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stretched out his gloved hand to retrieve it.
    He felt Franco start forward abruptly with a growl, as if he suspected Sasha of doing harm to the corpse. Sasha almost – almost – laughed out loud at the Italian’s absurdity.
    “Relax, Franco. What do you think I’m going to do to her? She’s quite dead, you know,” he murmured, retrieving the object.
    Spectacles.
    For some reason, his heart, mechanical and flawless though it was, seemed to stop working for the blink of an eye. An unnamed dread began to rise up inside of him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on its source, or why the spectacles should unnerve him so.
    He tried to shake it off and spun around to show the others what he had found. He gave Franco his most ironic smile.
    “I can hardly harm her any more than she has been. And I’m not the one who has let this poor woman rot where she lay for the past two days. Perhaps had you done your job better, you would have found these earlier.”
    Franco moved to take the spectacles, but Sasha snatched them away and strode out of the room, disgusted with his companions and the entire situation. He brushed rather abruptly past Rowan and stepped out into the hall. He swept down the corridor, towards an exit, needing fresh air.
    Not that there was much of that to be found in Genoa these days. The blighted Fog that had swept Europe from the Pale, where the Crimean War had reached its catastrophic conclusion, lingered in this part of Europe. The unstable, quarrelsome Italian Federation had yet to implement any of the clean air measures Great Britain and France had introduced, and anyone without an Iron Necklace would not have survived long in such an environment.
    Another reason aside from her tendency to cast up her accounts – not to mention the dead body – to leave the unenhanced Miss Finch behind. She’d had some allergy that had prevented her from being outfitted with the Necklace when she was an infant. He marveled she’d survived her childhood at all, considering how it had been in those dark days after the War.
    Of course, with his monstrous heart, the toxic air posed no danger, the Necklace around his throat a mere prop to prevent attracting undo attention.
    When he finally emerged into the blazing, soot-filled heat of a Genoa summer, he felt marginally better. It was certainly an improvement over the stench of death. He heard Franco and Rowan scrambling to catch up with him as they argued quietly with each other. It sounded like Rowan was trying to calm the Italian down.
    But it was too little too late, as far as Sasha was concerned. If Rowan had been a true friend, he would have never let him walk unprepared into this untenable situation in the first place.
    Fyodor was waiting for him at the edge of the courtyard, leaning against a pillar amid the gathering of the local gendarmerie under Franco’s command. The Weldling looked as out of place as a lion amid a flock of chattering, slightly hostile magpies. He raised his eyebrow in silent inquiry.
    Sasha shook his head and turned his attention back to the spectacles, studying them in the full light. Something about them continued to bother him.
    Rowan came up beside him. “So you think the spectacles are significant?”
    “The murderer staged the room exactly as he wanted it. I doubt he would be so careless as to leave behind a pair of spectacles, unless he wanted them to be found. As with the poem, the murderer is attempting to play a game with us. And in case you’re wondering, it is not I.”
    Rowan stared at Sasha, not bothering to hide his doubts. “It’s hard for me to believe you did this, Sasha. You have never shown the slightest glimmer of the insanity it would take to commit such acts. And even if you did, I would never believe you stupid enough to leave behind such self-incriminating clues.”
    “Damned with faint praise,” Sasha muttered.
    “But, dear God, how could I not be suspicious? This rogue has done his best to implicate you,