Chapter 7: The Dungeons Beneath the Gold

The candle had been cold for three hours when Mira knocked.

Elizabeth had not been sleeping. She had been doing the thing she had begun to recognize as her mind's particular response to danger — cataloguing, sorting, arranging the small facts of Lord Vane's dinner conversation into rows and examining the spaces between them — when the knock came, too soft for the hour and too precise to be accidental. Not the knock of someone waking a sleeping woman. The knock of someone who had listened first.

"Come in," she said.