The library looked like Lowry had disemboweled it. Wren saw both sides of him laid out in the arrangement of the room. His rage, in the overturned side table, the papers and books littering the room, the crystal decanter leaking brandy into the carpet. His cold calculation, in the way he’d already prepared the room with a bucket of water and a few surgical basins. As soon as he’d showed her to the door, he’d left her alone with nothing but a sly murmur of “Good luck.”

One servant—his body, anyway—was sprawled across a velvet chaise lounge. At a glance, he seemed to be sleeping, curled on his side with his arm pillowing his cheek. His body was split like the horizon with bruises. The entire left side of his face was marbled grisly black and purple with stagnant blood. The living man, barely alive as he was, lay sedated and shallowly breathing on the makeshift operating table of Lowry’s desk.

Above it, the taxidermied stag’s twelve-point antlers impaled the milky light. Wren removed her coat and tossed it over the stag, where it hung from the antlers like a torso gored and gone limp. It was better than the alternative. She couldn’t have it judging her work with those empty sockets. Trepidation melted away as she unfastened her medical bag and began sterilizing her instruments. Once she snapped on her gloves and arranged her tools, she began examining her patient and the corpse, letting her magic flow through their bodies. Protocol and procedure mechanized her, shielded her from the full brunt of her horror. She was saving a life, nothing more or less. She could fall apart later.

Because based on their wounds, Wren was quite certain this was murder.

They were far too practiced, far too intentional. The first man had died quickly, likely from the blunt trauma at the base of his skull. Her living patient’s injuries, however, assured Wren that Lowry was either more foolish or far cockier than she gave him credit for. They were bombastic, almost mocking. As Lowry suggested, the man’s kidney was necrotic from a poison she vaguely recognized but had no time to treat. He would need a transplant in order to survive.

This wasn’t just a punishment. This was a test of her skill.

Wren dragged the dead man, cold to the touch, from his seat with a mumbled apology. As quickly as she could manage, she sliced his kidney free from its nest of tissue and placed it in a waiting bowl. Then, her magic white and sharp, she opened an incision in her patient’s abdominal cavity. Skin and muscle and fat peeled back like a zipper beneath the Touch.