The room above mine.
I had walked past its door a hundred times in eight months without once thinking to look closely at who lived behind it. A packhouse staff member, a woman in her fifties whom Rowan had vetted as standard household staff and assigned without flagging, the way you assign someone who arrives with clean references and a willingness to work the early shifts.
She had been here four months before I had ever arrived. Placed, I understood now, exactly the way Fenn's room had been placed. Quiet. Patient. Built to be invisible.
I went in alone.
Caden waited outside.
I could see what it cost him to do that, the set of his jaw, the particular stillness of a man choosing, with visible effort, not to act on every instinct currently telling him to follow me through that door. He
