Bloodletter woke with the taste of copper on his tongue and a dull, steady ache chewing at his shoulder. The pills he’d forced down had burned out. Better. He preferred his pain undiluted—clean, bright lines instead of the gauze of chemistry. A wall clock ticked in the concrete quiet. He’d been out for a few hours. Longer than he liked, not long enough to blunt the edge of necessity.

He sat forward on the stool and peeled the dressing back. The cautery held—brown-black rims, no seep. The smaller punctures along his forearm, neat little mouths where the shuriken had lived, were pink and angry but closed. He flexed his fingers; the tendons answered. Range was limited overhead—good to remember. Thrusts drove fine from the elbow. Throws would punish him. He logged the math without emotion and wrapped fresh gauze with his teeth.

The fox had tried to kill him—there, at last, was a choice with weight. Not a scold, not a sermon. She’d aimed to finish the piece with a piton through bone. He’d escaped, and not without cost—for them both. He had made her bleed; she had made him bleed. It felt almost intimate, a brush of artists’ signatures on the same canvas. He allowed himself a thin smile. Intimacy demanded an answer.

Inventory came next. One axe lost to her cape. Revolver gone—dropped when the piton kissed bone. Stiletto kept. Parrying knife kept. Smoke spent. Mask lens scuffed from her ringing blows. He set each fact down like a tool on the bench. Replace what was lost. Improve what failed. Anti-flash lenses, then. A heavier guard for the off-hand. And a second-stage smoke: thicker, stickier, the kind that clung to light.

He rolled his shoulder until the pain sharpened and flattened, then stood and crossed to the map. Bloor ran like a vein through the board. Threads stitched out into little side streets where cameras died and dumpsters gave shadow. He pinned new routes with his good hand, stringing cotton from alley to alley. A hospital pin tempted him—theatrical, obvious—but security would be teeth and rifles tonight. Another time. Another stage.

He wrote on the margin in block letters: GALLERY FOUR — INTERRUPTION / CORRECTION. The title pleased him. The next scene would answer the fox’s vandalism and remind his audience who chose the frame. Not random. Not a message on a wall. A performance. Something that made her come on his schedule, to his angles, under a light he picked. Badge, press, or a place that sold the idea of safety—the category was enough; the particulars could wait until the map breathed back at him.

He cleaned his stiletto with methodical care, oiling the needle point until it gleamed like a promise. Pain throbbed time through his arm—anchor, not hindrance. He pictured her again: the canted ears, the yellow eyes, the cape thrown wide like a matador’s. He pictured the moment her certainty broke. He would force that moment. He would pose it.

He rewrapped the shoulder, tightened the sling he’d refused earlier, and killed the basement light. Above him, the house settled. He tasted iron and thought of color. Seventy-two hours was generous. Forty-eight would do. He had work to do before then—new steel to fetch, a lens to grind, a city to tune like an instrument—so that when the fox arrived, she would step onto his stage and feel the floor tilt under her feet.

He also had to make up for lost work. The next scene couldn’t be another anonymous carcass cooling in an alley; it needed weight—an image that bit into the city’s memory and left teeth marks. He turned to the rack: rows of steel like brushes in a painter’s roll. He let his good hand pass over each—feel, balance, the promise in the edge.

The karambit came first, a crescent made for hooking meat close in, intimate, obscene. Beautiful in the hand, but too private; its strokes read as whisper, not proclamation. The sai was next—parry, trap, break—an instrument for disarming men who liked to advertise their blades. Useful for teaching lessons. He wasn’t here to teach. The Bowie lay heavy and honest, a frontier sermon with a clipped point and a hunger for show. It performed, yes—but showy was not the same as precise, and tonight he wanted a line, not a flourish.

He lifted a kukri and felt the forward pull of its weight: agricultural truth masquerading as war. Choppers muddied the message. The tomahawk that matched his lost thrower spun sweet in his palm; the fox’s cape had eaten its brother, and capes could eat again. He set it back.

What he wanted was a conductor’s baton—a tool that drew pure geometry through flesh. The stiletto sang that note. A poignard-length thrusting dagger—triangular section, stiff spine, needle tip—would read cleaner against armor seams and joint gaps, and it would correct, not compete, with the composition. He measured a blank in his head: guard with a knuckle bow, grip that nested even when blood slicked it, sheath that lived flat against the ribs. He could grind it from stock before dusk if his shoulder held. He would make it black and keep it hungry.

The venue would do the rest. Steel set the line; the stage gave it echo. He glanced to the shelf below the rack and picked out the other brushes he needed for a proper frame: wire—fine, strong, silent—for control; caltrops to shape approach paths; a replacement smoke, this time with a cling that would turn light into fog. He hated guns, but a single round in a pocket revolver could force triage when words failed. He would carry one. He would not need it.

He laid the chosen pieces on the bench in a neat row, the way a surgeon lays instruments. Then he drew the blueprint in his head: long thrusts, points of entry mapped to tendon, artery, seam. Not frenzy. Correction. A gallery piece—seen, remembered, argued about. A piece that would make the fox come running to the exact square he named.

His hand moved across the rack one more time—and all of it felt wrong. Every edge he owned suddenly read too small for what needed to happen next. Not another anonymous alley tableau. Something that would rattle the city’s teeth.

He exhaled, slow. Then his eye caught on the shelf above the rack—where it didn’t belong, which was why he’d almost missed it. Not with the others, never with the others. It deserved its own place.

The oak box was small and solid, the hinges oiled, the lid closing with a carpenter’s pride. He lifted it down with his good hand and opened it as if revealing a relic.

Light from the worklamp slid across the blade and came back colder. Thick and wide. Good German steel. Full tang. Reinforced spine. The balance sat exactly where his wrist expected it, as if the thing had been cast from his grip. He turned it, watched his pale eyes break on the mirror of the steel, and for a heartbeat he could imagine there was a soul in the metal answering his gaze.

A cleaver was honest. No theatrics in the geometry: weight forward, edge square, a conversation with bone the way a chisel speaks to stone. He’d avoided repeating tools because repetition bored him—quality over type, always—but some pieces demanded a motif. This was his overture blade, reserved for occasions, withheld until the stage deserved it.

He tested the set of the handle—walnut scales burned-in to fit the swell of his palm, lanyard hole pinned clean—then let the head kiss the wooden bench with a soft, promising thud. The shoulder complained at the thought of long arcs, so he mapped the motion smaller: short, decisive chops from the elbow; work at joints; correction, not carnage. The stiletto would open; the cleaver would compose. Precision first. Statement second.

He checked the edge—not a chef’s razor, never; a micro-toothed bevel that bit and kept biting—then dressed it on a stone, stropped, oiled lightly to keep prints honest and rust a rumor. A strip of resin-impregnated cord went around the handle for extra purchase; blood was a treacherous varnish.

He held the weight at guard and felt the old familiarity settle. Farm lessons. Anatomy lessons. The language of joint and tendon and hinge. This wasn’t a brush; it was a signature.

Back on the shelf the empty box waited, open like a frame without the painting. He closed it and set it aside. The cleaver would be perfect for his next work. The city wanted spectacle. He would give it spectacle with straight lines and hard truths, and when the fox arrived—because she would arrive—she would understand, finally, what the proper tool did to a scene.

Now he just needed a canvas. It had to be special. The Toronto City Police officer would’ve been the perfect escalation—but that was ruined, ruined by the Vulpes and her meddling. Break into the hospital once his arm healed, finish what he’d started? No. He scolded himself for even entertaining it. An artist doesn’t salvage a spoiled piece; he discards it and composes something better. Something worthy.

He reached the shelf and drew down his scrapbook, laying it open on the desk. Names. Newspaper clippings. His poems and tight-lined journals. A ledger of exhibitions—his exhibitions—inked in careful hands. Somewhere between those covers, the next frame waited.

He turned pages with his good hand, each sheet whispering under his fingers. He studied headlines, circled dates, faint maps sketched in the margins. Then an article caught his eye. He stilled. His fingertip traced the edge of the clipping, followed the hard contrast of a black-and-white photograph. In the steel-blue reflection of the page, his eyes narrowed; a glint like a blade finding light.

His muse had found him.

He smiled—a small, cold, predatory crease—and breathed the word as if placing a title card beneath a painting: “Perfect.”

He slid a thin ribbon in to mark the page, tore a neat copy of the clipping, and closed the book with a reverent tap. On the bench, he wrote two words on an index card—GALLERY, CORRECTION—then set it beside the cleaver. The shoulder throbbed its warning. He welcomed it. Pain was the metronome. Timing, everything.

Now he just had to cool the heat in his blood, let the arm knit, and study the canvas—learn its habits, its domestic rhythm. In the end, it was only another animal to him, even if this one had more bite than the sheep he’d made immortal in his work. Any piece worth doing deserved craft: pattern first, patience second. He would watch the lights that went on and off, note the hour the door latched, the days the bins were dragged to the curb, the coffee runs, the visitors who lingered too long. He would sketch timings in the margins, let pain keep time like a metronome, and wait for the one clean moment when routine opened a seam wide enough for a blade.

He put everything back where it belonged—ritual, not tidying. Each knife wiped, oiled, and seated in its slot. The scrapbook closed, ribbon marking the page, returned to its shelf. Last came the cleaver. He dried the edge, stroked a film of oil along the micro-tooth, and nestled it into its oak cradle before easing the lid shut. A relic returned to reliquary.

He drew a slow breath and made it stay slow. Steady. Cool. The world would see soon enough—the magnitude of his art, the glory in gore, the beauty in blood. For now, he would heal, and he would prepare. Anti-flash lenses. A heavier off-hand guard. Smoke that clung. Drills for one-handed entries, short chops from the elbow, transitions across the body that spared the shoulder. If the fox came to meddle again, she would find a stage he had measured to the inch and a script that did not include her notes.

He clicked the bench light off. In the dark, the clock’s tick folded into the throb of his wound until they were the same metronome, counting him forward. He smiled into the black.

Soon.