Chapter 18: Masks, Mirrors, and the Underworld's Impeccable Décor

The Hadley estate did not, technically, announce itself.

There was no gate in the conventional sense—no wrought iron, no lodge cottage with a sleepy keeper and a lantern—only a place on the road where the Somerset countryside made a quiet, authoritative decision to become something else entirely. The carriage wheels did not slow. The horses did not falter. But Petra, who had spent eleven days studying Miss Chase's annotated maps with the focused attention she had previously reserved for texts she intended to argue with, felt the precise moment they crossed into the estate's grounds as a change in atmospheric pressure behind her sternum, as though something vast and old had turned its head to look.

She kept this observation to herself. She had been keeping a great many observations to herself since the Highlands.