Chapter 372 Reset, Agnes. Reset. You’re Too Hot For This.

“Reset, Agnes. Reset. You are entirely too smart and attractive to be a mistress. Your baby will be even better looking,” she told herself.

First pin. Click. Second pin. Click. Third pin.

CLICK.

The left entire cuff released. Her hand came free, and the sudden absence of silver on that wrist sent a rush of sensation through her arm that was half relief and half agony, the specific pain of blood flow returning to tissue that had been compressed and burned simultaneously.

She brought her left hand in front of her body. Flexed the fingers. They worked. Barely. The skin on her wrist was raw, blistered, carrying the imprint of the silver in a pattern she would wear for days.

“Excellent work, Agnes. Do it again.”

The right cuff took forty-five seconds. She could see this one. The pin found the tumbler, set three pins in sequence, and the cuff opened with a click that she would remember fondly for the rest of her life.

The ankle chains had padlocks. Heavier. The keyholes were larger, which was both easier and harder: easier to insert the pin, harder to manipulate the internal mechanism because the tumblers were spaced for a key twice the size of the pin she was using.

She knelt on the stone floor. Her wrists were raw. Her fingers were still trembling. The silver burns ran from her wrist bones to mid-forearm, angry and red and weeping.

The first padlock took two minutes. The second took ninety seconds, because practice is practice regardless of whether the practice is occurring during a training exercise or a prison break.

Agnes stood.

Her legs were unsteady. The silver had suppressed her wolf for long enough that her body felt wrong, too heavy, too slow, operating at a percentage that a woman raised on precision found personally offensive. She flexed her hands. Rolled her shoulders. Wiped the blood from her lip with the back of her wrist.

“How the fuck slaves wear silver all day is beyond me. Yikes,” she said to no one. “Also, congratulations, Father. You’ve managed to make your workforce weaker and slower on purpose. Garrett pays his people. Treats them like they matter. And shockingly, they perform. Revolutionary concept, I know.”

She looked at the door. Locked. From the outside.

She looked at the antique pin in her hand, then at the door lock, then back at the pin.

“Father,” she said to the empty room, “you trained me. You armed me. You chained me to a chair in a room full of your own tools. And then you left.”

She crossed to the door.

“This is the worst operational security I have ever seen, and I was raised by you, so the bar was already underground.”

Agnes pressed her ear to the study door. Two heartbeats on the other side. Steady, bored, carrying the particular rhythm of guards who had been stationed outside a locked room and were expecting the contents to remain locked.

The door was a bad option. Two guards with silver on standby, and her wolf was still suppressed, her strength at sixty percent, her wrists raw, her body running on adrenaline and the specific spite that had been fueling Viremont women for generations.

She turned back to the study.

The portraits. Reginald Viremont hung portraits of dead Viremonts the way other men hung decoration: strategically, in positions that communicated lineage and legacy to anyone sitting in the chair across from the desk. Three portraits on the west wall. Two on the north. Each one heavy, gilded, and positioned with a precision that suggested their placement was significant beyond aesthetics.

Agnes felt along the edges of the first portrait. Nothing. The second. Nothing.

The third was her grandfather. Alistair Viremont. A man whose operational paranoia had been legendary and whose estate had been designed with enough hidden passages to constitute a secondary floor plan.

She pressed the corner of the frame. A mechanism clicked behind the wall. A section of paneling shifted inward by two inches, revealing a gap wide enough for a body and dark enough to swallow the light from the study window.

“Mistake, Father,” Agnes said, stepping through. “Leaving me in your study with Grandfather’s portrait was mistake number one. Leaving me with your lock picks was mistake number two. I will be compiling the full list and presenting it to you at a later date.”

She pulled the panel shut behind her. The passage was narrow, dark, carrying the stale air of a space that had been sealed for years and the particular smell of old stone and older secrets. She moved by feel, one hand on the wall, feet testing each step before committing, because hidden passages built by paranoid patriarchs were occasionally designed with features meant to discourage uninvited guests, and Agnes was, technically, uninvited.

The passage ran straight for twenty feet. Then it turned. Then it ended at another panel, this one with a latch rather than a mechanism, which she pressed.

The panel opened into a bedroom.

Her father’s bedroom.

Of course.

Of course the secret passage from her father’s study led to her father’s private chambers, because Reginald Viremont was a man who valued convenience above all things, and the convenience of moving between his workspace and his bedroom without being observed was exactly the kind of architectural luxury a spymaster would commission.

Agnes stepped through the panel and immediately heard the second problem: two more heartbeats. Outside the bedroom door. Guards. Stationed at the entrance to the master chambers, because of course they were, because Reginald Viremont guarded his bedroom the way he guarded everything: with men who were paid to stand still and ask no questions.

She sighed. The sigh carried the full weight of a woman whose escape route had delivered her from one guarded room into another guarded room, and the only measurable progress was the change in furniture.

Her father was nowhere in the chambers. The bed was made. The fire was low. The room smelled like him: cold leather, ink, and the particular absence of warmth that characterized every space Reginald Viremont occupied for longer than an hour.

Her stomach lurched.

The nausea arrived without warning, the way it had been arriving for weeks, with zero respect for timing and zero interest in the fact that she was in the middle of escaping a fortified compound. The bile climbed her throat with the specific urgency of a body that did not care about operational priorities and had its own agenda.

Agnes sprinted to the bathing chamber. Made it to the basin with approximately half a second to spare. The sound she produced was violent, efficient, and profoundly undignified, and she hated every second of it while simultaneously being grateful that the two guards outside the door were far enough away to miss the audio.

She spat. Wiped her mouth. Braced both hands on the basin and breathed through her nose until the room stopped tilting.

“Your timing,” she whispered to the thing below her ribs, “is the worst I have ever encountered, and I have encountered your grandfather’s timing, so the bar was already in hell.”

She lifted her head. Her eyes landed on the window.

“Bingo.”