With enough convincing, she'd asked the bartender for a key.
"Wake up," she whispered in the darkness to the young woman asleep, poppy-addled, in her bed.
A bleary candle winked and swayed on the nightstand, its light offering more mystery than revelation. Phantoms clad in orange and black flickered on the walls and ceiling. The intruder's own silhouette was a hunchback sprawled across the molding, along the rafters. Water trickled, a liquid timepiece cluck-clucking in a porcelain vessel.
"The words you choose and how you wield them," said the shadow, her foreign accent bleeding on her tongue, "they sting. They smart. They hurt."
Cool water trickled briefly across Vara Tassnehof's neck. A pair of callused fingers carefully sought to peel moistened bandages off the young noblewoman's skin. In the brief illumination provided by the candle, Gloria Wynsee's fat, unremarkable face was a half-coin hovering above the pillow. Moisture glistened in the crescents beneath her eyes. Lids were as heavy as iron. "Look at me," she requested.
"How much of the infusion did you drink?"