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She entered the room and leaned her back against the wall and whispered the first rule the Wicked Widow had written for nights exactly like this:

A woman who survives the first night can survive all the ones after.

Chapter two

Stray

Aman who guards your door may be guarding himself as much as you.

— The Wicked Widow’s Rules

Kit

Marian had told him three weeks before she died.They had been in the library, the fire low, Marian in the chair by the hearth—the one she'd sat in every evening for forty years. She'd been failing all autumn: the slower steps, the longer silences, the breakfasts she'd refused. He'd started bringing her meals to her in bed. The fiercely independent woman had accepted it without comment, which had told him everything.

“I’ve written to my solicitor,” she had said. “The estate goes to my niece.”

Kit had looked up from the bridle he was mending.

“Audrey,” she had said. “Lady Audrey Kendal. She’s a widow. Hugh Kendal died three years ago and left her to the mercy of his cousin, who has none.”

He’d nodded.

“She was thrown from a horse when she was eight. But it was the cage her mother built around her afterwards that crippled her more than the fall.”

“She won’t need to come for some time yet,” he’d said. “You’ll be well.”

She’d turned to him, her smile warm. “No, Kit. I shall be in the grave soon enough.” A pause. “I wish I had something to give you.”

He’d squeezed her hand. “You’ve already given me too much.”

She’d kissed his cheek and whispered, “Do not worry. I am taking your secret to my grave. Audrey shall know nothing.”

Three weeks later she died in that chair.

He should have left then. Told himself he would. Silverton had never been his to keep, whatever he'd promised her, hand in hers. He'd go quietly, with no backward look, as he always went when a place stopped needing him.

Five years he’d spent watching over the Lintons. Now the eldest was a duchess, and every gossip sheet in London spoke of nothing but the Linton girl who’d married a duke. The notoriety brought scrutiny, and scrutiny would lead the Trade to his doorstep. The Lintons would not be forgiven for harbouring him.

So here he was.

Reeve's instructions had arrived in three letters, each shorter than the last. The first reported that the widow had declined the offer. The second that she had ignored the warning. The third was barely a letter at all. She's gone to ground. Left the inn. My man lost her for nine days. She surfaced at a boarding house that takes single women and would not come to the door. Then she hired a carriage and set out for the estate. A woman who runs and hides and still goes where she pleases is too clever to manage and too stubborn to buy twice. She'll be a headache every month the tunnel is in use. Kill her. No family who would notice. None who would grieve. Make it clean. Beneath the instructions, as though it were an afterthought: Her husband died slowly. Three years wasting. Physicians called it a fever, but the cousin says she dosed him. Arsenic in his evening tea, a little more each week. Patient woman. Cold. Do not underestimate her.

He'd read the third letter twice and burned it. Then he'd sat in the kitchen and eaten his bread and thought about a woman who'd been told she was being watched and had the sense to vanish and the nerve to get on the carriage anyway.

He was listening for the carriage that would bring her. Frail, they'd told him. Frail enough that the job would be quick. Clean.The carriage stopped at the front door after the light had gone. He'd been eating bread, cheese, the soup he'd made that morning, and though he'd anticipated her arrival for nearly a fortnight, he had not expected her this late.

He stood and lit the lantern and carried it to the front door. Marian would have lit the fire and put the kettle on and said a thing both kind and perceptive, but he wasn't Marian. A lantern he could manage. He'd no wish to manage much more than that for a lady who'd lived in comfort all her life.He went to Marian's room first. It still smelled of her: lavender and old paper and forty years of living in one place. From beneath the pillow, he picked up the sprigs she'd kept there, dried now, brittle, and chose the least faded one and placed it beneath the pillow that would be Lady Kendal's. Tidied the bedding. Straightened the counterpane with the same hands that had, three hours earlier, cleaned and sharpened the knife he kept in his boot.

For a week he'd struggled over which room would serve, not because any was grander than the others, but because of proximity. Having her across from him meant hearing her through the wall every night and hearing her would make her too real. But distance seemed careless for a man whose sole purpose was to kill her.The small barrel of water in the water closet was clean, no drowned vermin, no smell. He stood in the doorway and looked at the room he'd prepared. A guest room. Or a laying-out room. He could not tell the difference.

* * *

The key turned with a loud click and the door opened below.

The footsteps were uneven, and a cane tapped on the flagstones. Then a thud of a trunk. He could see the light moving below, the glow sliding along the cracked walls and peeling paper.

She was careful with her steps. Four of them, then the gasp. She’d found the hole.