Chapter 1

"Uncle? I think I'm being followed."

Callista bit her lip, then took a deep breath and continued, "Not at this very moment, you don't need to send a squad car, but for the last-"

She thought back.

"Two weeks, I've been seeing things. Just little things." Flashes in the corner of her vision, shadows on the eaves on an abandoned apartment, things just a little out of place at home. There hadn't been any signs of forced entry and, for the first week, she'd chalked it up to nerves. Some of her clients had folded, leaving her budget for the month strained. There were rumors of a nasty virus going around, and it was getting harder and harder to move around the city.

"I know the city's a mess right now," she said, suddenly not so sure that she had any right to be panicking, "and it could just be the news making me jumpy. Yesterday I barely got through the checkpoint leading to the Legal District. My papers... anyway, maybe it's nothing." The voicemail timer had to be running out, and she grimaced. "I- never mind. I'm sorry. See you next week for lunch."

Callista hung up and curled her fingers tightly around her phone. Great - now Geoff was going to panic, all because she was a little on edge. Anybody would be, after the month she'd had. Fired by one family, strangely scheduled by another... She rubbed at her face. And now she had to visit the one pleasant student she had left, and maybe, just maybe, she was leading somebody there.

There was nothing to do but keep moving. She sighed and slipped her phone into her pocket, then turned away from her apartment building and made for the bus stop.

Something shifted in the corner of her vision.

Callista stopped. The shadow stopped.

Just nerves, she told herself, and took another few steps. Nothing changed. Everything was as it should be. Still, she quickened her step as she passed a narrow alley, imagining with every heartbeat a hand shooting out from the shadows to grab her.

Nothing moved.

She drew up to the bus stop, next to a man in a fine suit and a dark wool coat. He had just lit a cigarette. In the distance, maybe five blocks down, she could see her bus. Her shoulders relaxed. Nothing would happen in public. A bus was probably safer than if she had a car of her own.

It was a miracle that the lines were even running at all, though. The transportation department's budget had been gouged over the last several months and, with the rumors of spreading illness, use had dropped off sharply in the last two weeks, cutting profit. The worst projections gave the system two more months before even the most-used lines had to drop most of their runs.

Callista made herself look away from the bus, and the worrying that came along with it.

The man tapped ash onto the sidewalk. He wore leather gloves, and his face was scarred. She managed a faint, tight smile as their eyes met, then she let her gaze drift.

He didn't look away.

"Callista Curnow," he said, softly, and her heart stopped. In her pocket, her phone buzzed. The bus was four blocks away now. She looked back up at the man.

Before she could scream, he'd thrown aside his cig and struck his elbow into her gut. She crumpled. He caught her.

The sky was a latticework growing close around her head as the shadows swallowed them both. She couldn't breathe, and her pulse hammered in the dark edges of her vision. The arm tight around her chest hauled her back, back, away from the road and the distant sounds of cars, from the bus pulling to a stop, from nobody noticing her desperate whimpers that were little more than an open mouth and a spasming larynx.

Her phone buzzed again. She tried to reach for it in a fog, even as she began to cough, desperately reclaiming the air that had been taken from her.

"I don't think so," the man said. He adjusted his grip, his arm now around her waist and elbows, pinning her to him while he rifled in her pockets. He took her keys, her small folding knife, her wallet, and slipped them into his own pockets. And then he took her phone, the screen flashing Uncle Geoff, and slammed it into the alley wall. It shattered, squealed, and went silent in his hand.

He tucked the wreckage into another pocket.

"Please don't kill me," she whispered, eyes bulging from their sockets, heels skittering along the litter-strewn ground. "Please, please-"

"I'm not here to kill you," he said. He loosened his grip. Hope surged for a moment, before he threw her to the ground, flat on her belly. He was on her in another moment, knee in the small of her back, hands sliding the tie from around his throat. "But if you scream, it will be much worse."

Her chest and lungs burned. Still, she tried to scream, hoping, always hoping that maybe somebody would-

He growled, a low animal sound, and for a moment she thought he would slam her face into the pavement. Instead, he covered her mouth with one hand. The leather of his glove smelled like tobacco and metal and something she couldn't place. Gunpowder?

He worked the tie over her eyes awkwardly, one-handed, with the help of his teeth. She thrashed. He swore. But soon enough she was blinded, and he could use his free hand to put pressure on her neck.

She stilled.

He leaned down close to her. "Be silent, girl," he murmured. "I may not be in the blood business anymore, but I know where your students live, where your uncle lives. He's your last living relative, isn't he? Important man. Don't make me lay him out on a slab."

The thought struck her, hard, and she closed her eyes beneath the silk. Her hope turned to ash in her mouth, and she swallowed it down along with her screams.

"Good choice," he grunted. His voice was rough as gravel, as split asphalt, and he smelled like smoke and a spiced aftershave. His miasma was all around her. She waited for him to press some drugged rag to her face, but he never did. He simply hauled her to her feet, and led her away.

The blindfold remained in place during the long car ride. He bound her wrists and ankles when they reached his vehicle, and he tucked her into the footwell of the back seat before covering her with a blanket. Her cheek and hands had begun to ache from the force of hitting the ground, but that and the silent screaming in her diaphragm that she never let reach her throat became just a part of the rhythm of the engine as they drove.

She tried not to imagine Geoff coming to the rescue, tried not to strain for any sound of sirens in the distance. All she could hear was the creak of the man's gloves on the steering wheel and the thud as they passed over grating and uneven patches of asphalt. Her own breathing was loud and ragged.

For years, there had been a row of small boxes and urns on a shelf in Geoff's home office, one for every family member he'd been close enough to feel the pain of losing. They were all gone, now, put into a small mausoleum that he'd spent years saving for, setting aside a part of every paycheck and bonus. They'd needed an entire stone room to hold the whole family as it slowly fell apart, and his police salary couldn't keep up with all of the funerals until they'd finally dwindled to nothing, because there was no one left to mourn.

Now she could see too clearly a small placard with her name on it, along with a few lines about how her body had never been found, sitting alone on that shelf for a day, a week, a year before he finally took it to the cemetery.

Her eyes burned, heavy with the threat of tears.

She had to get back to him. They had lost too much to lose each other.

She drifted in and out of awareness, never really sleeping, but never fully present. It was easier to retreat. The man never spoke. She never asked questions. Maybe it would make him treat her with some measure of mercy.

At some point, she must have slept. One moment, she was curled awkwardly on the car's carpeting, and the next she was tucked into a bed. There was never a moment of relief where she mistook it for her own; it was narrow, the pillow a hard, cold thing, and the blankets were too heavy.

Still, she held her breath as she opened her eyes.

The room was small, bare, and decorated only in white and black. The brightness of the walls and her bedspread burned against her eyes, while the black rug stretched across the white-painted floor seemed like a hole into nothingness. It was alien, wrong.

The door moved, and Callista made herself scan the length of it despite the overwhelming urge to shut her eyes against whatever was coming. There, below the doorknob, was a small, pale hand curled around the wood.

"Hello?" she asked, and her voice sounded alien to her, too.

"You're awake," said a small child's voice. The door opened a little more, and a girl not more than ten, with bobbed dark hair and white clothing, peered at her. She looked familiar in a dim, unsettling way. "He said it'd be at least another hour. He said not to wake you up. Did I wake you up?"

"No," Callista said, and, slowly, she sat up. Her jacket was gone, and her shoes, but she still wore her skirt and sweater. Her hair had come down from its bun, and she slowly picked the pins from it, eyes never leaving the wraith of a girl. "Who- are you?"

"Emily Kaldwin," the girl said.

Callista took a deep, shuddering breath. "Emily Kaldwin," she echoed.

The girl nodded.

Emily Kaldwin had gone missing nearly a year ago, after the brutal murder of her mother, the first empress in Gristol's recent history to take power back from her ministers. Emily Kaldwin was the heir to a great fortune and a legacy of political power. Emily Kaldwin was standing in the same room as Callista Curnow, and the man in the dark suit must have brought them both here.

There were footsteps in the hall. Emily's expression changed, from cautious curiosity to fury to grief to numbness. "I ordered him to be nice to you," she said, a conspiratorial whisper that barely made it across the room. "But he just laughed."

The girl shut the door, and tiny footsteps faded quickly.

Callista stared after her.

She was still staring when he opened the door. He hadn't replaced his tie, and his combed-back hair was still mussed. She couldn't have slept for long, unless he enjoy being disheveled because of a fight and had left the signs of her failed struggle on him for her to see. She felt faintly nauseous.

"You're awake," he rumbled, lips curling faintly. "Then we can get down to business. I take it you saw Miss Emily?"

Numbly, she nodded.

"You will be her teacher. You will instruct her in all the subjects you are familiar with, and you will use the resources in this tower to teach yourself and her the subjects you are not. She will need to know mathematics, history, rhetoric, etiquette, and a hundred other little skills."

"What for?"

Daud shrugged, powerful shoulders moving beneath his suit jacket. He slipped his still-gloved hands into his pockets and regarded her carefully, looking her up and down several times. After a moment, he seemed to come to a conclusion. "She'll be taking her mother's place, of course."

"Did you take her?"

"Yes."

Emily Kaldwin had gone missing less than a day after her mother's murder. Corvo Attano, the head bodyguard for the family, had been arrested on the spot for Jessamine's death, but later investigations had suggested that he hadn't had the opportunity to remove the girl, as well. There were rumors of accomplices and of distant family members trying to get her out of harm's way. But there was never a ransom note, never a sign of her. The official inquest hadn't had to quash the speculation; it had died a cold death on its own.

The government had lost interest quickly, and it didn't surprise those with an ounce of attention; Jessamine had come close to breaking the ministers' powers. Hiram Burrows, the head of Gristol's Intelligence Bureau and the Empress's most loyal associate, had simply stepped into the vacuum, and life had resumed.

It had been the companies that Jessamine had owned that had kept up the search. They had benefited the most from Jessamine's reign, and they would benefit most if Emily was found. But weeks had passed, then months, and even they dropped out of public awareness.

"Who are you?" Callista asked, unable now to pull her stare from him.

He didn't flinch away from it. Instead, his lips twisted into a thin, grim smile. "I'm a paid killer, Callista Curnow. Or used to be."

"Give me a name."

"Daud," he said, and panic overrode any horrified understanding she felt. She focused entirely on fighting the urge not to scream or crawl back along the bed. Daud was a name whispered in the dark, a shadow run on news programs under the at large and dangerous portion of the show. Daud was a man her uncle had been trying to keep tabs on for years, but who was always too good, too fast.

Daud was rumored to have killed upwards of thirty people - and those were just the high-profile deaths that couldn't be covered up or forgotten in alleys or on the river. Esma Boyle's husband, Timothy Brisby's aunt. Then there were the innumerable deaths of the less important, and the undoubted loss of various others in manners not immediately attributable to violent causes.

"Good," he said, "you know the name." He sauntered closer. He was broad but compact, not much taller than she was. The scar on the right side of his face traced over deep lines in his brow, around his eyes. She placed him above forty. She also gave up on staying still, and shuffled back across the mattress.

He stopped at the edge of the bed, looking down at her.

"You're going to teach Emily Kaldwin everything she needs to know. In return, you will have meals, a roof over your head, and as much comfort as is reasonable. The library is well-stocked, the rooms are clean."

"But you'll be watching."

Another shrug. He pulled one hand from his pocket, flexed it, considered it as if he were checking his nails. "Sometimes."

"And I suppose I shouldn't try to get out?"

"That would be foolish, yes."

"So I'm not safe here at all."

His smile was all teeth and no mirth. "Depends on how pragmatic you are about safety. Stay within the rules, and you're just fine, if a little constricted. You can even write a shopping list and I'll see what I can do."

She stared up at him. Shopping list. The absurdity of it - imagining this man toting around grocery bags and goodies from stationery shops - made her head spin. She watched as he slipped his hand back into his pocket, the picture of arrogance, of confidence.

Something in her broke apart. Geoff had made sure to give her self-defense lessons, lessons that had failed her in the alley when she was too scared to move an inch. Now, though, with Daud so calm and at ease, she scrambled, launched herself at him. She caught him before he could get his hands out of his pockets, her weight knocking him off balance as she drove her knee into his gut.

It was only a glancing blow, but he stumbled back, fell to one knee. His eyes widened, and he was grinning, open-mouthed, even as she reached for his throat, his eyes. If she could get him to stay down for just a little bit-

She'd do what? Try to run out of the building? Find her uncle, hope he could pull enough strings to rescue Emily, save her students? Pray that Daud didn't have men out there even now, waiting? Dream of being forgotten, so she could see her students and have her lunch with Geoff, and only have to deal with nightmares?

He took advantage of her hesitation, and in a movement that seemed impossibly fast, he caught her around the waist and shoved her over, into the floor, bearing down with his body on top of her. She scratched and clawed at his face, tried to smash her knee into his groin, but he twisted in time to stop her. With one broad hand, he caught her wrists, pinned them up above her head.

"That's your one shot at me," he said, panting, even as she squirmed. If she could just get a hand free, get it into his collar- "Try this again, and I'll be forced to hurt you more permanently. Trust me, cooperating will be-"

She jerked forward, cracking her forehead against his. It cut him off mid-sentence, but the pain blossoming across her skull was too brilliant to think through. His grip on her loosened, and she managed to lash out blindly and strike his throat. He coughed, but didn't falter. Instead, he caught her free hand and squeezed, until she felt like the bones in her wrist might break.

"Give up," he growled, fitting his other hand around her throat. He didn't seem to care that she might strike him again. But even as she tried to, her vision grew blurry and her hearing pulsed with white noise. "Give up," he repeated, and this time his voice was distant.

Self-preservation kicked in before she could stop it, before she could commit to dying defiantly, and she went limp.

His grip on her loosened, but only by a fraction. He waited to see if she would launch herself at him again.

When she didn't, when she only laid still and kept her eyes closed, he let go of her. He patted her cheek lightly, and stood up, the wool of his suit sliding over his skin in a quiet rustle.

There were no footsteps. After a long moment, Callista opened her eyes.

He was gone.