Her heart skipped a beat. The foyer was deserted.
She looked around, confused—as if she had been turned about.
Steadying herself against the jamb of the entrance door, she held a hand to her chest and stared down the glistening stone stairway out into the rain-soaked courtyard. All but one of the flaming torches had extinguished in the downpour. The cobbled ground shimmered under a layer of water. The central ditch was a torrent that fed through the main tunnel to be jettisoned out a grate into the surrounding moat. The sheer noise of it all was deafening.
But he was not there—no one was.
He must have gone deeper into the fortress.
She ran beyond the foyer into a small suite of interconnecting rooms and stopped dead in the center of the sitting room. The substantial oak door closed be
