Chapter 129

Sloane

Imogen came for me at eleven, the way she had said she would, and she didn’t knock.

I was already dressed. I had been dressed since nine, sitting on the edge of the bed in my boots with my coat across my knees, listening to the packhouse settle. The pipes ticking as they cooled, the clock at the end of the corridor, the third step of the back stairs below Cassandra’s rooms that complained if you put your weight on the left side of it. I had known those stairs since I was sixteen. I had come up them at three in the morning in heels, more than once, on my way back from somewhere I shouldn’t have been, and sat on that third step to take the heels off so nobody would hear.

Nobody had ever caught me. I had been very proud of that.

The door opened, and Imogen looked in at me in my coat and boots, and at the basket I had put ready by the door, and made a small noise through her nose that might have been approval.

“You’ll want gloves,” she said.