CHAPTER SIX: THE WIDOW'S RULES

VIENNA

Rule one: nobody sees your face and lives to describe it.

Rule two: never enter a building you haven’t already left, in your head, at least three separate ways.

Rule three: the moment your hands start shaking is the moment you’re already dead, you just haven’t noticed yet.

I recite them the way other people recite prayers, moving low along the vineyard rows toward Villa Corvo’s eastern wall, rain coming down hard enough now that it’s doing half my work for me — no dry gravel to betray a footstep, no clear sightline through the water sheeting off the grape leaves. Voss used to say the weather doesn’t care whose side it’s on. He was wrong about a lot of things, I’m starting to understand, but he wasn’t wrong about that.

The eastern perimeter radio post sits in a stone alcove built into the vineyard wall, more decorative than defensive, the kind of relic left over from a version of this family that worried about wolves instead of women like me. The guard manning it is young — younger than I expected for a post this exposed — hunched into his collar against the rain, radio crackling low static against his hip.

I don’t kill him. That’s not the job tonight, and a dead guard found early is worse for me than a live one found late. I wait until he turns to check the gate lamp, three steps, and close the distance in two. My forearm goes across his throat before he can finish inhaling to shout, my knee behind his, and he goes down soft, unconscious before his own weight finishes settling onto the wet stone.

I drag him into the alcove out of the rain before I go, which isn’t protocol — Voss would call it sentiment, would call it exactly the kind of soft, unnecessary choice that gets a person caught — but some part of me refuses tonight to leave a stranger drowning in a gutter over a debt that was never his to pay. He’ll wake with a headache and a story nobody at Villa Corvo will believe. That’s more mercy than most of the men on my list ever got from me.

The radio dies under my boot heel with a small, satisfying crunch.

I feel the old cold clarity settle over me the way it always does once the first obstacle is down — the useful kind of quiet, the kind Voss spent nine years teaching my body to manufacture on command. My hands aren’t shaking. My heartbeat, when I press two fingers to my own wrist out of habit more than need, sits low and even.

This is supposed to be the last time I ever have to do this.

I climb the eastern wall where the stonework is oldest, mortar crumbled just enough to give my boots purchase, and drop into the kitchen garden on the other side, herbs bruising sweet and sharp under my weight. Somewhere past the hedges, floodlights wash gold across a lawn wide enough to land a helicopter on, and past that, Villa Corvo itself rises up out of the storm like something that has never once had to be afraid of anything.

I used to hate buildings like this on principle. Now I mostly just study them for weaknesses, the way you’d study anything you’ve been trained since childhood to see only as a problem to be solved.

There’s a dog somewhere on the property — I hear it before I see it, a low, uncertain bark from the direction of the stables, and I go still against the garden wall, waiting to learn whether it’s been fed enough obedience to ignore a smell it doesn’t recognize or trained well enough to chase it down. A groom’s voice calls out something short and irritated, and the barking stops. I let out a breath I hadn’t noticed I was holding and keep moving, because standing still too long in a lit garden is its own kind of mistake.

The security camera mounted over the terrace door has a blind spot along its left edge, the kind every camera like it has, built into the housing itself — a gap I clocked from the file Voss’s contact sent weeks ago, back when this was still a scouting job instead of tonight. I hug that blind edge the last four meters, feel the camera’s slow mechanical pan swing past overhead like the beam of a lighthouse that never quite finds the boat it’s looking for.

A second guard patrols the terrace, slower than the first, flashlight sweeping wide arcs across the wet flagstones. I count his rhythm against my own breathing the way I counted Ferrara’s heartbeat two nights ago, patient, unhurried, because patience has never once cost me a job and hurry has cost me almost everything I still carry scars from.

He hums while he walks. I hadn’t expected that — some old, tuneless bar of a song under his breath, the sound of a man who has no idea tonight is any different from every other wet, boring shift he’s worked this year. It makes something in my chest twist, unwelcome and unhelpful, the small human detail of it. Ferrara hummed too, I remember now, going over his manifests, some old opera aria he probably learned from a father or a wife. I don’t let myself follow that thought any further than it’s already gone.

He turns his back at the exact right moment. They always do, eventually, if you’re willing to wait long enough for them to hand it to you.

I’m through the servants’ entrance before the lightning finishes its next strike, dripping onto marble that gleams even in the dark, and somewhere above me, past a staircase wide enough for six men to climb shoulder to shoulder, is a study with a thin gold line of lamplight under the door — the same shape of light I found at Ferrara’s house two nights ago, the same shape of light that has marked the end of fourteen names before this one.

Rule four, the one Voss never had to teach me because grief taught it first: the last name always costs more than all the others combined.

I press my back to the cold marble of the entry hall and let my eyes adjust, cataloguing exits the way I catalogue everything in a building I don’t yet trust — the servants’ stair to my left, a set of double doors straight ahead that likely lead to some formal room nobody actually uses, a narrower hall branching right toward what the file called the kitchens. Somewhere above all of it, a house this size breathes the way old houses do, settling and creaking under a storm that hasn’t let up since I climbed the eastern wall.

I start up the stairs anyway. Each one is cold marble under a boot sole gone soft with wear, and I place my weight on the outer edges the way I was taught the first month at the Nest, where the wood doesn’t creak, where fourteen years of servants walking these same steps never once wore a groove down the center. My pulse doesn’t climb. It never does anymore, not on the stairs, not in the dark — only ever after, when there’s nothing left to do but sit with what I’ve done.

At the landing I stop, back to the wall, and listen. A voice, low, on the other side of the study door — his, I assume, though there’s no second voice answering it, which means either he’s alone and talking to himself, or he’s on a radio I can’t hear the other half of. Either way, the door is close enough now that I can smell rain-damp wool through the gap under it, and cedar, faint, expensive, nothing like the smell of the house that used to be mine.

I close my eyes for exactly one second. Long enough to see my mother’s outstretched hands in a doorway that hasn’t existed in nine years. Long enough to remember why I’m here.

My hand finds the door handle. Cold brass, worn smooth by nine years of a man walking in and out of this room without once suspecting it would be the last door he ever opened without me standing on the other side of it. I think, absurdly, of Kestrel’s voice on the phone hours ago — be careful of him — and I file the thought away the same place I file everything I don’t have room to carry into a job.

Then I open them, and I go in.