Chapter 374 Unlikable Was A War Cry Now

Agnes’s body went rigid.

She stopped breathing. Her fingers locked into the stone with a grip that was fueled entirely by adrenaline and the understanding that being discovered on a wall outside a second-story window would add “caught eavesdropping during escape attempt” to the résumé the stranger had just finished reciting.

Corvin reached the window. His hand appeared on the sill. His face was three feet from hers, separated by a wall and an angle and the dense winter darkness that was, for the first time in this entire escape, doing her a favor.

He looked out. His eyes swept the grounds below. He breathed the cold air once, the way a man breathes cold air when a room is stuffy and the night is available.

Agnes was frozen. Flat against the stone. Her face turned away from the window. Her body pressed into the wall with the specific intensity of a woman attempting to become architecture.

Her fingers were white. Her arms were shaking. A single cough, a single shifted stone, a single sound louder than her own heartbeat, and the man three feet away would look left instead of down and the escape would end on a wall.

Corvin pulled the window shut.

The latch clicked. The light narrowed to nothing. The voices became muffled, then inaudible, and the wall was dark and cold and silent.

Agnes exhaled. The exhale was long, shaking, carrying the compressed terror of the last forty-five seconds in a single breath that fogged in the winter air and drifted away from the wall like a ghost with better things to do.

“Unlikable by design,” she muttered through her teeth. “I will remember that. I will remember your voice.

And when Garrett and I are sitting on a throne you will never touch, I am going to find you, and I am going to make you say it to my face, and then I am going to destroy you with a smile.”

She resumed climbing.

The last story and a half was graceless. The handholds ran out at the first-story mark, where the stone transitioned from rough-cut masonry to a smooth foundation that offered the grip of a wet mirror.

Agnes hung from the last viable foothold for three seconds, calculating the drop, calculating the landing surface, calculating the odds that a ten-foot fall onto packed earth would cause damage to the thing below her ribs that she was contractually obligated to protect.

She let go.

The landing was controlled in the sense that she aimed for the ground and successfully reached it. The execution involved her feet hitting the earth, her knees buckling, her body pitching forward, and her hands catching her weight in a position that any observer would have described as “face-first controlled collapse” and any gymnast would have scored a two.

She lay on the frozen ground for three seconds. Her wrists burned. Her knees ached. Her dress was torn at the hem, her lip was still bleeding, and the cold was so total that her body had stopped registering it as temperature and had begun categorizing it as a personality.

She stood up. Brushed the dirt from her knees. Looked up at the five-story wall she had just descended with raw wrists, a split lip, morning sickness, and zero equipment.

“Unlikable my ass,” she said, and started running. “I am very likable, thank you.”

The compound grounds were larger than she remembered.

Agnes crouched behind a row of hedges that lined the eastern walk between the main house and the servants’ quarters. The hedges were trimmed to military precision, because Reginald Viremont applied his standards to landscaping the same way he applied them to intelligence operations: obsessively, without variation, and with zero tolerance for anything that grew in an unauthorized direction.

Guard rotation: two pairs, staggered, covering the eastern and southern approaches in a pattern she had memorized at thirteen because Agnes Viremont’s idea of a childhood hobby was surveillance.

First pair passed. She counted. Forty-three seconds until the second pair rounded the southern corner. Forty-three seconds of dead space where the eastern walk was unwatched.

She waited.

Firelight caught her attention. A window, ground floor, cracked two inches. The glass was fogged with warmth from the inside, and the amber glow that leaked through carried the smell of cigar smoke and aged whiskey and the particular atmosphere of her father’s private parlor.

The cigar room.

Agnes had envied that room since she was old enough to understand what it was: the room where her father did his real thinking. The room where strategies were born and alliances were brokered and decisions were made in leather chairs with crystal glasses, by men who considered the presence of women an architectural impossibility.

She had stood outside the door a hundred times as a girl, listening to the muffled laughter of men who ran the world from a room she was forbidden to enter, and the exclusion had shaped her as precisely as anything her father had ever taught her on purpose.

Her father’s laughter came through the glass. The sound was warm, relaxed, the laugh of a man who was drinking good whiskey in a room where every outcome he had engineered was proceeding on schedule. She had heard that laugh at dinners and negotiations and the specific moments after a successful operation when Reginald allowed himself the luxury of satisfaction.

A second voice. The Viremont Gamma, a man named Dorren whose loyalty to her father was absolute and whose tactical mind was the second sharpest in the compound.

Agnes pressed herself against the hedge and listened.

“—rotations at the northern approach are the weakest,” Dorren was saying. “Darkhowler runs a skeleton patrol between the second and fourth watch because the terrain is dense forest and they rely on wolf sentries rather than fixed positions. The sentries mindlink if they spot movement, but the response time is four minutes from alert to mobilization. That is our window.”

Her father’s voice came next. “Four minutes is generous. We will need two.”

“The mages open a portal corridor along the northern tree line. Forty wolves, dark-channel insertion, moving in two strike teams. First team hits the gate. Second team moves through the forest to the eastern wall, where the Beta’s quarters face outward. Cross is Darkhowler’s spine. Remove the spine, the body collapses.”

“If any Darkhowler soldier shows here tonight,” Reginald said, and his voice shifted into the register Agnes recognized as final, the register where planning became ordering, “we launch immediately. The boy comes for his mate, and while his castle is emptied of its king and his best men, we take it. Darkhowler is the weakest of the alliance. Geographically isolated. The easiest to cut from the herd.”