The sun had barely cracked the horizon when the first carriage wheels groaned against the cobblestone path leading up to the Westing mansion.

Then the second.

Then the third.

One after another, like a procession of guilty men who had nowhere else to go.

The Hartfield territory stretched quiet under the pale gold of early morning — the fields beyond the iron gate still damp with dew, the air carrying the smell of wet grass and wood smoke from the distant tenant houses. The mansion itself sat at the end of the lane the way old guilt sits in a man’s chest — heavy, unavoidable, slightly larger than he remembered it being.

It was not what they expected.

Not the crumbling thing they’d engineered it to become. Not the gutted, starved carcass of a noble house bled dry by tightened ledgers and strangled supply routes. The stone was old but the windows were whole. The iron gate had been oiled recently — it swung open without protest when the first carriage approached, which bothered several of them more than if it had been rusted shut.

Servants were supposed to be gone. All of them. Every loyal hand, every familiar face — pulled away through whisper campaigns and withheld wages and gentle, untraceable pressure applied over months. That had been the plan. Isolate the woman. Starve the house. Let the territory crumble under her feet until she had no choice but to accept terms from men who were already drawing up documents for her land.

Six carriages stopped outside the gate.

Twelve men climbed out.

They stood on the lane in their morning coats and adjusted their ties and looked at each other with the mutual, uncomfortable awareness of people who have all done the same wrong thing and are now forced to be in the same place because of it.

"Where are the damned servants?" Castor Helling muttered — the fat man, still smelling faintly of last night’s dinner, tugging at his collar. His eyes moved along the mansion facade. "There should be nobody answering that door."

"There should be nobody inside at all," said the man beside him. Orin Brass. Gray-haired, sharp-eyed, three administrations survived. He said it quietly, the way men say things they’re already not sure about anymore.

Then Renwick — the one standing slightly apart from the rest, smoothing his lapel with fingers that hadn’t quite stopped trembling since last night — cleared his throat.

Renwick was the one who had pulled the servants. Specifically. He had been the one who circulated the rumors about late wages, the one who quietly arranged better positions for key household staff in distant counties, the one who had looked at the thick, imperious figure of Lady Eliantra Westing across a council meeting six months ago and thought, ’once I get my hands on that territory, I’ll pin her down and tear that dress off her and make her understand exactly who runs Hartfield now.’

He had imagined it clearly. Her wide hips hitting the desk. Her full, heavy chest bouncing as he shoved her forward. The fat, jiggly weight of that ass spread under his hands. He had imagined making her scream. Making her beg. Making that woman with her cold eyes and her straight spine and her attitude of someone who did not know her place understand her place very, very explicitly.

The fantasy had been vivid enough to sustain him through months of careful, methodical sabotage.

He had not been able to get an erection since two nights ago.

He did not understand why. He had not gone near any woman since then and yet his cock simply — refused. Lay flat and limp and uninterested as if something had reached inside him and made a structural adjustment. He breathed in through his nose and felt the familiar, creeping cold move through his lower belly when he looked at the mansion. Something was wrong in there. Something had changed.

Something with purple eyes.

"Renwick," said Dagger Lom from behind him, the dockmaster, a man built like a barrel someone had forgotten to empty. "Weren’t you the one who cleared the servants out?"

Renwick’s hand moved to his throat. Involuntary. He rubbed it.

"I arranged certain personnel transitions," he said.

"So you could get your cock into the mistress alone," Dagger Lom said. Not an accusation. Simply a statement. He said it the way one names a bird species — it’s that, obviously, we’ve all seen it, what else would it be. "Figured with no staff and no help she’d have to negotiate."

Several men looked at Renwick.

Renwick looked at the gate.

"That was the original assessment," he said.

Nobody laughed. Nobody was in the mood for laughing. Several of them had heard — through the fast, ugly channels that bad news travels through criminal networks before dawn — what had happened last night. Names mentioned. Operations. People who had been in certain places and were no longer.

The kind of ’no longer’ that didn’t come with a body.

They all moved toward the door.

The brass knocker was cold when Dagger Lom lifted it — he was the one with the most nerve this morning, or simply the one whose hands had stopped shaking first. Three slow knocks. Measured.

Silence.

Then the door opened.

She was small and white-haired and somewhere north of sixty — a woman with a straight back, a pressed apron, and the kind of eyes that had been watching powerful men behave badly for decades and had very long since stopped being surprised by any of it. The old maid. The one that none of them had been able to move. Every arrangement made to displace her had simply — not taken. Bribes returned. Rumors ignored. Position offers declined with a politeness so firm it felt like a door closing in your face.

She looked at the twelve men standing on the step.

She bowed.

"Welcome, gentlemen."

Not warmly. Not coldly. Simply the correct word, spoken correctly, by a woman doing her job.

She stepped aside and let them in.

The hallways were dusty.

Not devastatingly so — not the ruin they’d engineered — but the fine, settled dust of a house running on skeleton staff. The portraits on the walls slightly crooked. The floral arrangements dried. The lamp brackets not recently polished.

Renwick looked at this and felt, almost against his will, a small, ugly knot of satisfaction loosen in his chest. ’We did that,’ he thought. ’We starved this place.’

Orin Brass ran one finger along a side table and looked at the dust on his fingertip.

Someone chuckled. Low. Brief. The sound of men reminding each other that they had had the upper hand here. That the papers clutched in their coats — forged agreements, backdated documents, debt instruments with signatures obtained under duress or fabricated entirely — still represented leverage. Still represented something.

The old maid led them down the hall.

She stopped outside a door. Dark wood. Closed.

She did not knock for them.

She simply looked at them and waited.

Dagger Lom knocked. Three times. The same rhythm as the front door.

No answer.

He knocked again.

The door opened.

They entered in order of their own precedence — Orin Brass first because he was the eldest and had the most legitimate surface cover, Dagger Lom second because he was largest and moved like he owned floors he stood on, the others filing in behind, papers already being shifted from inside coats, mouths already forming the careful sentences they’d rehearsed on the drive over.

"Greetings, Lady Elian—"

The voice came from the head of the room.

"So you all came."