Ganymede wriggled in Andō’s grip. “Stop. This is serious. The Cann—”

Again Andō stole the Duke’s words with a long kiss. “The Canner Device?” he finished. “That’s old business. Don’t worry your head about it. The guilty have been well punished. It’s done.”

Ganymede wriggled. “No, you—uuuh.” A fresh gasp broke his words.

“It’s done.”

I do not know, reader, whether Andō mounted Ganymede here in front of Perry or spared him; it is the sort of detail a gentleman omits in interview. Perhaps Andō backed off, but, after Ganymede’s show of ducal fire at Perry, Andō might have taken this chance to drive home to both the others that he is and ever shall be first among (un)equals. Besides, I know Andō enjoys how the Duke’s unwilling buttocks clench like a virgin’s on these rare occasions when he is not ‘in the mood.’ You may choose for yourself, reader, how thorough a congress to imagine.

“Is this a perk that comes with being invited upstairs?” Perry asked, a freshness awakening in his face as he watched, as when a dozing dog pricks up its ears at footsteps.

Andō enjoyed that question. “Watching is. The twins are one flesh, and both of them are mine, as sure as man and wife and otherwife.” Fresh touches made sure Ganymede had no breath to contradict. “I paid for them, more money than you’ll see in your lifetime. The boy I leave free to share himself when he fancies, but the last man who glanced too long at Danaë is not here to remember it.”

“Understood.” The trial-weathered Prime Minister smiled as he stretched back to watch politics play out before him. “I really can never thank you enough, Andō. Tomorrow night. It hardly feels real; just one more night.”

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

Providence

Share now my horror, reader, as a liveried footman returns my confiscated tracker, and the first sight in my feed is Carlyle Foster stepping across the threshold of Madame’s. Dominic plays our puppet strings with a musician’s precision, like the grim matron who made him. He knew just how long he could keep me off the tracker network before Papadelias would go berserk, so he had my tracker delivered to my hands minutes before the Commissioner General would have called the Romanovan cavalry, and seconds after our sweet young sensayer had passed the door. That door, festive with its gilded ironwork of twining vines; I would have plastered it with warnings to match the gates of Hell, had I been free to reach it before Carlyle. Did Dominic know that I had tapped Carlyle’s feed? That I watched, live, as a pair of blushing housemaids swept the Cousin up, happy to serve as teeth for Dominic’s bear-trap. “Sister Heloïse is expecting you,” they crooned. “She’s just through here. She’s so been looking forward to your visit.” Their lies poured out like syrup as they coaxed their victim on, just a little further, through these suites, these doors, these bolts. I groaned inside. My warning had failed to save Carlyle, the instructions I had left with my fellow Servicers when I left them packing up Bridger’s toys to ship to Sniper’s doll museum: warn Carlyle to stay away, far away from Madame’s, from Dominic, and danger. But Carlyle had come fluttering to the flame, lured by the false invitation Dominic had sent in Heloïse’s name, and lured too by Carlyle’s conclusion that J.E.D.D. Mason was something not unlike a miracle. How confident the Cousin was that, in this golden age of peace and ever-watching trackers, a virgin with a bag of gold could walk across the Earth without danger. Our modern moths have bounced so many times off lightbulbs, they aren’t prepared for torches, and forget that wings can burn.