"Don't scream. Stay silent."
A cold blade pressed to the hollow under her jaw. The voice was a knife folded into silk.
"Hands where I can see them," the man said.
Leonie's fingers went to the bedsheet, then stilled. She kept her face turned away. She counted breaths like a slow metronome.
"Who are you?" she whispered, play-acting soft and helpless.
"A question for the living," he answered. "Answer wrong and you stop asking."
He stepped closer. Leather scraped against lacquer. Moonlight cut through paper screens and silvered the blade. His hand brushed a bloom of blood where her sleeve had ridden up.
"You're bleeding," he said. "Was that the wedding present? Or an accident?"
"Accident," she lied. Her voice trembled on purpose.
He laughed. "An accident that writes in blood. Cute."
"Please—" she began.
"Please nothing," he said. "Move and I cut your throat."
She kept her head sunk. She smelled him then—smoke and iron and the cold tang of oil. He smelled of the road. He smelled of war.
"What do you want?" she asked, mimicking fear.
"Not what you think," he said. "I want what someone in this house promised to bury tonight."
Her breath shortened. She forced a soft, indecisive cough. A tiny wet pearl of pain threaded through her arm from the old wound where a rusted nail had torn skin; she had dressed it badly, thinking she had time.
"You're an odd sort of surgeon," the intruder said
