The Windsor Palace breathes differently at midnight. Candles guttered low, cold marble underfoot, the smell of beeswax and foreign power heavy in the air. You are not supposed to be here. You were never supposed to be anything but invisible - a bonded girl brought to scrub these floors until your knees bled. But the payal is gone. Your mother's last gift, the only thing she pressed into your palm before fever took her. A guard named Aldric ripped it from your ankle and flung it into these halls like it was nothing. Now you move through shadow and silence, following the memory of a sound - silver on stone. One door. One candle. And then it opens.