Ophelia's POV
I waited until the halls had gone quiet before I slipped out through the servants' passage, a cloak pulled tight around my shoulders, my heart hammering harder than it had any right to for a woman who supposedly had nothing to hide.
Alaric was asleep, finally, exhausted from the day's collapse, guards posted outside his door on my own orders. Nobody would notice I was gone.
I made my way through the trees along the old trading path, the one traders avoided after dark for reasons most of them wouldn't say out loud. Two miles out, past the boundary marker, a small hut sat tucked into a hollow between the roots of an ancient oak, smoke curling faint from a crooked chimney.
I knocked twice, then once more, the pattern I'd been given weeks ago by a contact who swore this woma
