Sami walked the halls of the pace. Through her eyes, she saw a world of white tiles, of fine pottery, of flowers and paintings. She saw the steps she descended, the poured stone and cold light of the avenues the servants used. When others passed, she dipped into vacant rooms, or used the shadows to conceal herself, and though she tried to scream, to cry for help, nothing slipped past her lips. No sound to alert others of her presence. Her screams remained inside, and useless.

  She tried to compel her body to act in some way that would alert those others to her, but her body was not hers to control. Every attempt to will her arm to rise, to knock over a vase, to step a little wider in order to dislodge some trinket from its perch and send it crashing down, was met with resistance. Those others inside her, those invaders from that orphanage behind the bck triangle, were in command, and she a passenger within herself.

  She was the shadow she hid within. She was the silence of her steps. Her movements came without her control. She wanted nothing more than to make it stop, but she was their prisoner, held in their hands to wield as they saw fit.

  She had never felt so helpless.

  If I had only resisted when I had the chance. If I had just listened to my gut. As if she stood at one end of of a long tunnel, her thoughts echoed—a dark whisper in her ears, building in volume and intensity as they traveled, until they sounded like accusations.

  She paused outside a door on the main floor of the pace, passed it by, paused outside another. In one hand, she held a knife she had stolen from the kitchens in the night, when the servants were sleeping.

  With her free hand, she pushed a door open. She felt the grain of the wood against her flesh, the grit of dried cquer, just as if she was the one guiding her body’s motions.

  There could be no greater betrayal. Her body, reminding her of the command she had taken for granted, reminding her of how easily she had lost it to these Watchers. What greater crime against a mortal woman could there be? They had taken her autonomy.

  She was in an office. A silver pitcher sat next to a crystal gss on the desktop. The desk itself was ebony chased with gold. The walls were bare save for a tapestry in violet with the Raven and Thorns in bck thread embroidered over its surface. A series of swords was arranged on a bronze rack.

  Each sword was sheathed in a scabbard of a different kind of wood—cherry, mahogany, ebony, cedar, elm. All of them were chased with silver or gold.

  The articuted pieces of a suit of armor not unlike what the Bloodless wore rested just beneath them. A bck breastpte embellished with silver tooling, and a matching set of pauldrons was mounted there and framed by coverings for each of its owner’s limbs. She had worked on that set before, would know it anywhere for the grief it had given her.

  She stood just inside the door—waiting, dreading the moment the waiting would end.

  It arrived too soon, and though she tried to squeeze her eyes shut, to deny what was happening before her, she was forced to be witness to it. A bystander unable to flee, an accessory who wanted no part in this crime.

  What y in her path filled every recess of her vision, and there was no reprieve for her. Were it that she was sleeping, she would drift among her darkest dreams, for even there she would know a kind of relief. Relief in that she would not have to know how those gifted beings used her. Her hands fshed out. Light danced along the ft of the bde. The muscles in her arm strained behind the knife as tension built against it. Blood welled over her fingers, and though she could not retract them, she could feel the heat, the sticky, thick fluid spatter the back of her hand, leak between her fingers.

  She was rummaging through the pockets of the still twitching corpse, coming up empty. She scoured the study, knocked over neatly stacked papers, wrenched open desk drawers, spilled their contents across the floor. Paper rippling, trinkets cttering. They were the sounds that greeted her in the dark. Frenzied accompaniment for this theft, first of life, and then of the deceased’s possessions.

  Her hand closed on a ring, pulled a set of keys free. She held them at level with her eyes, blood cooling against her skin, congealing, glue-like, against shirt sleeves stained red and clinging to thin forearms. She shoved the keys in her pocket, took a st look at the corpse.

  Ugly, cruel, it was the face of Haman Bran that looked up at her through glossy, vacant eyes. The very man she had expected, who may even have deserved this fate; his limbs were spyed around him, knees oddly curled. Blood pooled in the space between his limbs and chest, kept orderly as it eddied away from him. She met that gaze, and spat on his cheek.

  She was running, then.

  Away from the sight of the crime, for it was not yet time to reveal herself. There were other affairs that must be seen to, other crimes to commit.

  Running, because the Watchers demanded it, though if they were lurking down some corridor within her mind, they hid in deep pces. She could not see them, and they did not see fit to speak to her.

  Running back the way she had come, leaving Haman Bran’s corpse to be found by those who cared for him. Running toward a pce of safety. Somewhere the Wraiths and the Thorns would never think to find her. To a pce the queen herself did not know.