had gone to sleep. By eleven, most of the ground floor lights were off. Only two guards were awake at the perimeter, and the corridor to the staff wing was empty in the way corridors are empty in houses that expect no one to walk them at that hour.

Aleandro walked it anyway.

He had never once, in fifteen years of ownership, set foot inside the staff wing after dark. The distance from his study to the third door on the left was less than two hundred paces. He counted