“Trudana, please. Please keep that on. Where is it?” He didn’t even look at her body, and he could tell it infuriated her.

“As I was saying,” she said finally, “I knew you’d be here tonight, so I gave the globe to my maid. She’s just two doors down. Are you satisfied?” She hitched up her dress and walked to her dresser. She looked at herself in the mirror.

The prince turned without saying anything. He’d thought this was going to be easy, that he was going to make his father owe him a huge favor for doing practically nothing. Now he saw that Trudana Jadwin was going to be a lifelong enemy. Never again, he promised himself. I will never sleep with a married woman again.

He didn’t even pay any attention to the sound of a drawer sliding open. He didn’t even want to look at Trudana. He wasn’t even going to stay long enough to lace up his breeches. One second more was one second too many.

His hand was on the latch when he heard the rapid shuffle of her feet. Then something hot lanced into his back. It felt like a wasp sting. Then Trudana’s body crushed into him, and he felt the stinger sink deeper. His head smacked against the door in front of him, and he felt the sting again.

It wasn’t a sting. It was too deep. He gasped as roaring filled his ears. There was something wrong with one of his lungs. He wasn’t breathing right. The stabbing continued and the roaring receded. The world took on a startling clarity.

He was being stabbed to death. By a woman. It was embarrassing, really. He was the prince. He was one of the top swordsmen in the realm, and this fat-assed old woman with saggy, uneven breasts was killing him.

She was breathing, practically gasping in his ear, the same way that she had when they made love. And she was speaking, crying as if every stab were somehow hurting her. The self-pitying bitch. “I’m sorry, oh, oh, I’m sorry. You don’t know what he’s like. I have to I have to I have to.”

The stabbing continued, and it irritated him. He was already dying, his lungs filling with blood. Coughing, he tried to clear them, which succeeded in spraying blood on the door, but his lungs were mincemeat and blood just rushed back into the gaps.

He slumped, hit his knees in front of the door, and she finally stopped. His vision was going dark, and his face slumped forward into the door.

The last thing he saw, through the keyhole, was an eye on the opposite side of the keyhole, emotionlessly watching him die.

He found the door with no problem. It was locked, but he picked it in seconds. Let her be asleep. Please.