Madrid had been restless, but now—weeks after Harrow's disappearance into the bowels of the Alcázar—the city exhaled like a man waking from a nightmare. The paranoia in the streets softened, though it never fully vanished. Spies still whispered, men still disappeared, but the sharp edge of fear dulled. A foreign spider had been caught, and with it, the city believed, the worst of the web had been burned away.
Lancelot knew better.
He stood in the courtyard of the safehouse in La Latina, sharpening a dagger on whetstone, listening to the scrape of steel over stone. Every report from London confirmed his suspicion: another would come. Yet a new certainty had begun to form in his chest, one that weighed as heavily as any blade. The war in shadows would never truly end. If he wished to preserve Spain, to secure her future, his struggle could not remain in taverns and cellars forever.
It had to move into the realm of kings.
