CHAPTER THREE: THE NEST

VIENNA

The Nest looked like a hunting lodge from the road, which was the entire point. Stone walls, cedar shutters, smoke curling from a chimney like something out of a postcard. Nobody driving past ever slowed down to wonder why a hunting lodge needed a firing range in the basement, or why the girls who came and went never seemed to age past nineteen before they simply stopped coming back.

I was there four years before Voss let me collect a single name.

“Again,” says a voice behind me, and I don’t need to turn around to know it’s Kestrel — nobody at the Nest used the names they’d arrived with, mine included, so for two years I was simply Widow-in-training and she was the girl with hair the color of a struck match, sharp-mouthed, competitive in a way that felt less like cruelty and more like the only kind of friendship either of us had left the vocabulary for.

I reset the blade in my palm, and the memory folds itself neatly over the present, the way it always does when I let myself think about the Nest for too long.

“You’re dropping your shoulder,” Voss says, from the edge of the training yard, arms crossed, watching the way he always watched — patient, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world to build something out of us and intended to use every hour of it.

“I’m nineteen and you’ve had me running drills since dawn.”

“Ferrara won’t care how tired your shoulder is,” Voss says — and there it is, a name I don’t even recognize yet at nineteen, dropped into a training yard years before I’ll ever hold a gun to the man’s skull, because Voss has always planned further ahead than I’ve been permitted to see. “Neither will the next one. Or the one after that.”

“How many are there going to be,” I ask, not for the first time.

“As many as it takes.” He never gives a number. I used to think that was because the number changed. I understand now, standing in a present-day safehouse with the memory still moving through me like smoke, that it was because a number would have let me count down to an end — and an end was never the point of what he built me for.

I remember the first time my hesitation cost me something. Twenty years old, a live drill Voss had built to look exactly like a real extraction — a stranger’s house, a stranger paid to play a role he didn’t know was rehearsal for someone else’s death — and I froze at the doorway for four full seconds because the man inside had my father’s way of clearing his throat before he spoke.

Voss didn’t raise his voice when he found out. That was always the worst part — he never needed to. “Four seconds,” he said, walking a slow circle around me in the debrief room, hands folded behind his back like a teacher grading an essay instead of a life. “Do you know what four seconds is, in a real room, against a man with a gun of his own?”

“I know.”

“Say it.”

“It’s the difference between walking out and not walking out.”

“Good.” He stopped in front of me, tipped my chin up with two fingers so I couldn’t look anywhere but at him. “You froze because some part of you is still looking for your father in every room you walk into. That part of you will get you killed. So we’re going to keep running this drill — tonight, tomorrow, every night this week if we have to — until that part of you understands he isn’t in any of these rooms. He’s not coming back. The only thing you can do for him now is finish what was done to him.”

We ran it six more times that night. By the fourth, my hands didn’t shake at all. I remember feeling proud of that, lying in the dark afterward, muscles aching in the specific way they ache after your body has been made to do something it didn’t want to do until it stopped objecting. I understand now, nine years and fifteen names later, that pride was never mine to feel. It was the shape he’d built for me to feel it in.

Kestrel corrects my grip without being asked, her fingers cool over my knuckles, and for a second the two of us are just girls in a cold yard instead of weapons someone else is sharpening.

“Do you ever think about after,” she asks, quiet, the way you ask something you’re not supposed to be asking at all.

“After what.”

“After the list. Whoever’s is longer. Yours, mine. After we finish.”

I remember not answering. I remember Voss appearing at exactly the wrong moment, the way he always seemed to, close enough to have heard the question and choosing, deliberately, not to acknowledge it.

“Focus,” he said instead. “A blade doesn’t get to wonder what it’s for. It only gets to be sharp.”

I believed that sentence for seven years. I built my whole life around the shape of it — didn’t marry it, didn’t argue with it, just let it become load-bearing, the way you stop noticing a wall is holding up your ceiling until someone knocks on it and it sounds hollow.

Tonight, it sounds hollow.

I sit up on the narrow bed of the safehouse, memory finally letting go of me, and reach for the burner phone lying dark on the nightstand. No message yet. Voss said tomorrow, and Voss is precise about the things he says, if nothing else.

I think about Kestrel’s question in that cold yard, seven years old now and somehow still waiting for an answer. Do you ever think about after.

I never found out what happened to her after that yard, after that year, not really. She finished her own list before I finished mine, or she was told she had, which at the Nest was never quite the same thing. Voss moved her somewhere I wasn’t given the address for, the same way he’s never given me one for anything that truly mattered. We still talk — burner phones, coded check-ins, the careful shorthand of two people who were raised not to trust anybody and made exactly one exception each, mostly because there was no one else left to make it for.

I do now. I didn’t used to let myself, because thinking about after meant admitting there might be a version of me that exists once the debt is paid — and admitting that meant admitting the debt was something separate from me, something I was carrying instead of something I was.

A blade doesn’t get to wonder what it’s for.

I say it out loud, once, in the dark, just to hear how it sounds now instead of how it sounded at nineteen with cold hands and a mentor’s voice telling me exactly who I was allowed to become.

It sounds like something somebody else decided for me a long time ago.

I don't like how much that thought scares me. So I do the thing I’ve always done with fear — I fold it small enough to fit somewhere I won’t have to look at it, and I lie back down.

Outside the safehouse window, Castelmare goes on the way it always does past midnight — a car alarm somewhere down the hill, gulls arguing over something on the docks even in the dark, the low, constant hush of a sea that has never once cared what any of the five families do to each other on the land beside it. I used to find that hush comforting, back when I first arrived here at nineteen, fresh out of the Nest and certain of everything. Tonight it just sounds like a city that will keep existing exactly the same whether I finish this or not, which is either the loneliest thought I’ve had in years or the truest one, and I’m too tired to tell the two apart.

I wait for morning, and for the one name that’s going to tell me, finally, whether nine years of being someone’s blade was worth what it cost.