Chapter 2
The west staircase sat behind a carved oak door nobody used during formal dinners.
Old servants’ route.
Narrow steps.
Stone walls.
It connected the ballroom level to a lower service hall and an unused delivery courtyard.
I had walked it perhaps five times in twenty years.
Roland knew every inch.
Of course he did.
Security men notice what owners forget.
I took Adelise, Rafe, and my estate steward with me.
Ismeralda remained upstairs.
Corwin too.
Separated.
I wanted different lies.
Halfway down the stairs, Adelise stopped.
“My father hated this staircase.”
I looked at her.
“How do you know?”
“He mentioned it once.”
When?
Three days before he vanished.
Roland came home late and told his daughter the house had “too many doors pretending to be walls.”
Strange sentence.
She thought he meant hidden service passages.
He did not explain.
At the bottom landing stood a narrow maintenance door.
Locked.
My steward frowned.
“That room has been empty for years.”
“Key?”
He searched the ring.
None.
Interesting.
Rafe forced nothing.
Instead he inspected the frame.
Old scratches near the latch.
Not recent.
Repeated.
Someone had opened it often enough to mark the brass.
I looked at the floor.
One corner of carpet had been replaced.
Different weave.
Eighteen months old perhaps.
Maybe newer.
Then Adelise noticed a shallow black mark on the stone stair.
“Burn?”
Rafe crouched.
“No.”
Rubber.
From a hard-soled boot sliding sideways.
Nothing dramatic.
Still evidence that the supposedly unused landing had not been unused.
My steward finally remembered something.
After Roland vanished, Corwin recommended the maintenance door be permanently sealed because the route was “a security weakness.”
I turned slowly.
“When?”
“The next morning.”
There.
Roland disappears.
Within hours, Corwin knows exactly which unused door needs sealing.
I looked back up the staircase.
“Who authorized that?”
The steward hesitated.
“Miss Ismeralda.”
Of course.
Not me.
She was not yet my fiancée publicly.
But she had already begun managing social events around the estate.
Small authority.
Growing.
I asked:
“What was behind the door?”
He swallowed.
“Old uniform storage.”
Rafe shook his head.
“No ventilation.”
Good catch.
A storage room does not need the exterior electrical line running into that wall.
Something else had been operating behind it.
I looked toward the sealed door.
May you like
Roland had not been wandering.
He had found a room someone needed forgotten by morning.
