Three knocks. Pause. One knock.
The signal from Berto's household — a wool merchant whose late wife had owed Giovanni Auditore a debt he'd never adequately repaid — meant clear, no movement in the street.
Trent had been in the attic room for three days. Three days of watching the city through a gap in the shutters, eating whatever Berto's cook sent up on a tray, sleeping in three-hour intervals because the body he was wearing didn't seem to require more. Seventeen years old and already conditioned to run on abbreviated rest. Useful, when it wasn't unsettling.
The system had updated twice in those three days, each increment small enough to be insulting.
[INTEGRATION: 25% NOTE: INACTION DECELERATES INTEGRATION NOTE: LEONARDO'S WORKSHOP — REPAIR COMPLETE IN APPROXIMATELY 6 HOURS]
He was reading the conspiracy documents for what was probably the fourteenth time when the footsteps arrived on the stairs.
Not Berto's. Berto was sixty and moved with the careful, weight-conserving shuffle of a man whose knees had specific complaints for two decades. These footsteps were three sets, coordinated, coming up at a pace that wasn't quite running — the approach of men who had done this before and knew that running announced itself.
Trent was off the bed and behind the wardrobe before the top stair creaked.
The door came open on the second kick. Not because it was reinforced but because whoever had kicked it first had misjudged the angle — something that told him everything he needed to know about their competence level. Capable enough to find him. Not experienced enough to execute without errors.
Two men through the door. Short swords. Good leather, not city guard livery — private contractors. Vieri de' Pazzi spending his own coin, not using official channels. The third stayed in the doorway with a crossbow raised.
The stolen sword was already in Trent's hand. Not because he'd made a conscious decision but because Ezio's body had made it while his mind was still processing the door's angle.
[COMBAT INTEGRATION — ACTIVE THREAT: THREE OPPONENTS — CROSSBOW PRIORITY ONE MUSCLE MEMORY: 28%]
He moved left, putting the wardrobe between himself and the crossbow before the man could track. The first contractor came around the right side of it. Trent met him with the committed violence of someone who understood that hesitation in close quarters was a death sentence — Ezio's body handling the blade geometry while his mind handled the framing. The man went down in the gap between the bed and the wall with a wound across the throat that produced a sound Trent registered and immediately stopped thinking about, because the alternative was worse.
The second contractor was faster and more experienced. The exchange covered most of the floor space in the attic — twenty seconds, three openings that Trent's reaction time missed by fractions, defensive wounds opening across his left forearm as a result. The fourth exchange, he got inside the man's guard.
When he turned around, the doorway was empty.
The crossbowman was already in the stairwell. Shouting.
Move.
The window first. Second floor, Berto's back courtyard below, hay stacked in the corner for the merchant's horses. Trent went through the shutters shoulder-first without fully opening them, the gap catching his coat briefly, the drop coming up faster than expected, the landing harder — hay scattering, a horse throwing its head and stamping in the adjacent stable. He didn't stop moving.
The alley behind the courtyard ran north toward the canal bridge. The crossbowman's voice carried over the pre-dawn quiet with the clarity of cold air — shouting location, direction, description. Comprehensible to anyone listening. Comprehensible to guards on the bridge two hundred meters away who would be awake and armed.
He went up instead of along. Ezio's body knew the geometry of rooftops with an intimacy that his mind was still calibrating — the angle of the next building's gutter, the span of the warehouse gap, the specific purchase on the canal bridge arch. The roofline swallowed him before the crossbowman reached the alley mouth.
[FREERUNNING — ROUTE MAPPED CANAL DISTRICT — PARTIAL ACCESS NOTE: YOU ARE BEING LOUD. QUIETER NEXT TIME.]
The crossbowman was faster on the ground than Trent was on the rooftops. When he dropped into the alley off the Via dei Neri, the man was already twenty meters right and accelerating toward the main street junction.
He was going to reach the guards. He was going to shout. The guards were between here and Leonardo's workshop and Leonardo's workshop had the only thing Trent needed from Florence.
Trent turned and ran at him instead.
The man saw it coming and raised the crossbow — a mistake at this range. The weapon was designed for distance, not for the four meters between them, and in the time it took him to load and raise it, Trent was already too close for the trajectory. The bolt hit the cobblestones two feet to his left with a crack that echoed off both walls.
Then they were close enough that the crossbow was a club, and neither used it as one for long.
The man hit the ground and looked up with the expression of someone correctly calculating survival options.
"The Pazzi," he said, breathing hard. "Vieri de' Pazzi — he's the one running the contract, not Uberto. Uberto's assets are frozen, everyone knows he's finished. Vieri took the operation."
Trent held still.
"How many hunters in the city."
"Eleven. Was twelve." A pause. "Seven more coming from San Gimignano in four days if there's no confirmation."
"Giacomo de' Pazzi — what's his role."
The man hesitated a fraction too long. "Financial. He's absorbing everything Uberto had. The whole Florence network."
"Giacomo de' Pazzi. Giovanni's documents had his name circled twice."
The information was accurate — the man had given it to buy time, but invented intelligence served no purpose in an alley at 2 AM with his back on the cobblestones. If it was meant to buy anything, it had to be real.
It didn't change what came next.
The body stayed in the canal with weights from the alley's iron anchor post. It would surface eventually. Not tonight, and not before the blade was ready.
Trent went to the canal's edge and put his hands in the water.
Once. Cold beyond what he'd expected. Twice. The shaking in his wrists was worse than after the combat — combat had adrenaline behind it, a clarity of immediate problem and immediate solution. This was something else. This was the specific tremor of a man who had chosen to do a thing and then done it and was now standing on the far side of it with nothing between him and the knowledge of what he was.
Three times. The water moved on.
"That's two kinds of killing now. Different."
He'd killed in combat in the upper hall, in the palazzo, in the bounty hunters' first rush — Ezio's body moving and his mind a half-step behind. This one had been entirely his own decision, arrived at while the man was still talking, executed while he was still conscious. He'd weighed it in real time and made a call and the call had been correct and he would make it again in the same circumstances and none of that made the shaking stop any faster.
The shaking stopped when it stopped. He couldn't hurry it.
[DARK ACT REGISTERED — CH.7 DELIBERATE KILL, NECESSITY ASSESSED INTEGRATION: 28%]
Vieri de' Pazzi. Giacomo de' Pazzi absorbing Uberto's network. Eleven hunters active, seven more in four days.
He had six hours until the blade was ready.
Dawn was beginning in the east, the sky pulling apart from the water in gradations of grey, and across the canal district Leonardo's workshop showed light through the shutters.
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