"They weren't inclined to at first, but I told them I'd looked into the faces of real monsters and they were a far cry from that."

He'd meant it, too. Harold does find the whole thing exasperating in the extreme, but he'd still tried to save them, whether or not they deserved it. That was a line he'd decided on a long time ago, in Nathan's memory. Making a mistake shouldn't consign someone to death, and no one is irrelevant.

"They did eventually come around, at least in terms of calling off the hitmen. Unfortunately, one was too professional and one was too spiteful to reverse course."