The dead should stay dead.
Jacob Carter repeated the words like a prayer as he adjusted the raven mask over his scarred face. The carved beak pressed cold against the bridge of his nose, the eyeholes narrowing his vision to slits of flickering torchlight. Beneath him, the ballroom of House Blackwood shimmered—a grotesque painting of gilded decay. Nobles in moth-eaten silks laughed behind ivory masks, their gloved hands clutching goblets of wine so dark it looked like blood in the candlelight. The air reeked of clove and something fouler beneath, like meat left too long in the sun.
He hadn't come for wine.
The dagger at his belt—his sister's dagger, the one he'd pulled from her charred ribs—twitched in its sheath as if alive. It had waited seven years for this night. Seven years since Lord Richard Blackwood's soldiers had kicked in the door of their cottage. Seven years since Jacob had watched from the treeline, nails biting into his palms, as the flames turned Emily's screams to smoke. Seven years of dreaming of this moment: sliding steel between Blackwood's ribs and whispering "For Emily" as the lord choked on his own arrogance.
A hand grabbed his wrist.
"You're not one of us."
The voice was low, female, and frayed at the edges. Jacob turned to see a woman in a cracked porcelain mask—one eyehole wider than the other, as if weeping. Up close, her emerald gown was stained with old wine and what might've been handprints of soot.
His dagger was at her ribs before she could blink. "Try to stop me, and you'll die first."
She laughed, the sound hollow as a rotten log. "I'm not your enemy, mercenary. Look."
She tilted her chin toward the balcony. There, wreathed in pipe-smoke and flanked by guards in tarnished armor, stood Lord Blackwood—with a knife already buried between his shoulder blades.
And the killer wore Jacob's face.