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Being an assassin meant knowing when to kill—and when not to kill.

Unfortunately.

I stood in a pool of midnight shadows, my boots, jeans, turtleneck, and fleece jacket as black as the night around me. My dark brown hair was stuffed up underneath a black toboggan that matched the rest of my clothes, and I’d swiped some black greasepaint under my eyes to reduce the paleness of my face. The only bit of color on my body was the silverstone knife that glinted in my right hand. I even inhaled and exhaled through my nose, so that my breath wouldn’t frost too much in the chilly January air and give away my position.

Not that anyone was actually looking for me.

Oh, a dwarf on guard duty was patrolling the vast estate. Supposedly, he was here to keep an eye out and make sure that no one snuck out of the woods, sprinted across the lawn, and broke into the mansion off in the distance. But he was doing a piss-poor job of it. I’d been watching him amble around for more than three minutes now, making an exceptionally slow circuit of this part of the landscaped grounds.

Every once in a while, the dwarf would raise his head and look around, scanning the twisted shadows cast by the trees and ornamental bushes that dotted the rolling lawn. But most of the time, he was far more interested in playing a game on his phone, judging from the beeps and chimes that continually emanated from it. He didn’t even have the sound muted—or his gun drawn.

I shook my head. It was so hard to find good help these days.

Still, I tensed as the guard wandered closer to my position. I was standing at the corner of a gray stone house, set in the very back corner of the yard, several hundred feet from the main building. Trees were clustered all around the house, their branches arching over the black slate roof and making the shadows here particularly dark, giving me the perfect hiding spot to watch and wait out the guard.

No doubt the man who lived in the mansion charitably referred to this house as a caretaker’s cottage or something else equally dismissive, even if it was almost large enough to be its own separate manor. Even Finnegan Lane, my foster brother, would have been impressed by the spacious rooms and expensive antique furniture that I’d glimpsed through the windows when I was sneaking around the cottage and getting into position—

“So are you actually going to break into the mansion, or are we just going to stand around out here all night in the dark?” a snide voice murmured in my ear.

Speak of the devil, and he will annoy you.

I looked to my right. Fifty feet away, a tall man-shaped shadow hovered at the edge of the tree line. Like me, Finn was dressed all in black, although I could just make out the glimmer of his eyes, like a cat’s in the darkness.

“I’m waiting for the guard to turn around and go back in the other direction,” I hissed. “As you can bloody well see for yourself.”

The transmitter in my ear crackled from the force of Finn’s snort. “Mr. Cell-Phone Video Game?” He snorted again. “Please. You could do naked cartwheels across the lawn right in front of him, and he still wouldn’t notice.”

Finn was probably right, but with the guard only about thirty feet from me now, I couldn’t risk responding. Instead, I slid back a little deeper into the shadows, pressing myself up against the side of the cottage. My body touched the wall, and I reached out with my elemental Stone magic, listening to the gray rocks that made up the structure.

Dark, malicious whispers echoed back to me, punctuated by high, shrill, screaming notes of fear and agony, as the stone muttered about all the blood and violence it had witnessed over the years and all the people who had died within its walls.

The mutterings didn’t surprise me, considering where I was, but their deep, harsh intensity made me frown. I wouldn’t have thought that the caretaker’s cottage would have been this affected by the man in the mansion, given the distance between the two structures.

Then again, anything was possible when dealing with the Circle.

I shut the stone’s mutterings out of my mind and focused on the guard. Like most dwarves, he was short and stocky, with bulging biceps that threatened to pop through the sleeves of his suit jacket. Your typical enforcer, save for the thin, scraggly wisps of black hair that lined his upper lip. Someone was trying to grow a mustache with little success.

Stopping about ten feet away from me, the guard raised his gaze from his phone and glanced at the front of the house. He tilted his head to the side, listening to the whistle of the winter wind as it made the tree branches above the cottage scrape together like dry, brittle bones.

I tightened my grip on my knife, the symbol stamped into the hilt pressing into the larger, matching scar embedded in my palm, both of them a circle surrounded by eight thin rays, a spider rune, the symbol for patience.

Something that the guard had little of. Five seconds later, he turned his attention back to his phone and resumed his slow, ambling walk, taking him right past my hiding spot. I could easily have reached out of the shadows, sunk my hand into the dwarf’s hair, yanked his head back, and cut his throat. He would have been dead before he’d even realized what was happening. But I couldn’t kill him—or anyone else here—tonight.

Unfortunately.

Once I started dropping bodies, the members of the Circle, a secret society responsible for much of the crime and corruption in Ashland, would realize that I was onto them. They would close ranks, increase their security, and come after me. Or worse: target my friends. Something that I wasn’t ready for.

So as easy as it would have been for me to kill the guard, I let him wander away, never knowing how close he’d come to playing his last video game.

Once the guard had moved far enough away, I relaxed and looked over at Finn, who flashed me a thumbs-up, then raised the gun in his other hand and saluted me with it. His voice crackled in my ear again. “I’ll be here waiting but with gun drawn instead of bells on. Just in case you need the cavalry to ride to your rescue.”

I rolled my eyes. “Please. I’m Gin Blanco, fearsome assassin and underworld queen, remember? The only thing I need rescuing from is you and your bad puns.”