Dying in his cellar and being eaten by rats was not enough punishment for Brabantio. For the first time, I hoped that there was an afterlife and he could look up through the sulfurous clouds of Hell to watch me unwind his plots, drain his power, and extinguish the light of his legacy. Why bollocks about with caskets and seals when I could undo the cabal’s plan with the flick of a blade on the snowy throat of a sleeping daughter?

I padded into the main hall and up the great marble staircase, as quiet as a cat. A row of heavy oak doors lined the mezzanine, no doubt leading to bedchambers that overlooked the gardens and the city beyond. With my lantern set against the wall to dim it, I pulled the fish knife from my belt and held it between my teeth, then palmed the heavy bronze latch so it opened without a rattle.

I had never killed a woman before, unless you count accidental poisoning, which I do not. I’d not have thought myself capable of it before I lost Cordelia, but accepting death folds the soul, tempers and layers it like a Damascus blade. When I’d thrown myself into the canal in grief, only to be pulled out by the Moor, I’d become colder, more durable. Again, when the mermaid dragged me under into the murky deep from the dungeon, I’d resolved myself to death, and awakened a harder, sharper thing. Even as my life bubbled away last night and I thought Viv’s claws were hooks from Hell, only to find breath burning again in my lungs, my edge was honed, so fine and flexible now that I did not give two furry fucks for the life of fair Portia. I could hold my hand over her mouth and watch her life run red over the bedclothes and drip down on the head of her dead father and smile for the justice of it.

Such a creature had I become. Vivian and I, in killing were as one.

I pushed open the door to find no one—a room empty of people, but full of papers and maps, hand-copied books such as I had seen only in the scriptorium at the abbey where I learned to write. I carried my lantern into the room, and found there, laid out on the writing table, my throwing daggers. I had thought Antonio had worn them back to the city along with my motley, that long-ago night when I was walled in, but no, the old senator had kept them. Who, I wondered, had brought them up here, if he died in the dungeon on that very night, as was the rumor? Perhaps the puppet Jones, my jester’s scepter, had survived as well. I strapped the leather harness with its three sheaths on the outside of my shirt. But alas, I did not find Jones. Not there.