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“I am not!”

“You don’t get to decide if I find you maddening.”

“We’re wasting time. And I don’t need your protection.”

Before he could stop her, Riella gripped the arms and pulled with all her strength. The metal groaned, then clanked, but the door did not budge. The metal arms broke off in her hands, leaving behind a featureless round metal surface.

She raised her brows at Jarin. “See? It didn’t hurt me.”

“You were lucky.”

She ran her hand around the circular door, looking for a crack or seam large enough to slide her talons into. “What’s the magic of it, then?”

Jarin frowned, putting his hands on the door, too. Riella took hers away. The way his veins popped in his wrists and hands against his tanned skin was strangely indecent.

“The door sits perfectly flush with the wall,” he said.

“So, we have to open it by force?”

He stood back, next to her. “That can’t be right. The whole point of magic is to circumvent force.”

Riella shrugged. “In my experience, anything can be broken with enough force.”

To demonstrate, she kicked the metal door. Upon connection, a blinding pain surged up her leg, sending her sprawling backward. She cried out and Jarin caught her before she hit the floor.

“The harder you strike the door, the more pain it delivers to you,” came a cold, clear voice from the doorway. “It’ll never open for you, siren, no matter how much you try.”

Madame Quaan stood in the remains of the office doorway, with Gerret.

Riella snarled. “I will kill you both. Slavers.”

She got to her feet, her injured leg still smarting.

“I doubt it,” replied the Madame. She crossed the room to Riella, Gerret on her heels like a ghastly shadow. “Sirens can’t hurt women. It goes against your rules.”

“I can make an exception,” said Riella.

But even as she said the threat, her words rang false. The rule may not have been set in stone, but harming any woman went against the very fiber of a siren’s heart and soul. In a way—perhaps the truest way—that was stronger than any rule.

Madame Quaan seemed to sense Riella’s uncertainty, because she laughed. “You may have physical strength, but you have little else going for you.”

Yvette rushed into the room, her dress torn and her dark hair askew.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Riella. “I tried to delay her as much as I could. The guards are taking the Count.”

Madame Quaan’s expression changed in an instant, from mirth to cold fury. She rounded on Yvette, her tone becoming venomous.

“This is why you were pestering me?” she spat at her subordinate. “You colluded against me in my own house?”

Yvette’s face drained of color and she cringed, like an abused animal who’d been long beaten into submission.

Her fear only seemed to incense the madame further.

“After all I have done for you!” she went on. “You worthless, ungrateful traitor! You will never be good for anything except for lying on your back and?—”

Riella sunk her talons into Madame Quaan’s shoulder blades and flung her against the wall, where she crumpled to the floor.

Gerret lunged at the siren, his black robes whipping the air with his speed, but Jarin intercepted. He punched Gerret in the face repeatedly with great force, making bones crack and blood fly, until the man’s eyes rolled back in his head. Jarin let him collapse on the tiles and stepped away from the body, massaging his bloodied fists.