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42

Will

T he door clicked shut behind us with a finality I felt in my teeth. Thomas turned the lock with practiced quiet, pressing it inward until the bolt sank into the frame with the softest metallic thunk . I held my breath and pressed my back to the wood, listening hard.

Outside, footsteps.

Two pairs. Slow. Crunching frost.

I mouthed a count to Thomas: One. Two. Three. Four . . .

The steps passed just inches from the other side of the wall.

Then—silence.

There was no rattling of keys, no banging of knocks against wood, no spotlights illuminating the night like a bonfire.

They’d kept walking.

I let myself breathe.

We’d made it in.

The kitchen was dim—moonlight seeped through high windows, casting silver across old ceramic tile. A single wall sconce in the far corner glowed like it had been forgotten—likely left on by someone too tired to finish shutting down the house.

I was just about to signal Thomas forward when I heard it.

A wet crunch?

Then the scrape?

Then . . . chewing?

I turned to find a woman—round, barefoot, and wearing a floral nightgown that hung like drapes over her shoulders. She stood at the kitchen counter, mid-bite into a thick sandwich she held in both hands like it was precious cargo. Her cheeks were puffed like a chipmunk’s, her eyes wide and shimmering with disbelief and sudden fear.

She stood and planted her feet, shoulder-width apart, as if she’d been surprised by intruders often enough to develop a stance for it.

I stared.

She blinked.

Thomas froze behind me.

It was a standoff.

The kind where the guns hadn’t been drawn, but the questions had already started firing.

I lifted a hand and pressed my forefinger to my lips.

One thought raged through my mind: Please don’t scream. Please don’t scream. Please don’t scream.

She didn’t.

Her eyes narrowed.

She set the sandwich down, carefully, as if it might explode, then she said something sharp and fast in Hungarian that I couldn’t hope to catch. The tone, however, made her meaning clear enough: Who the hell are you, and why are you in my kitchen?

Thomas stepped forward, his whisper smooth and steady. “ Néni, kérem . . .” he began, in the slow, formal tone of someone trying not to be shot by a housekeeper.

She didn’t scream, didn’t run, just squared herself like a cannon loading a second shell.

He’d called her “auntie,” and I couldn’t tell if she’d been flattered or was preparing to fight to the death.

Thomas switched tactics.

“ áram. Ellen?rzés ,” he said—power, inspection—and gestured with a vague motion toward the walls. “ éjszakai munka .”

Night work.

The woman’s brow furrowed.

Thomas gestured to the wall again, then mimed an exaggerated shrug and looked back at me as if to say, “Please, for the love of God, follow along.”

I nodded solemnly, pulling a folded piece of blank paper from my coat pocket, and holding it up like it was an official dispatch from some ministry no one dared question. I added a slight bow, for good measure.

The woman sniffed.

Her eyes flicked from me, to Thomas, to the door, then to the hallway beyond.

Then back to her sandwich.

She made a disgusted noise in her throat—the universal sound for “men are idiots,” apparently—and picked up the sandwich again.

“ Ne koszoljanak ,” she said, waving one hand at us, and then turned and walked off through a side door, bare feet slapping against the tile.

I let out a slow, shaky breath, then turned to Thomas. “What did she say?”

“Don’t make a mess,” Thomas replied, disbelief filling his eyes, and a half smirk teasing his lips.

We waited a moment until the sounds of the woman’s creaking ascent to her bedroom quieted. Thomas turned to me and pointed upward, his guess at which direction we should look first in search of Eszter. I shrugged, then nodded once.

The first step of the broad staircase held its tongue.

The second wailed like a woman who’d just dilated to ten with a baby eager to greet the world.

We froze.

Hell, my heart refused to beat . . . or was beating so fast I couldn’t feel it anymore. Nothing seemed to work right in that moment.

When the housekeeper didn’t appear, Thomas took a tentative step up. Our patient remained blessedly quiet, so up we went, carefully stepping on the sides of the stairs to avoid further squeals.

At the top of the stair, we were presented with far too many choices. That damn house was enormous.

There was one open door to the right, revealing a sprawling bedroom decorated in pastels and lace, as though some ancient woman had vomited all over the walls and curtains before dying and leaving the world her bad taste as its inheritance.

Four other doors watched and waited.

All were closed.

Thomas looked back, a question in his gaze.

All I could do was shrug and cup my hand to my ear, as if to say, “Listen at the door.”

I wasn’t sure that would do much good, but it was the best I could think of. How else were we to guess which room held the girl and which held the woman? Or if the other rooms held sleeping guards with rifles for bedmates? That thought hadn’t even crossed my mind until just that moment.

Thomas stepped to the first door and leaned as close as he dared. A few seconds passed before he stepped back and shook his head. He did this again at the second, then moved to the third. After barely a heartbeat, his hand moved to a pocket where he retrieved a fountain pen— the fountain pen Arty had given us back in Paris during our pre-mission brief. He twisted the top and a very determined needle snaked out through the golden nib.

I blinked a few times, then looked up. Thomas was staring at me.

He held up three fingers.

Then dropped one.

Then the other.

His hand lowered to the doorknob.

Slowly . . . so slowly . . . he turned.

It didn’t protest or squeak. It just turned.

He pushed.

The door slid open silently on well-oiled hinges, thank the gods of ancient metalwork. From what I could see through the widening crack of the doorframe, the bedroom was blanketed in utter darkness. No moonlight spilled in from the window. No lamplight illuminated the bed. I couldn’t see a thing through the gloom, which was a blessing—and a curse.

He stepped inside.

One foot.

The next.

Another step.

And the woman—the housekeeper we’d met in the kitchen—screamed.