“A kunoichi at – Lore!” Gwen squealed. She brushed past Reinhardt and wrapped her arms around his hunchback, who had come down the stair behind the secret door beneath the ancient portrait of Vladimir Reinhardt.

Reinhardt glared at Lorencz. A proper hunchback shunned human contact, flinched from strangers, and only touched a woman when he was strapping her to a lab table or carrying her to the edge of a storm-lashed cliff. But here was his hunchback, not only meeting the young ninja’s embrace, but also whispering something in her ear. Was it a threat? Unlikely: she blushed and giggled in a most-un-ninjalike manner. And now Lorencz’s mishapen, warty hand had slipped down to the woman’s derrière and rested-

Reinhardt suddenly had an appalling thought.

Impossible. Hunchbacks don’t do that, especially not with attractive young women.

“Excuse me,” Reinhardt announced to nobody in particular, “I need to go upstairs and invent a brain-erasing machine for myself. Dear God.”