My hands work on memory alone. This is not the first lock I’ve picked. Oh, far from it. It isn’t even the hundredth. Maybe not the thousandth. I press my ear to the door to listen for the sound of the tumblers moving, sliding into place as the pin toggles them.

Click, click. Click.

The door swings open under my hand. I smile.

Perhaps this night will not be a waste after all.

It’s more trouble than it ought to be, struggling up from my knees in this godforsaken dress. But needs must, I suppose. We could have probably slipped into the villa some other way, but Kiki did always like to make a grand entrance.

Inside, the room looks more utilitarian than any other I have thus far encountered. A desk made of dark polished wood sits toward the rear of the room, flanked by a set of massive bookshelves. A chair upholstered in red leather so rich it looks much like the wine spilled across my bodice sits pushed back from the desk as if someone had stood up and left it where it was, perhaps to return to soon.

There are no windows. Peculiar, since every other room on this floor had them. Tall ones, too. The kind that go all the way from floor to ceiling and are largely impractical considering the mountain chill that plagues us for several months out of the year.

I waste no time. I’m not nearly as good with this sort of thing—record-keeping, dreary as it is—as Kiki, but I make do. All I need to do is find something suspicious. Anything will do. A man like Cristobal must have the bodies buried somewhere, literally and metaphorically. Although I’d much rather unearth a metaphorical one made of paper than a real one made of flesh and bone.

Trying to leave as little disturbed as possible, I begin to shuffle through his papers. Most of the books are records of accounts, nothing that seems overly suspicious in and of itself. Wages paid to the household staff. Titles for land inherited from dead relatives. Deeds to property the man has probably never even seen. Accounts settled with businesses both local and abroad. Correspondences with family members and acquaintances back in Spain, covering topics that seem utterly mundane. How the livestock is faring. The condition of the olive groves back on the continent. Rolled maps of shipping routes across the New World, Europe, and Africa, stretching all the way to the isle of Madagascar. I put those aside with all the rest.

But—wait.

The map. There is something familiar about it.

I retrieve it from the pile and unroll it across the expanse of Cristobal’s desk.