"What happened to the radio?" Chen Bo asked, his eyes moving over the three injured men standing in front of him.
The soldiers exchanged another uncomfortable look before one of them finally answered.
"She spoke through it."
Gu Han's expression hardened. "I figured. I heard that part."
The woman had called herself the person keeping the thread, told him that his men were mostly on the ground, and dismissed his territorial claim as nothing more than ribbons tied around a neighborhood.
Then she had crushed the radio.
"She could have killed all of you," Gu Han said.
No one disagreed.
"But she didn't."
The men looked relieved, as though he had found something positive in their failure.
He hadn't.
Leaving them alive had clearly been deliberate. Dead men couldn't carry warnings home, and the woman had wanted Gu Han to know that she had refused him, that her people were stronger than his patrol, and that she considered his claim too unimportant to fear.
That wasn't mercy.
