Chapter 6 · The Bottle Tells on Them

The guard outside Wantang's door changed shifts at dawn. She'd counted the footsteps, memorized the routine. When the new one yawned and muttered something about needing coffee, she was already at the window.

The drop was twelve feet. She landed in the herb bed, dirt under her nails, and kept low. The sky was still that pre-morning gray, the kind that made everything look like a stage set. Three days until the pyre. Seventy-two hours to prove Sephra was the liar, not her.

She needed Milo. And she needed him scared enough to talk.

The apothecary shop on the east side of the estate had been shuttered, boards nailed across the door, but Wantang had seen the way Milo's eyes flicked toward the old grain cellar during their first meeting. People always looked at their escape routes.

She crossed the courtyard in a crouch, skirted the burnt-out shell of the west wing—still smoking, still stinking of scorched parchment—and found the cellar door half-hidden under a tangle of dead vines.

It wasn't locked. Stupid or arrogant, she wasn't sure which.

She slipped inside. The air was thick, medicinal, sharp enough to sting.