pinholed, then went black as the flurry stole what remained of his consciousness.
When the cops finally shouldered the door, cold night wind was already shouldering its way through the broken window, bringing Toronto in with it. Detective Benoit sat on her couch—bandaged, blood-streaked, steady enough to look like herself again. On the kitchen floor, Bloodletter lay cuffed and ruined, glass glittering around him like frost.
An officer moved to the stove, killed the burner; another swept the room with a flashlight and stopped when the beam found the unconscious man’s face. Radio chatter spooled out into the hall. The cape was gone—only a few orange-black threads caught on the sill said she had ever been there.
Liv looked up through the ache and took a sharp breath. “Call an EMT,” she said, voice level. “And when he comes to, I want to be there to read this motherfucker his rights.”
