Evelina closed the heavy oak door to her chamber, the silence of the hallway providing a cold, hollow relief from the suffocating tension of the Minister's study. She didn't light the candles. In her assassin days, she had learned to operate in total darkness, relying on her other senses and the faint biological heat signatures of those around her. Here, she moved through the room with the practiced ease of a ghost, the silver moonlight through the high windows guiding her path across the stone floor.
She reached under the bed and pulled out a small, unassuming wooden chest. To anyone else—to the maids who cleaned or the family that ignored her—it was merely a box of childhood keepsakes, old ribbons and dried flowers. To her, it was a mobile laboratory, her most lethal asset in this primitive world.
