“So,” said Sen, “how do you feel about helping me burn a criminal organization to the ground?”

Lo Meifeng gave him a narrow-eyed look. “What did you do?”

“I told the Foggy Falcon Toe Club to get out of the city or else.”

Lo Meifeng closed her eyes and took three deep breaths before she spoke again. “Why?”

“Because they keep sending people to kill me, obviously.”

“How long has that been going on?”

“Pretty much since I woke up and started appearing in public again. They’ve been really persistent about it.”

Lo Meifeng looked like she wanted to strangle Sen. “And why didn’t you mention it?”

“Well, I’ve mostly just been disappearing and making them look stupid. But they just keep showing up. So, I decided to take a different tack today.”

“I know I’m going to hate the answer to this, but what tack did you take today, Sen?”

“I killed most of them, tortured a bunch of information out of one of them, well, I say torture. It was her poison. She tried to shoot me with a poisoned crossbow bolt. I caught it out of the air, which just doesn’t get old. Anyways, I threw it back at her and, she was slow, so it took her in the gut. That poison must have been nasty stuff because she was writhing and moaning. I wonder what it was. I should have asked,” said Sen.

“Focus!” barked Lo Meifeng.

“Right. Sorry. So, long story short, bunch of dead people, torture, information, and then I issued threats of doom and destruction if they don’t clear out. I may have said something about a scorched earth policy.”

“Did it never occur to you to talk to me about this before you declared war?”

“It wasn’t a plan. I just ran out of patience with them. You can only let people go so many times before you just, you know, stop letting them go.”

Sen could see that Lo Meifeng was making a monumental effort to stay calm. He suspected that she was making that effort because the ground was still so very shaky between them. While he would have understood if she’d just yelled at him, there was no way for her to know that. Much like his efforts at trying to assess karmic consequences, she could only work with the knowledge and insights she had on hand, and he hadn’t been sharing many of his thoughts were her in the last few months. Beyond that, much of the information that she’d likely once taken for granted about him and his behavior was outdated or wholly inaccurate, thanks to him purging the heart demon. While she likely understood it as a good thing, generally speaking, she probably also saw it as a major hindrance to predicting him and his reactions to things. She gave him what she probably thought was an understanding expression, but looked more like someone ready to bend a piece of steel into a knot.

“I understand what you’re saying. I’m just saying that if I’d known something like this was coming, I could have planned some things that would have smoothed the way a great deal. Dirty tricks are my wheelhouse.”

“Dirty tricks?” asked Sen, not quite sure what to make of the unfamiliar phrase.

“Lethal tactics done in secret.”

“Ah,” said Sen, finally understanding.

It wasn’t even really a surprise. There had been plenty of hints along the way that her job involved some of the less savory elements of keeping a far-flung enterprise whole and functional. They’d just never discussed it. She hadn’t seemed to want to talk about it, and he hadn’t seen a need to pry. Now, though, it was relevant, which Sen took as the reason for her suddenly bringing it up. He also understood it for the gentle chiding that it was. If he’d trusted her enough to just tell her what was going on, she could have taken steps. And, she was right. There was nothing secret about the attempted assassinations. They’d been happening right out in public. The only reason she didn’t know about it was because the attempts had failed, and he’d intentionally withheld the information. It seemed especially petty in that moment because, like it or not, she had been assigned to protect him. He should have told her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have kept this from you. I made it impossible for you to do your job here. Our issues notwithstanding, it was childish and petty of me.”

Lo Meifeng froze in place for several seconds, like she was afraid she’d startle him into some rash behavior like a skittish animal. Then, she slumped a little.

“I know why you did it. I even understand it. If you can’t trust me, why would you tell me about a situation where it would be so ridiculously easy to betray you?”

Sen never would have said those words out loud to her, but that had been in the back of his head when he decided not to tell her. Yet, of all people, it was Shi Ping’s words that kept coming back and eroding Sen’s sense of righteous indignation over what she’d done. It’s obvious that Lo Meifeng would do just about anything to get back into your good graces. Sen hadn’t seen that, or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to see it. There had been conviction in Shi Ping’s words, though. He believed it, which had somehow translated into Sen believing it on some level. That left him feeling vaguely guilty and more than a little like an ass every time he made an arbitrary choice to keep Lo Meifeng in the dark about something. In the end, it was just getting harder and harder to stay mad at her. It had been simplicity itself when his anger was only ever a breath away from exploding all over everyone around him. He’d been furious at everyone, all the time. With anything even remotely like an actual reason to be mad at someone, he could have kept the distrustful anger burning forever.

With the heart demon gone, he’d had to spend more and more time working at keeping it going. And that seemed like a lot of effort to put into something that was, most of the time, wholly unproductive. Yet, he wasn’t ready to simply forgive and move on. He’d done things on that battlefield that he regretted. Granted, he’d been the one who ultimately chose to step into that fight, but it hadn’t been an informed choice. That piece of his distrust was legitimate, and the anger he felt about it was legitimate as well. He knew that, at some point, he would have to come to terms with that and either let it go or send Lo Meifeng away. He also knew he wasn’t ready to do either of those things. As long as she was going to be around, though, he couldn’t expect the trust to only run in one direction. He needed to include her at some level or she just became someone he bantered with on occasion. That wasn’t viable for either of them. He didn’t need a witty ornament, and she wouldn’t stand for it. Not for much longer, at any rate.

“Yeah, I probably thought something like that,” admitted Sen. “I’m not sure that I was entirely wrong to think it. But it’s not useful, especially not in the current circumstances. If things proceed the way I think we both expect they will, I’m going to need you to do things other than be pretty and lob sarcasm at Shi Ping. No matter how much I may appreciate that sarcasm thing. I’m going to need you to deploy your actual skills. For that to work, you need to be in the loop and part of the planning, which means I have to at least shelve that distrust for a while.”

Lo Meifeng got a thoughtful look on her face.

“Be pretty?” she asked. “I know your burning lust for me must be distracting, but you’ll just have to learn to look past my incomparable beauty.”

“I appreciate your sarcasm less when you lob it at me,” said Sen.

“Too late. You’ve revealed your soul to me, Lu Sen. You can never take that knowledge back. Tell me, was it my eyes you fell in love with?”

“How is it that pretty and sarcasm are the things that you’re taking away from everything I just said?”

“Because those are things that maximize my amusement, and I’ve had very few opportunities to glean amusement from you lately.”

“You feel like that’s what we should be focused on right now? Your amusement? Not the sect of criminal cultivators I just threatened.”

“Oh, we both know you’ll get yourself into some absurd situation with them, do something impossible, then probably kill one of them in some very public and terrifying way. Then, if they’re really stupid, they’ll send more people after you. If you’re true to form, you’ll probably just make a big pile of their corpses in the middle of the street. All very predictable. My amusement at your expense, on the other hand, must be seized in the moment because it might be six months before I get another chance.”

Sen didn’t say anything for ten seconds as he thought over everything she’d just said. Is she right, Sen wondered.

Lowering his head a little and sighing, Sen said, “Proceed.”

“As I was saying, was it my eyes, or the unmatched feminine allure of my body? It’s alright, you can tell me the truth. I won’t clue in the princess.”

“If I just say it was your body, will this stop?”

Lo Meifeng threw back her head and cackled. “Not on your life.”