_Rowena’s POV_

“Alice’s room?”

“Close to it. East side of the ground floor.” Kyra directed me, also seeming interested.

I took the servants’ staircase. Narrower, less traveled, it came out behind the east entrance near the linen storage and the small utility corridor that ran along the back of the ground floor guest rooms.

I stopped at the corner.

A figure was moving along the exterior path, not the same one from earlier, or if it was, they had changed direction. This time they were approaching the house from the garden side, moving with the low, careful gait of someone who had done this before.

They knew the path. They knew where the security lights had gaps.

“They’ve been here before,” Kyra said.

More than once.

I pressed myself against the wall and waited.

The figure reached the east entrance, the side door that was supposed to be locked from eleven onward. It opened.

From the inside.

Someone had unlocked it for them.

I gave them thirty seconds, then followed.

The blue guest room was at the end of the ground floor corridor, and the door was not fully closed. A thin line of light came through the gap, a lamp on low, enough to see by, not enough to show under the door from the main hallway.

I stopped outside it.

Inside, two voices rang out, although they were whispering.

A man’s voice first came first. “The subsidiary accounts are the priority. The old transfer records are the easiest to contest, three of them are dated before her mother’s will was formalized. If we file on those three specifically, the rest becomes disputable.”

Alice’s voice then followed, unmistakably. “She just got back. She won’t have reviewed everything yet. There’s a window.”

“How long?”

“Two weeks at most before Celeste locks everything down properly. After that it becomes much harder.” A pause. “She’s sharp. Sharper than her mother was. We need to move before she finds the discrepancy in the early accounts.”

“And the grandfather?”

Alice made a small sound, something between a sigh and a dismissal. “He trusts the family. He always has. He won’t look too closely as long as nothing disturbs the surface.”

“Rowena,” Kyra called out to me very quietly.

I smiled thinly, knowing I already caught Alice in the act. “Yes, Kyra.”

“What about the girl herself?” the man suddenly asked.

“She thinks she’s come home to safety,” Alice said, and the warmth she’d performed all evening was entirely absent from her voice now, what was underneath it was flatter and more practicat. “Let her think that. A comfortable woman doesn’t look under things.”

And I couldn’t hold it back anymore. I pushed the door open.

The room came into view properly, Alice in the armchair nearest the window, wrapped in her robe, a teacup on the side table that she had absolutely not been drinking from because it was cold and untouched.

And a man, he looked like someone in his mid-fifties, standing near the window with a folder in his hand.

Before I could process what was happening next, the man moved first.

Not toward me. He actually moved sideways, so fast that I knew he planned an exit in advance.

“Don’t you dare!” I yelled but it didn’t stop him.

Alice stood up and immediately her face transformed, the flat voice was gone completely, replaced with the trembling, wounded performance of a woman who had been unjustly disturbed. “Rowena! What on earth, bursting into my room in the middle of the night.....”

“Who is that man?” I demanded coldly.

“My.....he’s my relative. My nephew. He came to check on me because I was staying away from home and he worried......”

“At two-thirty in the morning. Interesting, Grandma.”

“He works odd hours.....”

“Shut up, Alice.” I kept my voice level. “I heard the conversation.”

Her face did something complicated. The performance didn’t drop exactly, it shifted and found a new configuration.

“You heard nothing of the sort,” she said, firmly and without flinching. “You’re tired and overwrought and you heard two old people talking about family finances and you’ve made up a story around it.”

Rita, her maid, appeared from the adjoining bathroom where she had apparently been waiting — or hiding — and stepped between us.

“Luna Rowena,” she said, her voice shaking slightly, “please. She’s an elder. She’s not well, the travel today was tiring, she says things sometimes that....”

“Shut your mouth and move aside, Rita,” I glared at her.

Rita did not move aside. She stood there trembling and entirely unwilling to leave her position, which I noted and filed away, her loyalty was real, which made her complicated.

I looked past her.

The man was gone.

I crossed the room in four strides, checked the window, unlatched, recently used, the catch still warm from a hand, and went out through the east door into the corridor.

Empty.

I moved quickly to the end of it, out through the side entrance, into the garden.

The path was clear.

“He went up,” Kyra said.

I looked at the wall of the east wing. The old wisteria trellis ran from the garden path to the second floor, and above the second floor the roofline had a flat section used for maintenance access. It was not a simple climb. It was a planned one.

I went up the trellis.

The flat roof section was empty. One set of footprints in the dust, it looked recent, definitely recent, and then the edge, and below the edge the narrow alley that ran along the outside of the estate wall. I looked over.

A figure, already across the alley and moving fast.

By the time I could have gotten down, he’d have been gone. And I had no shoes for an alley chase.

I climbed back down.

Alice was standing in the doorway of the blue guest room when I came back through the east entrance, wrapped in her robe, with her silly performance back in place, trembling lip, wounded eyes, the posture of a frail woman who had been treated unjustly in her own temporary home.

“I want you to know,” she said, to the empty corridor, to no one, in the voice of someone rehearsing something to be repeated later, “that I have never in my life been so disrespected by a member of my own family. Coming into my room, chasing my poor nephew up onto a roof.....” her voice cracked “.... as if I am some kind of criminal. I came here to support Rowena. I spent my whole day worrying about her. And this is how she repays an old woman who loves her.”

Rita made a small pained sound behind her.

I looked at Alice.

At the useless performance.

“I found the folder he dropped,” I said.

Alice blinked. One small break in the performance.

I hadn’t found any folder. He’d taken it with him.

But her blink told me everything, the contents were real, and she knew what was in them, and the mention of the folder had reached past the performance and touched something underneath it.

“Goodnight, Alice,” I said.

I turned and walked back upstairs.