Valentina waited three days before she went looking again.
Three days of learning the rhythm of the house — when the staff cleared out, when the guards rotated, when Damien retreated to whatever wing he disappeared into after dinner and didn't emerge from until morning. She used the time to memorize hallways, to catalogue which doors stayed locked and which didn't, to rebuild the version of herself that had spent seven years learning how to become invisible in rooms full of people who would have destroyed her for looking too closely.
She didn't go back to the hidden room. Damien would expect that.
Instead she went to his private study, during the one hour each week his assistant delivered a stack of physical documents that required a signature rather than a screen. Damien always took th
