Chapter 371 You Paranoid Genius (She Said To Herself)

Agnes Viremont looked around the study with new eyes.

The eyes of a woman who had been trained by the best intelligence operative on the continent, who had memorized the layout of Darkhowler’s castle in under a week, who had mapped guard rotations from a guest bedroom while pretending to read poetry, and who was now sitting in the workspace of the man who had taught her all of it.

He had left her in his study. In a room that contained his desk. His drawers. His bookshelves. His letter opener, his ink pots, his seal stamps, his quills, and, if his habits hadn’t changed since she was sixteen, a decorative display of antique pins on the shelf behind his desk that he kept because Reginald Viremont collected small, sharp objects the way other men collected art.

This was the most productive punishment she had ever received.

“You absolute idiot,” she muttered.

First problem: the chair was bolted to the floor in the center of the room. The desk was eight feet away. The display shelf was twelve. Her arms were threaded behind the chair back, wrists cuffed, fingers going numb. Her ankles were chained to the chair legs with approximately two inches of slack.

She hopped the chair.

The bolt, as it turned out, was threaded into a stone floor that was two hundred years old, and two-hundred-year-old stone had opinions about holding bolts that were younger than it. The first hop produced a grinding sound. The second produced movement. The third produced a wobble so aggressive the bolt protested audibly.

By the fifth hop, the chair was free, and Agnes was mobile in the loosest possible definition of the word. She could shuffle. She could tilt. She could perform a movement that was technically forward motion and aesthetically a war crime.

She shuffled toward the desk. The sound of a metal chair scraping across stone at two inches per shuffle was, she imagined, audible to anyone standing in the corridor, but the corridor was empty and her dignity had already been stripped along with her freedom, so the sound was a problem for a version of herself who still cared about appearances.

That version had been backhanded out of existence approximately four minutes ago.

Eight feet of shuffling. Each one accompanied by a screech of metal on stone that sounded like a cat being stepped on by a smaller, angrier cat. She arrived at the desk, spun the chair with her hips, and backed up against the edge until her cuffed hands could reach the surface behind her.

She couldn’t see what she was touching. She could feel.

Her fingers walked across the desk. Leather folio. Ink pot, warm from the window light, she nudged it aside with her knuckles. A stack of correspondence that she would have killed to read and would revisit if time permitted. A seal stamp, heavy, brass, useless. A quill, too flexible. Another quill. A paperweight shaped like a wolf’s head because her father had the self-awareness of a brick.

Her fingers found the letter opener.

She picked it up. Dropped it. The numbness in her fingers from the silver was turning her hands into suggestions rather than tools, and the suggestion her hands were offering was “give up,” which she rejected with the same energy she had rejected every suggestion her body had made since she was three years old and her father put a practice blade in her hand and told her to stop crying.

She picked it up again. Held it. The blade was thin, flat, decorative. Too wide for the keyhole on the cuffs.

“Of course,” she muttered. “You own a letter opener built for aesthetics. Nobody in this family can prioritize function over form.”

The display shelf.

Twelve feet from the desk. She shuffled. The scraping resumed. The journey took approximately ninety seconds and felt like ninety years, and by the time she backed up against the shelf, her ankles were screaming from the silver and her shoulders were making suggestions about dislocation that she was actively ignoring.

Her fingers found the shelf. Walked across the felt-lined surface. Found the pins.

Reginald Viremont collected antique cloak pins the way a serial killer collected trophies: meticulously, obsessively, and with a reverence for sharp objects that should have concerned a therapist. The pins were arranged by era, each one a thin metal spike with a decorative head, and the third one from the left, which Agnes had catalogued at age fourteen during a period when she was bored and mapping her father’s possessions for practice, was a Viremont-era steel pin with a gauge thin enough to pick a standard tumbler lock.

She had picked this specific pin up at fourteen, examined it, noted the gauge, and filed the information under “useful if I ever need to pick a lock,” which at the time had been a hypothetical and was now, seven years later, an operational reality.

“Thank you, fourteen-year-old me,” she whispered. “You paranoid genius.”

She worked the pin into the keyhole of the left cuff behind her back. Blind. By feel. The silver was burning her wrists, and the burning was making her fingers shake, and the shaking was making the pin slip, and every slip cost her a second she was running out of.

The tumbler was a three-pin mechanism. Standard Skardos military issue. She had picked this model exactly once, during a training exercise when she was fifteen, on a lock that was in front of her with full visibility and both hands free and zero silver eating through her skin.

She was now doing it behind her back, by feel, with numb fingers, while her wrists blistered.

First pin: set. The click was small, metallic, the most beautiful sound she had ever heard, and she had once heard a full orchestra play at her debut ball.

Second pin: set. Her ring finger cramped. She adjusted. The cramp spread to her pinky. She ignored it, because her father had taught her to work through pain before he had taught her to read, and the training was paying dividends he had never intended.

Third pin.

The pin slipped. She was back to zero.

“Motherfucker. I swear on every god listening,” she hissed through her teeth, “I am going to pick this lock, and then I am going to pick every lock between here and Darkhowler, and then I am going to go home and crown myself and have this baby and raise it to be nothing like you, Father, and that will be the worst thing I ever do to you, and it will be enough.”